<\/p>\n
I was somewhere outside of Raleigh
\nwhen the news began to take hold.<\/p>\n
Not only dead, but suicide.
\nGunshot to the head.\u00a0 I tried to
\ndecipher it.\u00a0 At first I began to think
\nmaybe it was just one of those miserable nights that all people who are fluent
\nin the language of mind-altering chemicals have.\u00a0 Unable to focus, bobbing in the vast sea
\nof Inner Thought, sometimes dipping
\nbelow the surface, sometimes rising back into coherency and Now.\u00a0 Past and present slow dancing with each other
\nin a lonely room.\u00a0 Drunk and baffled or
\nperhaps high and unmighty, solo-sitting in the kitchen and an idea, perhaps
\nplanted long ago, begins to sprout then flower.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t get angry about it.\u00a0 I didn’t feel misled, misused, or even
\nabandoned.\u00a0 I didn’t even feel that upset
\nabout the blabbering word jockeys that were chatting up the Good Doctor with
\ndeadlines in their minds instead of true love in their hearts.\u00a0 It was another great study in cultural icon
\nobituaries, where the words must be timely and the deceased himself must be
\nreduced to a handful of sentences about his life with no true
\nunderstanding.\u00a0 And so, the world that
\nnever read much of Hunter or knew of him only as a relic got all they needed to
\nknow: drug abuser, volatile writer, disdainer of standard journalism.\u00a0 Las Vegas,
\nWoody Creek,
\nRolling Stone.\u00a0 These things are slightly
\nnecessary, especially on a sub par holiday when everyone is waking up late and
\nsearching for Pop-tarts and something to occupy their time.<\/p>\n
But there was more, as always…<\/p>\n
In the early days of my exposure to Hunter, I was madly
\ninfatuated.\u00a0 I read Fear and Loathing in Las
\nVegas, then the Rum Diary, then all four volumes of
\nthe Gonzo papers.\u00a0 At that point in time,
\nhe was my consummate hero.\u00a0 I never
\ndoubted what he said, never thought to give it a second thought as to whether
\nanyone could actually live their life this way for any extended point in time
\nwithout any damage.\u00a0 I was in college,
\nworking for the school’s programming board, when I came across (somehow)
\nHunter’s literary agent’s phone number.
\nI called immediately and she gave me some warning.<\/p>\n
“What you have to know is that you never know what you’re
\ngoing to get with Hunter.\u00a0 He’ll either
\nbe brilliant or so wasted that he’ll piss everyone off, even his fans, and walk
\noff early, demanding to be taken home.
\nHe hates crowds.”<\/p>\n
I had her put in a word to him anyway.\u00a0 I assumed that visiting a historical place
\nlike Kent State
\nmight be enough to tempt him away from Colorado.\u00a0 It wasn’t.
\nAnd I learned my first lesson, that Hunter, like Kent
\nState itself, lived in the now, and
\nwas eager to shove the bitter past behind, no matter how monumental it seemed
\nnor how much notoriety it garnered.<\/p>\n
And I also learned how Hunter existed, what he had created
\nfor himself: not just a persona that argued with his real personality like many
\nwriters, musicians, and artists face, but also an aura that was difficult to
\neither nurture or kill.\u00a0 He was, at
\nheart, a deeply self-conscious man.\u00a0 You
\ncan glean this from his first novel (which he abandoned before going to Puerto
\nRico), or in any video interview.
\nIncluded on the Criterion Collection’s edition of Fear and Loathing in
\nLas Vegas is a great documentary made by the BBC in the late 70s\/early 80s, and
\nthe man you see there is so radically different from the one Johnny Depp plays,
\nthat the first time you see it you feel gypped, but then, later, and with more
\nunderstanding, you realize that it’s easy to reconcile the two.\u00a0 There are clips of the speech he gave after
\nlosing the election for sheriff in Aspen,
\nand you can tell that, even though in his campaign he was essentially throwing
\nthe new Fringe in the faces of a stodgy society and daring the people to face
\nhim that he still expected to win.\u00a0 And
\nthe loss, as you can see on his face, deeply upset him.\u00a0 You can see a man who is afraid to face a
\ncrowd of people outside the Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.\u00a0 You can see what the reality of the morning
\nafter a long, crazy night when the cameras enter his messy hotel room, a visual
\nthat struck me as extremely apt and heartbreaking, a metaphor, yes, for his
\nlife in the public eye: there is the carnage, the remnants of joy and violence,
\nbut in the center of it all sits a man in his underwear who is not entirely
\nproud of himself.<\/p>\n
I believe that this was a man who had probably accomplished
\neverything he wanted to a long time ago.
\nAnd in between that point and now, there was only the wait and the brief
\nglimpses of what true wisdom could be gained if anyone really bothered to go
\nand find out, but I think the fact that he was tied so unexpectedly to Nixon,
\nto the Acid Craze, to Violence, that, after the wipeout and rearrangement of
\nthe past few decades, no one really thought to consult him about new evils, or
\nnew terrors…no one felt that he could shock anymore.\u00a0 But that is not what people like me look for:
\nmere shock and style.\u00a0 Hell’s Angels and
\nFear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 are two of the best history books
\never written, and Hunter’s style only aids in the presentation of his research;
\nit never hinders or overshadows it.\u00a0 But
\nthis is what we do with our idols…we cast them in marble or copper and erect
\nthem, anchored to one spot in history, and the only time we climb up inside the
\npedestal is when we feel like seeing the same familiar view from inside out.<\/p>\n
Hunter knew this, and this may have been just one more
\nfactor in a long-standing mood of dissatisfaction.\u00a0 In the end, I think he may have always wanted
\nto go out tragically like F. Scott Fitzgerald, but rather had to settle for the
\ndisconcerting method of Hemingway.\u00a0 And
\nthose of us in the settling cloud, those of us with the reverberation of a gun
\nblast taunting our ears, can only look on in Fear at the body then let the
\nfirst wave of tears start to swell against an invisible, unknowable wall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,352],"tags":[68,353],"class_list":["post-2500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-gsarchive","tag-cassander","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2500"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2758,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500\/revisions\/2758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}