TWIRLING THE GONZO BATON

It's always sad when a hero dies. But when they commit suicide... that's just a fucking shame.

R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson.

Thompson was the only journalist I'd ever read who I didn't dislike. He seemed more like a hard-boiled novelist who had a day-job writing soft news and incorporated pulp/freak shock into his stories out of boredom.

I've always hated journalism, because there is no way to be completely objective about the subject of a news story. Many factors bias the finished result. A writer's moods and tantrums can greatly affect the slant by which he/she presents "the facts". I have nothing but contempt for journalism, especially nowadays, when everybody straight-out lies and makes shit up without remorse.

I think Hunter S. Thompson also hated journalism, which is why he pioneered his own brand.

Thompson's books and essays also inspired me to delve into the world of mind expansion. Funny, most people cite someone like Timothy Leary or Carlos Castaneda as their trip gurus, but Thompson's loony excursions into altered states were more gripping, more persuasive. I was pretty straight edge until I read Hell's Angels when I was 16: didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't get stoned... and I didn't try anything illicit until I was 18.

Hell's Angels was, to me, his finest book. It was the bummer side of the Summer Of Love that Thompson showed us, the post-WWII wasteland that many GIs came home to, disillusioned by the atrocities of The War To End All Wars, shafted by the rosy riveter-wives who left them for 4-F draft dodgers, left with nothing but a vintage Indian two-wheeler, a leather jacket and the open asphalt.

What was admirable about that book was that Thompson not only placed himself amongst the action, a la George Plimpton, but seemed to fit right in with the biker shenanigans and rampant hedonism. He was not in any way, sense or form a part of the Establishment, and as a result he was able to get his subjects to talk to him frankly and honestly.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is an incredible book, but it carries so much baggage and has so much to answer for that it mars the experience of reading it for the first time. Ironically, the I.T. Guy here at work and I were talking about Thompson last week. He and I disagreed over the movie adaptation by Terry Gilliam. The I.T. Guy felt that it didn't capture the book well enough; I felt that Gilliam was the only man who could turn Thompson's gonzo classic into a movie, and that he did a good job of conveying the dread inherent in that book.

For all those who thought of Fear And Loathing as a party tome, the kind of book that elevated your cool status just by carrying it under your arm, please remember that the subtitle is "A Savage Journey Into The Heart Of The American Dream". Sure, there's some insanely funny moments throughout, but the overall tone is that of a bad acid trip, Jack Kerouac's road dreams turned inside out, the death knell of objective journalism...

I'm surprised that Thompson didn't kill himself after writing that book. It took almost 30 years for him to finally turn off his own lights. In a way, Thompson's mania-- the drugs, the booze, the women, the crazy stunts, the self-aggrandization --was merely a gradual kind of suicide.

Kurt Vonnegut once reviewed one of Thompson's books and diagnosed himself as having "Hunter Thompson's disease". Vonnegut was right in ascribing symptoms to Thompson's creative pathology, and I'm sure Dr. Gonzo agreed-- after all, he once started one of his books with a quote from Samuel Johnson: "[H]e who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

I think time and sin caught up with Raoul Duke, and given Thompson's access at high levels of government, I'm sure there were plenty of things wracking his guilt-ridden mind. I'm positive that Thompson felt like he was an accomplice to unmentionable, unspeakable events, and his sense of self-hatred only intensified with the passage of the years.

I read an interview with him last year in RAZOR magazine, and it was depressing: he was flagellating himself, wallowing in self-pity and bitterness. Too bad. But then again, he did unwittingly unleash a generation of writers upon the world who took up his baton but twirled it with little of the grace and humor that could be found in even his most cynical works.

I was so enamored of Thompson that, when I made up an underground magazine in high school titled FUCK OFF!, I adopted his name as my pen name. A straight rip-off, a "bite" (as the rappers put it), and also a tribute to a man whose words mattered to a teenage car wreck such as myself.

I eventually outgrew him, not because I was bored with his writing (how can anyone with a pulse be bored by his words?), but because I traced the influence backwards, past Tom Wolfe (whom I admire but from a distance), past Norman Mailer and Gay Talese, stopping at The Beats and moving forward, landing on the bedrock of a writer named Terry Southern.

Terry Southern was "gonzo" before Thompson coined the phrase; to his credit, Southern was also a bona fide writer, not some journalist with "writerly" aspirations. Southern was one of the first to put himself at the center of the action of the story, although Southern's adventures were either way beyond Thompson's league or just shy of the craziness that infected the good doctor's best articles.

If you ever find a copy of the piece that Southern did for Esquire, "Twirling At Ole Miss", then you will see for yourself that, as good as Thompson was, there was someone better, with a far more humane approach to his subjects and less of a public image to pander to; "Ole Miss" straddles the line between fact and fiction so skillfully, you can't help but wonder how much of it is Southern's invention. I hear that "Ole Miss" is frequently studied in college courses as a prime example of what became known as The New Journalism.

I think that's the reason why Hell's Angels is my favorite Thompson book: it resembles Southern's satiric style, and was written before Thompson became famous for Fear And Loathing. Both writers had irreverent, devil-may-care attitudes towards straight society, but Southern was more subversive, more corrosive, because of the fact that he never became a pop cultural icon... that is, if you don't count Southern's inclusion on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as pop cultural iconography. I dare you to try and find him on the cover-- chances are, you don't even know what he looks like.

Meanwhile, Thompson was well-known enough to be lampoooned by Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury. He hung out with Johnny Depp, who played him in Gilliam's movie. Thompson even had a cameo in the movie.

Southern sort of killed himself in the end, by drinking himself into a slow stupor. But along the way, his comic inventions made lasting impressions: the scripts for Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, and Barbarella; the novels Flash & Filigree, The Magic Christian, and Candy; and his hysterical articles for The Realist with titles like "Terry Southern Interviews a Male Faggot Nurse" and "The Blood Of A Wig"...

Speaking of which-- and I know I'm straying from my HST obit here, but what the hell -- "The Blood Of A Wig" is possibly the funniest short story/journalism piece that I've ever read, ever. Nothing has come close to it in the ten years since I first read it. Nothing that Hunter S. Thompson wrote can ever match it.

"The Blood Of A Wig" is a surreal take on Sixties' journalism, countercultural disconnect, and high-pressure deadlines that must be met by lackadaisical hipsters with too much time (and not enough Dexedrine) on their hands. It deserves to be widely read and appreciated. But when Terry Southern died, no one even so much as blinked.

I wonder what kind of praises will be sung about Hunter S. Thompson, a great mind troubled by horrific demons and self-destructive tendencies. Who will come out to mourn him?

Why, everybody.

How many e-mails, phone calls, and messages have I received since the news of Thompson's suicide broke, all from people who knew my passion for his work?

Plenty.

And who will take the place of such beatific angels like Thompson or Southern or any number of writers who put themselves on the line just so they can get that much closer to the hearts of their stories? Who will pick up the baton and pass it on to the next generation of rambunctious wordsmiths?

In this age of Jayson Blair, right-wing blogs, and people calling for Dan Rather's resignation, the answer to that is... no one.