Really, do any of us?
Posted on 02/22/2005 1:04:35 PM PST by 45Auto
Hunter Thompson shot himself in the head sometime on Saturday and a few things are certain. He was either stoned or hung over, and his work will be forgotten.
Ask almost anyone today about Hunter Thompson and he will have no idea who you are talking about. Ask someone in a tiny sliver of demography, say ages 45 to 55, and all sorts of memories come conjuring up. There is the revelation of at least what we thought was his amazing ability with words, though I have not read him for years, so I no longer know if this is true. Even more than his work, however, we recall his comic-outlaw persona which many of us found quite appealing in those days. But the funny thing is that most of our memories come not from his work or even from him but from the seeming dead-on impression of Thompson by Bill Murray in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam, a period piece cobbled together from Thompson's most famous books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
The Thompson schtick was as formally set as any Hope and Crosby road movie; Thompson, the comic yet brilliant journalistic bumbler is sent as the skunk to the garden party where he promptly drinks all the scotch, all the gin, all the tequila, gets the waitresses stoned, frightens the horses, shocks the local burghers and constabulary, and still turns in award-winning copy to his faraway editors in San Francisco or New York.
It is a blessing that his work is not now still terribly well-known for he was a net negative influence on an entire generation. His famous aphorism, "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro" was the font of more ruined GPAs than any other single source back in the 1970s. "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro" meant that you could stay up all night doing every manner of substance and in the few milky hours between sunrise and the start of morning classes churn out a master term paper. Almost all of us discovered this was not true. Some, like Hunter himself, never learned it.
Hunter's life was littered with young "handlers" many sent from Rolling Stone to keep him on schedule. More than one crashed and burned living so close to the insanity. I worked briefly at Rolling Stone in the mid-Eighties and remained close to many Rolling Stone types for years after. All the stories you ever heard about Hunter were true. Hunter would come to town to finish a piece, hole up on a local hotel, borrow a Selectric typewriter from the magazine, and proceed to get stoned for days on end. Once a friend of mine was sent at long last to pick up the typewriter and discovered it in the hotel bathtub covered in topsoil. Go figure.
Here is my one Hunter story and with this I say goodbye to Senate confirmation. Sometime around 1990 Hunter and Jann Wenner, founder and editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, were invited to speak at Columbia University. I sensed at that time that Hunter was on the downward slide and this could be his last hurrah and so I agree to tag along. I decide at the top of the evening to stay until the end of the end wherever that might lead.
Our small group meets in the green room at Columbia. We stand around slugging from a bottle of Chivas Regal. Around and around the bottle goes. Of course, Hunter is well ahead of us, having started much earlier. We stumble upstairs for the speech.
The hall is filled to the rafters, I mean absolutely filled. Hunter and Jann sit at a table center stage. Hunter slurs and slurs, and slugs from the Chivas and hacks up oranges with a huge machete. At one point Jann, wearing natty French cuffs, is lustily booed for being a corporate sell out. Hunter keeps passing the only bottle of scotch through the stage curtain to those of us backstage. "Speech" over, we head cross town to Elaine's, the longtime watering hole of New York writers and Hollywood outriders.
Keeping with my pledge to ride this pony right down to the ground, I plant myself right next to Hunter at our table of now about ten. We are all pretty drunk, but Hunter is wasted. Still he orders about five courses and eats every morsel. He even eats all the bread, which he heavily butters and covers with pepper. I try to engage him in conversation and I swear hardly the only words I understand are "Nixon," "Peru," and "acid." Along with everything else, Hunter is tripping.
At one point Hunter leans over to me and says something on the order that he is going to the bathroom and there is a guy staring at him from the bar and that I am to watch his back. "Errrr, O.K., Hunter." Hunter gets up and heads to the men's room, Jann follows him and sure enough the guy at the bar gets up and follows them both. I join the parade and when I round the turn I see this: The guy from the bar is leaning his full weight on the men's room door, bending it so far back I can see Jann understandably cowering inside. So, I grab the guy and pull him away from the door and back down the hallway. The whole bar descends on the cacophony in that tight little hallway; bartenders, waiters, patrons. Hunter comes out of the men's room, comes up to the guy and the guy says this, really loud; "I just wanted to get stoned with you, man."
The hallway clears, they take the guy back to the bar (they don't toss him out; Elaine's is a remarkably forgiving place), and Hunter grabs me and pulls me into the lady's room whereupon he pulls out a huge bag of cocaine. "It's not very good," he says, "but there is a lot of it." Thankfully, almost immediately Tommy-the-good-bartender yanks us out of the lady's room and puts us back at our table.
I do not remember much of the rest of the evening except that I am the last one to clear out; well, me, Hunter, and his "secretary." It is the weeist of hours. Hunter's limousine takes us downtown. He pulls up somewhere on Central Park South. Hunter gets out and weaves along the sidewalk, scotch bottle in one hand, "secretary" in the other. I yell out to him, "Hunter, where are you going?" "Take the limo," he says, "He'll take you wherever you want to go..."
