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I'm saddened and chastened, but not surprised. I wish I was surprised, but when we met HST last month, something was obviously, physically very wrong. He wasn't drunk or otherwise intoxicated, but he couldn't stand up by himself. He had to lean on other people, or prop himself up on the clothes counters at Perlis. Though his mind seemed as sharp as ever (and I believe it was sharp, always, incredibly so, through all the bourbon and mescaline and adrenochrome and other things none of us has even heard of), he was completely dependent on others for his basic physical well-being. I can't imagine anyone used to fighting and scamming and shooting his way through life wanting to live like that. I didn't like to say anything at the time, but I tell you this now in hopes of letting at least a few people know that he most certainly did not take the easy way out.

I don't know what was wrong with him. I don't know if it had anything to do with the years of excess. If it did, I see nothing particularly wrong with that: we make our choices and set our priorities in life, and he got 67 years, spending at least part of most of them high, which was obviously one of his great joys.

Thanks to everyone who called and e-mailed me, wanting me to hear about this from a friend. You do me the honor of considering me somehow connected with the good Doctor, enough to deserve that anyway, and I am grateful.

I wonder if people who dismiss him as "just a druggie writer" have read him. I wonder if they've read his Saigon coverage, or his letters, or Screwjack (dateline 1991, for those folks who think he "useta be good in the '60s and '70s but burned out"), or the hilarious "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," or even this gorgeous piece of writing from his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ... but no explanation, no mix of words or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant ...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history," it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that ...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ...

And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

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I'm sad and kinda numb due to the news of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's self-delivered demise on Sunday. But I suppose a public reaction/statement is expected, so here I go...

I first encountered HST's writing in ROLLING STONE's abridged version of "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" in 1969, and the effect was as though a bolt of lightning lept from his words to the center of my brain.

I never met Hunter personally, but he was a major influence on many aspects of my life, including precise writing, politics, sense of outrage (and outrageousness), fashion, healthy paranoia and bad craziness. He also taught me how to laugh at the stuff that scares me the most.

Also, in 1978, I edited (with a rather heavy hand, I admit) an underground comix book anthology dedicated to HST and his gonzo legend, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, titled FEAR AND LAUGHTER, published by Kitchen Sink Press. Here it is:

http://www.gonzo.org/hst/ht/flaught.html

It's flawed, sure, but if you can find a copy, F&L still holds up pretty well, mostly because of its roster of unbelievably talented contributors, including William Stout, John Pound, Rick Geary (his first published gig), Carol Lay and many other cartoonists. If nothing else, I'm proud that it remains as a sign of my creative debt to my favorite writer ever.

I can't say I'm surprised that Dr. Thompson committed suicide; considering his legendary intake of alcohol, tobacco and drugs, I guess he'd been trying to kill himself for years. At least it was his choice, addled as he may (or may not) have been. All the same, it was always comforting to know that he was out there, cranking out his twisted observations for THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE and his various book collections. Finally, as in the words of Warren Zevon, "The shit has hit the fan." Indeed.

Speaking of Warren Zevon (who worked with HST and is also greatly missed), there's a lot of his music being played here tonight. Same goes for Steely Dan and the Eagles. Their material always reminds me of the King Of Gonzo, Lono himself, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Aloha,

Scott!

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People keep asking if I’m going to say something about the death of Hunter S Thompson. Hell, a couple of newspapers have asked. This is because I wrote a graphic novel series called TRANSMETROPOLITAN, the creation of whose protagonist was somewhat influenced by Thompson’s writing, persona and life.

I got the news from a friend at CBS at four in the morning, two minutes after it hit the ticker. I was, and am, numb. I’ve tried to write about it a couple of times. When John Peel died, I was wrecked. This time, I’m just numb.

I read an article a few years ago, that I haven’t seen cited in the obituaries yet, wherein it’s stated that Thompson’s body was pretty much packing up on him. His stomach was having problems with toxic substances like, um, food, and his diet was mostly liquid, mashed avocado and yoghurt. He’d spent time in a wheelchair in recent years. His drug use had always been exaggerated for comedic effect, but, at 67, he’d been hammering his body in a committed way for some 50 years. And, at 67, you don’t grow back the bits you killed. There’s a fair chance he was looking at years of dependency, chronic illness, and listening to his own body die by inches. Anyone would find that frightening.

He always wore his influences on his sleeve. JP Donleavy, Faulkner, Mencken, Fitzgerald, Kerouac,
Hemingway. He used and re-used the last line from A FAREWELL TO ARMS, over and over: “I walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Legend has it that he retyped a Hemingway novel to understand how the writer got his effects.

