R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson

I am not one of those rabid Hunter S. Thompson fans by any means. In fact, I've always found HST fans one of the more annoying varieties of writer-fans in existence. Almost always, the HST fan is a decently attractive white guy who's either physically in his mid-twenties, or spiritually/mentally/emotionally, forevermore, in his mid-twenties. Either way, he's typically 26, likes to drink and smoke a lot, likes to write about SHOCKING TOPICS like his masturbation habits or his abominable behavior with the female gender, and secretly prizes himself as being a very deep person because he occasionally spends an evening crying in bed, or he's scared of his father, or he actually actively regrets fucking over some poor virgin, etc. Anyway, he has feelings too! It goes without saying that lots of self-loathing is involved, and though he's never had a lost weekend in the desert with peyote, he sometimes tells strangers he has, and that it changed his life, man.

Yeah, you know one of these guys, or you've seen him walking down the streets of Wicker Park/Echo Park with a real sad-sack puss on for no fucking good reason, in his black t-shirt and headphones.

Anyway, I could rip on this type all day, but for all my cynicism, I'd be lying if I said I haven't been attracted to this type from time to time. It's hard, especially when you're physically/spiritually/mentally/emotionally in your mid-twenties, not to get caught up in this young man's particular vortex, as swollen with self-aggrandizement as it is. It's hard not to want to step into the center of it and see how much of it you can push away, if any.

That said, I still find the HST guy pretty annoying, right up there with rabid Tarantino fans circa 1995, and God Help Us All, fans of Ani DeFranco, anytime between 1994 and now. It's OK if you are a fan of either of those people--I liked Tarantino then and I generally do now--but I'm talking about worshipful, emulating, fan-people whose whole personalities get transfixed and then appropriated wholesale, entirely consumed by the 24/7 activity of LOVING AND BEING so-and-so. I'm talking about THOSE people. Like, don't even get me started on the guy I had in one of my writing classes at Columbia College who wrote a story about a jewelry heist and all the characters were named Mr. [fill in something wacky] and they all laid around discussing banalities till someone came in shooting a AK-47 to the strains of not kitschy-good classic rock, but this kid's awful, hapless and sickeningly unoriginal prose.

So when I read this morning that Hunter S. Thompson, at the age of 67, shot himself fatally with a shotgun and that his wonderfully named son Juan found him, I sighed a very complicated sigh. After I got over the simple, joyous fact that Hunter had a son named Juan (c'mon, it's so perfect! So West!), the reality of this suicide set in.

Not long ago, a month or so before the reelection, Thompson wrote a piece for Rolling Stone. It was nice to see his name in there--it had been a while. In junior high, when I first subscribed to RS, the two politcal writers who I remember most were Hunter S. and PJ O'Rourke. I would read their articles, but I was too young to catch a lot of the innuendo and the exact meaning of their contrary, spiky attitudes. As I got older, I think I understood Hunter much better, though I still found his trumpeting tiring, and almost always self-indulgent.

But here was this article before the election that was all about what an idiot Bush was/is and how America will surely send him packing. It was one of the most hopefully rowdy pieces of incendiary writing I'd read in a while. Thompson was so certain, so confident that America was better than this hack they'd barely elected last time, that his enthusiasm became a sort of emotional cornerstone in my own very resolute feelings that Bush's time had come. Though I don't recall articulating it to anyone, whenever I doubted that Kerry would win, Thompson's essay was on the short list of things I'd think about to comfort myself.

Turned out, obviously, that Thompson and I were wrong. Though in a way, I think we were both right, despite the statistics. The only thing that dragged us down was this small but sagging middle, this collective of people who didn't vote or didn't vote our way because, as the saying goes, you can't have a revolution on a full stomach.

Thompson is dead, but I'm glad that after years of reading him and disagreeing with him, after years of feeling like maybe he was even sexist or just a mega-asshole with no redeemable qualities, after years of rolling my eyes at his fan-boys and occasionally against my better judgement, kissing some of those fanboys, that the last thing I read by him before his death, I completely and happily ate up. I smeared it all over my spirit like some kind of salve. His essay wasn't just entertainment-- it was emotional fortitude. It's like Thompson and I held hands for one brief but important moment before all that self-loathing cut him off from this world, up and away from me and everyone else who loved him better and longer than I ever could.