Hunter S. Thompson Killed Himself
So I Don’t Have To
Yep, it was a case of the Real Fear, the one where you’ve moved beyond the mere existential terror of whatever giant void lies between yourself and happiness into a place of real live physical pain – and not just the pain of a hangover, which I happened to be nursing, not the pain of a jello shot and a little Jagermeister and a small rack of cheap beer - but the pain of an animal who’s been wounded far too many times by the cold rude difference between the dreams in my head and the startling shock of the reality that the rest of you force me to live in.
That pain was palpable and real as I rose from my bed and picked up my phone. I wanted to die and I knew it, and I have this feeling often enough that I’ve never seriously entertained the thought of owning a handgun or even a sharp knife, and despite the pile of orange pills that litter the floors of the houses I live in, I never let them give me more than ten hits of any serious sedative, just in case, just in case…
Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t nearly so cautious. If no one in his world realized that this was a likely outcome a long long time ago, then it had to be because he never stopped drinking long enough to let anyone know how depressed he could become. I don’t believe that, nor do I think that anyone other than he is to blame for how he ended his life, but how he came to die is certainly as important as how he lived and what he tried to reveal to us with his words.
Funny thing is, few out of the many hundreds of commentators obit’ing him across the Internet seem to want to talk about that part. Maybe it’s too soon. Maybe the legend of the mad dope fiend who criss-crossed the country on commercial jets on corporate expense accounts with bags full of loaded weapons and piles of acid, mescaline, and scotch while balancing a revolutionary’s typewriter on his knees is too sublime an image to let go of, even as we know that in the end, he saw no other solution then to take his own life.
Thompson, along with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, Abbie Hoffman, Lester Bangs, & Spaulding Gray, headed up a small cadre of counter-culture writer/cult figures that a teenage weirdo like me could seize hold of and say, “Him – I wanna write like him!” It’s shocking for me to look at this list now and realize that, with the exception of Ginsberg, who died a more or less natural death, and Tom Wolfe, who’s still with us, that ALL of the rest died just like Thompson – miserable, depressed, alone, and by their own hands. So many really smart and insightful men - all dead because the pain of living was far too much for them to bear.
William Shakespeare was never a favorite of mine – but by the time of high school graduation, I had read every last thing that Hunter S. Thompson ever wrote. Anyone who thinks that Thompson was just a drug fiend never read the eclectic collection of sports writing and political pieces that made up “The Great Shark Hunt,” never read the savagely poetic underclass drama that was “Hell’s Angels,” and most certainly never bothered to allow themselves to get sucked into the tour de force of American Presidential politics that was “Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972.” Campaign books as a general rule are a dull affair, generally written by someone who has a vested interest in taking the incomprehensible mess of a national campaign and making it all neat and tidy. Thompson took the mess of the ’72 campaign and made it interesting, and no one before or since has ever had the solid brass balls to take on the candidates, the issues, and the electorate from so many different angles, revealing both the obvious (that Richard Nixon was a part of ‘the dark and venal side of the American character,’) and that in voting him into office, Americans were also possessed of that same savage venality that was so easy to loathe in a figurehead but so difficult to face in ourselves.
These books and their messages, while not forgotten, were nevertheless far overshadowed by the Hunter S. Thompson book, the pamphlet-sized romp through American greed and decadence known as “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was serialized in two issues of Rolling Stone magazine, quickly rose to the top of the NYT bestseller list and would always remain Thompson’s calling card to the rest of the world. Subtitled “A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream,” this book beckoned to everyone who found themselves sitting outside the mainstream of the American way of life – be that economic, political, or lifestyle, and urged them to accept the possibility that the only way to get through the savagery of what the American experiment had become was to indulge in as much excessive behavior as one could stand – and by the time it was all over, clearly not even Thompson could stomach the excess it would take to make the nightmare of it all go away.
For even a minor-league drug fiend like myself, “F & L in LV” produced bust-a-gut laughter at the sheer enormity of Thompson’s drug inventory as he barrels off into the desert with his “attorney” inside the Great Red Shark Cadillac that they rent off the lot on Sunset Blvd. That anyone would attempt to ingest all that acid, cocaine, mescaline, and hard liquor and attempt to do anything at all is simply preposterous. That anyone would attempt this feat and try to cover a story – any kind of story – is an astounding tall tale, the stuff of legend that most people seemed to want to believe about Thompson – and perhaps most sadly, even Thompson himself.