Hemingway, of course, shot himself in the head. Old and sick and unable to live up to his own ideas on manhood.

I always thought it peculiarly apt that the man who wrote that line, whose work was all about keeping the expression of human feeling underneath the surface, sat somewhere quiet and alone and put a shotgun in his mouth.

Hunter Thompson waited until his young wife left the house, and then shot himself in the head with a pistol. He must have been quite aware that either she, or his son, there in the house with his grandson, would find his corpse. Dead bodies don’t lay neatly. They splay, spastic and awful. There is often shit.

I never met Thompson. Had the opportunity a couple of times – magazines wanting to send me out to Woody Creek, that kind of thing – but turned them down. I’ve been lucky so far, in meeting my great influences. But they don’t always go well. Friends of mine have had horrific experiences with their personal heroes, and it often leaves them unable to enjoy the work afterwards. And I wanted to keep the work. So I don’t know what kind of man he was.

And the numbness, in part, comes from now finding that he was the kind of man that’d let his family find him like that. I have a personal loathing for suicide. It’s stupid and selfish and ugly and cowardly and reeks of weakness. Someone said to me yesterday about Thompson, “What a ripoff.” And I kind of know what he meant. It’s become convenient to write Thompson off as parody in recent years, and there’s a case to be made that he peaked around the age of 36, with FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ‘72. But he could still make me laugh, even in the most recent collection, HEY RUBE. ” ‘We have many cigarettes here,’ I said suavely” still makes me smile. Writing had clearly become difficult, and a job, but every now and then you’d get a clear burst of the old anger, as in his support for Lisl Auman (google it). He was done with the big fireworks, but the devil was still in him. Probably his great work of the last twenty years was in Being Hunter Thompson. In performance.

But how you leave the stage is at least as important as how you enter it. And he left it alone in a kitchen with a .45, dying in – and wouldn’t it be nice if it were the last time these words were typed together? –

– dying in fear, and loathing.

Warren Ellis
down by the sea
February 2005

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May the kindly trickster gods collect you, Hunter Thompson, and drive you to where the buffalo roam, where your mind can unspool itself forever and your spirit can go on groping unsuspecting tits and trashing hotel rooms. You have earned it, Golden and Immortal Son of Classic Letters. Rest in Whatever You Would Prefer to Peace. We, the filthy and leaderless children who cherish your legacy, salute you, and will honor you with every bullet fired out of our car windows toward the unmarked desert sky.

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The family is looking into whether Thompson’s cremated remains can be blasted out of a cannon, a wish the gun-loving writer often expressed, Brinkley said.

“The optimal, best-case scenario is the ashes will be shot out of a cannon,” he said.

Other arrangements were pending.

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Ralph Steadman discusses this in his eulogy in The Independent:

Now I will be expected to build the monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a 100ft-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!

Embedded in a fire bomb shot out of a gonzo-fist cannon designed by Ralph Steadman. Now that's performance art!

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I don't know you, but a further commentary from a fan, if I may, may help you know more.

He retreated to Aspen to escape the American dream and it prospered in spite of his presence. He replied by running for sheriff on a platform of renaming it 'Fat City' among other things.

On marathon running: "We're not like these people, we're criminals. We can't run without something in our hands"

On life in Hawaii: "Even your best friends will lie to you. They can't help themselves"

There's just something about his writing that's appealing in its excess, much like the hedonistic life of Jim Morrison. Something that makes you want spin the top off a bottle of Jack (and of one or more prescription or non-prescription drugs) and celebrate man's ability to keep his head about him long enough to describe the trip, in technicolour, and often with bats. He alone could make sense of the American political machine (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas) or motorcycle gangs (Hell's Angels), or, for that matter, of the Hawaiian marathon and heiau sanctuaries (Curse of Lono). In as much as any sense can be made of any of those topics.

When I first heard he had 'committed suicide', I said I'd only believe it if he's cut himself. Anything to do with drug overdose or guns, I vowed to put down to misadventure. The man had an insane apetite for both. I'll never believe he went gently or of his own free, into that good night. But then again, he was not known for sleeping much.

I, for one, am nursing a bit of bourbon and awaiting, in my way, his gonzo take on the afterlife.

