Nothing sucks quite so much as finding out that one of your heroes has killed himself. In high school, they tell you most suicides are cries for help, but not the ones with guns. Those are the professional jobs, when the person intends to get it right. Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain: nothing tragic-romantic there, just dedication. And now there is another to add to the roll. Details will come out about the circumstances surrounding Hunter S. Thompson's death, but the irrevocable fact is that a light is out, a necessary voice has been snuffed, and we are all worse off.
I first read Hunter Thompson's "Hell's Angels" when I was 16 years old, at one of those impressionable times when my best friends were my books and records. It was one of those epiphany, Paul at Damascus moments, where you realize that there is no need to play by the conventional rules, that the conventional rules are just somebody else's ruse, that you're alive and can make it up as you go along. The words had trajectory, color and thrust. The rogue eye of the man who wrote them was keen, cynical, honest and American. The last page of "Hell's Angels" is as liberating an experience as hitting the open road, with such lines as, "That's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears."
The myth of Thompson often precluded his work. Lord knows how many American benders begin with some swig or hit of something and someone whispering, "Buy the ticket, take the ride." Walk through the long plastic hallways of any television station and someone is guaranteed to have the "Generation of Swine" salvo about TV being "a long plastic hallway filled with pimps and thieves where good men die like dogs" tacked up in defiance. There were the Bill Murray and Johnny Depp pictures, both great, but his words themselves are what matter most as they are the best, if not the most honest portraits of American cultural madness. No icon was safe, no target off limits in his narratives that braided politics, money, sports, race, sex, drugs and weirdness together.
In 2000, having just read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," I walked into my job here at the MTV, intent on looking for the wild ritual he saw in the Nixon/ McGovern race. When the towers went down, his Page 2 Web site posting was prophetic and wise. I read his writings from Saigon while on the roof of the Remal Hotel in Baghdad, watching just another war buckle below. But that's it now. Now there's nothing more. One bullet and it's all syndication from here on out.
Thompson didn't think much of our generation, one he dubbed "Generation Z" and called "born rich & Powerful, the certified Aristocrats of a new & Amazing century ... gilded little sots." He blamed the young for the war and Democratic failure of the last election. We gave him no hope in his final days. But those of you who pick up his works and travel through his words may prove him wrong, for there are great truths there. Sometimes the vantage point from the edge of reason gives the clearest perspective of all. Mahalo, Dr. Thompson. Hope it looks spectacular up there.
Comments