The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
From: Alex Wilson
Date: Mon., Jan. 16, 2023
Subject: Lono
Dear Tony,
To keep a potential screed down to a few lines, we would like you to write something about Ralph Steadman’s surfing illustrations in The Curse of Lono. Think about it.
Sincerely,
Alex
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.
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From: Tony Andrews
Date: Mon., Jan. 16, 2023
Subject: Re: Lono
Dear Alex,
Hell yes! It’s a strange idea, but it interests me and might even be fun. You know I don’t write cheap. I’ll need at least $20K for the nut, plus all expenses, incidental or otherwise. Of course, as one of the few surfers who read, much less write, I’m the only man for the job. I recently taught Thompson/Steadman (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to my college literature students: 48 vacant eyes staring back while I blathered on about The Death of the American Dream. They found the book repetitive, incoherent, and ultimately dull, and Thompson an irredeemable asshole. To be honest, I’ve never been able to fully convince myself they were wrong, yet his influence prevails like some long sickness. They did like Steadman’s pictures of the bats, though. You can contact my assistant to negotiate terms.
—Tony
“What the fuck is The Curse of Lono?” was my honest first thought upon receipt of the preceding missive. I’d come of age on Hunter S. Thompson, America’s favorite outlaw journalist: Las Vegas, Hell’s Angels, the Derby piece. I’d exhausted all the essentials. I’d plumbed the depths of his sordid life, read his son’s memoir and his widow’s manifesto. Never once had I heard of something called “Lono.” Either I was very bad at research, or this was a very bad book. Or both.
“Thompson struggled so badly to write The Curse of Lono,” Wikipedia filled me in, “that his [book] editor, Alan Rinzler, had to steal the manuscript, which was partially written on scraps of paper.” Rob Fleder, Thompson’s editor at Playboy, remarked of Lono, “I was surprised by the degree of degeneration in Hunter’s work.”
The book was so widely pilloried and sold so poorly upon its 1983 release that it swiftly fell out of print. But in the intervening years, and in the wake of Thompson’s ill-starred death, Lono has assumed new meaning as the duo’s swan song, a rare cult oddity in their oeuvre. In 2004, the year before Thompson died, it was rereleased in a run of just 1,000 signed copies at $2,000 a piece. It sold out instantly.
I clacked away after a copy, but quickly discovered that the book isn’t easy to come by. My first result was a first-edition, first-printing Lono for $12,500. Layers deep into the matrix, I found my prize: an “acceptable” softcover for $50 plus shipping—still no pittance—but when it arrived on my stoop beneath the California sun and I ripped it from its brown-paper packaging, the binding went poof and the pages scattered like a deck of cards in the wind.
In May 1980, Thompson received a letter from the editor of Running magazine, an eclectic Nike-backed journal that threw money at famous writers in exchange for their thoughts on the world’s most boring sport. The pitch was simple: Cover that December’s Honolulu Marathon. But the story quickly devolved, in Thompson’s trademark fashion, into a “dirty Hawaiian nightmare” that by chance applied one of the most distinctive styles of late-twentieth-century journalism, if only tangentially, to surfing.
For five months, Thompson neglected the letter in a pile of unopened mail at Owl Farm, his “fortified compound” in the Colorado Rockies. Then, on October 25, his day began as they infamously did: He woke up at 3 p.m., slid a Dunhill into his cigarette holder, blasted a cassette (the Stones), and took breakfast: four bloody marys, three grapefruits, a half-pound of bacon, a Spanish omelet, a slice of key lime pie, and six lines of “the best” cocaine.
Guests drifted in and out as he “talked on the phone, screamed, threw things, and told stories.” By 9 p.m., he’d started snorting coke “seriously.” Deep after midnight, Thompson produced a .45 caliber pistol and fired a bullet through the ceiling, his way of telling his guests to leave. At last, he was ready to write. Then, that letter fatefully caught his eye.
