Twas a Monday afternoon in my part of the world when it happened. A strange feeling began to hang in the air. A disturbance in The Force. Crazy as everything was at the time, I knew that something in the world had happened that would drive the weirdness home.Over the past couple of years, it has been with a bit of trepidation, fascination, consternation, and just plain, dare-I-say-it, loathing, that I have read the never ending stream of drivel flying across the Internet lauding the late great Hunter S. Thompson. The only thing I’ve found more bizarre than his suicide has been the way the establishment media he hated has now bestowed all but sainthood on the man.
Within days of Thompson’s death, it seemed as if everyone he ever cracked a Bud with was worshiping the good doctor and his work to the point of embarrassment. The majority of commentaries ending with the over used phrase: “We will not see his kind again,” as if a marble statue for a town square was being commissioned.
Yes, everybody seems to have his or her own Hunter S. Thompson story.
Well, I don't. Really. I don’t. Never met the man. And as is the case with any literary hero, it's probably a good thing I didn't.
But now that the dust has settled, the smoke has cleared, and the blood has dried, perhaps enough of the weirdness has died down to a level the good doctor would have thought appropriate. And now I can write about the guy, and what he meant to me.
Subversion 101
I was not yet old enough to drive when I first heard of Doctor Gonzo and began to read his rambling, wonderfully bizarre work. A burned out hippy I worked with as a part time telemarketer had given me a well worn and passed around copy of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas during a coffee break, along with the recommendation that I “get into it.” That seemingly innocent act of passing on a paperback would lead me on a very long, very strange life-long journey.
The next day, when one of my high school teachers saw me with my latest reading material in a study hall, I was chastised for being on my way to a life of “no good” and that the book I had in my possession was “total garbage.” It was further preached to me that I would never get anywhere in life and that I was on my way to someplace worse than prison, hell, or Camden, New Jersey.
Never had I experienced such a reaction to something I was reading. A book can do that? Wow! As a rabid teenager at the height of rebellion during the drug and sex soaked 1970s, I knew I had hit pay dirt. It was now official. I was a subversive. A troublemaker. Someone who had to be “watched” and “monitored.”
It felt good. And I wanted more.
I read what I could of Thompson’s work, and loved every bit of it. But exploring his material led me to other off-the-beaten track writers that pushed the limits of decency and the English language. People like Burrows, Joyce, Ginsburg, and many others. I learned from Thompson that literature was not something old and musty, but living and breathing. A combination of life and fire that dwelt upon the printed page.
Later on, upon seeing Bill Murray play Thompson in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam, I began to think seriously about becoming a writer or journalist. The movie drove the weirdness home the way only cinema is capable of. The weirdness was attractive. It seemed to be the only place one could find sanity given the state of the world. Then, or now.
You might think that the drugs, booze and wildness were what attracted others and myself to Hunter and his razor sharp words. Not so. Thompson proved right out of the gate that the pen (or Selectric typewriter in his case) is mightier than the sword, or any of the numerous firearms he had at his disposal. Thompson’s words represented raw, uncensored thought. It was beyond honesty. Paragraph after paragraph had a way of leaking into your head like old batteries leaking acid into an even older radio.
It was Gonzo!
Dead Enough to Appreciate
The sick truth now being revealed is that most journalists who looked down upon him, secretly loved Thompson’s work and longed to emulate him. Not in an overt way, but in a cowardly, Walter Mitty way. They dreamed of being Thompson. But the furthest most of them could get was being egotistical drunks. Forever wallowing in the pain of knowing that they had all the tools for greatness at their disposal, but none of the guts needed for the glory. As obvious and insignificant as the crosses of a graveyard, recording the wasted lives no one will ever remember.
And they were jealous of Thompson too. Jealous that he lived, while many of them merely existed. Jealous that he wrote what he wanted to, not what he was ordered to. Jealous that he didn’t sell out, no matter what it cost him.
There was also the commodity of truth. Thompson was willing to embrace the reality most journalists are unable, or unwilling, to admit these days: We are living in a world that is, quite literally, insane; that there is more idiocy than intelligence present in the halls of power; and that there is very little those of us who have figured out the scam can do about either.
But now they love him. The talking heads on television, the teachers of literature in schools. It is the way of things. The bane of all great writers is to be a social outcast while living and the subject of a PhD thesis while dead. Overread, overpaid, overweight university professors for decades hence will give lectures on what Thompson meant. But I seriously doubt few, if any, will be able to understand what Thompson wrote.
Yes, the poor doctor is being dissected. And you know by whom. The monsters over the bed. The same ghouls who have restrained humanity upon a gurney are still very much in charge. Those vein-faced creatures with Joker-like grins that hooked the world up to an IV cocktail of mediocrity and stupidity.
They loom over the bed, in the darkened room, watching the bottle above . . .slowly drip.
Thompson knew them for who they were, and tried to tell us. Some of us listened and acted accordingly. Others are just waiting for the autopsy.
Which one are you?
