For most of his life, Juan F. Thompson has carried a heavy burden. Though he has abided the notorious reputation and unfulfilled legacy of his late father, Hunter S. Thompson, for five decades, his boyish face does not betray a wrinkle of resentment or world-weariness.
Juan F. Thompson is thoughtful, and almost monkish in bearing, and exudes a calmness that is all the more shocking when you consider his father was Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living godfather of gonzo journalism. When I recently met Juan, 52, at the White Horse Tavern, an ancient West Village saloon steeped in literary myth, he eased into our conversation, dining on a ham-and-cheese sandwich beforehand as if to gather energy for our talk. His own 17-year-old son, Will, had come along from their home in Denver, and waited patiently as we introduced ourselves.
Over the next couple of hours, Thompson was comfortable letting our exchange lull, at ease collecting a thought or experiencing a feeling. This ebbing introversion was perhaps necessary in the writing of Stories I Tell Myself, his recent memoir about life in the orbit of his father’s ferocity. The book is as quiet as his father was boisterous, and as sensitive as the old man was savage. By adolescence, Juan had already observed with keen wisdom, “My father was a warrior, not a philosopher.” Juan understood that conflict and provocation informed his father’s vocabulary, and that he would be forever translating that experience in order to understand his own.
When asked why he felt the need to write the book, he closed his eyes and spoke slowly.
“I wanted to show people that there was a lot more to Hunter than caricature. That was really important to me at the time,” he said, before taking a long pause. “I felt strongly about it, and the way it evolved was to describe how I got to know him through our relationship.”
He never wanted to do a biography, he said. In many ways, what came forth was actually the biography of a relationship. Stories I Tell Myself is a chronological timeline of Juan’s life parallel to his father’s, up to the point of the elder Thompson’s suicide and memorial in 2005. In it, Juan plumbs his mind for observations, somberly noting that at the age of 10 he “began to suspect justice was not always the governing principal of [Hunter’s] rage” or, at the age of 12, finding watermelon spackled across the living room following an altercation between his parents. The Thompsons’ paths meander in and out of one another, finally meeting up when Juan is old enough to see that, in order to be close to Hunter—a man who could rarely bring himself to mutter the words “I love you”—he had to accept certain truths. Foremost, though his father was not—despite his place in the popular imagination—a stumbling drunk or strung-out addict, alcohol and drugs would always be part of Thompson’s daily life. He also accepted that he would have to spend time with Thompson on his father’s own terms, which meant riding motorcycles, cleaning guns, and watching football, all strangely traditional, yet thoroughly masculine American pastimes. The most illuminating and difficult scenes are the ones in which the myths of the gonzo gladiator dissolve: being admonished for calling his toddler grandson a bastard; sleeping peacefully, almost child-like, while Juan watches; a moment of incontinence as his aging body betrays itself; the pool of blood that had gathered when Juan finds him, dead in his chair.
Juan mentioned that a friend of Thompson’s read the book and felt the discussion of his incontinence was unnecessary.
“I think he would have been proud that I tried to be honest and didn’t cover up a lot of the unsavory stuff,” he said. “I understand where that person was coming from, but it seemed important to include because this was a consequence of his lifestyle, and a factor, I think, in why he killed himself.”
He re-asserted that Thompson would have wanted these facts to be known, but only after he was dead. “On one hand, he valued telling the truth; but on the other hand, he was very conscious of shaping and controlling the perception,” said Juan. “He would be proud that I actually finished [this book] . . . and that it seems to be communicating what it is I was trying to communicate.”
He added, “And Hunter doesn’t come out looking like a monster.”
In the decade following his father’s death, Juan has also accepted that, at times, he is his father’s emissary. By day, he works in health-care I.T., specializing in blood-analysis technology. And by night, he is the flesh and blood of a deceased legend, utterly divergent from his father’s path, yet inextricably tied to it by nature of his inherited bloodline. He will always be Hunter S. Thompson’s son. When on missions to represent his father, he often wears a silver medallion that Thompson treated with reverence, bestowing it upon Juan the day before he died.
“For a long time, I felt I could connect to my dad if I had things that were important to him,” Juan said of such talismans. “But they don’t create a connection. They actually accentuate the absence of a real connection.”
And then something changed. “I noticed a few months ago, that I didn’t feel that same need to have this possession or that possession—that the absence didn’t mean I was not connected to him. It feels like I have taken that inside,” he said, pointing to his chest.
By unpacking the stories of his life, in many ways, Juan Thompson has relieved himself of the burden he inherited at birth—the confusion that accompanies growing up with an addict or a celebrity, and the realization that this is not normal. Later, as we rode the F train to Brooklyn, discussing the spectacle of the current political races, it became clear Juan feels the bearer of Thompson’s literary legacy is yet to be named. As we both wondered what his father would have made of the raucous primary season, he puzzled as to why the Hunter S. Thompson of our era has not yet come forward. And, then, I remembered something he had written about Thompson’s belief in the afterlife: “He called himself a Road Man for the Lords of Karma. . . . He also spoke and wrote of reincarnation.”
In Stories I Tell Myself, Thompson writes about his father’s silver medallion, saying, “Perhaps someday, I will encounter a young boy who will recognize this medallion as his, and then I will tell him all about who he had been and all that he did.”
