Velociworld

"Cratering meteorite" sums him up just about perfect.

I never "got" Hunter S., as a young woman or at any other time in my life. I felt about him the same way I felt about Kerouac--about three chapters in and I just started thinking "What the FUCK is this?" When I was young I thought that meant I was deficient and simply not cool (well, I wasn't and I'm still not but that's got nothing to do with my feelings about HST's writing), but as I grew older I realized I had merely been right all along.

After reading about his suicide, however, I have discovered a modicum of admiration for him. He evidently had enough of a real person somewhere inside to realize what a fraud he let himself become, and he hated it. Not that I wish that agony on anyone, but that he apparently had that much self-awareness about himself speaks well of him at the end. Too bad he couldn't have worked through it to give us something real and good in his sunset years.

"Fear and loathing in the Soul" should be his epitaph. Or epithet. Whatever.

I read several of Thompson's books. He was adept at glamorizing self-destructive behavior. Terry Southern wrote about drug abuse in a way that made it alluring to a young teenager. The Electric Koolaide Acid Test by Tom Wolfe hyped the antics of the despicable vermin who ran around the Pacific Northwest as the Merry Pranksters. Ken Kesey was their leader.

Thompson had real potential. His early essay about visiting the grave of Hemingway was good. However, later, he vilified Hemingway with these words: "Hemingway was a demented queer, and Mark Twain was tortured to the end of his days with a penchant for interracial buggery."

I saw Thompson on Letterman sometime in the early
90's. He looked and acted like a caricature of a pathetic drunk. I suppose that when he killed himself, he was staring into the abyss that had once been his soul. He probably used one of his .44 magnums. Hemingway used a shotgun.

Hate him all you want, but for a few years there he created a unique style and voice that pretty much defined the counterculture. Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 showed the way for countless writers and reporters good and bad. His partnership with Ralph Steadman at the Kentucky Derby was pants-wetting funny in a way that few people away from this site can match.

Like Cobain, who launched a thousand bands, Thompson launched a thousand writers. Like Hemingway, his third act was dismal, cancelled by himself.

I don't presume to know why he killed himself. He had reportedly suffered back surgery, a hip replacement, and had recently fallen and broken a leg. Maybe he just decided to do to himself what any good horseman would do to their horse if it was time. I don't think many of us know what it's like to do your best work in the public eye as a young person and then be derided for not keeping it up. In recent years he at least had the good grace to stay out of the public eye for the most part. He wasn't desparately foisting himself off on the pop culture, some wrinkly and stumbling Gonzo Norma Desmond.

His early work will live on. Are the violence and misogyny in his work and life troubling? Sure. But no more than they were in Picasso's. And Picasso never got to cover the Super Bowl for Rolling Stone when that meant something.

Hell, I don't hate him. Pitied him.

For sustained comedy, I don't feel that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ever has been matched. Thompson was a poet. Like all poets, even the great ones, a lot of what he wrote was bad. But he also left behind some authentic pieces that are, distinctively, his. If his myth is larger than his work, I say good for him. The system has gamed a lot of great writers over the years, and it's inspiring to see a writer get one over on them (publishers, critics, assorted dilettantes).

His coverage for the Super Bowl (I forget which one) that he did for Sports Illustrated was a classic! He stayed too fucked up to see the game but wrote a great piece anyway.