The inspiration for Dr. Gonzo was not a “300-pound Samoan” but a Chicano activist who believed that Hunter S. Thompson never gave him his due.
Shortly before the publication of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in 1972, Random House sent a copy to Oscar (Zeta) Acosta. Acosta had accompanied Thompson on his reporting trips to Las Vegas; he was the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo, the flamboyant sidekick to Thompson’s alter ego in the book, Raoul Duke. Rolling Stone had published “Fear and Loathing” in two parts the previous fall, but by then Acosta was spending much of his time in Mexico, and he was unlikely to have seen it. Random House’s lawyers were concerned about Thompson’s depiction of Dr. Gonzo, who commits a variety of crimes while tripping on illegal drugs, and they wanted Acosta to agree not to sue for libel. But, when Acosta received the manuscript, he was incensed—not about the accounts of drug use or criminal behavior but because Thompson had transformed him into a “300-pound Samoan.”
Acosta, a Mexican-American lawyer, was a high-profile figure in the Chicano civil-rights movement. He had helped defend both the “Eastside Thirteen,” who were indicted on conspiracy charges for their involvement in the East L.A. walkouts—in which as many as twenty thousand students walked out of several public high schools, to protest inequities in the educational system—and the “Biltmore Six,” who were accused of setting fires in the Biltmore hotel in 1969 during a visit from Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. In the course of his work on those and other cases, Acosta had subpoenaed more than a hundred Superior Court judges in Los Angeles County, intending to prove that the grand-jury system discriminated against Mexican-Americans. He was known to show up in court barefoot, often with a pistol and occasionally on acid; he had the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli, printed on his business cards. In 1970, he ran for county sheriff on a pledge to dismantle the sheriff’s department. Accounts of Thompson’s storied campaign for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, rarely note that Acosta did it first, and at far greater risk. “That’s what you call big fucking huevos,” the filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez, who directed a documentary about Acosta, told me. “By contrast, Hunter was playing in a ski resort.”
Acosta did not object to being portrayed as a drug-guzzling maniac. But he wanted his ethnicity corrected. He also wanted his name and his photograph to be clearly displayed on the book’s dust jacket. Thompson said that it was too late to change the text, but he and Random House agreed to the latter request: the book went to press with a black-and-white photo on the back cover of Acosta and Thompson sitting in the bar at Caesars Palace, in front of two empty shot glasses and a saltshaker.
“My only reason for describing him in the book as a 300-pound Samoan instead of a 250-pound Chicano lawyer was to protect him from the wrath of the L.A. cops and the whole California legal establishment he was constantly at war with,” Thompson later wrote, insisting that “the only thing that bothered” Acosta about the book was that Thompson had made him Samoan. But, according to Acosta’s family and others close to him, the grievances were more far-reaching. Much of the dialogue in “Fear and Loathing” was reproduced verbatim from tape recordings that Thompson had made of his conversations with Acosta; as an actor-participant in Thompson’s gonzo experiment, Acosta felt he had shaped the book in substantive ways. He believed that Thompson had helped himself to Acosta’s sensibility and personality—and then erased his identity. “My God! Hunter has stolen my soul!” he told Alan Rinzler, the head of Straight Arrow Books, a division of Rolling Stone. “He has taken my best lines and has used me. He has wrung me dry for material.”
Rinzler gave Acosta a book deal. “I did not have the idea to publish his autobiography because I was trying to mollify Oscar or get rid of him in some way,” Rinzler told me recently. “I did it because I thought he was a good writer. He had a voice.” Acosta went on to write two novels: “The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo,” a semi-fictional account of his upbringing, published in 1972, and “The Revolt of the Cockroach People,” a roman à clef about the Chicano movement, published in 1973. They have become controversial classics, as canonical in Chicano literature as Thompson’s work is in any New Journalism syllabus. They are slippery and unclassifiable and, in places, wildly bigoted and misogynistic. They offer a rare perspective from a period when very few Mexican-Americans were getting published. Rodriguez, whose documentary about Acosta, “The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo,” aired on PBS in 2018, describes the books as sacred texts, elliptical and strange but revelatory in their candor. “It wasn’t this prosaic magical-realism, white-pleasing, noble-savage shit that so much of Chicano literature traded in,” he told me.
Acosta vanished a year after his second book was published; he is presumed dead, but his disappearance remains a mystery. Meanwhile, his novels have become the subjects of scholarly inquiry, his name figures heavily in histories of the Chicano movement, and his legal strategies are analyzed as templates for challenging institutional racism in court. And yet, if Acosta lives in the white imagination at all, it is as Raoul Duke’s wingman—a bombastic, cartoonish “ethnic” attorney whose ethnicity is obscured. For many readers of “Fear and Loathing,” the real Oscar Acosta remains invisible.
