Hunter Thompson and Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the second Hollywood iteration of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

A couple friends of mine were his handlers (babysitters) when he worked as a columnist at the SF Examiner in the eighties, during the reign of Will Hearst III. They carried his Wild Turkey and cocaine bindles for him, as well as sit up all night waiting in the Ex city room, while every hour or so the mojo wire would spew a page of rambling copy full of regurgitated Thompsonism's--allusions to the "sick, twisted, and depraved" stories he could never tell. Giving, according to my friends, a whole new meaning to the word "rewrite."

But we are in an era of Brand and this was/is the Hunter Thompson brand.

Hasn't written a new sentence in over thirty years.

The publishing world is full of vulturous enablers, number one being Jann Wenner, of course, who continue paying Thompson for the right to sell his byline to the aging believers who still show up at his booksignings. See: Defamer: Hunter S. Thompson Lives Up To Legend At Book Soup. It's perversely funny. There was a time when I thought this would be the greatest of all lives.

Like every other alkie on the earth, he wakes up in the Fear every single night. Booze and drugs have destroyed his writing, if not his career. And it is a shame, because we sure could use him right now, as new forces that make Nixon look like the Prince of Light gather across our beautiful land.

The Great White Shark, by Charles Perry

"Do you know Hunter Thompson?" asked a fellow Rolling Stone editor in 1970. This was an East Coast kid with the air of having seen it all, and it wasn't like him to make stabs in the dark. Something in him, though, cried out for confirmation-as when a man who has seen what might have been just a Frisbee that glows and gives eerie music goes around asking his friends, "Have you ever seen a UFO?"

"He's the guy who wrote the book about the Hell's Angels, right?" I said. "No, but I'd like to know him. I think." The last part was hastily added because the other editor was still staring into the middle distance.

"He's a weird guy," he said. "I was talking to him about my edit of his story, and he took off his hair--hewas wearing a wig, man, a red wig. He put it in this box he was carrying and took out another. He kept doing this all the while he was talking-wigs, weird hats." He shook his head and shrugged. Six months later he'd be through with San Francisco forever and safely back on the East Coast.

The story Thompson was writing for us was a report on his campaign for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, and for all I knew that would be the last time Thompson would ever be in the Rolling Stone offices. He left his mark, though-for years his campaign poster adorned our walls: a fist clenched in the freak power salute ... a fist clutching a peyote button, a symmetrical fist with a thumb at either end.

I was wrong, of course. Thompson was back just a few months later. This time he was working on a story about gang murders in East L.A., and for our deadline he needed to get it written right away. No time to go home to Colorado; Jann Wenner gave him a temporary office in the record library. It afforded a good deal of privacy-bitter experience had taught us that at a magazine that had a lot of rock fans in its employ, a record llibrary should have stout walls going all the way to the ceiling and a lock on the door.

Somebody pointed him out to me, a lanky figure wearing dark glasses indoors and a seaman's cap with the brim pulled down, and I felt obliged to introduce myself. I found, however, that somebody had already pointed me out to him.

At the time my title was Copy Chief. Deadline Trail Boss was more the way 1 thought of it. I copyedited and proofread the whole magazine, but my basic responsibility was making sure that all the departments got their work done as of deadline night and the damn paper came out every two weeks.

As a result, though I knew what it was like to have trouble getting a story done on time, I had no patience with deadlinitis in writers. One writer in particular-a brilliant writer, who would probably still have been working at the Los Angeles Times rather than Rolling Stone if he had not had one of the worst cases of deadlinitis on medical record-had felt my wrath. Once, in order to impress on him the seriousness with which I took my deadlines, I had held him partway out a third story window.

This had proven a fruitless technique; the guy just quaked whenever he saw me and continued to miss deadlines. What I didn't know was that Hunter Thompson was also notorious for pushing the outer edges of the deadline envelope. Another thing I didn't know was that the other writer had talked to Hunter about me and portrayed me as an ogre who held bad little boys out of windows.

In this two-ply ignorance I noted that the door to the record library was open, and a figure wearing dark glasses and twiddling a cigarette holder in his fingers was sitting at a typewriter in its murky depths. I brightly stuck my head in the door and said, "Hi. You must be Hunter Thompson. I'm Charlie Perry."

He stiffened and muttered something; an awkward conversational moment. "How are you doing?" I asked politely.

This brought about an unexpected reaction.

Words tumbled from his mouth like water from a pretty jumpy Rocky Mountain stream: "I'm doing great, this lead is incredible, it's like a train on greased wheels. If I can just keep this momentum up, but I don't know, but there's this terrible momentum.. . "

This had the desired reaction of making me back away from the door. I filed it away mentally ("Hunter Thompson: Wears hats and wigs. Talks about trains.") and went back to the perennial deadline crisis. Three days later I happened to pass the record library again, noticed Thompson sitting at the typewriter again, and stuck my head in to be polite again. "Hi, Hunter," 1 said. "How's it going?"

As a frog's leg galvanized by an electric shock first stiffens and then droops, he sat bolt upright and then crouched limply over his typewriter.

This time the words came out in a sort of doldrum frenzy: "I just don't know what happened, I lost the momentum, it was just like a train on greased rails, I've been taking speed to get the momentum back, I haven't slept in three days, I haven't changed my clothes, I think my feet are rotting."

It began to dawn on me that this was going to be a long deadline.

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