By HUCK THOMAS
Hunter S. Thompson was a juvenile delinquent and stayed that way, suspended in the amber of drink and drugs, the rest of his days. He could be a squall of anti-social behavior, yes, but also a brilliant writer of live-wire prose that flagellated the rich, powerful and stupid. Plus he was funny as hell.
His cultural influence surely has waned in the two decades since his death and his unquenchable appetite for mind-altering substances probably makes him anachronistic in an era when so many genuflect to the idea of “wellness”.
But in a fractured society, democracy in the doldrums, and more of our rights being shorn, we could use a stiff shot of Hunter. His work remains refreshing as petrichor.
He often addressed the American ideal and how we’ve always come up tragically short. “What a fantastic monument to the best instincts of the human race this country could have been,” he once wrote. He expected better, as we all should, and in some ways, albeit maybe twisted ones, he was the epitome of freedom.
The current orangatan-in-chief would make him retch more than a week-long ether binge.
“Hunter led the kind of life that secretly all of us would like to have the guts to live,” political operative James Carville once said. “To hell with the whole thing, just stay drunk and high and smoke and hang out and write outrageous things. He never lived life on anybody else’s terms.”
At age 67 and plagued by health problems, he caught his ride via a .45 caliber slug to the brain on February 20th, 2005. The long-threatened suicide was itself an act of liberty, freeing him from the indignities of encroaching decrepitude. It also served to enshrine the Legend of Hunter, Gonzo Journalist.
Stories abound about his, well, antics, though many of them—drug smuggling, weapons violations, false imprisonment–qualify as felonies.
I caught a glimpse of the shenanigans firsthand one debauched weekend in the late 90’s when I ventured to infamous Owl Farm, his 122 acre compound deep in the Rockies, with a famous young actor, whose sister I was dating. He’d been sending Hunter ingratiating faxes for months and finally scored an invite.
When we arrived on a postcard-perfect autumn Saturday afternoon, Thompson and a coterie of locals were drinking, smoking weed, and betting on college football games.
He rose from the couch with a slight wince, due to back pain, gestured with his cocktail hand, not spilling a drop, and said, “Welcome, interlopers, welcome. Grab some drinks… and don’t make a spectacle of yourselves.” He was wearing shorts, a white polo, and a floppy women’s wig.
He glanced at the TV, scowled, and barked, “That useless cocksucker fumbles?!”
A couple hours later, someone broke out home-brewed absinthe, sloshing around in a plastic milk jug. Hunter stuck out his tongue and a wild-eyed woman with a medusan snarl of dirty blonde hair placed, as if a Eucharist wafer, a bit of paper on it. He snatched the jug and washed down the acid with a couple mighty pulls. Cazart! The party had started.
Things got progressively louder and rowdier with Hunter pounding drinks and often producing a pen barrel to snort caterpillar-size lines of coke. When the mood struck, he would emit guttural yawps. Few even took notice; no one was triggered and retreated to a safe space.
I asked his assistant, a striking woman in her mid-20s sporting hoop earrings and purple lipstick, if the scene was unusual. She smiled ruefully and said, “You have no idea.”
Eager for the full Hunter show, my actor pal asked if we all could go outside and shoot guns. “Fine,” Hunter said through a maniacal grin, “but I might put one square in your spleen.” We stayed in.
The last thing I remember was him and his, er, assistant arguing about what seemed to be whether she should douche or not before coitus.
Sunday afternoon was symmetrical to the previous one, but this time they were betting on pro football and Hunter was cleaning up. In high spirits, as it were, he gleefully collected his winnings.
Redux: booze, acid, coke, pills, weed, amyl nitrite.
Some have speculated that his prodigious consumption was a myth, that no human could punish a body that way without soon croaking. It was not. He always maintained that without chemical enhancement he had “the mind of an accountant.”
In the wee hours, Hunter was mumbling gibberish, of which I understood about every fifth word. Most had scattered and I found myself face-to-face with him. Even plastered, he had a palpable charisma, like standing next to a six-foot-three electric eel.
