Stealing the entry title from The Rude Pundit is completely fitting for a farewell to Doc Gonzo, who was a thin white duke long before Bowie stole the idea. Unlike the Rude One I never met the man but he was one of two sources of inspiration for my decision to major in journalism many years ago before electricity was domesticated (the other, of course, was the work Woodward and Bernstein did in the same era). Doc Searles chimes in too but is too much of a gentleman, something I fear he cannot escape, for this event.
Oddly I can discern no hint of his coming demise in the final column HST wrote for ESPN.com, all about a new, biathlon-ish form of golf he invented where instead of skiing with occasional stops for target shooting one player hits the ball and the other attempts to drive it off course with a shotgun. Typically wacky and the column comes complete with a late night phone call to Bill Murray.
A habit I developed early in life is to find regular sources of information on subjects of interest to me and read them religiously. When I was young this meant two daily newspapers (the regional Newark Star-Ledger and the national New York Times), as many books as my dad passed on or I got from the library (odd melanges of science fiction, history, investing and constitutional law), and magazines, a buttload of magazines. Time, TV Guide, Analog, Business Week, Boy’s Life, Scholastic, Omni, Sports Illustrated, Creem, Rolling Stone and others that came my way from time to time.
Rolling Stone was where I first met Thompson, so to speak, with his columns a departure from the music and movies focus of all the other pages. I was still young and naive, not really aware of what drugs could do to and for a body; articles that mentioned booze, pills and pot were just words to me until a few years later–but that’s another story, for another post. Hunter, though, gave me a glimpse of the mind altering power of these substances with his towering, brash verbiage. If he wasn’t a poet like Dylan or Plant delivering experience through songs, his writing still washed over me with similar effect.
On the newspaper pages I was reading Woodward and Bernstein slowly, surely, methodically peeling away the layers of deception and corruption in the Nixon Administration and in Rolling Stone HST was swinging a much blunter axe but both were chronicling the downfall of the man who “broke the heart of the American Dream.” Why did he choose to type -30- on his life this weekend? Perhaps, after 50 years, Hunter Thompson finally realized that booze, cigarettes, drugs and other forms of bodily abuse and self-medication couldn’t fend off the void clamoring for his soul.
BillSaysThis 