Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship,
My senses have been stripped,
My hands can’t feel to grip,
My toes too numb to step,
Wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin’.
I’m ready to go anywhere,
I’m ready  to fade
Into my own parade,
Cast your dancing spell my way,
I promise to go under it.

-“Mr. Tambourine Man”, identified by Hunter as the only song he has requested to be played at his funeral

I was somewhere outside of Raleigh when the news began to take hold.

Not only dead, but suicide.  Gunshot to the head.  I tried to
decipher it.  At first I began to think maybe it was just one of
those miserable nights that all people who are fluent in the language

of mind-altering chemicals have.  Unable to focus, bobbing in the
vast sea of Inner Thought, sometimes dipping below the surface,
sometimes rising back into coherency and Now.  Past and present
slow dancing with each other in a lonely room.  Drunk and baffled
or perhaps high and unmighty, solo-sitting in the kitchen and an idea,
perhaps planted long ago, begins to sprout then flower.

I couldn’t get angry about it.  I didn’t feel misled, misused, or
even abandoned.  I didn’t even feel that upset about the
blabbering word jockeys that were chatting up the Good Doctor with
deadlines in their minds instead of true love in their hearts.  It
was another great study in cultural icon obituaries, where the words
must be timely and the deceased himself must be reduced to a handful of
sentences about his life with no true understanding.  And so, the
world that never read much of Hunter or knew of him only as a relic got
all they needed to know: drug abuser, volatile writer, disdainer of
standard journalism.  Las Vegas, Woody Creek, Rolling Stone.
These things are slightly necessary, especially on a sub par holiday
when everyone is waking up late and searching for Pop-tarts and
something to occupy their time.

But there was more, as always…

In the early days of my exposure to Hunter, I was madly infatuated.  I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, then the Rum Diary,
then all four volumes of the Gonzo papers.  At that point in time,
he was my consummate hero.  I never doubted what he said, never
thought to give it a second thought as to whether anyone could actually
live their life this way for any extended point in time without any
damage.  I was in college, working for the school’s programming
board, when I came across (somehow) Hunter’s literary agent’s phone
number.  I called immediately and she gave me some warning.

“What you have to know is that you never know what you’re going to get
with Hunter.  He’ll either be brilliant or so wasted that he’ll
piss everyone off, even his fans, and walk off early, demanding to be
taken home.  He hates crowds.”

I had her put in a word to him anyway.  I assumed that visiting a
historical place like Kent State might be enough to tempt him away from
Colorado.  It wasn’t.  And I learned my first lesson, that
Hunter, like Kent State itself, lived in the now, and was eager to
shove the bitter past behind, no matter how monumental it seemed nor
how much notoriety it garnered.

And I also learned how Hunter existed, what he had created for himself:
not just a persona that argued with his real personality like many
writers, musicians, and artists face, but also an aura that was
difficult to either nurture or kill.  He was, at heart, a deeply
self-conscious man.  You can glean this from his first novel
(which he abandoned before going to Puerto Rico), or in any video
interview.  Included on the Criterion Collection’s edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
is a great documentary made by the BBC in the late 70s/early 80s, and
the man you see there is so radically different from the one Johnny
Depp plays, that the first time you see it you feel gypped, but then,
later, and with more understanding, you realize that it’s easy to
reconcile the two.  There are clips of the speech he gave after
losing the election for sheriff in Aspen, and you can tell that, even
though in his campaign he was essentially throwing the new Fringe in
the faces of a stodgy society and daring the people to face him that he
still expected to win.  And the loss, as you can see on his face,
deeply upset him.  You can see a man who is afraid to face a crowd
of people outside the Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.  You can see
the reality of the morning after a long, crazy night when the cameras
enter his messy hotel room, a visual that struck me as extremely apt
and heartbreaking, a metaphor, yes, for his life in the public eye:
there is the carnage, the remnants of joy and violence, but in the
center of it all sits a man in his underwear who is not entirely proud
of himself.

I believe that this was a man who had probably accomplished everything
he wanted to a long time ago.  And in between that point and now,
there was only the wait and the brief glimpses of what true wisdom
could be gained if anyone really bothered to go and find out, but I
think the fact that he was tied so unexpectedly to Nixon, to the Acid
Craze, to Violence, that, after the wipeout and rearrangement of the
past few decades, no one really thought to consult him about new evils,
or new terrors…no one felt that he could shock anymore.  But that
is not what people like me look for: mere shock and style.  Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72
are two of the best history books ever written, and Hunter’s style
never hindered the truth of his research, only that masses’
accessibility to his hard-won evidence.  But this is what we do
with our idols…we cast them in marble or copper and erect them,
anchored to one spot in history, and the only time we climb up inside
the pedestal is when we feel like seeing the same familiar view from
inside out.

Hunter knew this, and this may have been just one more factor in a
long-standing mood of dissatisfaction.  In the end, I think he may
have always wanted to go out tragically like F. Scott Fitzgerald, but
rather had to settle for the disconcerting method of Hemingway.
And those of us in the settling cloud, those of us with the
reverberation of a gun blast taunting our ears, can only look on in
Fear at the body then let the first wave of tears start to swell
against an invisible, unknowable wall.