____________________________
Have pity for the minimalists...

“She’s too clever by half” said Dr Fruitbowl. “Lets remove half her brain then” replied Igor, feeling rather pleased with himself. “Ah, but what if we take out the wrong half, and she finds out, kicks the schmutz out of us and puts the two halves back together and then REALLY kicks the schmutz out of us?” countered the Dr, “It would be safer to move the whole operation to Costa Rica, get on the net and find a cheap flight”

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National Gonzo Press Club Vows To Carry On Thompson's Work

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LAS VEGAS—During a Tuesday press conference at the National Gonzo Press Club, members of the nation's foremost organization of gonzo journalists vowed to carry on the mission of its founder Hunter S. Thompson, who took his life last month.
Zolonga warns gonzo journalists to remember their ethics
Above: Zolonga warns gonzo journalists to remember their ethics "in the face of resistance from the pustulent pigs."

"Now that the whore-beasts and the scum-sucking degenerate rat bastards in Wall Street and the White House are hell-bent on turning us all into pliant, Scripture-mewling puppet-slaveys, we must take up Hunter's fallen colors and charge into the fray," said NGPC president Gene Zolonga, who is the National Affairs and Shark Hunting Editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "The next four years will be an unprecedented monument to bestial human ugliness, but I'd sooner let Yakuza thugs strap a rabid wolverine to my groin than shirk my responsibilities as a gonzo journalist."

The heavily sweating, speed-frenzied Zolonga then removed a Luger automatic pistol from his coat and shot the microphone with a deafening blast.

The NGPC is composed of nearly 3,000 journalists who practice gonzo, a subjective, emotionally charged observational reporting style that is often fueled by recreational drug use. Members of the 34-year-old organization cumulatively hold 14 Pulitzer Prizes, including eight in the Distinguished Weirdness In Feature Writing category.

"It's up to us to carry on the mentor's vision and expose all in American life that is strange, terrible, bad, crazy, or bad crazy," Zolonga said. He then climbed onto the podium and emitted a blood-curdling screech. "I am full of love, you motherfucking bastards. Pardon me, I believe my heart just stopped."

Gonzo stringer Zach Kiel, who most recently wrote "Fear, Loathing At The Owensboro Parks And Recreation Department" for the Louisville Courier-Journal, said Thompson will go down in the history of American letters as "the greatest gonzo reporter there ever was."

"Hunter opposed the editing of half-truths in all of his endeavors," Kiel said. "He had balls like an elephant and a cruelly beautiful prose style to match. He had stiff competition, but I'd say he bested even a hardened pro like Del Armbruster, who once wrote a story about Amazon gold prospectors while engulfed in fire head-to-toe."

Even gonzo journalists who have disagreed with Thompson in the past, such as award-winning New York Times columnist Heck Murdo, count him as a freak comrade.

"We did have sharp differences in opinion," Murdo said. "He thought Richard Nixon should have had his intestines slowly unwound onto a giant cable spool. I thought he should have been lashed to an oceanside cliff near San Clemente, so that ospreys could feast on his eyes. We feuded for years, at one point conducting a bourbon- and mescaline-fueled motorized-cart demolition derby on a Lake Tahoe golf course. But we patched things up when Dubya was elected, agreeing—to our mutual horror—that Nixon far outclassed that Jesus-loving pinheaded man-child."

During the past four decades, gonzo journalists have encountered their share of critical backlash, with college journalism departments around the nation reducing funding for gonzo-journalism programs and local editors questioning the wisdom of covering school-board meetings and slow-pitch softball matches on amyl nitrate.

"The gonzo philosophy is not always an effective or practical way to convey fact," Tulsa Daily Courier managing editor Patrick Jacobs said. "Average newspaper readers want to turn to the weather page and see the next day's forecast. They don't really have much use for a map captioned, 'Leeches are sucking my spinal fluid!' And when the sports page contains an unintelligible 3,000-word screed about ballpark hot-dog buns in place of the major-league scores, I get mail."

Gonzo entertainment writer Gail Nucci said 14 publications dropped her syndicated gossip column "Vacuous Sluts And Perfidious Dandies" over the course of the past year.

"The scores of out-of-work gonzo journalists say it all," said Nucci, an angel-dust abuser who tried to place Hilary Duff under citizen's arrest at the world premiere of Raise Your Voice last October. "Save for a handful of maverick magazine publishers, editors are too busy slobbing the knobs of the men on high to risk publishing an original voice."

In spite of these challenges, Zolonga is adamant that gonzo journalism has a place in this century.

"The world is growing assuredly weirder," Zolonga said. "Just as history remembers such prominent journalist-commentators as H.L. Mencken and Mike Royko, I have faith that future generations of swine will know the name of Hunter S. Thompson."