Fear and Loathing: The Good Doktor Hunter Thompson Commits Suicide

written by: Cory Q

I was somewhere around the beginning of my day when the news took hold. I remember hearing something like "Thompson committed suicide" and suddenly my mind was filled with huge doubts all swooping and diving around my memory which was going about 100 miles per hour...

It wasn't a fiery wreck at 2:30am in an extremely powerful Cutlass. It wasn't finally going a few steps too far on a galaxy of uppers, downers, ether, or a half salt shaker full of cocaine. It wasn't getting dragged out into the street by some bull neck bigot cop and beat over a few profanities in an election year. It wasn't getting mauled by a bear at night out in Woody Creek while wandering around completely drunk with high explosives. It was a self inflicted gunshot to the head on Sunday 2-20-05, on The Owl Farm, his 'Fortified Compound' outside of Aspen, Colorado. I was even reading "The Great Shark Hunt" when the news came.

Perhaps he viewed the ghost of his dying ember on the floor and in classic gonzo style ended it. Perhaps the glory days of Freak Power fighting the Old and Evil had slipped into deep shadows and he saw no way to fight anymore. Perhaps the sports writer gig finally lost its luster when hockey called it quits and went home to sulk with their pucks not with a bang but with a whimper. Perhaps he didn’t want to rot into a hollow carcass of former glory with rounded teeth and a long crazy track record. Perhaps Raoul Duke called in too many favors and the price of the loan was too high on all those borrowed typewriters and recording equipment.

What I know is the singularly unique voice of patriotism, that crazed American version of the modern great west underground sensibility kind of patriotism that demands a visceral application of the ideal, is gone never to return. He carved a niche for himself by not only projecting the boiling shadows and unctuous bile of American politics onto the page but by knowing politics balls to bone. He was a writer so gifted that a new name needed to be invented for what the hell he was doing. His whole life was a savage trip to the heart of the American Dream.

And maybe his death by his own hands is a comment on the fate of that dream: The dream born in the 1960's when it looked like maybe a new peace could really depose the corrupt system of shysters and professional liars that believed a New America could come forward where honesty was worth something, a dream where the guilty would be exposed in the withering light of justice. Or maybe not.

Gone is the voice that with its wild shrieking fear of the system and the self loathing that comes from living in a Land of Sharks that told us to be wild because the spirit can conquer. Never to return for the Hunters have gone too far afield and cannot reconcile their fate with the world as it is today. Better to burn out than fade away.

He was a realist by way of exaggeration and grotesquery. He was a wild man in a sea of plastic boys. He was brutal and harsh in a place too inclined to shy away.

It wasn't unexpected so much as disappointing. So few heroes left in this place where we take whatever heroes come our way and aren't inclined to haggle about it. Hate to lose a hero in such a bleak landscape.

"The only thing I can think of that compares to it is that long, long moment of indescribably intense sadness that comes just before drowning at sea, those last few seconds on the cusp when the body is still struggling but the mind has given up... a sense of absolute failure and a very clear understanding of it makes the last few seconds before blackout seem almost peaceful." Bought the ticket, took the ride: Sorry it had to end, and sorry you are gone, Hunter.

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