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Literary icon and counter culture hero, Hunter S. Thompson took his own life on Sunday, much as an earlier icon, and personal hero of Thompson's, Ernest Hemingway, did before him: with a gun. In his prime as a gonzo journalist, Hunter lived and articulated the passion of the sixties better than anyone. Like many of us, he believed, as he put it, in its "sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil." And when it was all over, and little had changed, Hunter once again spoke for us all: "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."
Well, he's done it. The bastard. Oh, he's mentioned it before for sure. At the beginning of The Great Shark Hunt, if memory serves, he mentions what it feels like to be an American writer at age 40 writing the forward of his collected works -- probably everything he'd ever written (except for the fiction, The Rum Diary etc.), certainly everything he'd had published -- on the night before Christmas eve (19'77?). He had an urge, he said, to sign it and leap off the balcony of about the 22nd floor. He said it would be a fitting end, and that he'd already lived much longer than he'd planned to ... Maybe he felt he'd done his best work -- and it's a thick bastard, the Shark Hunt, you could defend yourself with it. And it could be argued that he was right, he had done most of his best work. The chunk on Nixon is sublime, and it alone is worth the price. Of the hardback. The rise and fall of Richard M. Nixon. Who'd have thought that you could bring that to life. It made me roar, mainly with laughter, and I wish I had it here now so I could quote from it, but of course I've loaned my copy to you, nephew, and can't... I'll have to make do with this, from the Pulitzer Vs. Pulitzer piece, published in Rolling Stone in'83:
"I am living the Palm Beach life now, trying to get the feel of it: royal palms and raw silks, cruising the beach at dawn in a red Chrysler convertible with George Shearing on the radio and a head full of bogus cocaine and two beautiful lesbians in the front seat beside me, telling jokes to each other in French...
"We are on a way to an orgy, in a mansion not too far from the sea, and the girls are drinking champagne from a magnum we bought from Dunhills, the chic and famous restaurant. There's a wet parking ticket flapping under the windshield wiper in front of me, and it bores me. I am giddy from drink, and the lesbians are waving their champagne glasses at oncoming police cars, laughing gaily and smoking strong marijuana in a black pipe as we cruise along Ocean Boulevard at sunrise, living our lives like dolphins....
"The girls are naked now, long hair in the wind ... One of them is tipping a glass of champagne to my mouth as we slow down for a curve near the ocean and very slowly and stylishly lose the rear end at seventy miles an hour and start sliding sideways with a terrible screeching of rubber past Roxanne Pulitzer's house, barely missing the rear end of a black Porsche that protrudes from her driveway...."
Yes, well, he had a gift and he worked hard at it. Honed it. Got so fast on the typewriter that his fingers could keep up with his mind.... How intoxicated was he when he worked? Who knows. I don't s'pose it really matters now, and either way it doesn't alter a word he wrote or the impact it had -- that last statement, by the way, is pretty well a direct quote from HST, musing about Hemingway. Ernesto. Yeah, that's right, we had to get to him sooner or later.... I think Thompson admired his work greatly, even commenting somewhere that Papa Hem was so influential that he changed the way people spoke. (Certainly it's true that one of the strongest areas of Hemingway's writing was the way he handled conversation, as opposed to, say, his women, who never seemed entirely believable.) He even took the trouble to visit the little town (Ketchum sp? Idaho) where Hem lived his last years before he shoved a favourite shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger (more likely pushed it with his toe). Of course this piece too is in the Shark Hunt and therefore I'll have to rely on memory, but I think he does take some time to speculate on why he killed himself -- failing powers, alcoholism, head injuries to name a few.... But who knows why anybody does such a deed. Such a violent thing. But then they were both big, brawling, boozing, violent men who always had guns around them. And the world's a richer place for both of them having been here.
Hemingway was dead by the time I started to read him, but Thompson's been a part of my consciousness for a long time and I'll miss him. The world's definitely a poorer place now. Now that he's no longer down there in Woody Creek cursing at the TV, pounding out copy and shoving it into the Mojo Wire, snarling: "Chew on this gibberish you heartless swine".
Yours in mourning,
D.
Here's just a little more on our deceased friend, 'cause I can't quite let it go yet.
