Vaya con Dios, Hunter S. Thompson
The New York Times > National > Hunter S. Thompson, 65, Author, Commits Suicide
I nearly fell out of my chair this morning when I read that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself last night at 65. Not because he killed himself - I knew him to be a tortured soul - but because I was shocked that he was only 65. He looked much older than 65 the last time I saw him, and that was in 1989.
I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, living at the infamous Berkeley dope cooperative Barrington Hall during it's swan song semester. I was a long-haired Berkeley freak straight from central casting.
A housemate of mine who had a work-study job with the University got word that Hunter was going to speak to an audience at the journalism school. Somehow he got two tickets. Since he and I had burned through every Hunter S. Thompson book together over the past year, he saved his second ticket for me.
Wheeler Auditorium was packed with mostly young men. The air reeked of liquor and marijuana. Amongst the voices you could hear the sound of nitrous oxide being released from whippet cartridges into balloons.
Hunter was late and the crowd got more and more wild as we waited and more drugs started kicking in. By the time he hit the stage, more than an hour late, the walls were probably melting for more than half of the people in the room. I'm sure that Hunter wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
Finally, a tall, grey cadaver careened out onto the stage. When I tell you that Hunter S. Thompson looked old - he looked old. It is unbelievable to me that he was only my parents' age. In 1989 he looked older than my grandfather who was in his 70s.
Thompson was Wasted. He could barely hold himself up. They had a stool next to a microphone for him and he kept on almost falling off - some Young Republican event planner would run in from offstage and grab him and hold him back up just before he fell. Eventually they replaced the stool with a chair and with a cigarette holder in one hand and a nearly empty fifth of Jim Beam in the other, he spoke.
It doesn't matter what he said - I don't remember much of it anyway. He was incoherent that night and I was half in the bag myself. (The walls may have been melting for me, too, if you know what I mean.) The entire time he spoke, people in the audience threw drugs onto the stage for him - joints, bags of mushrooms, pills - all of which one of the Young Republicans carefully collected into a briefcase for Thompson to take home with him.
Thompson wasn't a great speaker - his art was the written word. He had his time and place where he was king - a shooting star. That ended a long time ago. Aside from a few tweaks to George Bush the Lesser this past year, I don't think I detected any joy in his writing since Nixon got run out of Washington.
If I'd known he was as young as he was I would have expected more out of him. Oh well.
I'm going to reread Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas today, and perhaps Shark Hunting.
Vaya con dios, Hunter S. Thompson.
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