In my reading of Fear and Loathing in America my interest in Hunter’s letters increased significantly as he approached the dates that covered writing and publishing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. F&L in America gives plenty of references to Hunter doing plenty of interesting drugs including his firm stance that a part of his candidacy for Sheriff of Aspen was that he would continue to do mescaline on a regular basis. But the volume of mind-altering substances referred to in F&L in Las Vegas was incredible. On the back of the Las Vegas book it summarizes the basic premise that a gonzo journalist and his lawyer had a crazy adventure in Vegas that the average traveler out on a bender could only look at with awe as a religious achievement to bent living:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge…”

When I first met Sarah two weeks after we had met I had a business meeting in California that took me through Las Vegas on a flight where I met her for some fun in Vegas. We sat by the pool at the Excalibur, sipping drinks and listening to the dim sound of the repetitive Disney style musac in the background, and I read F&L in Las Vegas to Sarah using my best impression of Johnny Depp in the movie who was probably doing his best impression of Hunter himself.

At night we went out to Nephrotite’s lounge in the Luxor tower and drank until about 2 am although we were having trouble getting drunk because of the extra oxygen pumped into the air to keep people from falling asleep while gambling. We left Vegas on a Sunday night skipping our original flight because we were busy playing black jack and drinking free booze on the floor of the MGM Grand which we learned was originally designed to resemble the emerald palace from the Wizard of Oz complete with the yellow markings on the rugs guiding drunken gamblers to the tables to represent the yellow brick road.

I don’t owe the Fear and Loathing book anything with regards to having a continued long term relationship with Sarah. But it is something like a favorite song that I can get a little sentimental about to remember the care free and more wild state of mind I was in when we first met. It's only buddy in the first books that Sarah and I read is Tom Robbin's 'Still Life With Woodpecker, "yumm", that I loaned Sarah because she is a red head.

While Hunter’s Vegas story as a whole smells of hyperbole, and Hunter helps because his style is always hyperbolic – like when he thought the only way to get rid of a girl was to feed her to the lizards in the desert - the amazing thing to learn in F&L in America is that by his own admission: Thompson wasn’t on drugs while working on F&L in Las Vegas.

He wrote in a letter to his publisher – “The only thing that vaguely alarmed me about your letter was your statement to wit: ‘You know it was absolutely clear to me reading Las Vegas that you were not on drugs…’ This is true, but what alarms me is that Vegas I was very conscious attempt to simulate a drug freak out – which is always difficult, but in reading over I still find it depressingly close to the truth I was trying to create.”

So while this isn’t as big of a discovery as the guy who dragged Oprah through the muck with a thousand little pieces I did find it interesting that Hunter, one of the more interesting authors, generally wrote sober even if he did get twisted from time to time.