‘Gonzo journalist’ gets
sidelined by isle injuryHunter S. Thompson hints at
a lawsuit after breaking his leg
Legendary journalist and self-described "Body Nazi" Hunter S. Thompson was in pain and it wasn't pretty.
Thompson, 66, who has been working out "full bore" since his recent marriage to his 30-year-old blonde assistant, held court in his suite on the ninth floor of the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel Friday night. With a tumbler of Chivas Regal at his right hand, the king of "Gonzo journalism" sat enthroned in a wheelchair with his left leg swathed in ace bandages resting on a pile of overstuffed pillows.
STAR-BULLETIN FILE
Hunter S. Thompson: Broke his leg in his hotel room before he could cover the marathon
Pained and talking to lawyers in town, Hunter floated that there was a hint of lawsuits along with sugar plums dancing in the air as a stunning hotel concierge hovered at Thompson's side holding his hand and giggling at his jokes.
"I'm in pain and I want to distribute maximum pain to all those around me. I don't want to keep it all for myself," grumbled Thompson, glancing menacingly around the room with his large, hollow brown eyes.
"I am in the darkest of funks," said the cult writer who has written for Rolling Stone, Playboy and other national and international magazines with an appetite for his hard-driving political satires, sports commentaries and social critiques all bound up in his self-made myth of rock-and-roll drug-inspired insanity with insight.
For more than 40 years, Thompson has chronicled his own, often drug-depraved, adventures living with the Hell's Angels or on the 1972 presidential campaign trail and turned irreverence into an art form. He shaped "Gonzo journalism," a form of counterculture "in-your-face" reporting that is anything but objective.
As a columnist for ESPN.com, Thompson came to Honolulu more than 10 days ago to cover the Honolulu Marathon, a race he wrote about in his 1983 cult-classic book "The Curse of Lono." In a recent ESPN.com column before the marathon, he wrote the race "is always a freak-out of some kind that usually involves speed, danger and thousands of naked people looking for action. Honolulu is not the world capital of aerobic sexuality for nothing. These people are serious health freaks."
But Thompson didn't make the marathon this year.
Two days before the race, he fractured two bones in his left leg about two inches below his knee. He even flapped the oversized X-rays in the air to prove it. The pictures showed his tibia and fibula cracked crosswise like two white stalks of celery.
As Thompson tells it, "It's as dumb a story as I could tell you."
It was about 4 a.m. Friday, and Thompson, who had been up watching television, decided he needed more ice for his drink and wanted to microwave some saimin.
"I executed a sharp turn at the mini-bar," said Thompson. He slipped, pivoted, legs splayed in opposing directions, and he fell hard on the highly polished floor of his suite.
"The floor has a high gloss like a Japanese watercolor," said Thompson.
In his signature style, Thompson continued, his voice rising as if he were recounting a Greek tragedy: "So my full weight went onto my left knee. The blow was so savage, everything shattered. I lay there. And things went desperate after that."
Paramedics arrived and rushed Thompson to Straub Clinic and Hospital. A veteran of medical campaigns, Thompson has an artificial hip and last year underwent a spinal implant. After X-rays at Straub, Thompson said he refused to let them operate or set the leg.
He just wanted to "get out of town." And he said it with the same high desperation he uses in his books.
Last Wednesday, Thompson tried to get on a United Airlines flight back to his home, "a fortified compound" in Colorado. But after handlers banged his wheelchair to the mouth of the plane, he couldn't fit into his first-class seat without excruciating pain.
"I had to be dragged back off of the plane. It was a monumental drama. I was having a massive adult dose of pain," said Thompson.
For the last week, Thompson has been calling for the aid of everyone he knows from Honolulu attorney Brooke Hart, Hawaii-based writer Paul Theroux and University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle to actors Sean Penn and Johnny Depp to help get him back to Colorado and the doctors of the same exclusive clinic who operated on basketball star Kobe Bryant's knee.
After much negotiation, Penn came to his rescue by chartering an air ambulance to take him, his wife and assistant Anita and a nurse from Honolulu to the back yard of the Steadman Hawkins Clinic in Vail, Colo., at a cost of more than $30,000.
"It's times like this you learn your real friends," bellowed Thompson in the lurching growl he has cultivated over the years of fame and abuse.
"Sean Penn delivered."
Penn could not be reached for comment. But Anita spent much of Friday night's interview in the other room in cell phone negotiations with Penn over logistics.
"The plane should arrive here at 5:30 a.m. It has to stay here 10 hours and then we can take off," said Anita with a smile. "He will be more comfortable if he can lie down for the flight."
And Thompson, leaving nothing to chance, has a backup plan for a bed: He has reserved five seats in a row on a commercial plane.
Next month, Thompson hopes to fly to Puerto Rico where he spent the early years of his reporting career covering cockfights and political turmoil. There, he will act as a consultant on the film version of his book "Rum Diary." Actor Depp, who first portrayed Thompson in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," is expected to star in "Rum Diary" along with Nick Nolte and Josh Hartnett.