I slump against the window as the car takes me the few blocks to my Upper West Side apartment. The morning joggers are jogging. People are walking briskly to work. The trash trucks are making that beeping sound that is joyful first thing in the morning but deeply depressing at the end of night. One cannot do this thing too many times or for too long and Hunter did both, and now he has a bullet in his brain.
Requiescat in pace, dude.
— Austin Ruse is president of the New York-based Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute and the Washington, D.C.-based Culture of Life Foundation. He spent many years in the New York magazine world.
"his work will be forgotten."
Probably rite.
"Ask almost anyone today about Hunter Thompson and he will have no idea who you are talking about."
Like me. Who is this guy they keep mentioning every day since, on some news outlet? I don't even know what the !%#@ "Gonzo" is.....
But wait, all the coffeehouse folks are mourning him! That means he was important, right? /sarc
Ouch.
Hunter Thompson shot himself in the head sometime on Saturday and a few things are certain. He was either stoned or hung over, and his work will be forgotten.I still suspect there was some sort of terminal and/or painful illness involved. Eating a shotgun doesn't seem his style, unless that was the case. In which case it totally seems like something he would do.
You can say a lot of things about the guy, and his politics sucked for sure except where guns (possibly the most important issue) were involved. But you couldn't call him fake.
-Eric
He was plenty talented. Just because you don't like his message doesn't take that away. Being talented has no moral value unless you put your talent to good works; I'm not claiming that. But the talent was there.
I remember.
Isn't it odd that this post is from 45Auto? Hunter would have appreciated that.
Everything you've ever heard about him is probably true.
Rest in peace HST.
Didn't have a new act.....
His work will be forgotten.
My Momma always said if you dont have something good to say about a person , dont say anything. No Comment.
I was always taught that suicide was the ultimate temper tantrum.
We're not going to tell you about the Manta bats,
you wouldn't see them anyway.
One thing about Hunter, he wasn't like the others.
Good confession column! ;^)
I dont know much about him except from that movie, fear and loathing in las vegas, which was quite kool.
Can't even get the quote right, it's "when the going gets wierd, the wierd turn pro". And the fine folks at Modern Library think he'll be remembered.
It took the DUmmies all of five minutes to conclude that he was murdered on the orders of Karl Rove.
You just knew that Hunter was really crazy - all of the time. The booze, the dope, the guns and exceedingly strange outlook on the world. But still...but still there was something endearing about him. I can't quite figure what it was, but his writing sure made college a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
He was a man who made positively no apparent sense in his writing - except to tell us that life was a bizarre and uncanny thing that could truly bite in you in the butt when you least expected it.
I hope God enjoys Hunter a lot.
PS: Do you think there's good scotch in Heaven?
Amen to that..
Really, do any of us?
It took the DUmmies all of five minutes to conclude that he was murdered on the orders of Karl Rove.True, but their parents all ate the brown acid.
-Eric
Same here. I never heard of the guy, and I keep wondering about this "Gonzo" stuff they're all talking about. I looked up gonzo, and it apparently just means unconventional or exaggerated. Whatever.
Is it just me or are all writers nuts???
There he goes.. one of god's own prototypes.. a higher powered mutant never even considered for mass production.. too wierd to live, too rare to die.
Who is Austin Ruse?
I think it's a prerequisite.
If you don't know who Thompson was, you are missing. . . . absolutely nothing. Clamor without content, as I read somewhere else, best describes his "work."
I'm 51. When I first heard of his suicide, my thoughts were that the name sounded familiar.
That was about it.
So behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal. -- Henry David Thoreau
Probably rite.
Probably wrong, actually. He, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Susan Orlean, Joseph Mitchell, and a handful of extremely talented writers throughout the late 1960s-early 1970s changed the way we look at long-form non-fiction to this very day.
IOW he and it are another set of fringe-sect icons which the vast majority couldn't care less about even in his day - hence no1 else even hears about it. Kind of like "the Smiths" being a great '80s band. Yeah, whatever!
Thompson used to be a sports writer. He was sent to the desert to write a piece about a dune buggy race, but he was so stoned, drunk, and screwed up, the copy he eventually turned in had little to do with the race, and lots to do with the Doctor's inability to cover the story due to the "hardships" (self-imposed and otherwise) he faced along the way. The editor published it as-is, and a new form of "journalism" was discovered.
Based on this piece, Mr. Sour Grapes 2005.
For some reason, I whipped out a Richard Brautigan book last night and read parts of Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar. Another beat/druggie writer who committed suicide.
Norman Mailer, Truman Capote - the only 1s I've at least even heard of, much less know something about.
But still, what is this word? How did it even come about?
Austin Ruse is president of the New York-based Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute and the Washington, D.C.-based Culture of Life Foundation. He spent many years in the New York magazine world.
BTW, P.J. O'Rourke is the modern incarnation of Thompson.
Gonzo is life over the edge. Gonzo is taking things too far just to find out what happens. Gonzo journalism is another name for what Tom Wolfe called "new journalism" which is basically personalizing a story by recounting not just the facts the journalist sought but what the journalist went through to get those facts, giving the reader (or viewer, new journalism has rewritten the concept of documentary TV and movies) a view to what happened to the guy giving you the story, letting you know that the best way to get your event covered favorably is to give the press access to an open bar. Gonzo is something you either get or you don't, gonzo is understanding that HST probably actually shot that typewriter... more than once.