Not that I didn’t try – indeed, in the 1980s I sometimes felt I was a part of a whole generation of young people who ripped all drugs from their literary-historical contexts, and in the interest of the sheer mass consumption for which the ‘80s were famous, took everything, all at once, and as often as possible. Using Thompson’s recipes for disaster, one found that acid made a perfect compliment to drinking all night (since you’d never really get drunk and you could use the alcohol to counteract the LSD) cocaine could easily be added to that mix when one felt a bit winded, and later on, one could handily drop acid and ecstasy at timed intervals for the all-night rave-cocktail known as “candy flipping.”
But in practice, I was a piker compared to a lot of my friends in these post-adolescent displays of anti-establishment decadence – but then again, I had writing to do, and most of those schoolyard nihilists couldn’t write for shit, despite the fact that many more than you might suspect could actually tell you the source of the mythos that they were trying to live. Writing well was hard, as I still know – but living up to the other side of the legend – that could actually be easy if you had a mind to try, but to this day, I know of only one who actually managed to do both, combining drink’n’drug excess and lucid thoughts and super fine writing all at the same time. And his name was Hunter S. Thompson and he killed himself just the same.
Over the years, well-meaning friends (or perhaps enemies out to insult me) would tell me that my work reminded them of HST, and I would blush, internally embarrassed that my adolescent adoration of him had somehow cropped up in my work. I would back off from the compliment, protesting that my prose was not as lucid, my insights not as clear, and that, in any case, I’d done my time trying to write on a headful of acid and a belly full of Wild Turkey and that the results were never terribly good.
“Hunter S. Thompson mapped that terrain so that the rest of us wouldn’t have to,” I’d say, with a grin that was half-rueful – and half-grateful.
On the morning of the 19th, I made it to the phone and called my sister Allison. “I’m not going to make it,” I said, my face twisted up, my throat emitting a desperate sob. “This life is too painful for me to keep living it!”
As she talked on the other end of the phone about how great I am, how beautiful and talented and important and necessary I am, I had a thought that probably saved my life, because I had just remembered a secret stash of anti-psychotics left over from the last time I tried to off myself in an early morning moment much more desperate than this one. There was a map in my mind of some basic bio-chemistry, unknown twenty years ago but old hat now, and I could see little molecules of serotonin rolling off my brain-pan into god knows where, but I knew there just wasn’t enough left to keep me a happy camper. I recalled the on-again, off-again way I’d been feeling since mid-December and how my psych-meds had felt sorely under armed in this year’s battle against Seasonal Affective Disorder. And I recalled too the insidious affect of alcohol on the delicate bio-chemical balance inside my now helpless little skull, the way each numbing, mania-reducing drop ebbed serotonin out of my head molecule by molecule until even the most powerful SSRI could be rendered useless. I saw two pathways up ahead, with signposts clearly marked – oblivion or death if I did nothing, or a few weeks or months of abstinence and a few AA meetings if I was going to make it out of this winter alive.
I got off the phone and called another friend and simply said, “I need a meeting.” He didn’t hesitate, and began to rattle off a short list of places and times to go. I needed a meeting a lot less than I needed some glimmer of hope, but with a time and place to go up ahead, I swallowed a 20mg tab of Lexapro and just prayed I’d get enough good feeling chemicals back into my battered brain.
Hunter S. Thompson clearly wasn’t so lucky. Unless his family chooses to tell us, we might not ever know the details behind his “methods”, like whether or not there was any depression or any other diagnosis behind his legendary excess, whether or not he spent his winters holed up in Woody Creek amidst the piles of snow partying his ass off – or just simply trying his level damndest to keep the blues away.
On the evening of my 35th birthday, February the 20, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson put a shotgun to his head and blew himself away, for reasons that still aren’t yet clear. Hunter S. Thompson was a man of extraordinary talent and a gift for story-telling who could take issues both mundane (the Mint 400 race) and important (the 1972 Presidential campaign) and combine those gifts with a journalist’s love for a wall of facts and details to bring them to the forefront of America’s consciousness as Real Stories that became History.
Hunter S. Thompson’s legacy up until his death can be summed up by one of my favorite lines of his, “Making a beast of one’s self takes away the pain of being a man.” But the legacy of his death may end being more compelling – and more fruitful – which is that the pain of being a man can overtake us – but only if we agree to let it.
