Obligatory Hunter Thomspon Suicide Response

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from JoeUser Forums
After another slow, lidless scrabble game we were recruited to support a "Part V" viewing in a Star Wars marathon. Interestingly enough, I guided Brooke through the exact marathon only three weeks earlier. Sometimes you're in the mood. Last night was not such a time, but we had ducked a couple of other engagements recently and I had a twinge thinking about my resurfacing anti-social tendencies.

Maybe this story should have started when we hung up on our phone conversation last night. Brooke asked me who He was. I explained about Hunter and the gonzo journalism phenomenon, to no avail. I suggested that she probably had heard of Fear and Loathing . . . (I probably should have started there with my explanation). Now she was on the same page. I proceeded with this ill-advised lecture about how "J. Depp played Hunter in the movie, but Hunter had also written several blah blah blahs, and Did you know the movie Fear and Loathing . . . was a combination of blah, blah, and blah?"

By the time we left the apartment, my feelings about the suicide were next to nil--closer to nil.

There's no way could I express to you how much the gonzo revolution speaks to me, me being a certified and licensed madman, me knowing and writing through the swirling, rhythmic depths of lysurgic acid and the honesty and majesty of Psilocybin, all the while struggling to appear sane for the benefit of my society.

However, the IDEA of Hunter Thompson, the craze, dies when I open one of his books. The root of gonzo is self-indulgence rather than insight or even "Searching for Truth". Not that it would have happened, but a chronicled interaction between Hunter Thompson and, say, Flannery O' Connor or Ernest Hemingway would have filled out an archive for the ages. I'm not an absolutist like those two stately nutjobs, but imagining either of the two staring one Hunter Thompson between his blurry, bleary eyes, and articulating every syllable of a declaration such as "Self-indulgence is the murderer of fiction" or "There's not one true sentence in your heart" overflows my soul with self-righteousness. Not pretty, I know that. But it's true.

The irony of the fact that Hemingway shot himself, too, isn't lost on me, but I havent had time to sort it out, yet.

The point is that, often, when someone mentioned Hunter, like you did about 1 1/2 years ago tellling me that he was holding down an on-line ESPN column, my first reaction was surprise. The guy is alive and capable of turning on a computer? Again, about a month ago you mentioned the "speech at U Penn" story. He shows up an hour and a half late, shwilled, tripping over himself and smelling like Victory Gin. He speaks for twenty minutes then prepares to leave, and someone asks, "Do you really have the nerve to stumble your way in here, drunk as a lord, spew your nonsense for twenty minutes and then leave without an apology?" He shouts "Guilty!" and the crowd cheers for joy. And I thought "Wow! The guy is still alive!" Yes, the speech took place before the column began, but that changes nothing. The fact that the guy was alive wasn't proof of the power of will or an uplifting triumph against the Man. His survival was simple surprise, as in "I'm surprised the guy isn't dead" or "that guy should be dead" or "that guy gave away everything--I thought he was dead. What the hell ever happened to him?"

So I wasn't affected too deeply, at first. But as Brooke and I walked to our Star Wars engagement, I considered your response to his death. I wondered whether it was the suicide, whether it was the fact that a writer you once loved was dead, or whether you were very drunk. I wondered if a public figure's death would move me like that. When Cash died, I was sad in a nostalgic way. If Bob Dylan rubbed himself out I might commit myself to institution. Seeing R. Pryor looking the way he does now makes me feel terrible, but in a generalized, "a great one is going" sort of way.

Recently, one of my favorite short story writers of all time, Andres Dubus, died. After a few days had passed, a shadowy unnamed feeling took root inside me--not sadness, not loss, not depression or shock--an emotional chemical compound resembling fear or anger but with a difficult ratioto define. Nobody knew Andres Dubus. No-one. He wrote unironic, nonwitty stories at a time when irony and wit carried the day. Vonnegut and Gardner ran the show, but he didn't care. Older, lifelong authors who knew him . . . well, they loved him and pimped his works for him. But now, if you give him a google, you get three engine-result pages about Andres Dubus III--the House of Sand and Fog (which I refuse to read or see--until, at least, someone remembers his father) guy.

So that guy dies, nobody knows, and I get the jeebies.

When we arrived at our friend's place, I mentioned that Hunter was dead. Picture it: there are four other college-edumacatedly smart adults in the room. Responses: Who? Wait, I know that guy. What was he in? Pipe it, Dickweed; he's a writer. He's the Fear and Loathing guy. How did he die?

"Suicide," I say.

Holy shit, they say. Suicide, really? Unbelievable.

