Hunter S. Thompson is dead and I don’t feel so well either

I don’t remember exactly when I first encountered Hunter S. Thompson. I had all ready read and re-read my parents extensive Watergate library and through those I probably found reference to The Boys On The Bus where I think HST is mentioned. I think he threatened to kill the guy writing the book. He may have been looking to damage the other author because he was also working on the pieces that would eventually become Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail 1972. FL was a much more, um, colorful account of the press’s travels with the candidates in 72 than The Boys On The Bus, he needn’t have worried about comparisons of the books. TBOTB was a photograph while FAL was a Peter Max poster.

Thompson, the King Freak, actually got to talk to Nixon, about foot ball. Nixon was a foot ball nut. He was also a nut nut, but Thompson was the one he talked about foot ball with in the back seat of a limo roaring through the late night on the way to some rural nowhere.

I read All The Presidents Men over and over and over. I was on my high school paper and was bitterly disappointed that my dreams of being my high schools Woodstein were probably not going to come to fruition. I also discovered that I was very lazy and all that investigative stuff would have cut into my after school rerun watching schedule. The only investigative story I wrote was an “exposé” about the money from the eleventyteen coke and candy machines at the school and where the funds ended up. Short boring story, shorter? The General Fund. I really wanted it to be lining the pockets of some administrative heavy or financing the principles pool, but no. That was the end of my big career as an investigative reporter. The rest of my bylines were over stories detailing the schools UIL (University Interscholastic League) competitions and the schools Academic Decathlon and occasionally, the minutes from German Club meetings. Yawn. Carl Bernstein would not have been impressed.

But. I loved Hunter S. Thompson. He was the coolest, he was who I wanted to be. I took to haunting the local half price book stores magazine racks, this was back when you could still find 15 year old copies of Rolling Stone for .75 a piece, before RS got glossy and the older copies all ended up on Ebay. There was always something interesting from him in those, odd peices that might not have ended up in the books, random drug indused tangents on imagined congressional sins and presidental outrages and 15,000 word screeds on what those sins and outrages all meant. I wish I still had those magazines.

I read most of Thompsons work. I can’t say I liked all of it or that I made it through all of them, or that it all made sense to me, for example, The Great Shark Hunt confused me but I really liked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, even though it confused me too. I did wind up with a precocious knowledge of drugs and drug paraphernalia that most of my friends didn’t come close to until college and most of them had to actually use them to find out what there were. I could talk an incredibly good game, drugwise. And I could thank HST for that. He got high so I didn’t have to.

He also taught me that politicians were lying pigs and none of them could be trusted. He taught me that Richard Nixon was the devil, something that the authors of my Watergate books weren’t quite willing to . They all thought he was guilty of just about every crime short of breaking and entering , they stopped short of Thompsons venomous truth. I didn’t read his later works. I guess I mellowed out. He never did, he got sober, he never got mellow.

The man survived Richard Nixon, he saw what that administration did to this country and he retained his hope. He was stoned out of his mind and thought he was a lizard or a dolphin or that you were a lizard or turtle or something, but he stayed the course, he didn’t put a gun to his head. I have a new reason to hate George W. Bush, he killed Hunter S. Thompson.