Hunter S Thompson ... RIP

[Seattle Zack]

I'm still in shock over this.

ASPEN, Colo. - Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself Sunday night at his home, his son said. He was 67.

"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death to the News. Sheriff's officials did not return calls to The Associated Press late Sunday.

Juan Thompson found his father's body. Thompson's wife, Anita, was not home at the time.

Besides the 1972 drug-hazed classic about Thompson's time in Las Vegas, he is credited with pioneering New Journalism — or "gonzo journalism" — in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.

An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson wrote such books as "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" in 1973 and the collections "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

Other books include "Hell's Angels" and "The Proud Highway." His most recent effort was "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness."

 

[minsue]

http://i.walmart.com/i/p/00/02/55/42/41/0002554241397_215X215.jpg

Damn.

 

[Seattle Zack]

Probably the best opening of any novel I've ever read ...

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 a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

--Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 

[BBWetKitty]

Thanks Zack, hadnt heard. On a different note, Sandra Dee passed too.

 

[hmmnmm]

wow
that's tragic

 

[Belegon]

While I find it unfortunate, Hunter dying in this manner is hardly surprising. He had an absolutely uncommon wit, and the world is a poorer place for it's loss.

edit: upon re-reading this, it sounds so uncaring, but it is not meant to be. I am very glad we had Hunter around as long as we did. It is just that the ending of his life fits the way he lived it like the final piece of a puzzle. That is why I find it so unsurprising. I was as pained and yet as unsurprised by Kurt Cobain as well. Farewell Hunter. I'd tell you to light the way for us, but I don't think I need to. You'll be so busy burning the hubris out of people we'll see it for miles.

 

[hmmnmm]

maybe it is no surprise, but still... wow. Heavy. Sad. Shit.

 

[M Crim]

I still don't want it to be true. He made me enjoy reading again. He motivated me to write and he made me want to enjoy life.

 

[Rhys]

Probably the best opening of any novel I've ever read ...

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 a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

--Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Yeah I was going to quote that one too. Fuck.

He'll be sorely missed.

 

[impressive]

Hell, after the warning he gave Kerry, this smells rather rancid to me.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Was never a fan, but I appreciated some of his work. Hopefully he can find some peace in the hereafter.

 

[SensualCealy]

Hubby is going to go into shock when he reads about his death at work. He loves that book, I dont know how many times he has taken it on buisness trips to read on the plane.

Too short of a life, yet he lived to a much fuller life than most!

C

 

[shereads]

Despicable. I wonder who's left to pick up his pain. All of us who admired him get pieces of it, but someone was no doubt close enough to inherit his misery and feel it doubled by guilt. So selfish.

 

[rgraham666]

Despicable. I wonder who's left to pick up his pain. All of us who admired him get pieces of it, but someone was no doubt close enough to inherit his misery and feel it doubled by guilt. So selfish.

That's the problem with suicide sher. The pain doesn't go away. It's just passed on to the survivors.

Having tried to take my own life once, I understand how far down he must have been. I wish he hadn't been too proud to get help.

Still, I'm going to miss him. He wasn't afraid of anything, except himself apparently.

 

[shereads]

That's the problem with suicide sher. The pain doesn't go away. It's just passed on to the survivors.

Having tried to take my own life once, I understand how far down he must have been. I wish he hadn't been too proud to get help.

Still, I'm going to miss him. He wasn't afraid of anything, except himself apparently.

I have an idea of how far down he was too, rg. Even then, I wanted to shield my family from it somehow. His son will remember his father as the body on the floor. It's hard to forgive. Why let people love you if you can't love yourself enough to protect them from this.

 

[Liar]

Well, shit.

 

[Seattle Zack]

Eulogies

Halberstam is one of the most distinguished social and political commentators in America. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the early days of the Vietnam War, and is the author of 14 best-selling books. Five of those books have been about sports, including "Summer of '49: and "The Teammates." His next book, about a battle in the Korean War in which vastly-outnumbered American forces fought against the Chinese army near the Yalu River, will be released this fall.

Farewell, Hunter
By David Halberstam

The phone calls from Hunter usually came at about 1:30 or 2 in the morning, and though I have always feared and disliked early morning phone calls -- they almost never bring good news -- I never minded his. That was Hunter and that was when he wanted to talk, and so be it. There was, after all, a two-hour time difference between Woody Creek and New York, but it didn't matter because Hunter always existed in his own time and space. If you were to be his friend, you had to adjust to his time, his place and his mood; he never had to adjust to yours.