Acosta was born in 1935 in El Paso. “I don’t add the state name,” he explained, “because that city isn’t really part of Texas no matter what the maps say.” When Acosta was five, his family moved to Riverbank, a small town in California’s Central Valley. His parents picked peaches until Acosta’s father, Manuel, enlisted in the Navy. His mother, Juana, took a job at a tomato-paste cannery and started going by Jenny. Like many Mexican-Americans growing up in California at the time, Acosta and his five siblings were encouraged to shed any evidence of their background. One of Acosta’s sisters, Anita, has said that their mother wanted them to be white. “That was her main goal in life,” she told the journalist Marcos Nájera, in a companion podcast to Rodriguez’s documentary. “Short of bathing in Clorox, everything was white-oriented: assimilate, assimilate, assimilate, or you’ll be nothing.”
In high school, Acosta played football, dated a popular white girl, and was president of his junior class. “I was not like the average Chicano who, in the forties, would either drop out or go quietly off to the side,” he recalled later. After graduation, he joined the Air Force. While stationed in Panama, he became a Baptist preacher and missionary—“a Mexican Billy Graham,” as he put it—delivering regular sermons at a leprosy settlement. But he began to doubt his faith, and eventually he wrote a letter of resignation to Jesus: “It wasn’t a natural relationship. You’ll have to admit that.” This rupture was traumatic. He continued to preach for several months, although he no longer believed what he was saying. “That really affected my whole thing,” he wrote later, “with the result that, when I got out of the service, I attempted suicide.”
Acosta’s twenties were animated by a turbulent search for identity and punctuated by mental breakdowns. He married a white woman from the Midwest named Betty Daves; they had a son, Marco, but divorced a few years later. He studied creative writing at San Francisco State University and worked as a copy boy at the San Francisco Examiner. He wrote short stories, poetry, and a novel, which he described as “a Romeo and Juliet story of Okies and Chicanos in the valley.” But he couldn’t get it published. He enrolled at the San Francisco Law School, passed the bar in 1966, and took a job at the East Oakland Legal Aid Society.
This is where “The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo” begins. It’s the summer of 1967, and Acosta is on the verge of a breakdown. “I stand naked before the mirror,” he writes. “Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle. It has not changed that I can remember. I was always a fat kid. I suck it in and expand an enormous chest of two large hunks of brown tit.” He tries to throw up, but “a meaningless belch and noiseless fart are all I get for my troubles.” Later, after successfully vomiting up his breakfast, in the bathroom at his office, he admires the “fluid patterns” in the toilet bowl: “Dalí could do something with this, I’m sure.” The book has both a radical honesty and a desire to shape-shift, a crippling self-loathing and a flair for the grandiose. The narrator quits his job, fires his shrink, and sets off on a road trip, just as Acosta did.
Acosta describes his upbringing, in a shack on the west side of Riverbank, through flashbacks. He was keenly aware of the caste system not only outside his home but also within it. His father was of indigenous descent, and his mother would refer to him derogatorily as “Indio”; if Acosta or one of his siblings misbehaved, she would accuse them of “behaving like an Indian.” There were three types of people in Riverbank, Acosta writes: “Mexicans, Okies, and Americans.” The Mexicans looked down on Acosta and his brother for being “easterners,” from Texas. “They said we weren’t real Mexicans because we wore long, black patent leather boots and short pants.” The Okies made no such distinctions: “To them we were greasers, spics, and niggers.” Acosta deploys racist epithets throughout the book; at one point, he recalls attending a Halloween party in blackface. On several occasions, he refers to himself as a “Samoan,” and, after making a scene at his shrink’s office, he calls himself “another wild Indian gone amok.” Bigotry is both a strategy for assimilation—a way to align himself with whiteness—and an ever-present reminder of his own outsider status. “He was struggling with his colonized self, with his self who hated everything that was brown, and trying really hard to make amends with that,” Rodriguez told me.
Gender and sexuality were also features of the caste system. “It seemed that the sole purpose of childhood was to train boys how to be men,” he writes. “We were supposed to talk like un hombre, walk like a man, act like a man and think like a man.” As with the book’s racial animus, Acosta exhibits a degree of self-awareness on the subject, but there is a disturbing thread of misogyny and homophobia throughout the novel nonetheless. Women are “broads” and “hussies,” objects to be subjugated; at one point, he writes of a former girlfriend, “I no longer cried myself to sleep thinking of her. I’d even gotten to the point where I no longer fantasized about stabbing her with a butcher knife, then raping the shit out of her while she begged for forgiveness.” When a man offers to light his cigarette at a bar, the narrator says, “I simply nod, for I have already noticed the short distance between his right and left eyes. It is my secret way of detecting fags.”