“What the fuck is the Honolulu Marathon?” Thompson hammered back on his typewriter. He had considered himself “retired” from on-the-ground reporting for years, even turning down the chance to investigate John Lennon’s murder. He liked his routine at Owl Farm. But he was also in chronic debt, and the Nike money spoke.
“Hot Damn!” he continued. “We can cover this goddamn thing in a style that will make people wish that wolves had stolen them from their cradles.”
There was one condition: “Can we get Ralph over from London for some art?”
Ten years before the Honolulu assignment, in May 1970, Welsh illustrator Ralph Steadman met Thompson in a swampy press box at Churchill Downs, where Scanlan’s Monthly, a counterculture magazine, had sent them to report on the debauched scene of the Kentucky Derby. “A voice like no other I had ever heard before, sinking its teeth into my brain,” Steadman wrote of his first impression of Thompson in his 2006 memoir, The Joke’s Over, “a cross between a slurred karate chop and gritty molasses.”
For the next 35 years and beyond, on future assignments and over middle-of-the-night phone calls, that voice would bark in Steadman’s skull, echoing long after its source had sloughed his mortal coil.
Thompson bullied Steadman from the jump, referring to his compulsive drawings as “filthy scribbles.” Over the course of those first 48 hours, amid the stately lawns spewn with bodily fluids, Thompson would mace Steadman repeatedly, compare him to Hitler, and threaten to “beat [his] kidneys into his shoes with a jackhammer.” As Steadman learned upon reading “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” the iconic article their meeting produced, and later noted in his memoir: “His eyes gave away nothing of what he thought he was looking at in me—‘a matted-haired geek with string warts.’”
But Steadman detected in the relentless abuse “a hint of a twinkle of those tight eyes of his, as though he was secretly enjoying the possibilities that [my drawings] might provoke.” Steadman’s work was the perfect complement to the radical mode of storytelling Thompson had been developing alone. Sure enough, in June, Steadman received a letter from Thompson at his home in the UK: “I’d like nothing better than to work with you on one of these savage binges again, and to that end I’ll tell my agent to bill us as a package—for good or ill.”
For the next decade, Thompson and Steadman combined to form their very own text-and-image journalistic subgenre, which came to be known as “gonzo.” The term was coined by editor Bill Cardoso, who defined it as Boston Irish slang for “the last man standing after an all-night drinking binge.” Steadman insists that it comes from the Portuguese word for “hinge,” inverted to mean unhinged. But the etymology suggests that it may ultimately trace to the Germanic word for “goose,” which fits with its honking quality.
The gonzo formula went like this: Get an assignment. Don’t report facts. Get high and wasted instead. Fuck with random bystanders. Draw them as hideous beasts. Record the ensuing chaos in a darkly comedic mash of fiction and fact, where the story of not writing the story is itself the story.
As with all singular styles, theirs were instantly recognizable—Thompson’s vicious prose the verbal equivalent of a machine gun’s rat-a-tat-tat, Steadman’s splattered ink like the blood of his eviscerated subjects. Gonzo bore its most famous expression in 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the bestselling account of a motorcycle race that devolves into a lunatic Sin City bender, adapted into a 1998 film starring Johnny Depp.
“Somehow, I saw the same thing in pictures that he had seen in writing,” remarked Steadman in For No Good Reason, the 2012 documentary on his life and work. “That chemistry made gonzo possible.”
Their connection was rooted in parallel karmic origins cleaved by the great Atlantic. Thompson grew up with a librarian mom and a dead dad in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was branded a delinquent and kicked out of his town’s posh literary society. Steadman was a churchgoing boy scout from a tiny town in Wales, where the vicious beatings of his grammar-school headmaster provoked a lifelong mantra: “Authority is the mask of violence.” Thompson dropped out of the Air Force to chase the heels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Steadman quit technical drawing school to make subversive political cartoons with the goal of “changing the world.”
Aside from their shared spirit of class resentment and contempt for those in power, the only other thing the duo had in common was male-pattern baldness. “Like chalk and cheese,” as Steadman puts it. Thompson was the macho wordsmith, Steadman the sensitive artist who, though he’d pound Wild Turkey with Thompson, refused to touch hard drugs, a difference that would lodge a defining stake in their respective careers.
