'Zo long: Tom Nawrocki talks with Ralph Steadman.

For more than two decades, Ralph Steadman served as muse, sidekick, and, most important, illustrator to the paranoid ravings of Hunter S. Thompson. Not since Ernest H. Shephard drew Winnie-the-Pooh for A. A. Milne has a sketch artist been so closely identified with an author. After Thompson's suicide on February 20, Bookforum asked Steadman to talk about his relationship to the gonzo journalist, how Thompson brought out the demonic in Steadman's own work, and what it's like to be chased out of Newport by the Coast Guard.

TOM NAWROCKI: Were you surprised that Hunter killed himself?

RALPH STEADMAN: He told me about twenty-five years ago that he'd feel real trapped in this world if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment. There's a lot of people right now in a hell of a state over it. What a wonderful thought, Hunter. Good idea. Blow your fuckin' head off. There must have been a moment when he snapped. Because he did sort of violently shout, "Why don't you leave me alone? Everyone's asking me to sign all this and that!" It was terrible. Everyone wanted him, taking bits off him, like tearing little pieces back. I just think it's terrible. I mean, he's really upset people, in a fundamental way. He did everything to upset, to disrupt, to castigate. What more can you say about the man? He was a public menace. The sheriff of Pitkin County and his men all came to Owl Farm and stood around his body and read some of his prose. They respected him, because he was one of their own. I think secretly he wanted to be a policeman. They get to carry a lot of firearms, and he liked that. I said, "Why have you got all these firearms out here?" He said, [deep, muttering Hunter Thompson voice] "Ralph, all around here, there are freaks wandering around. Do you think I'm going to stay in this place with all those weirdos wandering about outside without having all these firearms?"

TN: When was the last time you saw him?

RS: Last October or November. I wanted him to sign some things, and he said, "Everybody expects me to sign things." I said, "Well, I'll pay you. Sign these 175 pieces of paper, and I'll give you three thousand dollars." He came in like a thief in the night and he stole them and signed them. He came in the night and he went in the night.

TN: What made you such an effective muse to him?

RS: I looked helpless, but he knew that, in my way, I could be lethal when it came to the drawing. Take no prisoners, that was what we did. What we wanted to do, but we never did, was to go to a fancy wedding or a Hollywood party and just suck up to these people, draw them. He'd say, "But don't do that filthy habit in public. Don't draw in public--people get nervous. Maybe in England it's all right, but over here, people take that personally. It is a personal insult."

In Kentucky, when I first met Hunter, it was like, "What the hell are you doing, Ralph? Don't do that. People are watching." His brother, Davison, was very upset I drew him. Hunter said, "People are watching us. We've gotta get out of here." So we had to flee. We always had to flee. "I've got my mace gun with me, and I can fire it up in the air. Make people's eyes water, and there'll be a bit of a problem. But we've gotta get outside because I think someone's gonna go for you. I don't like this. At all." So he shot off a mace into the air, and we got out of the place.

TN: You weren't with him on his best-known outing, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, although your drawings ended up in the book.

RS: I did a dress rehearsal for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as his partner at the America's Cup in 1970. Our job, on a three-masted schooner, was to sail between the two racing yachts and fuck it up. The breeze wouldn't get up and they couldn't go, and they were all hanging about, people sitting on their two-million-dollar yachts with their gin and tonics, mint juleps, and all the rest, waiting for action. And there was no action. So we became the action. We went out there with a rock band on board and became the attraction. I had to get in between the boats with two spray cans in my hands, a black and a red spray can, and write "Fuck the Pope" on one of the boats. I was going to do it. But we got caught because when you shake the cans, they make that rattle, rattle, rattle. [sternly] "Who's down there?" "Oh, we're just looking at the boats." [Thompson voice] "Oh, fuck, we gotta flee, Ralph. We have failed, we gotta flee, but I must do something first. I must send up some distress flares into the harbor to announce our failure." So he shot a green and a red flare up. And one of them fell on a yacht in the harbor and started a fire. That was our diversion.

Meanwhile, Hunter was on the phone all the time, making phone calls back to Aspen, Colorado, to register as sheriff.

All my drawings in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are the direct result of what happened in Rhode Island. I needed to spill it all out. But Hunter didn't publish anything as a result of that Newport trip. The only bigger fucked-up story in the history of journalism was the Rumble in the Jungle with Ali and Foreman. That was just hopeless. I did the drawings, and Hunter hadn't produced anything. He sold our tickets to the fight! That night he took a three-pound bag of grass and threw it into the swimming pool and dived into it, and he took my bottle of Glenfiddich that I bought for him and watched it go down the filter.

What he was looking for was, Who financed this thing? And he figured it was a guy called John Daly, who was involved with David Frost, the journalist. So we went to see David Frost, in Kensington, in southwest London. [Thompson voice] "Oh, hello, David. How are you?" [high, piercing voice] "Come in, come in. Hunter. How nice to meet you," in that Noel Coward voice. [Thompson voice] "Very nice to see you. We've got a few questions about the fight in Zaire." David started saying, "Well, it was like this and like that." And then Hunter said, "Hang on a minute, David. I need to, uh, record this if I can." He's walking around the room, stepping over sofas, looking for plugs in the wall. And of course, there wasn't one. He said, "You don't happen to have a conversion thing, do you? So I can just plug my thing in? No, wait, don't start speaking yet." We came all this way to England, and he can't bloody well plug in his goddamn electronic gear. And looking for his cocaine--I was looking for his cocaine. I don't take cocaine. And I was the one who was sent out to look for it. Well, I suppose I was a bit of a patsy. I did quite a bit for him.

I was a naif, a perfect foil for a guy who did everything, who knew everything. I sometimes used my--excuse me--[adopts upper-crust Masterpiece Theatre voice] my English accent: "Excuse me, you wouldn't know how I could get some cocaine, would you? I have a friend who needs to get some." I was fucking innocent. And I am innocent. The bastard took me down roads that I'd never been down before. And that was why it worked. He was cheese and I was chalk.

TN: Yet your drawings have a grotesque streak to them that fit right in with Thompson's work.

RS: He loved them. He couldn't understand why I was so sweet, so innocent, and yet so venal in my drawings. Everyone was whatever they were in real life, but in drawings I could be anyone I wanted to be, so I could be the devil. Maybe I wasn't all that innocent.

For Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, I joined up with him in Miami like an assassin. If I could do my work and get out of America without getting arrested, I would really feel like I had done my job.

TN: You feel like you're being mean to people?

RS: Not just mean, but actually murderous. It's demonic. I get butterflies in my stomach when I do it properly. Hunter seemed to actually relish taking shots at those people. I was far more of an internationalist than he ever was. He hated travel, didn't want to go anywhere, wanted to be around America. So he was a home-spun kind of bloke who cared about his Constitution vehemently. And here were Nixon and Haldeman and Ehrlichman screwing up the Constitution, and he was absolutely outraged by that.

I don't know if Hunter felt he was stuck in a kind of time warp, you know? That somehow there was a part of him that couldn't work now. But they'll use him, like they used Mencken, because I think Hunter achieved what he was always after--being one of the great journalist-writers. He'll be remembered. And he'll be imitated.

Oh, ad nauseum. I mean, God preserve us.

Tom Nawrocki, a former editor at Rolling Stone, is now a freelance writer based in Denver. A limited edition of The Curse of Lono, autographed by Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman, is being published in May by Taschen.