Welcome to StudentTeaching.com - Information on Cast of My Tutor

WE WERE somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." This is the first line of Hunter Stockton Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it exploded like a multicoloured flare before my eyes when I first encountered it around 1972 when the book was published.

You can forget the great first lines of literary history, the fine conceits of Jane Austen or the abrupt demands of Herman Melville. For a 20-year-old in search of a new voice in the wilderness, Thompson was the man who had come down from the mountain with the tablets. On these tablets were written the new rules of writing, which stated that thou shalt not be a shrinking violet, rather thou shalt crash through the barriers of decorum and good taste and throw a spanner in the working of the system. Never mind Pete Doherty, this man was a real libertine.

Thompson cast a spell over my entire generation. His influence on writing in general, and journalism in particular, was utterly pervasive. Whether your special interest was motorcycles, drugs, liquor, rock 'n' roll, loose women or the latest in outlaw chic, then the articles you were reading bore the heavy imprint of the great man.

Everybody who thought they were cool wanted to be like Hunter, write like Hunter, live like Hunter. The credentials that he set out in Fear and Loathing, the necessary attributes for the gonzo way of life, were unambiguous and intimidating.

Outside of the need to take vast quantities of every kind of drug, the main requirements for those seeking initiation were a complete lack of fear and an obsessive interest at getting at the truth. And the final rite of passage was the ability, when the dust had settled and the casualties been carted away, to laugh like a hyena at the sheer absurdity of it all. I instinctively understood his need to question all authority because it was up to no good.

In the early days of its publication, Fear and Loathing was a well-kept secret. I was at university at the time, and was passed a copy by my tutor who had been sent it by a friend in the USA.

My tutor agreed to lend me his copy to read, but only after I had signed a post-reading agreement, which was to return the book to him whole and undisfigured. I honoured the agreement, but was puzzled that he was so insistent. After I bought my own first copy, I soon discovered why. I loaned it to a friend, it never came back. I bought another, loaned it out, and this one came back with half the pages missing, and covered in drawings of bats with huge claws.

Eventually, I worked out that the only way to spread the news was to buy people copies as presents. In this way, Fear and Loathing became one of the great word-of-mouth publishing sensations.

IWAS for ever after hungry for news of my new hero. He had previously written a book, published in 1967, about spending time with the Hell's Angels, but this proved only that they were a bunch of dull dogs compared to the man chronicling their activities. When the book was published, Thompson got a beating from his erstwhile compadres, but that only served to make him madder.

His next book was called Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, but this was not a tome that friends pilfered from one another. Thompson was, beyond the artificial energy, utterly engrossed in the minutiae of the American political system.

I read the book with a deepening sense of dismay. Who was Ed Muskie, for heaven's sake? Or Hubert Humphrey, come to that? It was clear Hunter did not like these people. Of Nixon, he famously wrote, "Jesus, where will it end?

How low do you have to stoop in this country to become president?" But the point was that this kind of stuff didn't travel across the Atlantic.

Nor, for that matter, did the man himself. From the early days of infamy, Thompson was a hot property in this country. Magazines and newspapers all wanted a piece of his action, because this was the man with whom their young audience empathised. This was when the myth of Hunter S Thompson, the fearless exploiter, began to take hold.

Stories circulated that he declined to be interviewed unless certain assurances were made. Top of the list was a guaranteed supply of top-quality cocaine. Hunter would summon interested parties, accept their narcotic gift, and then disappear to a private room to assess the purity of the product with his portable testing kit. If the chemicals he added to the powder in his test tube showed a low grade of cocaine, the interview was cancelled forthwith.

The great thing about these stories was that they were largely true.

AS THE years went by, the writing inevitably lost its edge. New work was intermittent and generally unsatisfactory. Far better to read the collections of shorter magazine pieces, wherein the protagonist, clad in Hawaiian shirt and dark glasses, puffing furiously on a cigarette holder between belts of bourbon, would turn up at a large event - sporting, or political, or simple showbusiness - and reduce all that was previously ordered into a condition of the deepest chaos.

Increasingly, the author retreated from public life, holed up in Woody Creek, his "fortified" compound in Colorado. I still loved to hear the occasional tales from behind the barricades, involving huge quantities of drugs, all sorts of barely tame pets, and a lifestyle that seemed to defy the years, not to mention all known medical thinking.

More worrying was Thompson's longheld passion for powerful firearms and large stocks of dynamite. Having terrified the straight world as a young man, the older Hunter was holed up like some paranoid survivalist.

Although he was past his best and in danger of becoming a burnt- out case, I felt a pang of acute sadness when I heard the news of Hunter Thompson's death yesterday morning. This was not the result of some mindless hero-worshipping of excess, but the recognition that a man who made a real difference in my life was gone. Without the fireworks and passion that Thompson brought to his best work, there would have been less excitement in my heart at the possibilities of the written word.

The only possible response to the news is to pick up that old copy of Fear and Loathing and enjoy once more that trip through the desert in a car with the top down going at 100 miles an hour on its way to Las Vegas.