The uncle drove his mother crazy, and she began to accuse her own son of being “an ugly and dirty Indian.” Oscar Zeta Acosta in 1971, in a portrait of Annie Leibovitz that recovers the documentary 'The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo'. Acosta idolized Ernest Hemingway and once started writing a book about his childhood - he was eight years old, and his father was off fighting in World War II when his uncle moved into the family home. As a child, he was taunted by his classmates for being “brown.” As a teenager, he was stopped by the police in his white girlfriend’s neighborhood for the same reason. Acosta would always outdo Thompson in everything, even in the massive quantities of recreational drugs they both consumed.īorn in 1935 in El Paso (Texas, USA) and raised in California, Acosta was the son of an indigenous peach picker from the mountains of Durango in Mexico. “Hunter, you son of a bitch, what I’m trying to do is build a society,” Acosta once wrote to Thompson. When they met in 1967, both still had hopes for the future, although Acosta was much more aware of the world’s injustices. Like Duke and Gonzo in the book, Thompson and Acosta had an explosive friendship, marked by a mutual penchant for bucking authority and an appetite for excess. Gonzo, the demented “300-pound Samoan lawyer,” who accompanied Thompson on the rollicking adventure to Las Vegas 50 years ago? His real name is Oscar Zeta Acosta. The life of Thompson and Raoul Duke, his alter ego in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has been thoroughly chronicled by now. His son John was in the next room and mistook the gunshot for a dropped book. Thompson shot himself in the head in the kitchen of his Woody Creek home in the US state of Colorado. On February 20, 2005, gonzo journalist Hunter S.

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