Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

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 what 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 only aids in the presentation of his research;
it never hinders or overshadows it.  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.