Late Edition
By Bruce Dobie
The same year in high school that I was supposed to be reading A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith, a flock of bats came screaming out of the sky and settled in my impressionable mind. A close friend passed along a copy of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, and from that point forward life was never quite the same:
"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?'"
Possession of that book at our school was akin to holding a bag of dope. You hid it. The teachers knew what the book was, and they were of a mind that it was bad. But to a 17-year-old in the mid-1970s, it was all so cool: the hallucinatory reality set in the middle of the American desert; the rich and unusual pharmaceuticals surging through the narrator's brain; the frenetic Ralph Steadman illustrations that were as fine in their own way as the words themselves; and the gloried ability of the book's narrator to maintain a sense of quasi-professionalism while completely altered. What was not to like?
One day we all went off to college, and when we entered the workforce some of us went into journalism. As it turned out, a new generation of professional writers had not only read their Shakespeare but Hunter S. Thompson and all the other New Journalists as well. It was a whole new way of writing—personal, colorful, experimental, high-octane—and it would give birth to a new form of narrative non-fiction.
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Among all the New Journalists, however, it is fair to say that Hunter S. Thompson stood out. No other writer was as outrageous or weird or complex—fucked up, actually. And no other writer brought such a dark, violent, invidious outlook to the decidedly upbeat, gung-ho American experiment. It wasn't that Thompson had no peer; it was that he stood utterly alone.
Until his death last week, I followed the career of Hunter S. Thompson rather religiously. When I wasn't reading him, I was reading about him—his arrests, his exploits, his explosions. After my period of youthful adulation, I slowly fell out with him when it appeared he had simply become a vegetable. At an appearance at Vanderbilt in the mid-'80s, he seemed more circus animal than anything. Guzzling every few minutes from a whiskey bottle at the podium, you could barely understand his mumbling. When he mumbled, people laughed, sort of on cue. It was really kind of pitiful. (Note: I did manage to get his autograph at the Vandy appearance on a reporter's notebook, which I have kept to this day.)
But in recent years, I was pleased to read some things Thompson wrote that were surprisingly coherent. And then, last year, I was floored when I read his piece on the Bush-Kerry race in Rolling Stone, "Fear and Loathing 2004." The writing displayed Thompson's usual sharp angles, dissonant word choices, violence, blood and beauty—a bright and shining America on the verge of conflagration.
There was Thompson on the city of Houston: "Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West—which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch."
Or Thompson on his love of politics: "The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election Day—especially a presidential election—is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to it."
Or a remembrance of when he first met John Kerry, at an anti-Vietnam War rally in 1972: "That was the first year I met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the president's lawn."
It doesn't get any finer than this, folks. In his final days, he was obviously on top of his game.
As I've spent the last few days surfing through the various obits written on Thompson, the finest I found was written by Tom Wolfe, who himself is probably the finest American writer alive at this moment. I howled as Wolfe recalled the time he found himself in Aspen in 1976 and invited Thompson out to dinner. "My soon-to-be wife, Sheila, and I gave the waitress our dinner orders," Wolfe wrote. "Hunter ordered two banana daiquiris and two banana splits. Once he had finished them off, he summoned the waitress, looped his forefinger in the air and said, 'Do it again.' Without a moment's hesitation he downed his third and fourth banana daiquiris and his third and fourth banana splits, and departed with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon in his hand."
These were the antics that fueled Thompson's notoriety. But there was more to his mad method than outlaw braggadocio, drinking games and bananas. "He wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir mixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization," Wolfe observed. "No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language."
I think we can all down a shot of Wild Turkey to that.