“I was looking at a worried man,” Steadman reflected of Thompson on that first fateful meeting. “What he had not yet let me know was that he had harbored a project since very early on that would help him to burn his own particular hole in life, but, in the process, would burn him too by the time he was forty.”
From: Alex Wilson
Date: Mon., Jan. 30, 2023
Subject: Re: Lono
Tony, I’ll pay 16 cents a word, plus expenses. Take it or leave it.
Alex
From: Tony Andrews
Date: Mon., Jan. 30, 2023
Subject: Re: Lono
Alex…
I didn’t take you for a poker player, but here we are, with you having sniffed out my bluff. I don’t like it—at all—but goddammit do I respect it. These days a writer is lucky to be able to afford a toothbrush for his work, and it is thus that I accept your abysmal offer. Please remit the advance immediately. Now that that filthy money business is out of the way, we can put our full attention where it belongs. I’d like nothing better than to work with you on this savage binge—for good or ill. We can cover this goddamn thing in a style that will make people wish vultures had plucked them from their nests. Just one condition: Can you send me to Ralph, over in England, for a sit-down interview? To do this thing right, I’ll need a red Bugatti, a penthouse suite overlooking the Thames, and a brick of the purest cocaína. Additional funds will be required for the manufacture of a rubberized manhole cover, to be customized to my dimensions. I’ll hide in the sewers outside his estate and, when he emerges for his daily walk or whatever, I’ll spring from cover and pepper him with our most urgent questions. The idea is that, especially for a man of his age, the shock of it will override his instinctive Welsh politeness and coax from his lungs the sheer, unvarnished truth. Don’t worry: I’ll have paramedics standing by in case it’s all too much for the old bugger’s system. “Ralph!” I’ll scream as they work to revive him. “Come back to the light. I need to know if you’ve ever surfed the Banzai Pipeline.”
—Tony
By the time Thompson and Steadman had agreed to document the 1980 Honolulu Marathon, Thompson was 42. Through a string of missed deadlines and obscene expense reports, his output had been faltering for years, compounding an increasingly tense dynamic with Steadman.
The prior decade had plagued the duo with the ego disease that inevitably befalls all great teams: the battle for credit. Thompson’s was the name in lights. Steadman felt dismissed as a mere cartoonist. Twisting the knife, Rolling Stone had convinced Steadman to sell his original Vegas drawings, worth millions today, for $75. He’s never sold an original since.
And yet if you stop someone on the street and ask them if they know Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the most common answer you’ll get is “The one with the bats?” referring to Steadman’s iconic cover art. “Fear and Loathing wouldn’t have been the success it was without Ralph’s illustrations,” confirmed Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner in For No Good Reason. “That’s how people noticed it.”
On some painful level, Thompson understood this, and he came to downplay Steadman’s role in his success. In one of their last meetings together, captured by Steadman via camcorder, Steadman can be heard confronting Thompson about their rift and his “burning, desperate resentment.”
Decades later, on February 20, 2005, Thompson, then 67, sat in his kitchen, carefully angled his trusty .45 caliber into his mouth, and deposited a bullet through the back of his skull, the round lodging itself into his stove hood’s steel and killing him instantly. Incontinence from long-term alcoholism had reduced him to diapers. His muscles were wasting away. “Act your age,” he instructed himself in his famously terse suicide note. “Relax—this won’t hurt.”
The Curse of Lono would turn out to be the last major work Thompson and Steadman ever completed together, the unlikely last stand of a love-hate tour de artistic force.
From: Alex Wilson
Date: Tues., Jan. 31, 2023
Subject: Re: Lono
Hi Tony,
Sending you to London, as you suggested in your last note, is out of the question. And though I thought we had a direct line to Steadman, the source is dead. The only contact on his official site is a generic “info@” email. Good luck with that.
