"Thompson
was a madman, but we needed a madman on our side
to keep the
lunatics on the other side in check. There's more of them
than
us and they're a lot more dangerous than Thompson ever was."
-- comment from an aging hippie in Hawaii.
The
tempestuous writer nicknamed Dr. Gonzo and Duke once said the only
way to learn the boundary of The Edge is from people who have gone
over it. He finally went over himself, but not like he imagined
when was younger. Back then he thought he would buy it pushing a
motorcyle over 100 miles per hour on some lonely moonlit highway.
When the time came, he ate a .45 pistol instead.
As
Don Meredith used to sing when Monday night football became a blow-out,
turn out the lights, the party's over. Hunter S. Thompson is gone
and a new earth would have to evolve before we see another writer
as original as he was.
The
founder of gonzo journalism would have approved of stretching a
football metaphor to describe the end of his life. Thompson
was a football fanatic who often ignored writing deadlines to watch
important games. In football he saw the American game of life in
all of its graceful splendor and bone-crunching ugliness.
Thompson's
last Sunday game was a different kind of blow-out. At his 100-acre
Owl Creek farm near Aspen, Colorado, he extinguished the candle
of his life and left millions of fans in the dark. He was pushing
68 and his physical health had been deteriorating for the past year:
spinal surgery, hip replacement, constant pain, in and out of a
wheelchair -- not to mention the likely degenerative effects of
his legendary use of alcohol and drugs. To top it off, he broke
his leg during a recent vacation in Hawaii.
Thompson
never expected to see 40, thought he would die young and leave a
good-looking corpse like James Dean. Approaching middle age, he
made a pilgrimage to the grave of one of his favorite writers, Ernest
Hemingway, to see if he could reach an understanding of why Hemingway
had killed himself. The residents of Ketchum, Idaho, had one thing
to say about Hemingway's condition in those last years: "That
poor old man."
Dr.
Gonzo was a large man (six-foot, three-inches tall) with a large
appetite for the pleasures of life. Being pitied was not for him.
He lived six years longer than Hemingway and cashed in his chips
for the same reason as his hero. When a man grows too old and frail
to enjoy the things he loves to do, the things that give his life
meaning, it's time for him to say goodbye. Thompson lasted to within
a year and a half of the average American male lifespan -- no shabby
feat for a man who lived perpetually on The Edge.
The
sprawling Colorado homestead Thompson occupied for many years was
officially named the Owl Creek Farm, but he sometimes referred to
it as "The Compound" -- as in bunker seige mentality.
Was Thompson paranoid? Or were "they" really after him?
A case could be
made for actual persecution in some instances. The Guardians of
Normal Society once tried to railroad Thompson into prison on trumped-up
charges which he beat with the help of influential friends. The
critics were not kind to Thompson's last couple of books. Some used
hairy phrases like "hopelessly out of date" and "has
been." In these neo-conservative times it has become fashionable
to ridicule icons like Thompson who emerged out of the wild 60s
movement. Thompson chose to hunker down in his Colorado retreat
to weather the new political storm raging across America. He stayed
out of the limelight as much as possible and even stopped visiting
his favorite watering hole, the Woody Creek Tavern, as often as
he used to.
But
since his death, I have been surprised by how gently the press has
treated the memory of Dr. Gonzo. Now that he is safely gone and
can cause no more trouble, it seems he is suddenly worthy of all
kinds of praise. I'm convinced Thompson would have a sarcastic remark
to make if he could read his obituaries -- just like he would find
humor in the fact that he died on the same day as Sandra Dee. The
former movie princess with a squeaky-clean image concealing a tragic
case of alcoholism and the madman who flaunted his excesses out
in the open for everyone to see. The comic irony would have drawn
a belly laugh from Dr. Gonzo.
My
own introduction to Thompson came 30 years ago when I picked up
a copy of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." It was ostensibly
about Thompson covering a motocross race in the southern Nevada
desert, but the subtitle gave hint to the book's true message --
"A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream."
I thought it was the most outrageously funny book I ever read. I
laughed so hard and long I actually got a stomach ache. Who could
ever forget the "medicine"-induced desert bats or the
300-pound Samoan attorney staring at a knife blade with a wild gleam
in his eyes or crawling to a hotel room closet to puke into a pair
of shoes? It was madness on a grand scale and it was bizarrely hilarious
for all the wrong reasons. After I finished the book, I concluded
that Thompson possessed some sort of skewed genius for darkly absurd
humor.