I think I can now quite honestly say that after each call -- that is, if I could still get a decent night's sleep -- I quite looked forward to the next one. For the calls were a kind of Hunter Thompson Seal of Approval; they meant that in his opinion, I was still doing decent work, and had not joined the mighty legion of the pigf------. As I write this, I note that my word processor spell-check is underlining 'pigf------' in red to tell me it is not a word. Hunter and I both knew the computer is wrong.

I like that, the fact that he thought I was OK, and I liked him and I liked his work. At his best, he was absolutely brilliant. We could not have been more different: I am hopelessly square, use no recreational drugs, drink a little bit of white wine each night, and gave up Wild Turkey and Jack Daniel's 30 years ago. I am the most literal of journalists, and I follow the tracks of a story the way generations of my breed have done it before me.

He came from the other end of the spectrum, the king of Gonzo. Sometimes I wish I could go Gonzo, let loose and make up whatever it is I want to have happened and say that it actually happened. And maybe, just maybe, there was an occasional moment when he wished he could go straight. Every serious actor longs to play a comedian, and every comedian longs to play Hamlet.

He was, of course, an American original -- sui generis, which for the benefit of the engineers in the audience means he was one of a kind, and he was not a journalist whom I thought young would-be journalists should emulate. There was room for only one Hunter Thompson aboard the Ark. But he was smart and original and talented; joyous, too, in a certain way, if you did joy his way and not your way.

The terms were always his. They had to be. Otherwise, the Gonzo didn't work. You had to enter his world on his terms. He never had to enter yours -- he had had quite enough of that, thank you. You had to suspend the traditional journalistic obligations of a world built around factoids and accept his givens, that in general in America, the truth was a lie, and lies were truth. He believed somehow that the truth as handed out and rationed in a society like ours was not true, and that therefore you invented your own world and created your own factoids. If you made the journey with him, you accepted his terms, and his rules. Otherwise, how else to explain a country so rich with so many blessings which had so impoverished a public heart, and where so many people were cut out of a fair share of the American pie.

There was a kind of Hunterspeak, which I cannot imitate, nor would I try. But as he spoke to you, if you listened carefully, if you could get through the outer protective layers of the stuff that he used to camouflage what he really cared about, then you could pick up the real stuff, partially hidden away in there. It was always real, always quite well thought out, and almost always, I think, very good. I am not sure to this day that Hunter listened very much to me at the other end of the phone, or perhaps to anyone else. When we talked, he was, I thought, like many writers, trying things out, hearing how his words and ideas sounded, trying to gauge your response to them.

He was an easy man to get wrong. If you read what he wrote about the life he had led, you would expect, in his Sixties, to find someone who was breaking down physically. But instead, he always looked like someone who had just finished plowing the back 40 acres on a tough rock-filled piece of land in rural Maine. I think he liked to give off the feeling of a certain wildness and madness; but if you read what he wrote carefully, especially the letters -- which are very good; he was a very good and faithful letter writer -- you will see that it is all quite well thought out, and quite carefully considered -- even calculated.

There was a moment when he was younger and he needed the money badly when a young editor at Playboy named David Butler tried to help him re-do a piece that wasn't working and was going to be turned down. But saving it would have meant de-Gonzo-izing it. "I'm pretty well hooked on my own style -- for good or for ill," he wrote Butler, "and the chances of changing it now are pretty dim. A journalist into Gonzo is like a junkie or an egg-sucking dog; there is no known cure."

He was a man who went his own way and did things on his own terms. He became in a curious way a prisoner of his own truths; that is, he had to do it his way. There was no other, easier escape route. If he did not do Gonzo, then Hunter Thompson as a writer and as a person did not exist. Because of that, it was a very hard journey, and the rewards were never very large. And as the letters show, it never got easier.

A few years ago, I wrote the introduction to a book of his letters, and the letters are very good but they are painful to read, as well. These were letters written in the Sixties and Seventies, when he had finally made it; but even then, the financial rewards for what he was doing were marginal. No one was in a rush to make a Gonzo king rich. Even when he finally made it, he was more of a cult figure than a mainstream idol; his constituency was more underground than overground.

But he was, I think, someone special, brave and honest, and above all, true to himself. I will miss the phone calls, and I will miss the writing, but I know one true thing -- if he decided to take his life, he knew exactly what he was doing. Hunter always knew exactly what he was doing.

 

[Seattle Zack]

Eulogies

Farewell, Hunter

Ed Bradley is a correspondent for CBS' "60 Minutes."

Hunter's been a friend for 30 years. I met him in 1975, during the presidential campaign. During the campaign we talked almost -- well, he was on the road then much more than in recent years, but we talked almost every day. Even when he wasn't on the road with the campaign, we'd check in with each other at night or in the morning, usually late at night more than in the morning. And we'd talk politics, and life.