Alex
From: Tony Andrews
Date: Tues., Jan. 31, 2023
Subject: Re: Lono
Hey Alex,
That slush address you fed me is a filthy digital black hole. It looks like Steadman’s collection is managed by his daughter, Sadie. I could message her on LinkedIn, but I don’t want a restraining order. I’ve thrown a pebble into the chasm. All we can do now is wait for the sound.
—Tony
When the Running magazine piece was published in 1980, it was so well received that Thompson’s publishers encouraged him to expand it into a book, but the adaptation turned out to be a torturous process for him. By the end of its creation, Lono was in many ways more Steadman’s work than Thompson’s.
“That goddamn wretched LONO book haunts me like a cancer in the nuts & I would kill it if I could, but the shitwheels are already in motion,” Thompson wrote Steadman down the stretch. When the publisher came for Thompson’s manuscript, “there was hardly any writing and nothing was connected to anything else,” writes biographer David S. Wells. “Only Steadman’s art possessed any value.”
Steadman had to mail his finished drawings to Thompson at Owl Farm, where they were pinned around his typewriter for inspiration. “Appalling” is how Wells described the results. Thompson’s contribution to the book amounts to a flimsy 100 or so pages of plotless, disjointed text. Nothing really happens. Thompson attends the marathon, waits out bad weather in a house by the sea, and goes fishing a couple of times.
The book was patched with Thompson’s letters, block quotes from Mark Twain, and a biography of Captain Cook, then printed in huge font on oversized paper—both to make it seem beefier and to showcase Steadman’s illustrations. It was Steadman who came up with the title. Thompson was so embarrassed and bitter on receipt of his copy that he crossed out Steadman’s name.
Surfing barely appears in the word portion of Lono, though there’s promise at the beginning: “I’ve entered you into the Pipeline Masters,” Thompson writes to Steadman, “a world-class surfing contest on the north shore of Oahu. You will need some work on your high-speed balance for this one, Ralph. You’ll be shot through the curl at speeds up to 50 or even 75 miles an hour, and you won’t want to fall.”
Like so many threads in the book, the Pipeline bit simply trails off, never to loop back in. Later, Thompson mentions a storm that “canceled the Surfing tournaments on the North Shore,” with no mention of Steadman’s dashed wildcard dreams.
The closest Steadman seems to come to surfing is when, in the book’s fourth chapter, “he put on his flippers and paddled toward the reef, only to be picked up by a wave and bashed on a jagged rock, punching a hole in his spine.”
A lifelong sufferer of the Kent winters, Steadman had always dreamed of seeing the tropics, and Hawaii didn’t disappoint. In his memoir, he refers to “the powerful ambience of such a place” and the “myths and legends” it evoked for him. It also evoked surfing, which at some point Steadman did see, and he found it so compelling that it features disproportionately in his drawings versus its scant presence in Thompson’s text.
Here, Steadman wields his signature eclectic style—a mixture of rough brushstrokes, sketchy lines, and splattered paint and ink—for profound expressionistic effect. In an image of a vertiginous peak, the riders (unmistakably crouched upon the era’s Lightning Bolts) appear as Goya-like beasts with brutish brows and razor teeth and beady eyes. In another, the surfer is some kind of punk-rock troll in a studded vest, grinning in shacked bliss. Behind him hovers the petrified face of a fellow tube hound about to be swallowed by the pit, showing that Steadman understood both the choreography and humor of a good burn.
Another painting takes a more humanoid approach, depicting a muchacho with a blond mullet and a porno ’stache, red blade under arm, sauntering to the waterline. Before him rises a pale-violet tsunami of a shorebreak, threatening to drown the crowd on the sand, where, despite there being no record of Steadman’s presence at the event, a banner amazingly declares: “BANZAI PIPELINE MASTERS/SURFING CLASSIC/1980.”
Reviewing these illustrations, it’s difficult to contain an overriding emotion. Of the singular artistic styles, it’s not uncommon for admirers to fantasize about their application to untouched subject matter. “How would Ralph Steadman interpret surfing?” feels like one such hypothetical, obscured in the mists of fantasy, for which we should never have an answer. It’s just too improbable—a neurotic Welsh painter at Pipeline. But, my God, we have them.
