A lecture at San Diego State in 1985, a night at Symphony Hall in 1988, two end zone seats nobody sat in, and one line about El Cajon nobody can explain. All sourced and cited.
On Saturday night, January 30, 1988, the night before Super Bowl XXII at Jack Murphy Stadium, Hunter S. Thompson was booked to speak at Symphony Hall downtown. He would not go on until he was promised a $2,000 bonus, and the man assigned to look after him finally pushed him onto the stage.
The San Diego Union's reviewer wrote that Thompson "arrived one hour too late and stayed two hours too long."
He had two tickets to the game the next day. He did not use them. And when he was asked, years later, about San Diego, he mentioned neither night. He talked about El Cajon.
Almost all of what follows comes from the people who were in the room.
The first visit was a campus lecture. In October 1985 Thompson flew into Lindbergh Field for a speaking engagement at Montezuma Hall at San Diego State.
The San Diego Reader sent a reporter, David Diaz, and his account ran that month. Thompson had just started a weekly newspaper column. He sat in the airport bar and explained his schedule problem: "Two hours is an awful long time to go without a drink."
Then he went shopping. Diaz reports that Thompson bought San Diego souvenirs at an airport gift shop, broke a light bulb on the counter, and had opinions about the city's sweatshirt slogan of the moment, "San Diego Feels Good All Over," which he called "ill-fated." He also had something to say about the run of peep shows and porn shops in the Gaslamp Quarter, which in 1985 still had a good deal of the old Stingaree in it.
The Reader's account of that week, reprinted in 2023, fills in the rest. Thompson stayed at the Radisson in Mission Valley. His host from the university was Scott Pederson, and he gave a joint interview to two reporters from The Daily Aztec, the campus paper.
At Montezuma Hall he drank Chivas Regal and took questions for about two hours. Asked about the voters who had just re-elected Ronald Reagan, he called them "a generation of swine." Three years later he used the same words as the title of his next book, "Generation of Swine," a collection of those Examiner columns published by Summit Books in June 1988.
When someone took his whiskey away, he yelled at the crowd. Back at the hotel bar, a liter of Chivas cost $65 and went on Pederson's room tab. Thompson's verdict: "Hey, these things happen."
San Diego hosted its first Super Bowl in January 1988. Super Bowl XXII was set for Sunday, January 31, at Jack Murphy Stadium in Mission Valley, Washington against Denver.
The concert promoter Bill Silva Presents booked Thompson for Symphony Hall the night before. It was a natural fit on paper. Thompson had been writing about Super Bowls since "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl" in Rolling Stone in 1974.
The man the promoter sent to collect him was a Reader writer, Thomas K. Arnold.
Arnold explained his position in the Reader the next year, in 1989. Thompson had told the promoter he did not want reporters around. So Arnold went in as the promoter's assistant. He picked Thompson up at the airport, and he spent the next three days and nights with him.
He planned to write it up in the style of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." He never did. In that 1989 piece he wrote that he felt ashamed of the deception, and that the story stayed in the drawer.
It stayed there for thirty five years. In October 2023 the Reader finally ran it as a cover story, and almost everything below comes from it. Arnold is the only witness to most of it, so I will tell it in his name.
By Arnold's account he collected Thompson at Long Beach Airport on Friday, January 29, 1988, and drove him south. Thompson had him chase a Mustang through Orange County on the way.
The promoter's office had booked him into the Sports Arena Travelodge, across from the Sports Arena in the Midway district. Arnold took him to Nati's in Ocean Beach, where Thompson had two shots of tequila with a Vodka Collins on the side. He signed Arnold's copy of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" with an IOU for "a vicious beating" over $2,000 he claimed Arnold had stolen from him. A late lunch at a Baker's Square ended with the manager telling Arnold about Thompson's behavior in the kitchen.
The program itself kept shrinking. Former Mayor Roger Hedgecock had been part of the evening and was dropped. Arnold quotes Thompson: "I fired Roger." A 91X disc jockey, Oz Medina, was supposed to moderate, and Thompson refused to share the stage with him.
