IT WAS, as such, a quintessentially gonzo situation. Hunter Thompson and his "technical adviser" (drug conduit) Yail Bloor, while escaping the angry Yucatan town of Cozumel and unpaid bills for hotel rooms, drugs and cars, have to get rid of "two hits of MDA, six tabs of acid, about a gram and a half of raw cocaine, four reds and a random handful of speed" before their Aeromexico flight touches down in Texas. The Lone Star State, it seems, has a reputation for being unfriendly to people who try to carry massive amounts of hallucinogens through customs.

He hunkered down in his seat, saying nothing. Then he stared across at me. "What are you saying? That we should just throw all this shit away?"

I thought for a moment. "No. I think we should eat it."

"What?"

"Yeah, why not? They can't bust you for what's already dissolved in your belly--no matter how weird you're acting."

"Jesus Christ!" he muttered. "We'll go stark raving nuts if we eat all this shit!"

I shrugged. "Keep in mind where we'll be when we hit Customs," I said. "San Antonio, Texas. Are you ready to get busted in Texas?" He stared down at his fingernails.

"Remember Tim Leary?" I said. "Ten years for three ounces of grass in his daughter's panties..."

He nodded. "Jesus...Texas! I'd forgotten about that."

Not surprisingly, the two manage to survive their adventure with only a sustained high. This episode, typical of the acknowledged "Prince of Gonzo," can be found in the title piece of his first book in six years, The Great Shark Hunt.

Those who do not look kindly on Thompson's scream-of-consciousness writing style consider his stuff to be no more than "pseudo-literary exhibitionism," the product of a burned-out mind and of little significance to anyone but academics doing studies on the evil effects of narcotics. William F. Buckley Jr., writing in this week's New York Times Book Review, predictably attributes Thompson's work to "a very nearly unrelieved distemper," and comments that he "elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral."

Such high-toned criticism ignores the value of an observer (and often participant) like Thompson, who, instead of couching his accounts in detached and restrained tones and carefully excising any references to personal experiences, writes spontaneously and subjectively, with a minimum of pretense, refinement and distillation.

Gonzo journalism takes the oxymoron "objective journalism" and laughs in its face. When Thompson "covers" an event, he writes through his own eyes and experiences, because it is the best--if not the only--way to convey what he has seen.

A newspaper article is not reality; it is the reporter's closest acceptable approximation of it. The difference between "gonzo" and "objective" journalism is that while AP/UPI/New York Times/Harvard Crimson news articles usually walk a treacherous tightrope between what the reporter actually believes has happened and the accepted rules of "fairness and balance" and attribution for everything, the gonzo piece just spews observations and conclusions that would have no place in formal, tightly constructed "factual journalism."

THOMPSON'S NEWEST BOOK, over 600 pages, includes 49 articles that span his career from a relatively straight South American reporter for the National Observer in the early 60's through the protogonzoid transition stage of the late 60's to Rolling Stone national affairs correspondent in the disgustingly un-freaked-out 70's, where Thompson's semi-paranoid, disoriented, "vulgar," terminal brilliance reminds the stultified that there is an unpleasant side of life, whether they like it or not.