Monday, February 21, 2005

Hunter Stockton Thompson. July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005.

Well, what can one say? I guess we all figured as time passed and Dr. Thompson blew past one milestone after another that he’d blow past 70 with just as much fury and élan as he’d careered through everything else. Sure, there were those rumors about the toll the alcohol and narcotics intake had taken. (My favorite was the contention that his liver was so distended it prevented him from tucking his shirt into his pants . . . no reason not to think that was true.) But as much as he abused himself or tried to fuel the flight from whatever demons were chasing him, there was also the fact of his apparent indomitability, the idea that he’d prevail, just as he had thought the Sixties generation would simply prevail, as predicted in that passage from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas that will be quoted and quoted and quoted in the coming days as people try to make Thompson one of the “doomed refugees of the Love Generation,” as he called Sixties folks.

But that misses the point — as a lot of stuff written about Thompson while he was still alive did, also — and tries to put him in that particular box of nostalgic ideas about that decade. But he was not just in front of that idea and some social trends. He was a force unto himself. What the Sixties did was provide him with a venue and an audience. But he could be just as brutally and hilariously dismissive of both venue and audience as he could about the Kentucky Derby or anything else he examined at close range and found to be half-assed, disappointing, bent, spindled, crushed or twisted: When Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo finally find what’s left of the American dream in Las Vegas, it’s a charred slab of concrete in a weed-choked vacant lot. The book has one kick after another at the corpse of the 1960s. Sergeant Pepper is not the anthem of a generation; it’s something coming out of Harry James’s trumpet as Debbie Reynolds is “yukking across the stage in a silver afro wig.” The soundtrack for the first part of the journey through the desert to Las Vegas isn’t anything by Dylan or the Beatles. It’s “Sympathy for the Devil,” a hymn celebrating some of the basest moments in human history. “White Rabbit” isn’t the musical accompaniment for kicking open the doors of perception. It’s the musical accompaniment to having a 300-pound Samoan try to kill Duke or himself . . . not that it really matters. In fact, like Manson, he tried to soothe Duke by telling him he only wanted carve a little ‘z’ in his forehead . . .

Thompson knew the 1960s were dead in 1970. It took another five years or so for the rest of the culture to catch up. Anybody who had hoped that perhaps as some of the 1960s idealists grew up, they might transmute some of their youthful idealism into political pragmatism should have been following Thompson’s work more closely. He knew where that led, having followed that experiment through the Freak Power uprising in Aspen, and having shown in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 that the brutal realities of politics were the same and had the same ends whether they were being played out across the republic or in one mountain village. Not that such things stopped him. He thought of running for the U.S. Senate from Colorado for awhile, and tried to work out a way to bring some of his Freak Power insights and lessons to bear on the national political stage.

There will be a lot of musing-out-loud about whether Thompson was trying to live up to (or down to) expectations that resulted from his public persona. In fact, in everything that’s been written about him and related by people who worked with him, the persona that emerged in his writing was a lot calmer and more rational than anything he did out in the world.

The letters in The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America show that he was that way long before there was a 1960s drug culture. He was a connoisseur of derangement. Under different circumstances, he could have started issuing a narcotics/hallucinogenic newsletter — something like The Wine Spectator, only for drug fanciers. One has only to read “First Visit with Mescalito” (in Songs of the Doomed) or any of his descriptions of the effects of everything from LSD to ether in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to see that he was able to cogently and evocatively describe the effects of whatever brain-scrambling compound he ingested. In fact, in reading this story in the New York Times Magazine three weeks ago, I was reminded of that passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about Thompson’s encounter with “name deleted at insistence of publisher’s lawyer.”

MAGAZINE DESK January 30, 2005, Sunday
“Dr. Ecstasy”
By DRAKE BENNETT (NYT) 4390 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 , Page 32 , Column 1
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 4390 WORDS – “Alexander Shulgin, Sasha to his friends, lives with his wife, Ann, 30 minutes inland from the San Francisco Bay on a hillside dotted with valley oak, Monterey pine and hallucinogenic cactus. At 79, he stoops a little, but he is still well over six feet tall. . .”

The story goes onto detail Dr. Shulgin’s work, which seems to have consisted — for decades — of imagining drug compounds, fabricating them in his lab, ingesting them and making careful notes on their psychoactive/emotional results. Both he and Thompson lived in the Bay Area for awhile. Maybe they found each other . . .

Thompson’s drug intake always seemed like a means to an end. He said he knew there wasn’t any enlightenment to be found, that he just liked to gobble the stuff and see what would happen. And, as he also said, he never wrote when he was on drugs. So the drugs don’t seem to have been fuel for chasing insight, but fuel to escape something else . . . the drugs were just a more completely deranging, more powerful form of fuel than the alcohol that preceded them. Thompson seemed to like shocks and surprises more than anything. That was true when he threw a bag of lye around a bar in New York, when he and Oscar Acosta tried to freak out and baffle people in Las Vegas, and he apparently liked to do it most of all to himself — throw something weird at his brain and try to maintain, to function, despite a terrible self-inflicted mental/perceptual handicap.

Hunter Thompson wrote his own obituary in a number of different forms and places. And, like the “symbiotic trapezoid quote lead” he pioneered in one of his Nixon/Watergate stories, any decent, worthwhile obit that could do him justice would have to be lashed together from a range of disparate sources: the top could come from his “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” piece for the National Observer, where he tried to piece together what had changed in the world and in Ernest Hemingway that led him to shoot himself on July 2, 1961. Somewhere in there would have to be that line from his story about Jean-Claude Killy, where he described fame as “a crazily inflated culture-economy that eats its heroes like hot dogs and honors them on about the same level.” His obituary for Lionel Olay, “The Ultimate Freelancer” would have to be in there as well, because it contained a lot of explanation about what Thompson achieved. Throw in that passage about Louisville’s Cherokee Park from the unpublished first novel Prince Jellyfish. Somewhere, we would also have to include, as counterpoint to Thompson’s righteous rage about the Republic of the United States and its inability to live up to the noblest aspirations of the Framers, Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Be Angry at the Sun,” which I first encountered — as a lot of people did — in Campaign Trail ’72. There could be a couple of lines in there someplace from Thompson's obituary for Oscar Zeta Acosta, especially the point at which Thompson describes him as "a mutant . . . a prototype never even considered for mass production."

I think that’ll about cover it. But there’s one more thing that would have to be in there: a piece of insight from his two-part Rolling Stone story [“Fear and Loathing in the Near Room”; Fear and Loathing in the Far Room”] about Muhammad Ali: “Some try to write their novels, some try to live them, and some fools try to do both.” Thompson said Ali was trying to sidestep that entire dilemma and cut a new path by “living his own movie.” But long before Clay/Ali even imagined doing that, another Louisville native had beaten him to it.