Then came the money. Arnold writes that Thompson would not go on until he was promised a $2,000 bonus tied to ticket sales, and that Arnold himself made the promise. Sales never reached the number, so the bonus was never paid. And when it was time, Arnold physically pushed him out onto the stage.
The show ran about ninety minutes. The best record of it is the review Mike McIntyre filed for The San Diego Union, which Arnold quotes. It ran under the headline "Bad Time For Gonzo." McIntyre wrote that Thompson "arrived one hour too late and stayed two hours too long," and that "the first half of the show was anarchy."
When it settled down, by McIntyre's account, Thompson told a story about a hunting trip in South America, described trouble with the Secret Service after a talk at Marquette University, and called Vice President George Bush "a lying, whimpering creep." Bush was running for president that winter.
Super Bowl XXII was played the next afternoon. Washington beat Denver 42 to 10, Doug Williams was the MVP, and 73,302 people were in the stadium.
Thompson was not one of them. Arnold writes that Thompson had two end zone seats as part of his fee and had invited him along, and that the next day Thompson told him he had traded both tickets for an ounce of cocaine.
He spent the afternoon in the Travelodge suite instead, at a party of thirty or forty people stocked with the promoter's Heineken and Wild Turkey, until he threw everybody out.
There is one independent record of the day. Tom Blair's newspaper column of February 4, 1988, which Arnold also quotes, reported that Thompson skipped the game and held a knife throwing contest with Thomas K. Arnold. Arnold's version is that Thompson showed him how to throw knives.
On Monday morning, Arnold writes, Thompson answered the phone at Arnold's place in Point Loma as "Thomas K. Arnold's office."
That is two documented visits, three years apart, and the city comes out of both of them looking like a stage set Thompson walked through. But he seems to have remembered a third San Diego that nobody wrote down.
In the fall of 2004, about four months before his death, Thompson did a book signing at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip with Benicio del Toro, who had played his attorney in the film of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." The Reader's piece after his death in February 2005 records what he said, sitting next to del Toro: "This reminds me of the times in San Diego, over in El Cajon."
Nobody at the table asked what the times in El Cajon were. Nobody has explained it since. Thompson spent the mid 1960s riding with California motorcycle clubs for "Hell's Angels," and his letters fill several published volumes, so the answer may be sitting in print somewhere. I have not found it.
The most interesting thing he ever said about San Diego is one sentence about El Cajon, and nobody, including the people who babysat him, can tell you what it meant.
Symphony Hall is still downtown, now Copley Symphony Hall inside the Jacobs Music Center. Current numbers for the area are in the downtown market report. The 1972 convention that was supposed to be at the Sports Arena, across the street from Thompson's Travelodge, is its own story, the convention Nixon took away.
After the show, Thomas K. Arnold remembers a stop at Liticker's Liquor in Ocean Beach, where they ran into Mojo Nixon. Mojo Nixon's San Diego.
Whose account this is. Nearly everything about the 1988 visit comes from one man, Thomas K. Arnold, writing about thirty five years after the fact. The parts that do not rest on him alone are Mike McIntyre's review and Tom Blair's column, both from 1988, and both as Arnold quotes them. I have not read either original.
The tickets. That Thompson traded his Super Bowl tickets for cocaine is what Arnold says Thompson told him. It is not documented anywhere else. Blair's 1988 column confirms only that he skipped the game.
The knives. Blair called it a knife throwing contest. Arnold says it was a lesson. This page gives both.
El Cajon. The line is quoted once, in the Reader, from a signing in 2004. What it refers to is unknown. This page does not guess.
La Jolla. The 2023 Reader piece has La Jolla in its title because the author saw a Thompson musical at the La Jolla Playhouse decades later. There is no record here of Thompson spending time in La Jolla.
More San Diego history: every story, oldest history first.