The corpus of art depicting Hawaii and its surf—Georgia O’Keeffe’s oils, John Severson’s watercolors, the photorealistic totems of Herb Kawainui Kāne, et cetera—is principally bright and picturesque. Gallery collections on the North Shore evoke the Lisa Frank notebooks every girl brought to middle school in the ’90s—neon rainbow orgies of dolphins frolicking in tropical bliss.
By contrast, Steadman’s palette is willfully drab. His sea tones are muted, brushed with his infamous “dirty water” technique, which applies his brush water as its own sort of ink. He eschews shiny vistas for environs of gnarled black scribbles of palms, rusty blood-splatter waves, and jaundiced skies. This is not the Hawaii of the airline commercial, nor even the beloved surf mag. This is gonzo Hawaii, where the lines between paradise and hell are deliberately smudged.
Why? What was Steadman saying? For all the piss that gonzo takes, its goal is not (or not merely) to impart shock value. Both Thompson and Steadman were morally serious artists who believed in the political power of their work.
Indeed, gonzo’s biting aesthetic contains a political perspective, expressing a judgment about the world as it is versus how it ought to be. But gonzo doesn’t fit the simple mainstream binary of Democrat versus Republican. Though broadly pro-labor and liberal-minded, Thompson was a Second Amendment nut and rabid defender of personal liberties.
“A conservative redneck” is how Steadman described him in a eulogy. And yet so much of Thompson’s career was spent verbally eviscerating Republican politicians: “Nixon was so crooked,” Thompson wrote in a scathing obituary of his own, “that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”
Ultimately, gonzo was allergic to illegitimate authority and idiocy of all stripes, which it found wherever it glanced in America, the 50th state no exception. If we stretch ourselves even a fiber, it isn’t hard to see.
Think about the last time you went to Hawaii. No, not like that. Think about everything you left out of your Instagram posts: the thirsty SUVs glittering in the hot sun and jamming up the Kamehameha Highway. The impossibility of finding parking virtually anywhere on the North Shore. The feral roosters screaming bloody murder all night, and the stray kittens and the starving dogs. The sticky heat and the mosquitos. The sallow faces peering out from tattered tents. The heaps of trash and plastic bags and bottles at the beach parks. The seething crowds at the breaks, more flesh than water. The bleached reefs poisoned to death by the sunscreen leached off the soft, sweaty, red, pimpled backs of tourists. The fact that you are one too—a dumb, selfish, greedy, ugly, disgusting, consumptive beast gallivanting on stolen, blood-soaked land. You are, inescapably, a piece of the rot that stinks all around you, defiling, by your sheer presence, the very place whose virgin nature you came here to see.
Not to be a bummer—I’m merely reporting. Thompson and Steadman get away with this kind of invective without seeming shrill by infusing the book with cartoonish humor, but as author Hari Kunzru wrote, the true voice of gonzo is actually “that of American moralist…one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.”
In Lono, that ugliness manifests in Captain Cook’s brutal colonial legacy, the violence of the Hawaiian myth from which the book takes its name, and the desecrated face of contemporary Hawaii as seen through the twin lenses of virulent racism and obscene commercialism. It’s depressing to consider that way back in 1980, Hawaii had, to a significant extent, already been paved over by the steel compactor of late capitalism:
“The highway from the airport into town was one of the ugliest stretches of road I’d ever seen in my life…the new western edge of America,” Thompson writes of his arrival in Kona. “We were 2,500 miles west of [San Francisco], and the first thing I saw was a Texaco station, then a McDonald’s hamburger stand.”
Steadman’s most pointed critique of the strip-mall-ification of the islands comes from a seemingly random image of a wake of vultures—a species not found in Hawaii’s wilds—feasting on a husk of carrion. A caption loudly decodes it: “PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT COMES TO HAWAII.”