We talked to him a couple of weeks ago, and I saw him at Christmas. I moved to Woody Creek because of Hunter. He invited me in 1976 to come out to Aspen for a weekend. I fell in love with the valley and ended up buying a condominium in town. And then got tired of the bustle of town and bought a house on a quiet dead-end road in Woody Creek. Hunter and I were neighbors.

I was totally shocked. It's hard to believe. He came to dinner Christmas night, brought a whole bunch of Gonzo clothing, Gonzo underwear, Gonzo T-shirts, gave Gonzo thongs to the women. He was in great form.

I think Hunter got a lot of attention for his lifestyle, but the thing that impressed me most about Hunter was his eye as an observer. I mean, even with the excess of his life, he could cut right through to the core of the problem. He could show through his words, he could paint a picture that any reader could understand. I covered the campaign, it was my first campaign, and I read all of the heavyweights -- David Broder and Jules Witcover and Jack Germond. Hunter was as good as any of them.

He was a freak of nature. I told Bob Braudis, the sheriff of Pitkin County and probably Hunter's closest friend out there, many years ago, "You know, one day I'm going to get a call, probably from you, telling me that Hunter's dead. And my reaction will be, "You know, I'm not surprised. He lasted longer than I thought he would."

But when I got the call Sunday night, I was surprised. Because I never, never expected Hunter to take his own life.

He was a great friend. He was there. As much pain as he was in this summer, he came to -- I got married this summer in Woody Creek, at my house down by the river, and Hunter came to the bachelor party, he came to the dinner party the night before, and he came to the wedding. And he was in serious pain. He had to leave the wedding early. He was supposed to make a toast. And he had to leave.

 

[Seattle Zack]

Eulogies

Farewell, Hunter

Long-time friend Ralph Steadman is the satirical cartoonist who illustrated several of Hunter S. Thompson's books, including "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." This remembrance originally appeared in the British newspaper The Independent earlier this week.

"I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time," he told me many years ago, and I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if but when. He didn't reckon he would make it beyond 30, anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There were no first, second, third and top gears in a car -- just overdrive. He was in a hurry. Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red Mercedes Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage beast pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really happened anyway. So we wrote in a Beverly Hills house one drunken night. I wrote the stanzas -- he wrote the chorus. Don't write, Ralph, he said. You'll bring shame on your family.

"Those Weird and Twisted Nights." That was the song.

Yesterday morning, Sunday, I had just finished signing the 1,200 limitation pages for a Taschen version of "The Curse of LONO," which Hunter had signed so uncharacteristically -- obedient and mechanical, over the month of December. I thought that was very strange. He has to be cajoled like a child to do anything like that, so I drew his portrait across the last sheet, glaring out, his two eyes in the two O's of LONO, put the cigarette holder with the long Dunhill prodding upwards in his grimacing mouth, signed it with and extra flourish and closed the last of the four boxes. The old bastard! He waited to make sure I had finished the task, then he signed himself off. I knew it was too good to be true. Now I will be expected the build the monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a hundred-foot-high column of steel tubes, with the big red fist on its top and his ashes placed in a fire bomb in its palm. Two thumbs, Ralph! Don't forget the two thumbs!!

It was the Gonzo fist and he really believes I can do it! Such were his demands as he tipped at his windmills. People were f------ with his beloved Constitution, and he was born to banish the geeks who were doing it. In that way, he was a real live American. A pioneer, frontiersman, last of the cowboys, even a conservative redneck with a huge and raging mind, taking the easy way out and mythologizing himself at the same time.

He spent a lot of his early years of rejection writing, verbatim, excerpts from Hemingway, Faulkner and Conrad, trying to imagine what it was like to write some classic text. He could be very persuasive. As a boy, he was hired by the milkman to collect outstanding bills from the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, but he was shunned by his neighbours and, especially, the literary establishment in the town, so he had a score to settle.

I had only just arrived in America in late April of 1970, and was staying with a friend in the Hamptons to decompress. I got a call from JC Suares, art editor of Scanlan's magazine in New York. He said, "How'd ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell's Angel who just shaved his head and cover the race? His name is Hunter S. Thompson and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of the local establishment who meet there. He doesn't want a photographer. He wants something weird and we've seen your work."

