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by Joe Harvard Hunter S. Thompson, the man who once described his journalistic beat as "the death of the American Dream", is dead by his own hand. A paradox to the end, his status as a symbol of the Counterculture was cemented by quotes like "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've always worked for me," yet his lifestyle and attitude often seemed closer to that of a Redneck Survivalist than a poster boy for the Left-leaning members of "New Journalism." That Thompson's demise was self-inflicted can't come as much of a surprise considering we're talking about a person with a penchant for living in remote areas, hermit-like, often in cabins loaded with the aforementioned firearms and drugs. What is more surprising is the fact that he remained a first-rate writer, vital, acerbic and powerful, in a field and profession that favors younger men, right up until the moment he chose as The End, at age 67. My brother Bobby was a bad-ass. I mean he was a punk, back before there was punk rock, back before it was anything remotely like fashionable, in the days when unruly, working-class kids like him, finding themselves in serious trouble, were commonly given a choice of joining the Army or going to jail (he did, he was, and he went -- to Vietnam, as a Marine, on one of these generous, one-sided "bargains"). They say smell is the most evoctive sense in terms of memory; Bobby wore a thigh-length leather jacket, and when I was a kid the combined smell of Marlboros, Jade East cologne and leather was the one I recognized as meaning Male. Sexy. Big Kid. It also meant Trouble, and my brother came home on more than one ocassion bloodied and battered -- once wearing a white shirt puntured so many times in a knife fight that I thought it was a red shirt with white patterns, and that my mother was screaming because he tore it -- until I noticed the spreading puddle of blood on the floor. What does this have to do with the late Hunter S. Thompson, who shot himself in the kitchen of his Colorado home on Feb. 20? For one thing, like Thompson my brother Bobby was brilliant, creative, possessed of a fantastic sense of humor, a druggie, and drawn towards violence as a sesnsible means of conflict resolution. Bobby also died at his own hand, albeit by an "accidental" overdose. More relevant to this article, however, is that when I was about twelve, I was looking through a box of my brother's stuff -- he was long banned from our house, and at any rate he was in Vietnam, so I had dibs on anything he left behind -- when I came across a dog-eared paperback entitled Hells Angels. Cool, I thought, recalling Hell's Angels '69, an exploitation film I got to see on a trip to New York City (because my mother didn't want us to see the musical Hair, which my sisters and I were whining for, due to the nudity). But the book in my brother's box was nothing lke the film, which was chock full'o groovy biker hijinx - knifefights, rumbles with cycle chains, wild women passed around like a popcorn bag at the movies, terrorizing of innocent pedestrians, etc. Instead, I read about the history and ongoings within a perverse subculture, and an expose of the media's glaringly biased distortions with regard to it, from the point of view of a person who was clearly sympathetic to that lifestyle. This writer lived among these, these ... animals … and, well, he actually seemed to like it! Worse still, he kinda made me like it, too! Hells Angels was my first taste of critical reading - and thinking. Up until then I assumed anything that was written in a book or in the newspaper was true. The lid was off now, and nothing I heard or read in the news from then on would go unquestioned. This gift of objectivity was a clean, cool breeze blowing in a window that, for thousands and maybe millions of readers, was first opened by Hunter S. Thompson. Comic enthusiasts will best remember Hunter Thompson as the model for Uncle Duke in "Doonesbury," the Garry Trudeau comic strip. Among his peers, Thompson is lauded for the creation of "Gonzo Journalism", a genre in which truth and fiction are blended, in quest of a more effective means of getting at the truth than the old "objective" journalism. Gonzo forever changed the way journalists report the news, making irreverence, exaggeration and overt anger viable tools of the trade. In the public eye Thompson is best remembered for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both the book he wrote and the well-intentioned but somewhat disappointing film adaptation which features Johnny Depp as the author. That tome is a brilliant piece of work, rivaling any of the masters of the bizarre and hallucinogenic: Baudelaire, Poe, Bukowski, Burroughs. My friend Paul called as I wrote this piece, and he told me about seeing Johnny Depp stumping for the film on the Tonight Show. Depp gave a hilarious account of going to Thompson's house for the first time, getting his head shaved and taking potshots at propane tanks with a shotgun. Hospitality, Hunter S. style. For me, it is his lesser known work, like Hell's Angels that tell us most about the man, and his relationship to his craft. Thompson rode and lived with the renegade motorcycle club for almost a year to write that book, just as he bullshitted his way onto the press bus for the '72 presidential election to write Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. In the latter book Thompson detailed the failure of George McGovern and the American Left in their attempt to unseat Richard M. Nixon; along the way his outrageous behavior and uncompromising attitude insured that his employer, Rolling Stone, will be banished henceforth from future White House press junkets. Both Hell's Angels and …Campain Trail reveal a writer determined to make his statements from a position of first-hand knowledge, to put not just his minutes but his months where his mouth was. Somehow I think that it's genuinely symbolic that Thompson chose to check out while his wife was at the gym. For while the rest of the country is going through a look better, feel better, eat healthy diet-and-exercise kick, Thompson kept looking at the other side of that failed American Dream, living and writing the American Nightmare. That's hard to live with, and apparently, he finally had his fill. But he is best remembered, perhaps, by the words he himself wrote in '66 for Hell's Angels: "like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give 'em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know." And he did. Joe Harvard |
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