It’s also notable that, even as a non-surfer, Steadman picked up on the crowd factor. In the Goya-beast drawing, 11 riders vie for a single peak. Another piece shows a massive curling right (likely Backdoor) sucking roughly 50 hapless surfers into its vortex. The image is Steadman’s finest surf-themed piece. A clear homage to Japanese master Hokusai’s iconic Great Wave, Steadman’s wave spirals in a great white slashing brushstroke, at once primitivist and mimetic of real streaking foam. The image blends cartoonish elements with surrealist abstraction, the wave like a machine that devours surfboards and spits them out in streaks of red, blue, and orange paint. As in Hokusai’s wave, where tiny fishermen with worried eyes cling to their oars, Steadman’s surfers form a pattern of terrified faces stuck to surfboards, responding to the ocean’s overwhelming force.
Of surfing, Steadman seems to be saying: What an absurd, beautiful death wish.
We can’t know for sure what Thompson really thought about surfing, but while reporting for Lono, he met writer friend Paul Theroux, in whose 2021 novel, Under the Wave at Waimea, a Thompson-based character proclaims, “Writing is surfing, surfing is writing.” In an NPR interview, Theroux claims that “Hunter loved watching surfing.”
It’s not hard to believe. Surfing is the single most visually gripping human act.
Nothing else approaches it. And we know that Thompson, a connoisseur of sports cars and guns, loved fast, violent machines. In his description of surfing to Steadman, you can almost hear the admiring thrill in his voice. No one doesn’t dream—if only in private corners of their soul—of being a surfer.
Unfortunately, Thompson hated exercise. He suffered from arthritis (the reason he used a cigarette holder), and an old football injury had left one leg shorter than the other, undoubtedly contributing to his grim worldview.
Indeed, Theroux confirms that Thompson “never swam himself.” His central question about marathon running, the original subject of Lono, is “Why do these buggers do it?” Here, I tend to agree with his friend Jay Cowan, who wrote in an Aspen Times retrospective on Lono, “It seems odd that even if [Thompson] couldn’t comprehend wanting to be in shape, that he didn’t understand the endorphin releases involved that make long-distance running a lot like other drug addictions.”
Gonzo is itself a kind of surfing—each letter and splatter a turn in response to the mental waves formed by the terrible miracle of consciousness. In his memoir, Steadman figuratively describes his drawing process as “surfing nocturnal imagery.” And the most famous passage Thompson ever wrote features surf imagery: “We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave,” begins the “wave speech,” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ thesis. Here, the wave functions as a metaphor for the energy of a generation, naive in the conviction it would better the world. Of course, in the end, it did what waves do: It “finally broke and rolled back.”
Thompson’s descent was doubly tragic. He deprived not just his family and friends of his golden years, but the world of his verbal incandescence. It’s tempting to imagine an alternate timeline where perhaps Thompson might have substituted his chemical addictions for other, less lethal, compulsions. In one of his final interviews, an endstage Thompson offered a new interpretation of gonzo, one that seamlessly doubles as a description of surfing itself: “learning to fly while falling.”
Is it grotesque to wonder whether something like surfing might have saved Hunter S. Thompson’s life? Perhaps. Though, as with all tragic cults of personality, it’s hard not to consider how things might have turned out differently, and what exactly it was like inside his mind.
Thompson’s final interaction with Steadman revolved around the 2004 release of a small chapbook titled Fire in the Nuts, written by Thompson and illustrated and privately published by Steadman. It was Steadman’s project, and he had arranged for a release party in Aspen, near Owl Farm, where he had made a special request that Thompson sign the f irst 200 copies to juice their value.
Thompson hated signing books—didn’t have the patience. It was late on Steadman’s last night before returning to London the next morning. He had left the copies on his kitchen table for Thompson to come by and pick up, and he was fretting that Thompson wouldn’t come through. In that moment of doubt, he recalled a confession that Thompson had made “in one of those moments when all defenses are down…something that no one but me knows…that to do what was expected of him, officially, professionally, and at the precise moment sent [Thompson] into paroxysms of fear.”
