Rachel Sauer
The Palm Beach Post
Maybe you know a Hunter S. Thompson.
A Hunter S. Thompson is the friend who shows up on your doorstep at 11 p.m. and suggests driving to Mexico. Right now.
A Hunter S. Thompson is the person you never, ever trust when they say, “Here, try this” and poke something that feels like a pill into your mouth. Especially not if you’re driving.
When you go out at night with a Hunter S. Thompson, it’s inevitable that someone’s going to get their ass kicked. All you can do is hope it’s not you.
Hunter S. Thompson – the 67-year-old writer who fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Colorado home – was patron saint to all the Hunter S. Thompsons out there. That is to say, the crazy people.
He was inimitable, a real original, in the way that crazy people usually are.
He had no tolerance for phonies or idiots. A particular joy was eviscerating the self-important, the shameless liars, the rogues – even though he could be all of those things, but context was everything.
He was called the father of gonzo journalism – a stream-of-thought style in which the writer becomes part of the story – but his writing was so good, it could make you cry.
Once he went to Renfro Valley, Ky., to write about bluegrass music and came away with this: “Not much speed on those narrow highways, plenty of time to look off across the white fences and wonder how the cows find anything to eat in the frozen fields. Time to listen to the sermons on the radio or the lonely thump of a shotgun somewhere back from the road.”
He hung out with Hell’s Angels, made a trippy foray through Las Vegas while ostensibly writing about a desert motorcycle race, went on the campaign trail, covered the Roxanne Pulitzer trial here, hung out on the fringe. He wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He took a lot of drugs. He said what he thought. He chased the story. He was cool.
Who knows what he was really like? He was notoriously private. For all anyone knew, he might have closed the gates to his compound outside Aspen, Colo., and retired for a night of tole painting, say, or fantasy baseball.
But the face he presented to the world was that of a man who careened through life clutching a martini and a fistful of mescaline.
He was brilliant and skeptical and world-weary. It’s amazing he lived as long as he did.
And that’s how it always is with the Hunter S. Thompsons, who most of us know and sometimes love. They’re the ones who jump without first making sure the parachute was packed correctly, creatures of impulse and whim. Generally, they’re the smartest people you know.
Sometimes, there is no greater euphoria than following along with them. Than getting in the car and heading for Mexico when they suggest it, without a map or a plan.
Except.
There’s often that moment, usually at 3 a.m. the day after next, somewhere around El Paso, when the Hunter S. Thompson is strung out and feeling intense ennui, slouched in the passenger seat and delivering dark, rambling monologues about selling out or the meaning of life. They’re exhausting.
You want to trust Hunter S. Thompsons, because they don’t mean to be flaky, but then they accidentally shoot you in the leg (as Hunter S. Thompson did to his assistant several years back). They are dangerous, which has a certain appeal, but you can’t help acknowledging that you’re not going to live forever. And neither are they.
Eventually you have to say to them, “I can’t just go. I have to work tomorrow.”
There is scorn.
Sadness, too. A Hunter S. Thompson makes you miss who you were. But Hunter S. Thompsons tend to burn out in a quick flash, and you’re left to sort through a backpack of odds and ends – the dog-eared Faulkner, the Hawaiian shirts, the mystery pills, the heel-worn cowboy boots, the hotel receipt from Tucson, the wrinkled photo of a smiling family.
You go north, they go south, and you wonder, like you do every time, if you’ll ever see them again.