Dr. Hunter
S. Thompson-
Another Inspiration Gone
A commentary by Preston Peet
Posted at DrugWar.com
Feb. 21, 2005
"I'd hate to advocate drugs, alcohol,
violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for
me." -
Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson- born July 18, 1937; died Feb. 20,
2005
When eighteen years old, embodying the life of a bohemian druggie
in the streets of Paris, I was living in the Hotel
de' Nesle, a cheap hotel overrun with hippies, heads and freaks
in the center of the city, selling (and using) lots and lots of
LSD
and hashish
to supplement my meager cash flow. A voracious reader, I would
scour the hotel for books in English that other travelers may
have finished reading or have forgotten when they'd continued
on their roads. It was like this I found a tattered copy of Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas by the man who would become
my driving inspiration, the main, number one source for my desire
to pick up a pen and write and publish, Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson.
The first time I picked it up, I wasn't sure
what I'd found or what I thought of it. So utterly different than
anything I'd ever even imagined being published, much less my
reading it, I was soon enrapt, in complete awe that someone had
managed to make a living doing what this man had been doing. I
soon discovered this wasn't even the first book by Hunter S. Thompson
I'd read, as just the summer before moving to Europe, in 1984,
freshly kicked out of my parents' home, I'd recovered a cover-less
copy of Thompson's first book, 1966's Hell's
Angels, from the dumpster behind Charlie's Books on Main
St. in my hometown of Sarasota, where it had been dumped as overstock.
I didn't immediately make the connection between the two books
due to that missing cover but it didn't take me long to not only
make that connection but to search out and read every single thing
by Thompson I could get my hands on.
I went from Paris to Spain to live in the
tiny mountain village of Las Navos, outside Barcelona, for the
month of August, 1985, carrying Thompson's heavy but brilliant
700 page anthology of articles and essays, 1979's Great
Shark Hunt with me as my bible, picking it up and reading,
then reading again and re-reading some more, paragraph by paragraph,
essay by essay. It was on this trip that the bright white light
bulb exploded in my mind: "If he can not only do this many
drugs but get paid to travel and report on the world's inner and
outer spaces too," I thought to myself, "then by god
so can I!" I picked up an inexpensive little spiral notebook
and began scribbling in it non-stop, soon filling it and moving
on to the next, spending the next few years always carrying a
spiral with me everywhere I went. No matter if I was living easy
and employed or strung out homeless on the streets, I was writing.
Born July 18, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky,
Thompson went on to serve two years in the US Air Force, learning
the basics of journalism while covering sports for a service paper
at Eglin Air Force
base in Florida in the late 1950s. Once back in civilian life,
he first took on a position with the New
York Herald Tribune covering the Caribbean, then spent
two years traveling and writing as the South American correspondent
for the National Observer, where he once described a brief
spell spent on an island with bloodthirsty bandits and smugglers,
a foreshadowing of topics and stories to come. Moving to San Francisco
in 1963, he began researching and writing his seminal breakthrough
book, Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga. Thompson
then moved to Rolling
Stone magazine in 1970, for which he turned two articles
into the classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (published
in 1972), and for which he covered the 1972 Richard Nixon-George
McGovern US Presidential Race, which produced his Fear
and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (published in 1973),
thereby giving birth to Gonzo Journalism. And inadvertently, without
my ever getting the honor and privilege to tell him so unfortunately,
to my
own journalism too.
Years later, a working writer and editor,
finally published and still writing my skinny ass off, writing
about those things that matter most to me, chronicling my own
many drug-fueled misadventures and outraged rantings as often
as possible in writing, I came across another connection I had
to Thompson I hadn't previously known about- serious back pain.
Thompson
wrote in 2003 about how he'd been replacing his spine with
titanium, and how it was such a relief to be finished with the
pain he'd been dealing with for so long. A chronic pain patient
myself, I could empathize completely with what he was saying,
and now find myself wondering if his surgery was not really that
successful after all, and whether he realized he wasn't actually
finished with the surgery and never ending pain. It's exhausting
living in such unrelenting pain day in, night out, not to mention
depressing and extremely difficult to deal with. One can only
take so many drugs until the tolerance to the drugs is so high
nothing can really break through the pain. I wonder about Thompson's
drug tolerance levels, and his resistance to never ending pain.
His friend and drinking buddy, George Stranahan, a former owner
of the Woody Creek Tavern, Thompson's old watering hole, was
quoted in the Associated Press (Feb. 21, 2005) as saying he
wasn't surprised to hear about the suicide, making note of Thompson's
bad year medically, and how he couldn't imagine Thompson dying
in a hospital bed with "tubes coming out of him." I
guess I never did either really. Pain is a terrible thing and
doesn't leave much room for negotiation, especially in this opiophobic,
prohibition-crazed world we inhabit today.
I tried contacting Thompson last year (2004)
while putting together my own first book, Under
the Influence- the Disinformation Guide to Drugs, but
couldn't ever get anyone to pick up the phone at his Colorado
home. It would have been a real honor to have published anything
by him in a book I put together, but now it will never be. I can
only hope I am one day portrayed by two brilliant film stars (Bill
Murray in Where
the Buffalo Roam and Johnny Depp in Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas) and have a comic character
based on me (Uncle
Duke in Doonesbury),
not to mention found a new school of journalism like Gonzo. Thompson
was sharp, wicked, irreverent, brilliant, mad, self-absorbed,
a drunk, a stoner, a head, a punk rocker, a sports columnist (ESPN's
Hey
Rube) a gun and motorcycle loving rebel without peer and genuine
living legend who will be missed by many of those who love freedom
and the lure of something dangerous, out of bounds and licentious,
by all who will gladly give the finger to a "treacherous
little freak" (to quote the good doctor), like George W.
Bush and all his ilk.
Thompson was found by his son Juan Thompson
on Sunday, Feb. 20, 2005, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound,
apparently committed with a .45 handgun, in the kitchen of his
Owl Farm ranch outside of Aspen, Colorado.
Dr. Thompson, I am sorry I never made your
personal acquaintance, but I want to make clear that even more
than Gary Webb, another hero and inspiration of mine who shot
himself to death this year, I, along with many
others out here still, will miss you and your work, and more
importantly, your play.
"He who makes a beast of himself gets
rid of the pain of being a man." -
Samuel Johnson
.