As it turns out, Thompson’s enigmatically excessive persona—his very way of being and creating—may well have been fashioned partly in response to a simple, inborn sense of stage fright. In Steadman’s telling, we see the bitterness between them, but also a sense of tenderness for the collaborator who was his friend.
More than two decades earlier, after the initial reporting for Lono, which featured a failed fishing trip Steadman reluctantly attended, Thompson tried to convince him to go back to Hawaii for another try at the big catch. “I don’t think,” Steadman wrote back in the negative, citing his discomfort around boats and the “macho” men who shepherd them, “you ever realized the brave faces I have had to put on to look like a man among men. They frighten me…and they can’t speak properly because their big chests push their chins up under their noses. And what’s worse—we’re ruled by those men, and it worries me that you might be one of them—against your will—a flower in a macho prison.”
When Steadman awoke on the day he was set to leave the Fire in the Nuts festivities in Aspen, the copies were gone. In their place was a note on the kitchen table. “Dear Ralph, sorry I got lost in the night. I got a flat tire. Please help me evaluate this profoundly rare wine. Love H.”
Thompson would sign the books. The note was his last ever to Steadman, the only one he ever signed “love.” They never saw each other again.
From: Ralph Steadman Art Collection
Date: Thurs., Aug. 31, 2023
Subject: Interview Request – The Surfer’s Journal
Hi Tony,
Are you available tomorrow?
All the best,
Sadie Williams
Director
Ralph Steadman Zoomed into my kitchen from his English manor one gray dawn this past September. He sat next to Sadie Williams, his daughter and his collection’s director, the shelves behind them stuffed with old books. They both wore dark cardigans, and on Steadman’s beaked nose sat a pair of black-tinted glasses. He looked small in his chair next to a window. A wash of daylight cast his skull in a ghostly halo. Though polite, Steadman and Williams didn’t smile in that insincere American way upon first meetings, their faces resting in no-nonsense poise. The whole scene formed a kind of gothic tableau.
For the eight months prior, I’d been doing my best Thompson: violently procrastinating. Despite the historic flat spell in California that summer, which a local graybeard had termed the worst in 30 years, I paddled out every day just to sit and avoid writing. I went out to bars and lost my mind in the blur of the night. Now, I’d been given fewer than 24 hours to present as a credible interviewer to one of the most famous illustrators in the world.
Steadman’s moderate persona and diligent professionalism have afforded him a prolonged career, active deep into his ninth decade, that has transcended counterculture and attained to pop. He did the cover art for the Breaking Bad box set (Walter White the perfect neo-gonzo subject). You can drink craft beer that bears his signature ink-splat bats. Mainstream celebrities like pop rapper Jack Harlow covet having Steadman paint their portraits.
Yet, as we spoke, all I could do was try not to yawn. Not that he was dull—I was fried because I’d pulled an all-nighter reading Lono. But all the cramming had amounted to two basic questions: What do you remember of that time? And what were you thinking when you drew these pictures?
“It’s falling to bits, actually,” Steadman said of the first-edition copy he’d pulled from his bookshelf, mirroring the decrepit state of my own. His genteel accent gave every word charm. “I thought it was called The Cures of Loon at first.”
It had been 40 years since the book’s release. Steadman was now 87. I’d expected some degree of memory loss, but found, to my dismay, that he recalled astonishingly little of the project—not even the back injury he’d allegedly sustained while body surfing, which, implausible though it sounds, he’d verified in his memoir. Williams kept interjecting with her own recollections of the trip (like swimming in volcanic tidal pools), though she’d attended at just 8 years old.
Steadman expressed an intense aversion to analyzing his own work, allowing merely, “I liked watching the surfing.” He told me he hates the word “style.” According to him, he doesn’t stylize anything. He merely depicts what he sees. “You know the way surfers do things,” he said with a great sweeping gesture of his arm, like a brushstroke. “That caught my imagination more than the book itself.”
That was as much as he’d give me on the drawings. There was a brief rant about Jehovah’s Witnesses. But regarding Thompson, Steadman came truly alive. He kept reading from random pages and impersonating Thompson’s deep bark.