As I
soon discovered, that was only one facet of his multi-dimensional
writing. Since "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," I have
read literally every word that Thompson ever published and some
of it multiple times. I wanted to get to the bottom of what actor
Jack Nicholson called "the most baffling human iceberg of our
time." Aside from ordinary curiosity about an author I enjoyed
reading, I had personal reasons to explore the life and work of
this mysterious wild man. (See sidebar)
Like
his favorite boxer Mohammad Ali, Thompson grew up in Louisville,
Kentucky, home of the high-society Kentucky Derby which irritated
him enough to perfect his new kind of journalism when he covered
the horse race in 1974. Thompson got into trouble with the law when
he was a fatherless teenager. Details of the incident are sketchy
and obscured by the mythology Thompson loved to create about his
personal life. Suffice it to say that from an early age he didn't
believe policemen were his friends. Following high school, he attended
Columbia University, but dropped out after a short time.
Thompson
began his professional writing career in his early twenties as a
newspaper reporter in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nearly four decades
later he wrote about his San Juan experiences in "The Rum Diary,"
a laid-back narrative that included a glimpse of his friendship
with future fiction author William Kennedy.
After
Puerto Rico, Thompson took a job as a roving correspondent for the
National Observer in South America. For a young man with scant formal
training in journalism, his National Observer reports were amazingly
perceptive and well-written to an experienced journalist like myself.
While in South America, Thompson became ill and took some medicine
that caused his hair to start falling out, resulting in his trademark
baldness.
His
next stop was San Francisco on the cusp of the hippie revolution,
but Thompson was no instant convert. At that point in his life he
was much more of a Kerouac beatnik than a Flower Child, preferring
to hang out with motorcyclists than longhairs. He had a rough time
finding steady work to support himself in the City By The Bay and
he moved to Big Sur for awhile to hunt wild pigs in the bush. Later
he began following the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang with
the idea of collecting material for a book about them. When the
Angels discovered he was a writer, they nearly beat him to death,
but he got his book published and it attracted a lot of attention
in the right circles.
Thompson
was in San Francisco for the 1965 Summer of Love and eventually
he embraced the goals and the lifestyle of the hippie movement in
his own unique way. Years later Thompson reflected on the 60s as
a time when "we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful
wave." Looking back at the era's passing, he added with obvious
disappointment: "You can almost see the high-water mark --
the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
By the time "Hell's
Angels" appeared in print, Thompson was married and had a young
son, Juan, whom he didn't want to grow up to be a "good German."
The reference was to atrocities committed by Nazis who claimed they
were only doing their patriotic duty by following orders. Hatred
of fascism disguised as patriotism was an early hallmark of Thompson's
thinking.
His
breakthrough book was "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,"
published in 1971. It sold millions of copies and opened doors that
would otherwise have been closed to Thompson. He decided to make
presidential politics his bailiwick, a fateful choice that would
shape his writing for the rest of his life. In 1972 he followed
the presidential candidates around the country. Among the press
corps, he was the odd man out, usually riding on the Zoo plane instead
of Air Force One with incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon.
Thompson cultivated
a venomous dislike of Nixon and the feeling was mutual. Thompson
once said Nixon and his "Barbie doll" family were "America's
answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in
us. He was a liar, a quitter and a bastard. A cheap crook and a
merciless war criminal."
Thompson
recalled standing on the tarmac beside Air Force One while it was
being refueled one day. He lit a cigarette and gleefully pondered
tossing the match into the fuel to save the country from Nixon.
He didn't do it, of course, but this revealed how twisted his imagination
could be.
 He
was nearly as merciless in his assessment of two other presidential
candidates in 1972. He called Hubert Humphrey a "ward healer"
and wrote: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible
and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until
you've followed him around for a while." Covering Edmund Muskie,
he said, "was something like being locked in a rolling box
car with a vicious 200-pound water rat."
Thompson's
book "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72"
was an immediate success, but he took less satisfaction than he
expected because Nixon was re-elected in a landslide victory
over the anti-Vietnam war candidate George McGovern.
After
the presidential campaign book, Thompson began writing for
Rolling Stone and other magazines. He was always late settling in
for a writing assignment at some unlikely location, setting
the stage for an ordeal of anxiety, missed deadlines and mutual
recriminations with his employers. Thompson seemed to work
best under these disagreeable conditions. He usually started
by getting loaded and wandering around, which seemed like wasting
time, but it was his way of absorbing the ambience of the place
to cut through the bullshit and reach the pertinent underbelly of
what was happening. He put off the actual writing to the last minute
when the magazine editor was tearing out his hair by the roots and
screaming on the phone for copy to be faxed one page at a time hot
off the typewriter. In his deranged state of mind Thompson's thinking
went something like this: All I have to do is lash some paragraphs
together and send this puppy off before the hyenas move in for the
kill.