Ralph Steadman and Hunter Thompson were made for each other.
The editor, Don Goddard, had been the New York Times foreign editor and he thought I was naïve enough to take this on. I was looking for work -- so I went. Finding Hunter -- or, indeed, anyone covering the prestigious Kentucky Derby who is not a bona fide registered journalist, was no easy matter; and trying to explain my reasons for being there was even worse, especially as I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an accredited press man. Why shouldn't I think that? I assumed that Scanlan's was an established magazine.

I had been watching someone chalk racing results on a blackboard while I sipped a beer, and I was about to turn and get myself another when a voice like no other I had ever heard cut into my thoughts and sank its teeth into my brain. It was a cross between a slurred Karate chop and gritty molasses.

"Um . . . er you . . . er . . . wouldn't be from England . . . er . . . would you . . . er . . . an artist . . . maybe . . . er . . . what the!!"

I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. "Holy s---!" he exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him."

We took a beer together and sat in the press box. Somehow, he had got our accreditation and we were in. He asked me if I gambled and I said, only once in 1952. I put two shillings on Early Mist to win in our Derby, and I did. I picked a horse but didn't bet and it won, so then I picked another, backed it with a dollar, and lost. "That's why I don't gamble," I said.

"I thought you had been picked up," he replied.

"Picked up??" I didn't quite understand.

"Er . . . yes. The police here are pretty keen. They tend to take an interest in something different. The . . . er . . . um . . . the beard. Not many of them around these parts. Not these days, anyway."

I was beginning to take in the whole of the man's appearance, and his was a little different, too. Certainly not what I was expecting. No time-worn leather, shining with old sump oil. No manic tattoo across a bare upper arm, and strangely no hint of menace. This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone, and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-coloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand.

Arthritis was to plague him all his life, as was the football knee injury which left him with one leg shorter than the other. But it never truly encumbered his physical rage or his action-packed approach to a deep respect and love of writing -- and righteousness.

We found the decadent, depraved faces of Louisville by the end of the first week we spent together. They were staring at us from a mirror in the gent's toilet on the infield, where the rest of the riffraff, who are not eligible to stand in the privileged boxes of the chosen few, spent their time at the races, just like us.

We spent many assignments together, bucking the trend, against the cheats and liars, the bagmen and the cronies -- me, an alien from the old country; and him raging against the coming of the light. "F--- them, Ralph," he would say. "We are not like the others."

Well, he wasn't anyway, but I was easily led. Before "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" we tried to cover the America's Yacht Race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (who were just about to go bust and get onto Richard Nixon's blacklist), from a three-masted schooner, a rock band on board for distraction, booze and, for Hunter, whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick and Hunter was fine. I asked him what he was taking and he gave me one. It was psilocybin, a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first and only drug trip apart from Librium.

I was the artist from England, so I had a job to do. He handed me two spray paint canisters.

"What do I do with these?"

"You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side of one of those multi-million dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away from where we are."

"How about F--- THE POPE?" I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling dogs attacking a musician singing at a piano dressed as a nun at a shore-bound bar.

"Are you a Catholic, Ralph??"

"No," I replied. "It's just the first thing that came to mind."

So that was the plan and we made it to the boats and I stood up in the little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them, as one does. They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph! There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed."

He pulled fiercely on the oars and fell backwards with legs in the air. He righted himself and started rowing again. We made it back to our boat; and then while I was gabbling insanely, he was writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case and we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two Leery distress flares into the harbour and we hailed a boat just coming in. The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue as we got to dry land.

There's more and I won't go on, but I guess that was the genesis of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

Such a wild game was possible, but it needed all the genius and application of Hunter S. Thompson to make it live. He has done that and he has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen. I had the good fortune to meet one of the great originals of American Literature. Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late 20th Century. Time will sort the bastard out. I have always known that one day I would know this journey; but yesterday, I did not know that it would be today . . .

I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy.

 

[Seattle Zack]

Eulogies

Kevin Jackson is one of the founding editors of Page 2 and worked with Hunter S. Thompson during his four years at ESPN.com. He never did get the Good Doctor to hit his deadline.

By Kevin Jackson

Most of the voicemail messages left on my office phone are quickly terminated with a punch of the No. 7 button -- many of them "marked for deletion" before the speaker even finishes talking.

For the chosen few, however, there is the No. 9 button, that magical key that validates a voicemail, says it's worth keeping and sends it into the archive of saved messages.

The No. 9 button was made for Hunter S. Thompson.

You can say what you will about the counterculture author and Page 2 columnist who died Sunday night of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. But you cannot say that the man was ever boring. Every correspondence with the Good Doctor -- be it a phone call, a voicemail or one of his infamous FAXes -- was an adventure waiting to be lived. Many of them were worth saving, so that co-workers and friends could live them as well.

