Feb. 21. A long goodbye to Hunter S. Thompson

[shereads]

I don't have many heros, or require them. And God knows, you were an unlikely candidate for the job. It would have ticked you off, just knowing you were under consideration. You, the champion iconoclast. You who raged against our tolerance for false heros; who lived large and died small. Nasty, ignoble little death. Some hero.

But you were one of mine. And I miss you, damn it.

Two years ago, the Author Formerly Known as SubJoe asked me why I took your death so personally. I was stumped. On the 2nd anniversary of your death, I'm still unsure of the answer.

When I first became a fan, it was because you made me laugh. "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" was fine entertainment, and I liked that you prodded powerful people with no evident regard for the consequences - which could be considerable, in Nixon's case. I was a spectator during the Nixon years, and too uninvolved to appreciate the darker implications.

Over the years, the more involved I became - or at least aware - and the more I dared to hope the good guys would win, and the more shocking the losses, and the harder it became to hold onto a belief in the basic goodness of people and rightness of the system - the closer I came to knowing what those words meant to you:

Fear. Loathing. Outrage. Impotence. Shame, on behalf of our neighbors and ourselves. The realization that our most paranoid fears are someone else's victory.

Because you made me laugh, it was easy to forget that you were afraid.

People close to you have speculated that the 2004 election, more than the chronic pain of a bum knee, was what pushed you over the edge. Your involvement with the Kerry campaign. Your belief that Bush's failings were so numerous and obvious that he couldn't possibly win a second term. The bitter shock of that loss, and what it said about the wasted lessons of history. Loathing - an emotion that turns inward as well as outward - must have dragged at you like an anchor.

You had written, "Where is Richard M. Nixon, now that we finally need him?" Jesus! This, from the man who once wrote, "What a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.” Nov. '04 demonstrated that, not only had we learned nothing from Vietnam and Watergate; we had embraced values that made it possible to feel nostaligic for Nixon's.

On Feb. 17, you published your last column for "Hey Rube," your ESPN feature. Seattle Zack posted it here, and your fans in the AH were happy to see you laughing again after the long defeat.

You had called Bill Murray at 3 a.m. to tell him of your plans for Shotgun Golf. You wrote, "Shotgun Golf will soon take America by storm. I see it as the first truly violent leisure sport. Millions will crave it."

Later that week, you killed yourself. I've been back to that column a bunch of times since then, haunted by the final goodbye:

"Welcome to Shotgun Golf. Welcome to the future of America.

"So long and Mahalo.

Hunter"

http://files.photojerk.com/shereads/200px-10504755110907657454.jpg

~ ~ ~

I had looked up the meaning of "Mahalo" when you began using it as a signature. It's a sort of bookend for "Aloha," not exactly a greeting or a goodbye, but some of each, with a spiritual slant. "Aloha and Mahalo are invocations of the divine," writes a Hawaiian linguist, "acknowledgements of the Divinity that dwells within and without."

Pretty damn sensitive for a gun nut. But that's the thing, isn't it? You were the Angel Gabriel of drunken s.o.b's. The mean-tempered, insensitive, intolerant, sarcastic bastard who didn't give a damn what we thought of him - but cared what became of us, too deeply for his own good.

So long and Mahalo.

 

[McKenna]

for Hunter

for Sher, too

 

[TE999]

A post-Adios to ya, 'Duke'.

You took the 'Hemingway' out, but you were one cool dude!

Fire a round into the clouds for me, buddy.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

SheREADS may not admit or even know it, but SheWRITES damn well.

More than most of us can imagine possible, Hunter S. Thompson lived life on his own terms. He went out the same way. He is missed. I just hope he found The Edge, and it was good.

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson

Rumple Foreskin

 

[shereads]

From Rolling Stone #622, January 23, 1992

A Wild and Ugly Night With Judge Clarence Thomas...
Bad Craziness in Sheep Country...Sexual Harassment Then and Now...
A Nasty Christmas Flashback and a Nation of Jailers

Fear and Loathing in Elko

by Hunter S. Thompson

[Part I] Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Sexual Harassment Then
and Now..The Ghost of Long Dong Thomas...The Road Full of Forks

Dear Jann,

God damn, I wish you were here to enjoy this beautiful weather with
me. It is autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is
so wonderful to be out in the crisp fall air, with the leaves turning
gold and the grass turning brown, and the warmth going out of the
sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the
lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now
that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and
all the flowers die from freezing.

Oh, God! You should have been with me yesterday when I finished my
ham and eggs and knocked back some whiskey and picked up my Weatherby
Mark V .300 Magnum and a ball of black Opium for dessert and went
outside with a fierce kind of joy in my heart because I was Proud to
be an American on a day like this. If felt like a goddamn Football
Game, Jann -- it was like Paradise.... You remember that bliss you
felt when we powered down to the farm and whipped Stanford? Well, it
felt like That.

