Hunter S. Thompson July 18, 1937-February 20, 2005

Hunter Thompson died three Sundays ago. He took a shotgun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. It was a shock to a lot of people. But I think to those who followed him it was almost a fitting end to a pretty insane life. Not a good end by any means. No. Suicide is a nasty business. Especially that kind of suicide. Too much of a mess to clean up afterwards. But somehow taking his own life is how Hunter was supposed to go. He lived fast and dangerously for so many years throughout the 60s and 70s that to just slip away quietly at the age of 93 wouldn’t have fit him at all.

I first saw Where The Buffalo Roam in the mid-90s when I was working at Evil Empire Video. I was on a Bill Murray kick and was watching what I thought were his little known films. (I never made it to The Razor’s Edge. Some say that was good planning.) I didn’t know hardly anything about Hunter S. Thompson at the time. All I really knew was that he occasionally wrote for Rolling Stone and even that I wasn’t too sure about.

After seeing the movie I was a convert. Could someone so strange have truly lived? Could he still be living today? Was he really that much of a rebel in the face of the people he was supposed to be observing from a distance? Did he really do THAT many drugs?

It would appear that he did all of that and more.

Soon after seeing that movie I heard that Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was finally being made. We had actually talked about the movie in film class before it ever came out. It seems that the project had been bouncing around Hollywood since the mid-80s with Alex Cox (Repo Man, Straight To Hell) attached to direct. After that fell through (partly through Hunter’s constant discontent with the screenplay, partly because of budget constraints. But it was now finally going to be made with Hunter’s full participation (and even a cameo in the film) and Terry Gilliam directing. With Johnny Depp playing Hunter and Benicio del Toro playing his lawyer “friend,” Dr. Gonzo, everyone involved knew that it was going to be a trip that they would never forget.

I read the book almost immediately. As immediately as I can, anyway, being a reader of about the speed of a snail on quaaludes. What amazed me about Hunter’s writing style was the fact that he never actually talked about the subject of his story. He was mainly talking about himself (or, Raoul Duke as he calls himself in the book) and Dr. Gonzo and how they infiltrated every orifice of Las Vegas with their drug-addled minds. And yet he spoke volumes about his real subject. If Vegas is the culmination of what the American Dream is all about, then that dream is a pretty sad state of affairs. Things have gone severely downhill since the 30s when the concept was first thought up.

Then the movie came out. As soon as the opening credits went by I was an instant convert. I wanted to read everything that this guy ever wrote. I wanted to be as crazy as he was. And I especially wanted to be Raoul Duke for Halloween.

Well, none of that happened because, being a lazy-assed American, I dropped the ball on it. Fear And Loathing is still the only book I’ve read by the man. I have never been able to write like him. (No one has, though they try sometimes too hard.) Hell, I couldn’t even get this tribute up within a week of his death. Buy, hey, if Garry Trudeau had a problem doing that, then I feel vindicated. (His character of Duke is based on Hunter, and he just got his tribute comic out this morning, brilliant though it is.)

It’s strange to think that there is no Hunter S. Thompson in the world anymore. Sure, he had only been writing for ESPN’s website lately with the occasional foray into what he does best, writing political commentary for Rolling Stone. But he was still writing. And, even though his time had passed, his words never lost their bite or their quality. It’s the world around him that changed. There are no more Gonzo Journalists anymore. In a way, they’re all Gonzo. (Especially that Geraldo guy.) They have become bigger stars than the news they’re reporting on. But they do it with a respectability that probably sickened the Good Doctor.

So now, as I look out of the window down the hall from my office (I don’t get a window actually IN my office), I see a world that has lost a little piece of itself. The journalism world has lost a hero. The rebels have lost a kindred spirit. And the 60s have lost an icon. His time may have passed, but we needed him more than ever in this crazy, conservative filled world.