Patients suffering from psychiatric illnesses - alcoholism and major depression - contribute the lion's share of the fatal suicides, but the vast majority of depressives and alcoholics do not take their own lives. For each of these diagnoses, different "risk factors" predict who will commit suicide. Persons suffering from major depression, for instance, take their lives for "internal" reasons: feelings of misery, guilt, and hopelessness. Alcoholics, by contrast, kill themselves in reaction to events in their environment: of the alcoholics who commit suicide, one-third experience the loss of a close relationship within the prior six weeks, and one third expect to sustain an equally severe interpersonal loss.
In studying fifty alcoholic suicides, I was struck by how often seven factors again and again were associated with their deaths. Nearly all these suicide victims (96 percent) had continued their substance abuse right up to the end of their lives. More than 70 percent communicated their suicidal thoughts to others, often over a long period of time; or had a comorbid major depression; or had no spouse, family, or friends offering them any social support. Nearly half the suicides were unemployed, or had serious medical problems, or lived alone. These seven factors predict risk of suicide in alcoholics; in another study I participated in, they characterized the 32 alcoholic suicides, but not the depressed, non-alcoholic suicides.
The alcoholics' lack of social support explains why acute interpersonal loss so powerfully drives alcoholics to suicide. Of the 20 cases where the loss occurred within the last 6 weeks, 19 possessed no other social support beyond the minimal camaraderie of their tavern buddies. The relationship they lost was their last relationship; losing that link, coupled with the global deterioration in their lives, proved unbearable.
Our next question was whether this pattern uniquely points to the alcoholic suicides, or whether these stressors occur commonly among all alcoholics. Six of these risk factors were investigated in a large mental health community survey. When we reviewed their data, we found these risk factors were present far more often in alcoholic suicides than in living alcoholics. Every suicide had at least one risk factor; 90 percent had at least three risk factors, and 80 percent of the suicides had four or more risk factors. In contrast, one quarter of the living alcoholics had none of the risk factors, and only one had four risk factors. This suggests that the risk factors cumulate: the more factors an alcoholic has, the greater his suicide risk.
These factors discriminated suicidal alcoholics from alcoholics living in the community, but would they serve to select the suicidal alcoholics out of a hospital population? We compared our suicides with 142 medically-treated alcoholics. Each of the five factors evaluated was found significantly more often among the suicides. Other researchers have also found that similar risk factors characterize the suicides of substance abusers who are not primary alcoholics.
All I know is his name, he may be a legend in leftism circles but I doubt too many people even know what he was about. Rolling Stone is so 1960's, 70's.
It sounds like gonzo is just one type of personalized journalism. I don't object to putting a journalistic piece's narrative into first person. There's a diary style. But it has happened more than once that I find myself reading what kind of wine the writer ordered. A fatal violation, I won't continue reading it beyond that point.
Seems that I read somewhere that women don't use shotguns
to commit suicide, oh well.
HST was a very good writer in the "stream of drugged conciousness" school.
His best was F&L in LV, and Hell's angels, certainly I don't think he gives a rat's ass what any of us may think of his demise.
I can never hear "White Rabbit" with out picturing the scene
of him and his attorney in the bathroom of the LV hotel.
Toss a grapefruit for me Hunter!
Yeah, basically gonzo is a subcategory of personalized (aka "new"... although it's been around long enough that monicre should be dropped) journalism. It's personalized journalism by a nut job who really doesn't fit into the scene he's in, and if he does fit in there's probably something deeply wrong with the scene.
Like all things some folks take it too far. Many that try to use personalized journalism forget what the story really is. The story isn't them, it's the journey, they tell it through themselves to give the reader an anchor, a way to feel like they were there. It wasn't really even new when Thompson started doing it, he was just the first one to take it in the direction of "serious" things like politics.
HST wasn't a Beat, which was straight out of the 50's (not 60's). Hunter was an alcoholic drug eater who could write. He was more libertarian than left, hated Nixon along with virtually everyone else, was a passionate-- albeit cockeyed-- proponent of the 2nd Amendment (shotgun golf, anyone?), and admired virtually no one but Hunter S. Thompson.
He was a cultural black light illuminating a particular acid soaked moment in time.
He wasn't my brand of alembic pot stilled brandy. He was something just a little more volatile, grain alcohol, maybe; 120 proof, at the least, and when the proof had gone out of his writing he blew off the only thing a writer really has.
The tragedy for HST was that his mind had gone long before. It's a wonder he hadn't taken his life years earlier....
I'm one of the few people of my generation who know who Hunter S. Thompson is. While I find his life fascinating, I wish more people knew about it. He was a wildly talented guy who took a flamethrower to his own mind and burned it to a crisp. In the end, he proved himself wrong on everything he ever espoused, and I think 'attention should be paid' to the wages of his particular sins. His life is a case study of the long, downward spiral, but a brilliant one.
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