Zonked myself, I nevertheless managed to form a pertinent question. What, I asked, was the status of the American Dream?
Hunter stared at me for many uncomfortable seconds, perceptibly deflating, a rifle losing its erection. “Swine and greedheads and goons stomped the living shit out of it years ago,” he finally said, and clearly. “They trashed or bought everything, and no one seemed to give a fuck. Now most poor bastards don’t stand a chance, but are too stupid to realize it.”
He snagged a Chivas bottle, wobbled to his bedroom, and slammed the door behind him.
Hunter knew the fix was in, dice loaded… and it’s only gotten worse. The venality and savagery of today makes the 90s look like kindergarten recess. Dunce quotient spiking, “Idiocracy” should now be considered a documentary. Maybe he had a foreboding sense of the dismal future and got out while the gettin’ was good.
If he were still alive, prigs surely would try to cancel him. And fail. How do you cancel a force of nature?
Gen Alpha—bless their wilted little hearts–will have to slog through the muck longest and perhaps their escapist, feckless reading habits reflect that. Harry Potter and video game captions are really, like, you know, fire, bro.
The Gen X crowd I ran with preferred more dynamic fare; we treated “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” like an instruction manual.
In college, a group of us Hunterheads called ourselves The Nihilist Brigade and liked to wreck shit. Wall phones were doomed. We regularly caused fire hydrants to ejaculate when there was no fire. Rare was the empty beer bottle that remained intact. Micro-aggress this, bitches!
Freshman year four of us were booted with extreme prejudice from our house when the landlord came one Saturday morning and discovered three inches of broken glass covering the floor like sparkling moss.
There were bar fights, grisly breakups, flunk outs, and crackups. Of course not all due to Hunter’s influence, but he usually seemed to be riding shotgun. We were, of course, morons masquerading as rebels.
And then there was the bad writing, some of us convinced we were the Second Coming of Hunter. We weren’t.
There was only one Hunter Stockton Thompson, the iconoclastic, drug-addled, sometime-genius, oiler extraordinaire who lived far longer than most–and he–expected. That Grand Poobah in the Sky not only blessed his typewriter ribbon, but also bestowed on him a titanium liver.
We outgrew the HST phase and most avoided jail. Like the rest of the normies, we slipped into careers and mortgages, raised families.
But for me at least, something of his sway always remained: I’ve never been cubicle-bound, still bristle at authority, drive fast with Zevon cranked, enjoy a good muzzleflash, and continue to dabble in the intoxicant arts.
And, like Hunter, I am at my core a Romantic. All he longed for—as many of us do—is the real and true and beautiful. But with most everything slimed in bullshit, disgust can take hold.
He was a modern-day Gatsby, his flashing green light the desire to make the moment—this moment, the only one there ever is– incandescent, even if it required vats of liquor and drugs. Of course, Gatsby was delusional and met his demise facedown in a swimming pool.
Fetid water is rising all around us and our species seems hell-bent on self-destruction. Acrid stench of ruin in the air, society is so warped that many actually adulate Kardashians. Kardashians! We often act dumb as lobotomized chimps. Mind cages have only shadows for bars, yet we remain imprisoned.
Our brutal system—lousy with lies, greed and predation—is enough to make one run off and become a monk… or emulate Hunter’s uber-hedonist tack.
“I do believe we’re headed toward apocalypse,” he said a full 50 years ago. “The collapse, the total shame and impotence of the American Dream.”
Maybe his approach—eccentric, reckless, batty—is actually the most honest reaction to life on an insane planet. He would certainly concur with philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who said: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Samuel Johnson put it even more bluntly: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
HST spent six decades here trying to transcend the horrors by pursuing Fun, a word so important to him he capitalized it in his suicide note. While still in his 20s, he wrote: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely with a well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! ‘What a ride!’”
Mission accomplished, old sport.
HuckThomas22@gmail.com
