By
Nona Polichick & Carman
Dead Rebel Of The Year
~ Hunter S. Thompson ~
I was sweating, hard. I had agreed to do this piece as a collaborative effort, thinking it would make it easier to make DEADLINE. Man, was I wrong. Now I had the DEADLINE weighing me down, and the evil thing was breathing down the back of my quaking, soaking neck. I’d agreed to write a memorial for HUNTER S. THOMPSON. Gonzo himself. The hombre. The madman. The legend. The myth. The drug-soaked suicide. I was in trouble, oh hell yeah.
What could I possibly write about the guy who inspired me to plant my ass at the typewriter while leveled on multiple layers of drugs? What more could be said about the dude who invented the art of planting your own worthless ass right in the middle of what otherwise would have been a competently written and workman-like article, turning it into a battleground for the raging battle between one’s dope-soaked ID and one’s arrogant, superior superego? Nothing that I was up to, it appeared. Especially not with the DEADLINE looming. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse… the damned BATS appeared. I couldn’t just sit here and write. That’d be what the rabid little bastards wanted. I had to take ACTION. So I popped a 30-mg morphine and a Sudafed (hey, I can’t get the good speed Thompson could, so I gotta make do) and resolved to fight those little winged fuckers. But… that didn’t help me any with the DEADLINE. What to do? I called on Carman, hoping against hope that the sardonic young straight-edge could help me sort this all out. I gave him the floor, allowing him to do battle with the DEADLINE while I went off to slay me some bats…
I know almost nothing about his writings, but I do know about his reputation. Hunter S. Thompson was a sports journalist by trade and he wrote a book about the Hell’s Angels. He was to most of our generation (20-50 year olds) what Walter Cronkite is to grandma. He was one of the few who had the balls to call the bullshit when he saw it. Ironically, when he was granted a personal interview with Richard M. Nixon, he was only allowed to talk about football. He ran for sheriff of his county and was a board member of NORML. He was also in the NRA, if I am not mistaken.
Walter Cronkite? I cackled like a madwoman at the idea of Cronkite writing something like “Hell’s Angels” or “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail”. Of course, in a way, the analogy made sense… Cronkite spoke for the “silent generation” while Thompson definitely spoke for the “me generation”. What better journalist for a self-centered generation than the most self-centered journalist of the past fifty years? The idea of Thompson as an eminence gris, along with Carman’s purple font, distracted me momentarily from my mission to fight the bats… and by “momentarily” I mean “for the next two hours”. Or maybe it wasn’t the font… it might have been the morphine. But of course, it wasn’t really the font or the morphine at all. It was the Sudafed. Had I learned nothing from Thompson? Hadn't his writings served as a totemic warning to WATCH YOUR DAMN STIMULANT INTAKE before you sat down at the typewriter? Look at his most famous book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. If it hadn’t been for stimulants, it’s entirely likely that he would’ve written a straightforward article about a motocross race or a national sheriff’s convention, instead of the jittery ramblings of an amphetamine-ether-acid freak on a tear through a desert resort town. Wait… did that mean that the stimulants are what made his voice what it was? Now I was all confused, and the bats were still on the offensive and the DEADLINE still loomed. Carman, HELP! Some thoughts on Mr. Thompson, please, while I fight these bats and this DEADLINE.
I personally think he was a junkie hack who became famous for being the right kind of writer at the right time. Granted, the guy had a way with words, but I found his stories themselves mundane and boring. Maybe it is because I don’t do drugs, and I therefore don’t identify with some of the shit he was talking about.
Well, luckily for us all, I, Nona, do enough drugs to get both of us through this, Carm. (No need to thank me.) It appeared we were making some headway with this thing after all… or we were, until the Sudafed really kicked in, and I realized that I was making this tribute all about ME… and these damned bats. Why the hell was I running off at the mouth about me popping morphine and trying to fight my way through the bat country, when a tribute to Dr. Thompson was what had been promised in the byline? What sort of crazy egomaniac would agree to take on a writing assignment about one thing, only to completely toss that concept out the window and start ranting and raving about THEMSELVES, and all the drugs they did, and doing battle with most-likely-imaginary winged mammals? Who would ever think to write like that? Carman, can YOU think of anyone like that?
There are some rumors about his death.... apparently, some believe that he was about to blow open a bunch of shit about the government in a new book, and that he was assassinated by the S.S. men. Personally, I don’t know. If he WAS going to write a book about all that stuff, he did not, so it has no relevance (call me a student of objectivism). What I do know is that his legacy will live on through the band Avenged Sevenfold’s song “Bat Country”.
Of course, as much as we all love a good conspiracy theory, at the end of the day there’s no way that this cat could’ve met any other end than the one we all heard about… suicide - teleconferenced to the wife with whom he shared a volatile, drunken relationship. I’m sure he’d love the idea that his fan following would try and spin it to make him a martyr for free speech and a warrior against Big Government, but at the end of the day there was no room for any other ending than the one he wrote with a gun. There was never really any room in his stories for anybody but himself. That’s just the way Hunter S. Thompson always was. While most reasonable folks would consider that a form of pathology, it gave rise to a new art form, and a new kind of political journalism, that was wholly original and completely American. He had the balls to admit that he was more interested in himself than any story he could write, and he had the very final arrogance to write the ending to the story of his favorite and ultimately only topic, himself. Conspiracies, chronic illness and a toxic marriage aside… Hunter S. Thompson needed a killer ending to the story he spent his life writing as he lived it.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pick up Gonzo’s mantle and go slay me some bats. Next round of ether’s on me.
