A few minutes ago, I was informed that Hunter S Thompson had shot himself. He was found by his son Juan in that cabin he’d called home in Woody Creek since the early 60s.
He was a near-failure from Kentucky that’d joined the Air Force and found journalism as a sports editor for the base’s paper. Some people find religion, he found out how much power the written word had. From the Air Force, he started writing bits here and there, gaining the attention of the sort of people who hire writers and it was this reporting that got him his first book deal, Hell’s Angels. It was this tome that led to him getting stomped by his titular subjects, his nose broken. He wasn’t embarassed about this incident or particular proud - it was what it was - bad behavior on the part of bad people, just proving the point he’d made.
He traveled quite a lot, as journalists are wont to do. It was Colorado that would serve as his own Foxbase Alpha, though. From Woody Creek, he’d make dispatches to the world, tussling with Richard Nixon and other bastards that needed to be put in their place. He redefined journalism with his “gonzo” style - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas being the example of how to waste a magazine’s money in glorious style while still capturing a story, if not the one you were sent off to do.
If you’ve only seen the movie for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas or the Bill Murray vehicle Where The Buffalo Roam, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Oddly enough, I was rereading The Great Shark Hunt on the subway for the last few days and I can’t recommend it highly enough for a big slab of his best work. It goes without saying that comics fans wouldn’t have had Transmetropolitan without Thompson - he was so bizarre that no writer could invent him.
I’m sipping some bourbon right now for you, Raoul Duke. I hope you’ve already popped by Nixon’s afterlife and managed to give him a bit of a shock.
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
UPDATE: As he does so often, Rob beats me by a country mile.
