The Wake

I got a call at about 10:30 this morning. The message my friend left told me that Hunter S. Thompson had blown his head off with a shotgun. My first thoughts of what the body would have looked like. I wondered if it was a clean blow, or if he only shot off enough tissue to elicit a scream from his wife. I wondered if his flesh, blood, bones, teeth, skull, and brains were splattered all over the wall of his room. I wondered if he had stuck the gun in his mouth, or just placed it to the side of his head. I wondered where he was sitting, and how much blood was soaking wherever that place was. I wondered if his eyes had been blown out too – or if they were just dangling from their sockets. I wondered if his tongue was lying on his shirt collar. I wondered if the Sheriff felt special for finding him dead. I wondered if his wife cried. I wondered what his dead body must have looked like. I wondered what was on the television. I wondered how much scalp was probably plastered to the wall behind him. I wondered if he had had a bad trip prior and had just forgotten how to deal with it. I wondered if you could look at where his face used to be and see the back of his throat.

I was shocked. But I wasn’t sad. I was fascinated.

Because in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably what Thompson would’ve wanted. For a man so vividly remembered as a champion of living life to its seemingly inexhaustible extremes, it would seem stupid to wish him a debilitating journey into the twilight years. Thompson was old at 67. And for a man who deliberately perpetuated a drug&drink lifestyle, the years were surely catching up to him. I could never imagine an elderly and ailing Thompson walking down the grassy hills of some sanitarium-turned-upscale nursing home.

So to morn Thompson would be counterproductive. To characterize his fate as that which befalls other suicide “victims” would seem out of place. Though we will probably never know what happened to the Good Doctor in those last contemplative minutes, I would imagine that he knew well what he was doing. The man knew what made the greatest stories. His is now a classic. It is the ultimate ending to a life’s story of dark humor and shattered romanticism.

So I would like to remember Thompson for what he was – an outlaw rebel of a journalist who wrote some of the greatest stuff ever. He wrote great because he wrote truth. People hated him for writing the truth. People loved him for writing the truth. And he was a genius for it.

He is a genius for getting the last laugh in all this, as seventy years from now, people will view Thompson with the kind of lens reserved for only those tragic literary heroes. Thompson is hardly tragic. But he is a hero. And now, if reputation is everything, Dr. Thompson will be laughing in his grave.