As one of the very few prominent Mexican-American journalists of his time, and a vocal critic of LA law enforcement, many in the Chicano community thought he had been intentionally assassinated. Later that day he ducked into the Silver Dollar bar and cafe in East Los Angeles for a beer and was sitting at the bar when he was struck in the head and killed by a teargas canister fired into the building by an LA County Sheriff’s deputy. The previous August, Salazar had covered the Chicano Moratorium March in which a coalition of Mexican-American groups protested the war in Vietnam. Thompson had come to LA at Acosta’s request to investigate the death of the Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar. They just needed somewhere secluded to talk. As it happens, when Thompson and Acosta arrived at the Polo Lounge that day neither had any intention of writing a cult novel. He has wrung me dry for material.”Īcosta’s unhappiness at Thompson using his words without credit is reminiscent of the recent debate, sparked by Robert Kolker’s New York Times Magazine essay “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”, about whether writers can use language lifted directly from other people’s lives without being considered plagiarists. “He has taken my best lines and has used me. “My God! Hunter has stolen my soul!” he wrote to Alan Rinzler, the editor who ran Straight Arrow, Rolling Stone’s books division. On top of that, Acosta believed he deserved credit for the work itself, in which much of the dialogue is reproduced verbatim from recordings Thompson made during their adventures in Vegas. When Acosta first read Thompson’s story, he had no problem being cast as a drug-crazed lunatic but was incensed that his identity as a proud leader of the Chicano civil rights movement had been erased. In the film, as in the book, Acosta’s alter ego is essentially a sidekick, portrayed as a drug-crazed lunatic “Samoan”. On any given Halloween you will still find plenty of Raoul Dukes roaming the streets, cigarette holders clamped between their teeth, and a fair few Dr Gonzos trailing in their wake. These days, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas exists most powerfully in the popular imagination thanks to Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film adaptation, which starred Johnny Depp as Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke and Benicio Del Toro as Duke’s attorney, Dr Gonzo. “We become conservative if we’re still trying to preserve the mythologies of our youth.” I almost spit out my singapore sling. “We have to rethink a lot of our gods,” he tells me, a smile breaking through his short-cropped snowy beard but his eyes deadly serious. Reading Thompson as a teenager made me want to write for a living, so my plan had been to mark the 50th anniversary of Fear and Loathing first appearing in Rolling Stone by having a few drinks and toasting the memory of these two icons of cultural rebellion. Fifty years and seven months later, I’m sitting on that same patio with the filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez, who made an incisive documentary about Acosta’s wild life and times, The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo. On Friday 19 March 1971, the journalist Hunter S Thompson and the lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta were sitting in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel – “in the patio section, of course” – drinking singapore slings and plotting the high-speed desert trip that would inspire Thompson’s most celebrated work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Hunter S Thompson (left) and Oscar Zeta Acosta in the Baccarat Lounge of Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, in April 1971 (The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo)