Dr.
Hunter S. Thompson meant the world to me. I did not have to know him personally
to be his understudy. I had his words at my beck and call. First enamored by
the idea of him after watching the film Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas, I picked up every single one of his books from the library. I remember that two mile
walk with an armload of big books, thinking I should have brought a backpack
but smiling because I knew the ache in my arms would prove worthy once I
feasted on the words. The first book I read was Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas, a no-brainer for you, dear reader, I’m sure, to have predicted. I
consumed this novel in about ten hours. After that I backtracked to the
beginning, Hell’s Angels. If you want to know more about his works, read
them yourself. Don’t be a barnacle. I can feed you my opinion on the works but
the pith within must be gathered on one’s own. This isn’t about his books. This
is about the man and why I love him so much.
The
day he committed suicide my brains may have well been pasted on the wall along
with his. Shock, horror, disbelief, rage, sadness and more scrambled my
thinking worse than a hit of bathtub crank when the news of the Ace GonZo dying
at the moment when we needed him most, when a brat president was waging war on
a country in order to appease his father and anyone else who enjoyed slapping
him on the back, including the Bin Ladens. To my generation people like
Thompson and Jon Stewart were the heroes and the ones to watch, not the swine
on Capitol Hill. Knowing now what I did not know then, Doc would have given me
a taste of the long knuckle for being so naïve.
At
twenty-seven I ought to have known better. Instead of mourning and then
beginning to think clearly I opted to throw jack flags and conspiracy theories
about his death to anyone who would listen. “Thompson never would have gone out
like that!” I’d say. “He’d have ridden a fifty caliber shell into an oil drum
to make a statement. It had to be the government or some J.P. Fatback with
interests in Halliburton angry at the comments made about 9/11 in Kingdom of
Fear! Or a rogue cop gone mad at the fact that Doc made a mockery of the
police in court, not only beating their case against him but even having his
guns and drugs returned! He was not just
a scribe! He was Scarface with a pen!”
I
was wrong. Tragically, he did end his own life in much the same way as Ernest
Hemingway, acting quickly and without question. Why does that make more sense
than what I thought as a young man? Thompson saw too much. One of his first
rules had always been “Pay Attention” and eventually his acumen brought him to
his knees. For when a person, moreover a writer, pays close attention to media
trends, no matter how banal, and does this for a great deal of time they begin
to see around corners. Not simply be able to think around corners, but see what is coming with the eye of a
prophet. A few proselytize as if wearing a magical sandwich board and ringing a
bell; I myself agree with Thompson. It is just logic, logic built like muscles
via hunting down the subtext lying inside everything. And the poor man, grown
old and tired from all the years of taking every move to the absolute limit
could no longer stand watching the country he loved so dearly slip through his
fingers like a threadbare silk power tie. He could no longer abide knowing many
of his friends--such as Richard Nixon--were downright criminals.
I
describe him as part Edgar Cayce, part F. Scott Fitzgerald, and part Studs
Terkel with a generous dose of the Tazmanian Devil. His second wife described
him as a “teenage girl trapped in the body of a mean old man.” Perhaps both are
true. Watching Thompson in his documentaries, he is alternately gentle and
vicious like a dog that will bite but would rather lick. He once wrote a letter
to a young boy who shared his first name that read; “Never forget you come from
a long line of lovers and warriors.” He braved the wilds of Argentina and lived
dangerously in Puerto Rico to write for The
San Juan Star that constantly held out on paychecks. He risked his life
covering Vietnam and the Chicago Seven protests to help Jann Wenner make a real
magazine out of Rolling Stone. He
took severe punishment and a beating from the Hell’s Angels to write the book
about them so he and his family could have a house of their own, Owl Farm. How
many men stack up to him? Not many, regardless of his suicide which I believe
was brought on not by some Man In Black but by that ability to see his own irrelevance sneaking up on
him with the very dagger he had created, the triumphant fist holding a peyote
button. Toys and the dumbing down of a generation by these smiling morons on
the television…they are still smiling and they always will and there’s not a
blasted thing even Thompson could do about it.
He
may well have been wrong. We shall see.
A
Final Note: The day he died, I grabbed a black sharpie and my acoustic guitar
and wrote on the soundbox: HST-’37-’05 and added my favorite sentence of his,
one from The Rum Diary that, to me, says more about his thinking, life,
and attitude than any one of these words.
“They would
finish their drinks and file quietly into the night, like a troupe of clowns at
the end of a laughless day.”
Rest
in Peace, old Viking. You proved it, at least to me if no one else. The pen
really is mightier than the sword.
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