The Wake

February 21, 2005

It’s 1:45 a.m.; the dark cover of night has finally pulled itself past the horizon. The city skyline is filled with esoteric lights that illuminate the blackness. A thick blanket of fog hangs next to the window. The pane is covered with ice that has formed botanical designs, a perfect visual for my scrambled thoughts. Outside, the village lush struggles to find his way home, heading everywhere, anywhere, nowhere. The echo of the shot has finally gone silent.

His lips enclosed the cold barrel of the .45 caliber handgun when Hunter S. Thompson pulled the trigger to end his life. His wife, Anita, heard the blast on the receiving end of his phone call; his son, Juan Thompson, and son-in-law were sitting in the room adjacent. News sources disclosed this morning that Thompson said, “The way he chose to do it was not a surprise, but the timing was a total, total surprise.”

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, where he attended public school, and after, joined the United States Air Force at the Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Thompson was hired as the Sports Editor of the Command Courier—the organ of Eglin AFB—as a result of falsifying his application. In 1958, after serving two years in the Air Force, Thompson was honorably discharged. He wrote, “a reportedly ‘fanatical’ air man had received his separation papers and was rumored to have set out in the direction of the gatehouse at a high speed in a muffler-less car with no brakes…{Hunter S.} Thompson was known to have a sometimes overpowering affinity for wine and was described by a recent arrival in the base sanatorium as ‘just the type of bastard who would do a thing like that.’” Thompson approached the base on the wrong side of the road, and proceeded to hurl a wine bottle into the AP gatehouse, which exploded on impact.

His first real success as a writer came when he moved to South America and began sending stories back to The National Observer. He wrote a story for The Nation on the demimonde of motorcycle outlaws that he turned into his first book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. He continued to freelance for magazines, honing his bracing and sardonic narrative. In 1971, his voice was cemented in the drug-induced rant called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, which chronicled a hallucinogenic maelstrom—rife with images of savage lizards conversing in a hotel bar, and a polar bear copulating with a cocktail waitress. Ye gods.

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved—an article that appeared in Scanlan’s—was the first article he deemed “gonzo,” defined as using an exaggerated, first-person style of reporting. Thompson had written of the article, “It was one of those horrible deadline scrambles and I ran out of time. I was desperate. Ralph Steadman had done the illustrations, the cover was printed and there was this horrible hole in the interviews. I was convinced I was finished, I’d blown my mind, couldn’t work. So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.”

Thompson was an admitted alcoholic and drug fiend. Wild eyes veiled by gold-rimmed Aviator glasses and teeth perpetually gnawing on the end of a cigarette holder, Thompson told Playboy in November 1974, “Yeah…obviously, but I drink this stuff like I smoke cigarettes; I don’t even notice it. You know—a bird flies, a fish swims, and I drink. But you notice I very rarely sit down and say ‘Now I’m going to get wasted.’ I never eat a tremendous amount of any one thing. I rarely get drunk and I use drugs pretty much the same way.”

Thompson’s acerbic and cynical view, coupled with his eccentric lifestyle, has lead many to mythologize him as a twisted caricature. Yet, this was the same man who would type Hemmingway’s books verbatim just to understand how a sentence was written. This was the same man, who at age seventeen, wrote, “So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

This man refused to play into the American dream and cast his line into the sea of contented boredom. Instead, Thompson wrote of the dissolution of this dream. Thompson wished to be cremated and have his ashes blown out of a cannon, spread across his “fortified compound” in Aspen, Colorado. His works, which pile up around me—and many others—in innumerable stacks, filled with incendiary and inspiring words, will stand as this man’s tombstone. In this silence, the epitaph will be left up to the reader.