Then, as a useless afterthought, I asked if by any wild chance a Mr. Steadman had checked in… She chuckled. “You won’t have any trouble finding him. You could pick that man out of any crowd.” “Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong with him? What does he look like?” “Well…” she said, still grinning, “he’s the funniest looking thing I’ve seen in a long time. He has this…ah…this growth all over his face. As a matter of fact it’s all over his head.”
…
But Steadman was already in the press box when I got there, a bearded young Englishman wearing a tweed coat and RAF sunglasses. There was nothing particularly odd about him. No facial veins or clumps of bristly warts.
-from The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. It was the first thing I ever read by Hunter S. Thompson. I read it more than twenty years after it was first published, but, having grown up in the South, it didn’t surprise me.
I see, though, that more than forty years later Mr. Steadman has shed a great deal of that growth.
