Hunter S. Thompson

Ye fucking Christ, as the man himself would say, were he still around. But he isn't. Hunter S. Thompson killed himself today. Here is a link to one of the stories about him. I am sure it will change as the day goes on- as more information comes out, as we get all the gruesome details, as the morgue-lovers and sycophants obsess over the details of a death that was, like all death, sad and personal, with the intimacy and horrifying solitaire nature of suicide. We'll gawk, but we won't really know.

This gibberish I am about to spew will be out of tone with the rest of the essays: more personal, more emotional, sadder. How can anyone feel differently? Hunter S. Thompson is one of the main reasons I want to write. I picked up his books in high school- the first one was "Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie," about the 1992 presidential elections. I realized later that, for all its high points, it wasn't his best work. But it didn't matter. I woke up while reading it, and realized, this is what I want to do.

The next book I grabbed, rushed to, was "The Great Shark Hunt," a collection of essays from the 60s and 70s. This was Hunter (and he is always a first-name guy) at his finest: he is best known for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which is a masterpiece, but it isn't his finest journalism.
And that is important- so very important. Hunter was a journalist. He tried to experiment with the style- you'll hear how he invented "gonzo journalism" a million times in a million obituaries- but that sadly obscured the heart of his works: the desire to gnaw at the bone of truth, to push aside any hypocrisy, any falsehood, any easy, truth-obscuring cliche. His essays in "The Great Shark Hunt" rank among the finest pieces of American journalism ever.

A personal aside: Hunter is who made me want to write. I have shaken off the tendency to try to write like him, because that is impossible. The desire to sound like Hunter has undermined many writers far more talented than I. But there is always something of Hunter there. There always has to be: his ferocious lust to get to the heart of the matter inspires every shallow imitation I produce. Every essay, at least in part, is a humble, non-imitative offering to the man. There are very few times when I don't imagine what he may have thought of an article, and many words have been scrapped because of his imaginary disapproval.

And this is important: this is what great writing does. Like so many others, I feel as if I knew Hunter. I feel his style, his beliefs, his artistic and moral aesthetics, affected nearly every word he ever wrote. Hunter was one of the few writers who you could feel his life on the pages; he encouraged you, prodded you, forced you to feel things deeper, harder, clearer. You did feel as if you were inside his head- he spilled it onto the pages, and his words bled out of the books: onto your table, your desk, spilling over your face. There was no way to read Hunter without coming hard against the man. Reading Hunter was to set yourself on a collision course with on of the most unique and idiosyncratic voices in American letters.

And that is what makes his suicide so harrowing. I have no idea what happened, but I cannot get this scenario out of my head: Hunter, alone in a room, drunk, pondering, feeling the intensity which surrounded his life, which was his unavoidable curse. God, the humanity in his writing, the depth of emotion. He is caricatured into a grotesque archetype of waste and excess- and he helped play up that role- but at the heart of his work was a human being possessing a terrifying involvement with life. I hate the thought of him alone and suddenly overwhelmed by a burst of deep, unknowable sadness, and pulling the trigger without a second thought.

Hell, in his novel, "The Rum Diaries," a mediocre book with some outstanding sequences, the narrator speaks of The Fear. What is The Fear? Who knows. It is a unnamable, clawing, atavistic emotion that no one can describe. The feeling that things aren't right- not that something is going badly, but that there is a fundamental flaw with the whole situation, and it can only be grasped at in certain moments, when the world turns at a strange angle, and you are seized by this awful feeling, but can't describe it. It has you, but you don't have it. The Fear. Hunter had it all the time, and I weepingly envision it being the last thing he felt.

This isn't the first time he talked about suicide. The introduction to "The Great Shark Hunt" in heavily involved with it. He talks of having a nice typewriter, a new one, and of being a 40-year-old writer in America. I will quote the end at length.

I feel like I might as well be sitting up here, carving the words for my own tombstone...and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into the Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.
Nobody could follow that act.
Not even me...and in fact the only way I can deal with the eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live- (13 years longer in fact)- and everything from now on will be a new gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.
So if I decided to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear- I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.
But what the hell? I probably won't do it (for all the wrong reasons), and I'll probably finish this table of contents and go home for Christmas and have to live for 100 more years with all this goddam gibberish I'm lashing together.
But, Jesus, it would be a wonderful way to go out...and if I do you bastards are going to owe me a king-hell 44-gun salutr (that word is "salute" goddamnit- and I guess I can't work this elegant typewriter as well as I thought I could)...
But you know, I could, if I had just a little more time.
Right?
Yes.

Well, Hunter, there you go. You'll get your goddam 44-gun king-hell salutr, all right. You'll be trumpeted for gonzo, for Las Vegas, for your obsession with drugs and guns and Las Vegas, for marking the debauched excess of the Kentucky Derby as the decadent and depraved slice of American filth it is. Your work in the 80s, distressingly sub-par, will be fairly glossed over. Your later work on ESPN.com/page2 was in the tradition of your best sports-writing- getting to the dark heart of the sports culture, of the violence around it, while still maintaining a love for the purity of athleticism.

But I worry the true darkness of your life will be passed over. You were taken by The Fear, and you saw it everywhere, and with it you captured America as well as anyone ever has. You are always described as "counter-culture" and you were, but that is such an easy term, lumping you in with Abbie Hoffman and a slew of others. You were not oppossed to things for the sake of oppossing them- you deeply felt the hypocrisy that tore apart the nation as it ate up individuals. Your tragedy was never being able to convince yourself that things could be better- you never comforted yourself with idealism. You saw the darkness everywhere.

I'd raise a gun for you Hunter. You liked guns, you liked the noise of guns, the rush of drugs, the thirll of lights and explosives and abandoning responsibility. Of taking life to the very edge. But that was always to run from The Fear. It wasn't hedonism, as I fear your obituaries will imply. You were not some hippie free-spirit. You were a spirit as chained to emotion as any which ever picked up a pen. You weren't oppossed to everything- you were a writer deeply versed in literature, and deeply affected by its power. You were a slave to The Fear, and it was evident in all your writing, and it seemed to catch up with you on a cold Aspen night.

You wrote of Hemingway's suicide. Of the bleak despiar of the Idaho town of Ketchum in which he put a shotgun to his head, and I can't help but think you had the same thought running through your head as you got ready to pull the trigger in a rush of emotion. "Perhaps he found what he came for," you wrote of Hemingway, in what could be on your tombstone, "but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him...So, finally, and what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun."

Hunter couldn't escape his fear. He couldn't escape the madness he saw in the world. He always had his reasons for everything, good and solid reason obscured by the insane force of his personality, but reasons rooted deeply in humanism and literature and a torturous sensitivity to the cruel rhythms of the world. And, finally, he put a shotgun to his brain, and destroyed his mind. Ended everything. For what one can only assume were the best of his reasons.

RIP, Hunter S. Thompson. One of the heroes.