“I can still hear Hunter’s voice going, ‘Ralph, you waterhead bastard!’”
“Did he ever offend you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I never took it personally, because it was the way he was. He used to say to me, ‘I’d feel real trapped in this life, Ralph, if I didn’t know I could commit suicide at any moment.’ I didn’t say, ‘Oh, don’t do it.’ It was sort of matter of fact.”
The sun had come out. Steadman’s face was lost in the glare. Again and again, he returned to Thompson’s voice: “It’s the only thing he left me. It was perfect for my name. Ralph. It’s that snap. Ralph! If my name was anything else, it wouldn’t have sounded the same.”
It was as though that voice was somehow flowing through him, as if Thompson’s life force hadn’t been extinguished when that bullet slid through his brain and lodged itself into eternity’s vent shaft, but instead was slung into Steadman’s chest, where it merged with him and soothed old wounds. Indeed, Steadman’s imitations clearly sprang from a stubborn affection. You only twease someone you love without question.
“Did you think,” Steadman wrote Thompson’s ghost the year after his death, “about never seeing familiar things again…never figuring out that there was still fun to be had, good pain to be endured…never to know ever again that life is a drug…never to know another spring…”
Though scattered seemingly at random and without context, the excerpts of Hawaiian myth and history in Lono echo with the themes of death and reincarnation.
Lono is an ancient Hawaiian god. He has existed since before the world was made. He descends on a rainbow to a breadfruit grove, where he marries the beautiful Kaikilani. For a time, there is bliss. They surf together. Then things get squeamish. A rumor circulates that Kaikilani has cheated on Lono. Blind with rage, he beats her to death. But in her last breath, she assures him of her innocence and love for him.
Lono goes insane with regret and bounces around the islands fighting every man he sees. Then he builds a magnificent canoe with a mast of ohia wood and cordage twisted from coconuts. Forty loyal subjects bear the canoe to its launch, but Lono sails off alone. He promises to one day return on an island shaded by trees and swarming with fowl and swine.
On January 16, 1779, after six months at sea, British explorer Captain James Cook took refuge in Kealakekua Bay, a tiny black shore at the base of a 500-foot cliff. It was known to Indigenous Hawaiians as the “the path of the gods,” and that’s how they received him, according to Mark Twain: “The people always expected Lono’s return,” writes Twain in Letters From Hawaii, “and they were easily led to accept Captain Cook as their restored God.”
In Twain’s version, the prophecy plays out in reverse: It is the Hawaiians who feed Cook and his men. After several weeks, the crew had devoured every pig on the island, whereupon the Hawaiians realized they’d been deceived and bashed Cook to death against the rocks.
Reverent of the dead, they returned Cook’s remains to his men. A truce was established. The two parties even arranged for a return visit from Cook’s ship, and for a lieutenant to remain behind as “the new god Lono.”
“And when will Lono return?” asked the Hawaiian king.
“Before long,” it was promised.
In The Curse of Lono’s grand finale, Thompson is gripped by the delusion that he is Lono’s modern-day reincarnation, an idea he conveys in a letter to Steadman. Why else, he argues, would he have quit his retirement and dragged Steadman over from London to spend “the weirdest month of our lives on a treacherous black pile of lava rocks?”
Reincarnation isn’t necessarily just some mystical thing. Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, believed consciousness to be the fundamental substrate of reality—matter its mere derivative. If that sounds too far-fetched, consider the material basis for reincarnation: Matter, the theory goes, is neither destroyed nor created, but simply transformed. T he same is true of energy, which swirls through matter forever, like a gust of solar wind breathing through the ocean and killing itself on a shore. Does it disappear? No. It heats the grains of sand and the air molecules and makes all things vibrate to eternity.
Wales, Kentucky, a volcanic archipelago. A typewriter, a paintbrush, a tattered book. Las Vegas. The Pacific. Forty years past, 244, 1,000 years into the future. Lono becoming Cook becoming Thompson becoming me becoming—Ralph!—you. Surfboards. Vultures. Waves on an infinite sea.
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