Song For The Doomed: A Eulogy for Dr. Hunter S Thompson
It’s 16 years ago today since we lost one of my heroes, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Here’s what I wrote when it happened in 2005:
My husband told me yesterday evening that Hunter S. Thompson died on Saturday. Shot himself in the head with a .45 at his desk in Woody Creek. I was making chicken fajitas at the time and the kitchen was full of smoke and burning mesquite, so when I started tearing up he didn’t even notice at first. Just went and got himself a beer from the fridge and went in to watch the football.
It wasn’t until an hour or so later, when we were sat down watching TV together, that he finally noticed something was wrong.
“What’s a matter?”
I could feel my throat closing up; this great big stone of misery in my chest. So hard to explain or even justify such sadness for the death of a man I’d never even met. But I knew it was real grief. Real wrenching, painful sadness at the realisation that I had lost someone important to me, someone who had had such a profound effect on my life and beliefs.
“I’m just sad.”
“About what.”
“About The Doc.”
I could see him trying not to roll his eyes at me, trying not to laugh at the fact that — even now, thirty-two years old and supposedly a grown-up — I still referred to my hero by his more familiar nick-name than his actual title.
“I was just thinking about his family. About Juan (his now-grown-up son) finding him. I just…I suppose I’m just surprised. I never expected him to do something like this. Die old and crazy and surrounded by the heads of bucks he’d shot and his fucking peacocks…yes. But to shoot himself?”
Steve shrugged, “Maybe he’d just had enough.”
“Of what?”
“Republican presidents? Life?”
“I can’t believe that. He wasn’t even that old. 67? That’s not even as old as my Dad.” I shook my head, “I wonder what happened that made him finally…give up.”
Like most people, my first experience of The Doc was through the pages of his most famous (and infamous) semi-auto-biographical ‘Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas’. I read it at sixteen, in one sitting, revelling in a style of writing I had never come across before. Thompson was irreverent and funny, his language peppered with odd metaphors and outrageous similie, shifting from dialogue to description like the gears of a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle. It was short and cheap to buy and — over the next 15 years — I bought a copy of it for anyone who ever told me that they had ‘trouble getting into books’.
‘Hells Angels’ — The Doc’s first published novel — seemed the natural follow-up and, happily, I wasn’t disappointed. Casting aside his costume of Raoul Duke, the real Dr Hunter went on the road with a collection of some of the most feared and demonised members of 1960s society. His experiences with the notorious motorcycle gang, although often horrifying (and life-threatening) were documented with a humour, fondness and humanity that characterises many of his encounters with so-called ‘low-lifes’.
‘Songs Of The Doomed’ was the first collection of Thompson’s articles I read, introducing me to American politics for the first time in my life. ‘The Great Shark Hunt’ followed; “covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine”, then the idiosyncratic ‘Curse of Lono’; “the best description of marathon madness I have ever read”. I loved all the Gonzo Papers — a term Thompson coined to describe his own particular brand of journalism; gung-ho, honest and without fear — and devoured everything the man ever wrote with the same envy and admiration that I have for anyone who lives life to its full potential.
If reading his many articles and novels fuelled my admiration and fondness for Hunter, then ‘The Proud Highway’ — Thompson’s mammoth first collection of letters published in 1999 — truly introduced him to me. Reading his thoughts and dreams, expressed candidly to his family and friends over the period from 1955 to the publication of ‘Hells Angels’ in 1966, brought The Doc to life in the way that only reading a personal diary or journal can. Seeing how the many facets of his character were shaped, how his beliefs were formed, where he essentially came from, was a profoundly moving experience I will never forget. Or reread I suspect. The fucker was almost 300,000 words long.
Hunter was one of the bravest men I’ve ever known. His unshakeable belief in his own convictions — although they often differed so wildly from my own — taught me to always have faith in myself. He was fiercely intelligent and absorbed life and its experiences like most of us breathe air. He believed in equality and fairness and, above all, in honesty. He believed in justice and — what’s more — he fought for it daily, weekly, monthly, his whole fucking life. He never misrepresented himself or compromised what was important to him; his was an integrity borne from experience and intelligence and empathy and heart and, although I never met him and now never will, I loved him for that.
“So we shall let the reader answer this question himself: Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
Hunter S. Thompson (aged 17)
Goodbye Hunter. You will be sorely missed. You were a great man and the best friend I never had.
………………
Law Turley is an MBACP-registered Integrative Therapist and certified Radical Honesty® Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