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Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
Here in california, hunters big claim to fame was when the Hells Angels kicked the crap out of him, I always thought he was a pretencious lout myself.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
You know, before he killed himself, I had a conversation with a friend about Hunter Thompson, which led to the U Penn story I wrote into the article. Apparently, he was a prick. I'm not talking about 'Doing It MY Way" prick style; I mean "Beating Up My Women" prick style.

I don't know anything about that stuff, except the gossip. But this is the thing: he achieved notoriety for three genres of writing. He covered the Nixon campaign, he covered sports events (from super bowls to obscure races), and he wrote expository prose into novels. Everyone who knows the slightest bit about the guy understands he drugged himself beyond insensibility (almost lapping himself back into rationality). He refused to acknowledge conventions. the question always seemed to be whether he was indulging an abnormal narcissism or whether he was actually fighting some unspoken societal flaw.

what do you do with the guy? i have no doubt that approximately 51% of america had no use for him. the other 49% wanted to have a use for him. i dont mean to align this politically, so i apologize for that last comment. but the point is that he wrote and lived AS IF he wanted something more, something different, than what our "freedom" allows us.

i want to be able to value that effort. i like to believe he took the physical and societal brunt for people like me, comfortably safe and cozy with my modest, but adequate, lot--while i secretly wish for a revolution. so that is the point.

but the problem is that im not sure any of this is true. more likely than not, that value is just something that a whole dissatisfied population of thinkers like me imagined into his most-likely-crazy-but-i-wish-his-craziness-was-a-sign-of-extraordinary-sanity life.

as vonnegut might say, so it goes.
Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
Free thinkers are much admired, but when the free thinking goes beyond what anyone can recognize as rational thought it become just so much babble. HUnter was at his best 40 years ago, with his dissenting and war protesting thoughts, after that he just drank/drugged and babbled himself into a parody of what he used to be.
Reply #5 from JoeUser Forums Top
a friend of mine just suggested that some of his prose was excellent; he was paid for all of his prose.

it didnt affect his bank either way. the guy got paid whether he was producing his sad, insightful nixon campaign-covering prose, or his espn pg2 prose. none of his recent prose was good for any consistent period of time, but you never knew when an inspired piece would surface.

mod: i hear what you're saying. im not sure that the accumulation of years of drugs knocked down his style. maybe. the guy plunged headlong into whatever he could find straight from the starting gate. i would guess that booze killed his writing more than anything else. the other drugs took him to a weird place, no doubt about it. but the later day boozing depressed him, i think, to the point where things may have made sense or not--he just didnt care. the lack of caring was the difference.

maybe.

what i wonder about, thinking about babbling and reality anyway, is if he was trying to communicate something to someone. my belief about writing--fiction especially--is that an author is trying to explain something about his unique world to a single, anonymous Entity . . . THE Entity who will understand exactly what he is trying to say. it's like an undisclosed personal muse, a personified inspiration to explain something unexplainable about your own life to Someone who might actually understand.

in the end, i do not believe that hst did much besides babble . . . which would be the opposite, or antithesis of communication. but for the lack of caring, do you think he was communicating?
Reply #6 from JoeUser Forums Top

if i were thompson, i woulda seriously (although briefly) considered suicide after screening the film treatment of 'fear & loathing'--then prolly passed on it just outta spite.  

espn made sense to me when i compare his report on the raiders to plimpton's 'paper lion' (which i liked but which is ultimately the more important work?).

if you haven't yet read 'hell's angels'--as i recall, it was one of them little gems (as was crumb's 'fritz the cat')  which owes its existence to some nameless editor at argosy or true--you might consider doing so.  i don't wanna give too much away, so suffice to say there's a priceless surprise contained in its pages.

Reply #7 from JoeUser Forums Top
fritz the cat was the shocker . . . as i checked it out before i knew too much about crumb. afterward, well, not much surprises me about that guy. i assume you saw the documentary. if you want humor, you would have found it by sitting in at your local cinema with people who had absolutely no idea who he was. watching them laugh, initially--thinking they were supposed to laugh--and then listening to the laughter die into a confused, horrified murmur was quite pleasurable.

espn: he just didnt care. it made some sense (anything espn can do to spruce up their collection of jovial conservatives makes sense to me) for everyone, but theres a difference between gonzo and blather. of course, because it's hunter, the two blend. but i like to think that gonzo was the ideal and the blather stemmed from an injured, isolated person who wished the world was other than it is.

and i should admit i never read hells. i picked it up at the library (where i decided to read or skip all of his stuff) when i was also learning about tim o'brien, flannery o'connor, and hermann hesse. you put all four together, and you have a group of very different individuals who were obsessed with the absurd and with re-writing reality. for me, hunter just didnt care as much. unfortunately, ive heard that hells IS the gem (along with the nixon campaign) and it sucks that i just said no to him before i read it. but i will.

tbt