<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42719-2005Feb21?language=printer> The Washington Post washingtonpost.com The Dark Star Gloom May Have Stalked Hunter S. Thompson, but His Writing Was a Beacon By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 22, 2005; Page C01 From Hunter S. Thompson's "Songs of the Doomed -- More Notes on the Death of the American Dream": "It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods . . . lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about electricity. "Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is rampant and even children are losing their will to live. "The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end, looking like they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals trapped in bags." He wrote this in Washington, in 1989. As his first wife, Sandy, once said: "Hunter tends to make things worse than they are sometimes." Thompson, at 67, was the gonzo journalist who shot himself in the head with a handgun on Sunday. He was also what you get when you combine Murphy's Law and some hillbilly Calvinist preaching the doctrine of innate depravity. He believed every man had it in him to do wrong. He also believed that if something could go wrong it would. We were all doomed, to use one of his favorite words. Hence the birth of gonzo journalism, a term he picked up from a fan letter, and one that applied only to him. He was the prose laureate of the Age of Paranoia, which began, let's say, with the election of Richard Nixon in the middle of the counterculture's nonstop mental fire drill brought on by psychedelic drugs. Then he took it further, as he took most things: "There's no such thing as paranoia," he said. "The truth is, your worst fears always come true." This was the fundamental joke that served as the fulcrum and lever of all his writing, starting with "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." He attained "full-bore" torque, or maybe "king-hell" torque, to use his phrasing, with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," followed by "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," which George McGovern's political director, Frank Mankiewicz, called "the most accurate and least factual" account of the election. Other Thompson titles: "Generation of Swine," "Songs of the Doomed" and a short piece called "Hit Him Again, Jack, He's Crazy." You get the idea. He was from Louisville, a former juvenile delinquent and "hard case," as he liked to say: a big tense guy, 6 feet 3 with tight skin, wary eyes, short hair and a hectic way of moving, as if he were trying and failing to approximate the condition of normal. He wore aviator sunglasses and smoked with a cigarette holder. He looked like a combination of puzzled and threatening. He liked Dobermans and guns and liked to "get loaded on mescaline and fire my .44 magnum out into the dark -- that long blue flame." He spoke in bursts of words that later in his life became so unintelligible that a documentary about him provided subtitles. He had a sharp eye for the right people and he hung out with them. He had charisma. Being around him gave you the charmed but unsettled feeling of having joined an entourage. He took a lot of drugs and drank a lot of Wild Turkey. Louisa Davidson, who knew Thompson in Colorado for 30 years, said he was a Southern gentleman with moments of genius, but "he was a prisoner and slave to his addictions." He could be polite, when he wasn't picking an occasional fight, but there was nothing mellow or laid-back about him. Thompson on the '72 candidates: Being around Edmund Muskie "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat." Nixon "speaks for the werewolf in us." And Hubert Humphrey, the saint of long-ago liberalism: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while." Strange that he became a hero to a generation known for its long-haired, "gettin' it all together," feminist, free-sex pacifists. Thompson wanted to break it all apart, and he rarely mentioned women or sex in his writing. In 1971, at the beginning of his big-time fame, he'd already written the obit for the '60s, a time when "you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning." But by then, "with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." People will forgive almost anything of writers who can astonish them and make them laugh. None of them can anymore. In his early '70s heyday, which was the last time that writers could still be heroes -- he was among the very last of them, along with Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe, all of them outrageous in style and subject, the final heirs of J.P. Donleavy, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger and Terry Southern, who all taught us the irreverence that Thompson made even more hilarious by taking it into the craziness that comes with sticking the big toe of your brain in the socket of "high-powered blotter acid," and "uppers, downers, screamers, laughers." He was a particular hero to journalists, whose terrible secret is that beneath all the globe-hopping and news anchor fame, they are merely clerks and voyeurs. Thompson, despite his rants about the onanistic squalor of journalism, had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the very edges of madness and menace. He had much rep for walking the walk, which he did, but mostly he talked the talk. In fact, he'd never done very much in his life except write about it, which he did with clarity, hilarity and big-train momentum. He was a master stylist -- he once typed out the entire "Great Gatsby" as an exercise. He also created a pyrotechnic public persona called Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. How much more can we ask? He'd done a little jail time as a kid in Louisville. He joined the Air Force, which let him out two years early after a prescient commanding officer said that in Thompson's military newspaper work his "flair for invention and imagination" and his "disregard for military dress and authority . . . seem to rub off on the other airmen." He worked for small papers, wrote from South America for a now-gone Dow Jones weekly called the National Observer, drove a taxi in San Francisco while working on a novel, got in fistfights, ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., got pulled over for drunk driving, beat a drug bust at his home in Woody Creek, near Aspen -- small-time stuff. Rolling Stone sent him to cover the fall of Vietnam -- where he could find no end of real fear and loathing -- but he split for Laos and failed to file a story worth mentioning. In 2000, he slightly wounded his assistant while trying to shoot a bear on his property. And yet readers worshiped him as a man of profound experience, to the point of playing what you might call "the Hunter Thompson game." The point of the game is to create mortal fear out of nothing more than, say, the sun flashing in a window. First man: You see that glint? Second man: Like binoculars? First man: Try 12-power Unertl glass on a Remington .308. Second man: Your first wife's boyfriend? First man: But he's a cop. Second man: Exactly. Our heads? In four seconds? Vapor, baby. This is the sort of conversation that boys have in treehouses, to scare themselves for the fun of it. Thompson's writing had the venerable American quality of boys' literature, in the manner of Hemingway, Jack London and Mark Twain. And of: old-fashioned sports writing, with its flamboyance and moralities, and the good but long-forgotten men's magazines such as True or Argosy, which honored the courage, luck and jocularity of the lone cowboys lurking in American men. Lately, with his best writing behind him, the gonzo just a collection of occasional gestures, he'd been writing a sports column for ESPN's Web site. We're left wondering what happened. He once said: "I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've always worked for me." Until maybe he got wondering about the ultimate high being a 1,500-feet-per-second implantation in the neurological system. Or the paranoia got to him -- in paranoia you are your own worst enemy, and that's a tightening circle that nobody can escape, except, say, by suicide. Or it was pain and depression brought on by reported back surgery, a broken leg and a hip replacement. Or he was playing out the last moves of the Hemingway game -- the paranoid, shock-treated Hemingway who ended up with his doctor one day, crying because he said that he couldn't write anymore, he just couldn't write. Or America has finally become what he said it was, with lie-awake fears of suitcase nukes, jails full of secret uncharged prisoners with no legal recourse, and quiet applause for the recreational torture of Arabs in Iraq. Or people have stopped reading, and there are no more literary heroes. Or maybe he just killed himself, like a number of other people on any given day. He lived on his terms, he died on his own terms. Except he wasn't like a number of people -- he left us his prose, his genius persona, and his insights into the dark side of America, insights that could change your life after the laughing stopped. You would like to think that beneath the forbidding scowl of post-9/11 America, and despite the dark side, that a lot of people understand that Hunter S. Thompson was a great American. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'