It was
a game Hunter loved to indulge in, particularly with Rolling Stone
publisher Jan Wenner. "A writer must have his little diversions,"
Thompson once calmly explained to an irate Wenner. The magazines
put up with Thompson's slovenly work habits because he was the most
insightful (if somewhat warped) journalist of his era.
In
practice Thompson honed a revolutionary kind journalism in which
the reporter plays a central role in the story. It was in your-face
outlaw journalism, but he prankishly named it gonzo journalism after
the goofy-looking Muppet character. In traditional journalism reporters
are supposed to be invisible and objective in what they write. Thompson
chose to inject himself, his strong opinions and his imagination
into every article he composed. Some called his writing fiction,
but Thompson was quick to point out that a writer's work is ultimately
based on his real experiences.
Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times worried Thompson might some
day "lapse into good taste. That would be a shame, for while
he doesn't see America as Grandma Moses depicted it, or the way
they painted it for us in civics class, he does in his own mad way
betray a profound democratic concern for the polity. And in its
own mad way, it's damned refreshing."
In
1983 Thompson came to Hawaii on assignment to cover the Honolulu
marathon. After dismissing the race as "a bunch of Japs running
past the Arizona Memorial," he relocated to the Big Island
where I happened to live. He arrived in Kona just in time for the
worst winter rainstorm in decades. After the storm abated, he went
deep sea fishing and noted how the boat captain turned into a Nazi
the instant he stepped aboard. But Thompson wore him down and the
boat ended up adrift and on fire off of South Point. When Japanese
tourists waved from the cliffs, Thompson shouted: "Remember
Pearl Harbor!"
In
Kona he also met some marijuana growers and made a nuisance of himself
at the Kona Inn bar. I deduced this from the reaction of the bartender
when I asked if he had seen Thompson lately. He stopped wiping a
glass and glared at me hatefully. "No, I haven't. Why?"
My deduction was
confirmed later when I read "The Curse of Lono," Thompson's
book about his long stay in Hawaii. With one exception, he was quite
perceptive in his observations of the Aloha State. He noted that
native Hawaiians were unfairly forced to live on the margins of
island society, but he expressed astonishment that Hawaiians believed
sharks were the manifested spirits of their ancestors. Thompson
didn't care for sharks, especially not when he was swimming in the
ocean.
One passage
in the book upset me. I lived in a tropical rainforest on the east
side of the island which I considered one of the most beautiful
places on earth. After a drive through the area, Thompson described
it as "a vast fern wasteland" -- a very odd choice of
words in my opinion. Apparently, he was turned off by the constant
rain I had become accustomed to.
In
his later years Thompson mellowed a bit. He traveled less and stayed
home to take care of his Colorado farm, which had a peacock as a
"watch dog." One photo purportedly shows Thompson feeding a wolverine
-- one of the most vicious animals on earth. He fooled around with
his massive gun collection and had his own firing range on the farm.
Two of his drinking buddies were actor Don Johnson and CBS newsman
Ed Bradley, who owned homes nearby.
"Nothing
exceeds like excess" could have been Dr. Gonzo's motto in his
heyday if it hadn't already been used as a buzz line in the film
"Scarface." Or, as poet William Blake said, the road of
excess leads to the palace of wisdom. These sentiments applied to
both the life and the writing of Thompson. I try to picture him
as the ancient Greek demi-god Pan carrying a typewriter slung over
his shoulder, a silver-tongued satyr with mischief always on his
mind, but the hooves would have freaked him out. "Holy shit,
man," I can almost hear him mutter. "People will think
I'm the devil, dig up my grave and beat my corpse like a red-headed
stepchild."
Thompson
was a shameless ham around cameras -- his daughter-in-law hinted
at cross-dressing and excessive use of lipstick on occasion -- but
for all his clownish posturing, he was at heart an intensely private
and thoughtful man, according to family members and friends. His
public persona was a defense mechanism to keep the world mystified.
Dr. Gonzo, we hardly knew ye.
After
his close friend and attorney Oscar Acosta vanished without a trace
in Mexico (some say in a drug deal gone bad), Thompson wrote this
simple eulogy: "He stomped the terra." Hunter Thompson
did the same with his own brand of panache.
He
requested one song to be played at his funeral -- Bob Dylan's "Mr.
Tambourine Man":
I'm ready to go anywhere
I'm
ready to fade
Into
my own parade
Cast
your dancing spell my way,
I
promise to go under it
If
Thompson had left the choice to me, I would have selected this tune
by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young:
Find the cost of freedom
Buried
in the ground
Mother
Earth will swallow you
Lay
your body down
Selah!
TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE
BY THOMPSON MORE
THOMPSON PHOTOS |
