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This is not your ordinary memoir

Date published: 2/4/2007

WRITING a remem- brance of a friend who was also your most important artistic collaborator must be hard. Similarly tough, even if not equally so, must be penning a memoir.

Ralph Steadman is a household name for most anyone who knows much about Hunter S. Thompson. His art illustrated much of the Doctor of Journalism's words, perhaps most dramatically the legendary "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

So a committed Thompson fan like me is sure to be taken by this work, and any other that provides additional insight into the crazed figure who pioneered "Gonzo journalism," the notion that reporting a story is really more important than the story itself, and that fiction and fact can be blended.

It's interesting to hear how difficult working with the man was. After all, Thompson made no secret of his drug use, or his love of "high explosives and weapons of many kinds," which Steadman claims he came to accept as "part of the package" one received when collaborating with the writer.

These were things I was eager to hear about, and the book is filled with such anecdotes. But the reader gets thrown for a loop when Steadman seems to realize midway through the text that maybe he wasn't as close to Thompson as he thought.

Steadman writes. "I fooled myself that there was something in me that he found important. Actually, as time went by, he hated the very idea that something as putrid as a cartoon drawing could ever capture the essence of what it was he was trying to describe."

Whew.

Other readers might applaud this honesty, and maybe I should, too, but it just seems too sudden.

Stranger, too, this theme is dispatched fairly quickly, and enjoyable stories of Thompson's general rowdiness follow, including an account of a road trip in which Steadman riffs on the famous first line of "Fear and Loathing": "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert."

Then there's Thompson's morning meal at England's Fox and Anchor pub:

"The barmaid enquired whether Hunter was famous since he acted, she said, as if he were. He ordered two pints of orange juice, two large Bloody Marys, a pint of bitter, coffee, a triple Scotch with ice and a vodka and tonic. He ordered an English breakfast: 'Bring every condiment in the house.' He smothered his plate in an uneatable layer of mustard, pepper and salt and left it largely untouched."

It's these tales, and others of Thompson's rampaging lifestyle, that really make "The Joke's Over." They give the reader that which became rare when Thompson took his own life in 2005: more stories about this one-of-a-kind literary giant.

THE JOKE'S OVER By Ralph Steadman (Harcourt $26)

Date published: 2/4/2007