I digress. My fits of Joy are soiled by relentless flashbacks and
ghosts too foul to name....Oh no, don't ask Why. You could have been
president, Jann, but your road was full of forks, and I think of this
when I see the forked horns of these wild animals who dash back and
forth on the hillsides while rifles crack in the distance and fine
swarthy young men with blood on their hands drive back and forth in
the dusk and mournfully call our names....

O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again.

Right. and so much for autumn. The trees are diseased and the
Animals get in your way and the President is usually guilty and most
days are too long, anyway....So never mind my poem. It was wrong from
the start. I plagiarized it from an early work of Coleridge and then
tried to put my own crude stamp on it, but I failed.

So what? I didn't want to talk about fucking autumn, anyway. I was
just sitting here at dawn on a crisp Sunday morning, waiting for the
football games to start and taking a goddamn very brief break from
this blizzard of Character Actors and Personal Biographers and sickly
Paparazzi that hovers around me these days (they are sleeping now,
thank Christ -- some even in my own bed). I was sitting here all
alone, thinking, for good or ill, about the Good Old Days.

We were Poor, Jann. But we were Happy. Because we knew Tricks. We
were Smart. Not Crazy, like they said. (No. They never called us late
for dinner, eh?)

Ho, ho. Laughs don't come cheap these days, do they? The only guy
who seems to have any fun in public is Prince Cromwell, my shrewd and
humorless neighbor -- the one who steals sheep and beats up women,
like Mike Tyson.

Who knows why, Jann. Some people are too weird to figure.

You have come a long way from the Bloodthirsty, Beady-eyed news Hawk
that you were in days of yore. Maybe you should try reading something
besides those goddamn motorcycle magazines -- or one of these days
you'll find hair growing in your palms.

Take my word for it. You can only spend so much time "on the
throttle," as it were....Then the Forces of Evil will take over.
Beware....

Ah, but that is a different question, for now. Who gives a fuck? We
are, after all, Professionals....But our Problem is the
Problem of Everyman.
It is Everywhere.... and the story I am about to tell you is
horrible, Jann.

I came suddenly awake, weeping and jabbering and laughing like a
loon at the ghost on my TV set....Judge Clarence Thomas....Yes, I knew
him. But that was a long time ago. Many years, in fact, but I still
remember it vividly....Indeed, it has haunted me like a Golem, day and
night, for many years.

It seemed normal enough, at the time, just another weird rainy night
out there on the high desert....What the Hell? We were younger, then.
Me and the Judge. And all the others, for that matter....It was a
Different Time. People were friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you
afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days -- without
fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your
money or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense
of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now.

You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check
into a motel in Winnemucca or Elko when you were lost in a midnight
rainstorm -- and nobody called the police on you, just to check out
your credit and your employment history and your medical records and
how many parking tickets you owed in California.

There were Laws, but they were not feared. There were Rules, but
they were not worshiped....like Laws and Rules and Cops and Informants
are feared and worshiped today.

Like I said: It was a different time. And I know the Judge would
tell you the same thing, tonight, if he wanted to tell you the Truth,
like I do.

The first time I actually met the Judge was a long time ago, for
strange reasons, on a dark and rainy night in Elko, Nevada, when we
both ended up in the same sleazy roadside Motel, for no good reason at
all....Good God! What a night!

I almost forgot about it, until I saw him last week on TV....and
then I saw it all over again. The horror! The horror! That night when
the road washed out and we all got stuck out there -- somewhere near
Elko in a place just off the highway, called Endicott's Motel -- and
we almost went really Crazy.


Yours,
HST


P.S. And, speaking of crazy, take a look at this riff on the Judge and
Sexual Harassment that I received yesterday from that brute who runs
the Sports Desk. He must have been drunk when he wrote it -- but
whiskey is no excuse for this kind of brainless, atavistic gibberish.

I want that screwhead fired! He was harmless once, but ever since
Judge Thomas got confirmed for the High court, he has been mauling
women shamelessly. Last week he pinned my secretary against a hot wall
in the mainframe room and almost twisted her nipples off. Then he
laughed and said it was legal now, and if I didn't like it, I could
take him to court [see enclosed memo, below]. It was addressed to me,
but I have a feeling we'll be seeing it soon, taped up on the wall of
the Men's Room -- and probably the Women's Room too.

Special Advisory From the Sports Desk
To: HST
From: Raoul Duke, Ed.

 

[Frank Noir]

Like I always says: It's the crazy people that give us all hope.

R.I.P, Duke.