November 1971. Across an old oak table piled with print, the old librarian passed me the latest Rolling Stone. Under a drawing from hell was:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . ."And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas...
Hunter Thompson and his 300-pound Samoan lawyer were on a roll:
Once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can...
The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab...The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge....
Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out.
Hunter Thompson shot himself a la Hemingway on Sunday, Feb. 20.
I knew Hunter a little.
In 1972, as local papers fawned over Sen. Henry Jackson - father of Vietnam and WPPSS - a friend gave me Hunter's phone number, and I asked him for a piece on "Scoop " for the Seattle Flag.
Thompson sounded sane, then barked, "But Scoop's just a #@$!." It was the worst thing you could call a man. And he kept repeating it, until he asked, "How many words did you want?"
My friend Peter was circulation director at Rolling Stone and recalls Hunter and cocaine in a D.C. bar.
"'Lay it on my hand, you #@$!,'" he ordered. "'These idiots don't know what the #@$! it is.'
"Later he made an illegal turn and got pulled over by a cop. Hunter jumped out and rushed the shocked kid with screams of 'WHO THE #@$! IS RESPONSIBLE FOR DESIGNING THESE #@$! LIGHTS?! THEY SHOULD BE CASTRATED TO ENSURE THEIR GENES DON'T CONTAMINATE THE NEXT GENERATION!"
Oh, they got off.
The shot at Woody Creek has created a Thompson tsunami. Parts of him have washed to the surface from Rolling Stone, Salon, and Playboy. The Paris Review has George Plimpton's 15-hour interview from Woody Creek on its Web site.
Tom Wolfe - Ph.D., Yale, English literature - called HST "the century's greatest comic writer in the English language."
From the grave came Ken Kesey's highest praise: "A natural fool."
Surviving Hunter is a young wife who looks like Julia Roberts, a son, grandson, a hundred-acre compound next to Aspen, millions and a loving audience to whom his death seems so unnecessary.
According to family members, Hunter's pain wasn't that bad. He'd always dealt with arthritis and one leg being shorter than the other, the result of football. As for the substance abuse, Thompson put it in perspective: "I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing."
Now, Hemingway shot himself after watching a man fly fish on the Big Wood River below his cement castle in Sun Valley. He was depressed because he thought he couldn't fish, make love or write.
But Hunter never lost his powers. The day after 9/11 he predicted we'd soon pulverize Afghanistan and Iraq. Last fall he wrote: "George Bush has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war.... Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?"
He also predicted that W would finish off the American Empire, and as the dollar heads for being 50 cents against the Euro, he might not be far off.
When Thompson's column appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, its circulation soared.
Without being asked, all our children read his books - and like them.
I keep thinking Hunter might have been saved if there had been a good gym down the road or a lap pool in the compound, or if he could have gotten another name, assignment or scene.
But his artist in crime, Ralph Steadman, says Hunter once told him: "I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time."
By his own count he could or should have died 13 times before.
Steadman describes Hunter as damn near 6 foot, 6 inches of solid bone and meat, with two fierce eyes firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head.
Hunter S. Thompson: Born in Louisville, Ky. 1937. Father an insurance salesman; mother, a librarian. Use to type out Hemingway, Faulkner and Conrad to catch their rhythm. Sports editor in Air Force. Covered Latin America. Fell in with Hell's Angels. Had big problems with deadlines. Once pulled a gun on an editor and told him, "Don't ever touch my lead."
Hunter reminds me of an American Cyrano. Like Cyrano, he was a deadly poet, who detested falsehood, cowardice and compromise.
And who did everything with panache.
Maybe there's a bright side. Hemingway's best book appeared three years after his death.
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