In the new novel “Gonzo Girl,” out Tuesday, the lead character is a 22-year-old aspiring novelist who shoots a .22-caliber gun at targets with the faces of Ronald Reagan and Marilyn Monroe while tripping on LSD, all with a famous author named Walker Reade — whom she met just days earlier.
The roman à clef is based on the five months author Cheryl Della Pietra spent in 1992 as the assistant to wild-man journalist Hunter S. Thompson. (She estimates the book is about 60 percent true.) Her job was to ensure, by any means necessary, that Thompson got at least one page of writing done everyday, usually after 2 a.m.
Those means included doing tons of drugs with him whenever he wanted — which was always.
One time, the pair were pulled over by police while tripping on mushrooms that had been baked in a chocolate cake. As Thompson had an obsession with weapons, there were firearms in the car.
“The police pulled us over, and I was like, oh my god, I’m about to get arrested,” says Della Pietra, now a freelance copy editor for US Weekly. (They didn’t get arrested.)
“It was very movielike — terrifying and thrilling. I’m with this icon, and there was a .44 Magnum in the back of the car under a blanket. After the cops leave, he sets up this exploding target on a tree, and I’m shooting a .44 Magnum with Hunter S. Thompson while I’m ’shrooming.”
Della Pietra heard about the assistant position through a friend who worked at Rolling Stone, the magazine for which Thompson regularly wrote. After writing Thompson a letter, she received a phone call from the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” icon at 3 a.m. He told her: “Get on a plane tomorrow and we’ll see how things go.”
At Thompson’s Woody Creek, Colo., ranch, Della Pietra was subjected to a three-day “trial period,” which was Thompson’s test to see if she could keep up with his ravenous appetite for intoxicants. The incident with the police occurred during this time. She passed the test, though the real trials were yet to come.
There’s a scene in the book where Walker hurls a plate at the narrator’s head like a frisbee. This was based on a real incident.
“He could turn on a dime,” she says. “It’s raging, classic addict [behavior].”
Given her lack of any drug-taking background, Della Pietra was apprehensive about diving so deep, but tried to stay open to the new experience. Life with Thompson was never boring, and his antics were often thrilling.
He would host A-list celebrities (Della Pietra won’t say who) at his drugged-out bashes, drive to Don Henley’s house to prank him with fireworks and always ordered an insane amount of food at restaurants, starting with 10 or so steaks and piling on from there.
“It was always an adventure. You feel like you’re in one of his books all the time,” she says, chalking up the massive overordering to his need to keep up his gonzo image.
“It sounds insane, but for all the crazy things he did, he didn’t strike me as a reckless person. He wasn’t gonna shoot me.”
As for the partying A-listers, in the novel Della Pietra created a famous actor named Larry Lucas that the narrator sleeps with. The character is a composite, she says, and while she won’t reveal the inspirations, she says Alley’s relationship with him is based on some truth.
Another aspect of the novel she says is based on truth is the-character’s deteriorating writing skills. Whether due to age, drugs or both, Della Pietra says that Thompson’s chops then were clearly not what they had been during his “Fear & Loathing” heyday.
“The book that eventually came out was ‘Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie,’ about the [Bill] Clinton campaign, and I think it can be reasonably argued it’s one of his weaker works,” she says.
Della Pietra also questions what role drugs ultimately played in his downfall.
“We look at people like Amy Winehouse or Philip Seymour Hoffman, people who have their genius tied to their substance abuse, and we have some sympathy for them. We feel perhaps they’re controlled by these substances,” she says.
“[Hunter] had this image of being so crazy and drug-addled that we gave him a pass. [But] were the sensitivities he had as an artist too much for him? [Substance abuse is seen] as part of who he was, and that it was funny, crazy, and interesting. I have a hard time believing there wasn’t something else there.”
Given the collective insanity and her own massive substance ingestion, she decided to pack it in and head home after five months.
Della Pietra and Thompson split on good terms. She now lives in Branford, Conn., with her husband and 9-year-old son, and says that when Thompson committed suicide in 2005, she was saddened but not surprised.
“I don’t think he expected to live that long,” she says. “His lifestyle spoke to that, a lot. [His suicide was] such a sad thing, but . . . you don’t live your life like that and expect to grow old, do you?”