I can still hear the words echoing from HST's final message on my phone a couple of weeks ago. It was short and sweet, and it represented two of the things that Hunter talked most about: missing his "deadline" as a Page 2 columnist and partaking in a few good libations.

"Uh, yeah, Kevin, it's me ... uh, Hunter. I heard a rumor that you might ... uh, be out here for the X Games. You should stop by and get together for a drink ... or three," he said with a snarky laugh. "And, I ... uh ... probably won't have a column this week. [long pause]. Yeah ... we'll keep working on one for next week."

Sadly, the rumor was untrue, and I wasn't in Aspen for Winter X last month. (Even sadder, that voicemail was automatically erased from my archives late last week.)

The last time I visited Hunter at his home was in February 2003. His ranch in Woody Creek, Colo., was extremely chaotic that night, with random friends popping in unannounced and a photo crew on hand to shoot Hunter for some new music magazine.

As he often did, Hunter seemed enlivened by the late-night hour and the commotion. Our visit began at 11:30 p.m. -- which is actually the middle of Hunter's day -- and lasted until 3:45 a.m., when the Doctor and his soon-to-be-wife Anita were headed to a neighbor's pool for his customary 4 a.m. swim. (Apparently, HST had a regular arrangement to use the facilities and said the regular swimming helped his joints.)

The photo crew spent more than two hours trying to get Hunter to do three things: change his clothes for the shoot, move from his kitchen into his living room and pose with a Samurai sword. It was easily the most difficult negotiation I've ever witnessed (and I have a 3-year-old daughter at home).

The photo folks really had no use for me or my two ESPN colleagues, Page 2 writer Eric Neel and SportsNation editor Daniel Dodd. We were in their way, and they kindly asked us to stand back and move to the back of the kitchen.

Each time we tried to oblige, Hunter would motion for us to come back over, so he could resume doing one of the things he enjoyed most: talking about sports. He had three living, breathing ESPN dudes in his home, and -- hot damn! -- nothing was going to prevent him from getting our take on Bob Irsay's Colts or the ugly demise of Al Davis' Raiders the previous week in the Super Bowl against the Buccaneers.

When the camera crew finally coaxed Hunter into position for the shoot and the photographer started clicking away, Hunter barked, "Tell those ESPN guys to come back in here."

Between shots, he took great delight in getting us to hold his props. He handed a bullwhip to me and asked me if I knew how to use it. I nodded my head, even though my experience with bullwhips was limited to watching Bob Knight show off one at a press conference.

Then he stepped back to create some space and whirled the Samurai sword in the air. When he finished his martial arts display, he handed the sword to Daniel and asked him to hold onto it. I can still see Daniel's eyes widening as he stared down at the blade and imagined the damage it might inflict.

When the cameras quit whirring and the weapons were safely stored away on the living room's coffee table, Hunter said he had something he wanted us to see. He pulled out an old video tape from Allen Ginsberg's funeral in 1997. Hunter had been too ill to travel, but he had written a tongue-in-cheek eulogy that he had Johnny Depp read at the memorial service. The one-liners were sharp, and they brought down the house. As Eric said to me Sunday night, we can only hope someone will read something like that when the Good Doctor is laid to rest this week.

I can't really claim that I knew Hunter S. Thompson especially well. I was exactly half his age, and much of his great work was done while I was still in diapers.

But I can say that I did get a brief glimpse into his Gonzo world. A world where it seemed perfectly ordinary to perform a dramatic reading from a "Nash Bridges" script that HST had consulted on. I read the lines of Cheech Marin's character, while my ESPN colleague Jay Lovinger played the part of Don Johnson. A world where breakfast is eaten at 4 p.m., Wild Turkey takes the place of tap water and throwing on an Indianapolis Colts jersey is considered getting dressed up. A world where peacocks are pets, a letter of praise from Marilyn Manson hangs on the wall, and an old photo of HST with John Belushi is buried among assorted clutter on the refrigerator. A world where HST got me to attend a rally and sing "Give Peace A Chance" ... in 2003.

If you stay in that world long enough, "weird" becomes "normal." I'm definitely going to miss it.

 

[blackpenblueink]

Yeah I can't tell you the number of times I've read Fear and Loathing.
Am in the middle of a Bio on Hunter now, was reading it the night before I heard about his suicide.
It's terrible really, but such a selfish thing too.
At least we had him for a long time.
Gonzo

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Aw, jeez... let's just put the head pieces in a sack, bury them with the body in the box. Chump coulda at least did it in an interesting way--like a C4 diaper or something.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Thanks, Zack.

Rumple Foreskin