The Best of Reasons

February 20 marked the third anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson's death. Over the following days, a few homages rolled in. This inspired a piece on my own brief encounter with the Doctor; however, the task proved more difficult than anticipated.

There were—and are—so many pop-cult / Doonebury-ish / self-perpetuating myths surrounding Thompson that it required hours to hack through the obfuscating underbrush: upon approach, he would skitter off into the weeds again.

In the end, this is more epilogue than epitaph. The good Doctor will continue to make house calls. Why? Because we will always want the truth. A man who could write a line like this will never be truly forgotten: "Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested ... Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll."

... If I hadn't have shot poor Delia
I'd have had her for my wife...
But jailer, oh, jailer, I can't sleep 'Cause all around my bedside
I hear the patter of Delia's feet
Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone

"Delia's Gone" — Johnny Cash

The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine. . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson

It was exactly 9:55 A.M in late August 1986. Hunter S. Thompson and I sat five feet apart in a Toronto coffee house, eyeing each other with mutual regret. I was to begin interviewing him at precisely 10:00 A.M. The interview was to last no more that 15 minutes. Absolute maximum. We (that is, my publisher) had paid Hunter cash-in-advance. His agent had laid down strict terms. It was absurd that we couldn't even begin speaking together.

Thompson was tall and lean. He was outfitted with yellow-tinted firing range sunglasses and a beige fishing vest. His hands were in constant motion, either lighting a Dunhill or spinning a bottle of Heineken around the tabletop like a live hand grenade. He was naturally agitated and I couldn't imagine him enjoying a conversation with me, let alone anyone else.

That afternoon he was to speak — if you could correlate Thompson's slurred meanderings to the English language — to an audience of 1,200 at a music hall.

A few times he suddenly halted all movement, swung his head to one side and gave me a zombie glare. He didn't want to be there. I certainly didn't want to be there. Hunter came for the money; I came because the publisher, who knew of my lifestyle, figured I'd get on famously with Dr. Thompson. Perhaps, but right then the timing was all wrong.

I had nothing to ask him. I had read his three big books, Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72' — and figured he had permanently adopted his gonzo, pill-popping persona. He would be "in character," and I'd be forced into a hateful drama in which only one of the actors knows the lines.

In any case his books didn't permit follow-up comments — for Thompson was an editorialist, a fantasist, not a journalist — closer to J.R.R. Tolkien than to Bob Woodward. Imagine: "So tell me J.R.R., how big — really — is an orc?" It's like trying to forcibly step into someone's dream.

At 9:58 a slight, young man approached Thompson. They whispered fiercely together. Thompson mashed his smoke out, rose, and walked swiftly from the shop. The young man turned to me, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "We just learned that Hunter's son has been injured in a motorcycle accident in Colorado. Hunter has to go home right now. Sorry. See ya."

And that was it.

So here I am, over 20 years later, and three years after learning that Dr. Thompson killed himself with a bullet to the head. He was 67.

Though it was never reported, I assume he shot himself with one of his many prized 1911-type handguns, the muzzle velocity of which — assuming a .45 caliber bore — is 860 feet a second, roughly the speed of a blink. I mention the technical stuff as homage to Thompson because he embraced mechanical statistics, just like his hero Ernest Hemingway. (Both men had a penchant for procedure — there's a proper method to do things and proper things to do them with. A psychologist friend tells me that such an inclination is typical of depressives who hunger for the safety of patterns).

In a non-ironical twist, Thompson loved Hemingway — and said the most traumatic event of his life was Hemingway's suicide in 1961. Despair, violence and death are written all over Hemingway's stories; you just have to lift the flaps and look under the words. As for Thompson, he overstates his chronic "fear and loathing" to attain humor. But you can't write about dread for forty years and not really suffer from it. He walked with many ghosts. You can be sure that if one of his shoulders was shaking with laughter, the other was wet with tears.

Thompson was fond of a quote by the 18th Century-writer Dr. Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself avoids the pain of being a man." No elaboration required. More than once Thompson told his pal, illustrator Ralph Steadman, that the option of suicide made life bearable.

What's surprising is that when you get around his movie star friends, skip over the egotism, and pole-vault the self-parody, Thompson was a great writer, sometimes brilliant.

But the road always ends, be it by accident, old age, disease or suicide: you can pick only the last one, the others just happen. Even in spite of drugs, Hunter liked control — and control means choice. In that sense his final chapter was written years in advance.

But we didn't know that — for surely it was all a joke, all 1960s anti-establishment jabbering and drug-induced paranoia. He was so aggressive, so persistent, so original and so American, that it required a bullet to the head for us to realize that for all those years the hunter was indeed the hunted.

When John Belushi died in 1982, Thompson said, "Even though he was a bit of a monster, he was our monster, as well as a damned good person you could count on for help in the dark times... As far as I'm concerned, John is welcome at my house anytime, dead or alive. For me, John's epitaph is: THIS MAN WAS THE REAL THING. HE NEVER NEEDED PROPS."

In old age it becomes harder to push the darkness away. You run out of steam. You run out of costumes. The beast can no longer avoid the pain. Maybe Thompson grew resentful of his props. Maybe, like his hero, he just wanted to die on his own terms — because that's the way he had lived, that's what made him a star.

When he was a young man, Thompson once wrote an article about Hemingway, "What Drew Hemingway to Ketchum." He tried to figure out Hemingway's motivation to kill himself: "The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older... He was an old, sick, and very troubled man... The illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him... So, finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun."

Twenty years ago I made the mistake of trying to create questions to ask him about his books. It was a dead-end. I didn't realize that Thompson was bigger than his work. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde (which is generally unavoidable), Thompson put his genius into his life, not necessarily his writing. He himself was a lot more interesting than the printed page.

The law treats suicide as an act akin to murder. Instinctively, we search for a motive. So, if I could go back to that August morning in 1986, my first question would be, "Hunter, what exactly does the term 'best of reasons' suggest to you...? And take your time."