"OK. HST" That's how he would sign his book galleys after he'd proofed them for the last time. Next stop, the printer. And that's it, sport, no more changes. It doesn't matter if the man reads the sentence -- "Fcuk off, he snarled" -- he's not going to change a thing... Sorry squire, I thought maybe you'd reversed the letters for effect. The pages/galleys Thompson had worked on but wasn't satisfied with, he'd sign -- "OK For Now. HST"
But I was thinking: 'No, not OK, not for now or later.' In fact I'm feeling kind mean about it this evening. What a horrible thing to do to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. We are told that his son found him. Can you imagine? Juan Thompson must be about 30. Real horrorshow...[Knocks. Pushes door open slowly. Fearful. Has found father in all sorts of strange states before. Has a flashback to the Ibogaine days...] "Hey Dad, Dad, are you ok? Oh Jesus! Holy cow..."
Not nice. I wonder what caliber hand gun was used? It would make a difference to the sight young Juan had to endure, as well as to the cleanup crew. (I guess there are people who clean up that sort of thing for a living, just like there are guys who pump out septic tanks 5 days a week.)
But dammit, Hunter Thompson was one of the people I've relied on over the years, to wade through the gibberish, to watch the news 24 hours a day on 75 stations, to read 3 or 4 newspapers a day, to make some kind of sense of it all and then distill it down into something I can comprehend. Like this, from Better Than Sex--Confessions of a Political Junkie: The Gonzo Papers Vol. 4. Random House 1994. (All quotes are from this book.) Thompson followed the '92 election even more closely than usual. He threatened publicly to move to Paraguay if George Bush was re-elected. He had a fit when Ross Perot joined the fun, fearing he'd split enough votes off Clinton to put George H.W. Bush back in the White House.
"In the winter of '91, George Bush was a lock for reelection. His 'approval rating' had rocketed from 41% in August to 89% six months later. The smart money said he was unbeatable in 1992...
"George Bush was in charge that year. He walked tall and kicked ass. George and his generals were the toast of the civilized world, and later that year they became almost godlike, as 'democracy' swept the world and the Soviet Union crumbled....It was a heady time, folks; the USA was definitely Number One, and so was George Bush. He was The Man.....
"...No president in American history has fallen so far, so fast, as Bush did between the summer of '91 and the summer of '92....
"He dipped about 55 percentage points in those 12 baffling months, and in the end he was just another oil lobbyist from Texas.
"The main problem George Bush had in the summer of '91 is that nobody in big-time Republican politics really owed him anything. He was the president, but so what? Richard Nixon had also been the president, and look what happened to him. When Nixon became an embarrassment to the GOP [Grand Old Party: The Republican Party] they dropped him like a stone and hunkered down, all but conceding 1976 presidential race to a lightweight, nonthreatening peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.
"There was no hope for any Republican candidate in '76, they felt; it was better to 'let the wounds heal,' they said, and turn the terrible responsibilities of the White House over to a maverick, small-state Southern governor with no real power base and no hope of reelection.
"It was a strategic retreat for the GOP. Let the Democrats reap the whirlwind of the public rage and loss of faith in government that came in the wake of Watergate.... Carter was merely a caretaker, a short-term lessee.
"The strategy worked like a charm, and in 1980 Jimmy Carter was swept aside like offal by the 'Reagan Revolution,' which ushered in eight years of berserk looting of the federal treasury and economic crippling of the middle class.
"That was the eighties, folks. That was the feeding frenzy of the New Rich, who found themselves wallowing in excess profits as their maximum income tax rate got chopped down to 31% and who were welcomed like brothers in the White House at all hours of the day or night."
That was a long chunk to quote, I know, but it's an eloquent summary. And it reminds us of why America's in the state it's in today. Hey! Maybe that's it! Maybe that's why Thompson took himself out: Another Bush in the White House, for another term. Unendurable. When your main enemy, the president of the country, is some mediocrity who peaked during his frat house years at Yale; someone who could make even Dick Nixon look like a class act.... Dr. Thompson had lost all sense of challenge, and maybe all hope... Check this out:
"Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seen honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together."
And this:
"It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road...
And finally (I think):
"... but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I'm proud of it. He was scum.
"Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in the way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or moral or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling back on the ship."
No American president since Nixon has given us that kind of clarity. (Ford, Carter, Bush, Clinton, W.Bush -- not exactly an illustrious group, and W's certainly the bottom of that barrel.) Hunter S. Thompson needed an worthy adversary, an enemy of great stature to rage against, a real monster, and he lost that very thing when Nixon died in '94.
Yours in angry mourning, D |
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