Eventually, Acosta ends up in the city of his birth. In El Paso, he feels an immediate sense of belonging. “All the faces are brown, tinged with brown, lightly brown, the feeling of brown,” he writes. He waxes poetic about hearing Spanish in the street. But as he crosses the border into Juárez a familiar anxiety sets in. People won’t know what to make of his Pendleton shirt and broken Spanish, and he has no identification on him, having lost his wallet. He soon finds himself in a cockroach-infested jail cell. He struggles to explain to a judge that he is a lawyer, and later to a border guard that he is an American. These events precipitate an awakening, leading Acosta to identify with the buffalo, an animal hunted by both cowboys and Indians. “What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American,” he writes. “I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice.”
As part of his epiphany, Acosta decides to move to Los Angeles. His second book, “The Revolt of the Cockroach People” is a loosely accurate chronicle of the next three years of his life, which he devoted to the Chicano movement. On his first night in L.A., Acosta feels a cockroach crawl across his butt and thinks of the old revolutionary corrido “La Cucaracha.” When he runs for sheriff, “cockroaches from the barrios and beaches” pass out bumper stickers on his behalf. Later, Acosta refers to Presidents who “drop fire on poor cockroaches in far-off villages in Vietnam,” and tells the judge presiding over the Charles Manson trial that “a hippie is like a cockroach.” Line drawings of cockroaches appear throughout the book, positioned between paragraphs and in the margins, as though actual cockroaches were crawling across the pages.
In “The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo,” Acosta stops in a Colorado town he calls Alpine and meets a character named King—a writer who, like Thompson, has written a book on the Hell’s Angels. When Acosta takes acid for the first time, accidentally, he wakes up in King’s cellar, a “dungeon” filled with magazines, newspapers, and guns. But there is little trace of Acosta’s friendship with Thompson in his second book. The Thompson-like character comes up just a few times, and only briefly; he is likened to “an angry baboon.” He is not called King anymore but Stonewall.
Some of Thompson’s biographers have alluded to a rift between the two men; during what must have been one of Acosta’s last visits to the Rolling Stoneoffice, he reportedly carved “Zeta” into a wall in the men’s bathroom. In his documentary, Rodriguez shows a letter that Acosta’s lawyer sent to Thompson, in February, 1972, demanding fifty per cent of all royalties for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”; later letters reveal that Acosta continued to feel cheated and even asked for money. “As you know, counterculture ‘legends’ don’t pay off in cash,” he wrote to Thompson, in November, 1973. “I am still looking to you as my only serious white connection.”
Acosta disappeared in June, 1974, after boarding a friend’s sailboat in Mazatlán. Thompson hired a private detective, and collected some of the rumors that he heard about Acosta in a piece for Rolling Stone, first titled “Requiem for a Crazed Heavyweight” and later anthologized as “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat.” Thompson mentions a dozen or so “Brown Buffalo sightings,” including a wild anecdote that had Acosta running drugs near Coconut Grove, in Miami. Strangely, after Rolling Stone moved to New York City, in 1977, hospital bills for “Oscar Zeta Acosta” started showing up at the magazine’s offices. Later, it came to light that the F.B.I. and the L.A.P.D. had shadowed Acosta as part of the COINTELPRO program, fuelling speculation that he had run afoul of the federal government.
Surprisingly, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” was the first piece of writing by Thompson to get adapted for the screen. It somehow became “Where the Buffalo Roam,” a buddy comedy released in 1980 and starring Bill Murray as Thompson and Peter Boyle as Acosta—except the Acosta character is a Hungarian lawyer named Lazlo. Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” from 1998, got closer to reality: Dr. Gonzo is played by the Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro. In Gonzo’s L.A. office, we see a poster for Acosta’s 1970 sheriff campaign, a United Farm Workers flag, and an image of Cesar Chavez.
The Straight Arrow editions of Acosta’s books went out of print shortly after they were published. In the mid-eighties, Acosta’s son, Marco, set out to get them republished. Vintage agreed to do so if Thompson contributed an introduction, which he did. The new editions came out in 1989, and remain in print.
But one of Acosta’s last pieces of published writing appeared in a less rarefied setting: the letters section of Playboy magazine. It was a response to a profile of Thompson that the magazine had recently run, which had credited Thompson with creating gonzo journalism. The article described the approach as “a very cranked-up style,” and explained that Thompson “stays well cranked in order to maintain the pace: Guacamole, Dos Equis and MDA are the staples of his diet.” Acosta took issue with this. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was the result of a collaborative effort, he wrote, in which he and Thompson carried out the reporting “hand in hand.” He added: “P.S. The guacamole and XX he got from me.”
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/what-fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas-owes-to-oscar-acosta
