A Last Tribute To Thompson

Posted: March 2nd, 2005 | Filed under: Culture, Features, Personalities | No Comments »

“You should do this in Hunter Thompson’s voice.”

It was my radio engineer speaking. I’d throttled my way into the studio to record a commentary on the recently departed icon, leaving other Thompson acolytes who wanted to be heard bobbing in my wake. A day late and a dollar short they were.

Brad’s keen at what he does, facile with the knobs, deft with digital software. Gives good edit, knows when to give suggestions, when not. Most helpful. So I tried to ignore the specter beside him that kept morphing grotesquely into various reprimanding editors past and present.

“Do this in Hunter Thompson’s voice.” I wanted to think him naive. But I couldn’t help feeling the presence in the room of some sinister force setting me up for a fall. The specter and Brad merged. Was this some secret agent from Literary Hell, here to undermine my career?

Didn’t he understand how hard it’s been to move away from that quicksand of gonzoid emulation? Was he sent to push me back in?

Didn’t he realize that every guy in the ’70s who dropped a tab, listened to the Airplane, dodged the draft and could string together a subject and predicate thought he could walk in Hunter S. Thompson’s shoes?

How those of us still struggling at the craft three decades later have, at the not so gentle insistence of our superiors, had to crawl our way out of that sinkhole?

I guess not. Thus I deduced Brad was really an agent from Devil’s Workshop.

So I accidentally forearmed him in the chest. Gently, of course. Then helped him up. He was unfazed.

Hmmm.

“I’ll do it in my own voice, thank you very much.”

He didn’t bring it up again.

* * * * *

Thompson’s dead now. You know that. Blew his mind out. Forever and always. With a handgun. At his kitchen table.

As I said here last week in a truncated howl, how very trite. HST ended it the way we all expected. No creativity there.

I was pissed. At the futility of it all. At the alcoholism and drug addiction that sucked the creative marrow from his raging bones. At the public who always wanted Thompson’s switch on, cranked to 11. At the after-the-fact ruminations on his life, most of which herald his persona, not his real gift.

The guy was a great writer. OK, not so much after decades when he serially crisped his noggin in the fry baby. But early on, the guy was good. Real good.

He could see clearly. That’s the first step for anybody who wants to write seriously. Chronicling fiction or fact, or a combination of the two, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to have peripheral vision.

Then you must be able to string words together in a manner that is true, enlightening and entertaining. And readable, which, in most circumstances, means succinct. (If only I’d learned that from HST, not just the yowl.) Thompson was a master at getting to the point quickly.

Unlike fellow New Journalist Tom Wolfe, who observed the counterculture and its progeny from a distance, bellowing in curlicued, kandy-colored, not-so-streamlined rants. HST cut to the chase, threw himself into the fray.

Thompson was a student. He claimed to have transcribed “Gatsby” and “A Farewell to Arms” in their entirety on his manual typewriter, to teach himself Fitzgerald and Hemingway’s cadence. It’s a neat story. I believe it.

Several years ago, Thompson opined that “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was better than “The Sun Also Rises,” and as good as “The Great Gatsby.” Nobody ever accused HST of humility. It may be the truth.

Thompson’s most famous work is outrageous, inflammatory, ground-breaking, narcissistic, fantastic and factual. As important is the immaculate prose. The guy could write a great sentence. The kind of writing profs put stars by.

Now he’s gone. What we have left are vestiges of Hunter Thompson’s political acuity, the aftermath of his feigned insouciance, his body of writings and this epitaph of his own hand, written in ’71 as jacket copy for “Fear and Loathing”:

“So we pushed it as far as we could, and we survived — which means something, I guess, but not much beyond a good story … and now, having done it, written it, and humping a reluctant salute to that decade that started so high and then went so brutally sour, I don’t see much choice but to lash down the screws and get on with what has to be done.”

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