At least they got his name right at the end. In the often-told legend of Hunter S. Thompson, Bill Cardoso makes an early cameo under a variety of misspellings—Cardozo, Cardoza, depending on which writer is selling the tale—as the guy who first dubbed Thompson's writing "gonzo." After that, of course, their paths diverged: Thompson went on to milk the gonzo shtick for a mint while Cardoso disappeared into the anonymous ranks of journeymen odd-job writers. He was a fine and frequently comic journalist, Cardoso was, but, really, it was the precise application of that single word that earned him his few obits when he died recently. He was sent off with the full honors accorded a footnote: AP moved a few vague, dutiful paragraphs ("Bill Cardoso, writer who coined term 'gonzo,' dead at 68"); Rolling Stone, where he published a few pieces in the good old daze, threw him a couple of sentences. He was Cardoso in every one I read, which would have pleased him—partly out of mild vanity, but mostly because he was a stickler for getting the easy stuff right. He once stickled me for being too lazy to check the proper spelling of Bemidji, Minnesota, in something I wrote ("Go to the atlas! Respect your country!")
I still have some of the fitful correspondence he and I exchanged in the late '80s and early '90s, page after typewritten page, each carefully corrected in pencil before he mailed it. I'd reached out to him after chugging his collection of articles, The Maltese Sangweech and Other Heroes, which you can still find in used-book stores, and should; I was charmed by its combination of urgent reportage and speedy, casual style. (Of course, his connection to Thompson was a huge drawing card I was polite enough not to bring up too often.) In our exchanges, I played the tail-wagging pup, eager for a few pointers and a pat on the head; he was generous with both, offering encouragement and ironic-in-hindsight advice, like this gem from 1989: "Stay away from 'alternative weeklies.' Are you out of your mind?"
But the sunny banter couldn't dispel the darker currents that tugged at him. He knew fashion and relevance had passed him by. There wasn't much demand for his brand of comic, literate New Journalism—especially when practiced by a guy without a marketable byline—in a business that came to be defined by trendy snark and celebrity stenography. "Please accept my apologies for not responding sooner," he wrote in February 1989. "I was too broke to afford stamps, to distraught, too hungover, too f--ked-up, and too, too much of everything else dreary and dreadful to do much of anything, including answer letters." Many letters described his futile attempt to interest editors in a large, serious piece about wild horses in Nevada—and everything that needs to be said about the chancy fortunes of the freelance piece-worker are embodied in his readiness to pounce on a hint that Conde Nast Traveler might pay him to recast the story with a focus on (and it hurts my fingers to type this) "rancher lifestyle." That didn't happen, either.
Our letters dwindled into the sad experience of him urging me to get him a job at the Las Vegas Sun, where I worked. September 1996: "So I'm asking you to put things into play ... I'm a sure-footed, seasoned presence in a city room ..." I tried, but the bosses had little interest in some old dude and his past glories. We lost touch soon after.
Thompson idolatry aside, my heroes have always been little-known magazine sloggers like Bill, like smooth-writing Craig Vetter or tough, intellectual John Lombardi; seasoned pros whom 98 percent of readers don't recognize but who have done great work in a fleeting medium. It pains me that Bill's afterlife as a writer depends on one word he applied to another writer's work instead of his own many good words. But that's the game for most of us, regardless of our profession. (Plumbers don't earn immortality for their great pipework.) When I sent a link to Bill's obit to another mag vet, he wrote back, "I'd thought he was already gone." It was the ultimate freelancer's epitaph.