America is fucked.

That's all I can think now. Kill Michael Moore, off Ralph Nader, kick the living shit out of Jon Stewart and leave him for dead. You're not even close to the damage that's been done to the American Dream tonight.

Hunter S. Thompson, dead at 67. Shot in the head. Shot himself in the head.

I still remember in the early 1990's when my dad gave me a moth-eaten, falling-apart paperback copy of The Great Shark Hunt. I barely even flipped it. As a 12 year-old talk of decades-old american politics didn't interest me much. I lost it eventually but I never threw it out.

Thompson was never afraid to call a pigfucker a pigfucker. He knew that the realities his generation faced were too ugly, their future too bleak to be talked about directly. Their parents let them down, their government lied to them, their friends were loaded up on planes thousands at a time and told to kill or be killed.

When I found The Great Shark Hunt again in high school I had the same sort of thrill that kids get from finding a porn in the alley beside the convenience store. As I read about him running from Columbian police and drug lords with a head full of coke and acid and a briefcase full of cash, ll I could think was "Who gave me this? My
dad?!?"

Hunter used drugs as a filter. Write the truth of the matter, not what actually happened. Reject the bland repetition of 'objective' history and get right the fuck in there. Rip open the story's chest and tear out its heart with bloodied hands to count the beats before it stops. That's fucking gonzo.

It wasn't until later in the 90's when I finally got around to reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I really started to understand him. I plowed through The Proud Highway, Fear and Loathing in America, Better than Sex, The Rum Diaries and Kingdom of Fear over a period of about two years. There's still more to read, and I'm not stopping until I've taken in every word.

Twelve hours into my first acid trip. My friend and trip guide was passed out asleep in the livingroom unresponsive, catatonic. The mirror was looking back at me like a kaleidoscope, and my face was slowly turning into a hairy, toothy demon with half a beard and saliva dripping slowly into the sink. I was caught in a downward spiral. I felt god himself turn his back. I was alone, and there was nothing I could do. This was never going to end.

Of all his writings, it was his correspondence that really revealed the depth of Thompson's commitment to his idea of the great american dream--one of the few in recent memory that was actually great. Take it or leave it, there was a savage honor in his absolute commitment to the rugged individualism from which America takes so much of her character.

At the last moment, when I felt the drug taking over, when the tip of the straw I had been using to breathe slowly slipped down under the surface of the stream-now-gushing-river that was my consciousness is when I heard it.

"Jesus god, you pigfucker. Don't you fucking do this. Don't you fucking give up on me, man!"

When I heard about his death, I didn't believe it. Here was the one motherfucker I was sure was too hard to die. This is the guy who brought Hells Angels to Ken Kesey's compound for an acid test. This is the guy who struggled through years of poverty and unemployment, sure of his genius even when no-one else could see it. A man who ran a Freak Power campaign for the sherrif's office in Aspen Colorado. His platform: Rename it Fat City, tear up the streets to plant grass and only arrest drug dealers if they tried to make a profit.

I shook my head and pushed back against the drug. Dragged myself to the computer and started typing, something anything. Just keep the words going. As long as I'm talking to myself I'm talking to someone, and if there's someone in here then he can sure as fuck make it through. Reading his books made me think I knew Hunter S. Thompson, but it wasn't until that minute when I started typing that I really knew him.

His fearless courage in the face of the heaviest shit you can imagine--your best friend with a knife at your throat, fifteen hells angels showing up at your door, adrenochrome boiling your blood--had brought millions of kids safely home from millions of trips. Wherever you were he'd been somewhere worse and he'd fucking made it, so you'd better damn well make it too or he'll come there and gut you like a fish.

The initial surpise is fading, and now I'm just mad as hell. I hope to fucking heaven he had some kind of terminal cancer, because he was too goddamn smart to pull any kind of Kurt Cobain shit. But then, who knows, maybe he was off his head on acid, staring at a dartboard with mugshots of Nixon and Dubya tacked on, hot tears on his face and crying out to the night and whatever gods hadn't been frightened away
by the noise "Goddammit! Goddammit! Haven't these pickfuckers learned ANYTHING?!?"

We'll know soon enough. His body is still warm, and there's no details yet. Hell the poor bastard's still probably got enough amphetamines in him to keep his heart pumping for weeks, even though his soul is long gone.

I made it back from that acid trip safely. And even though I'll never touch the stuff again--I'm glad I did. Because I've taken a single step on the road he walked for forty years, and it was enough to scare the fear of god into me. You never really appreciate firefighters until you've been in a burning house and tried to get out alive.

Hunter Thompson, you were a strange and savage breed. To weird to live and too rare to die.

Good luck with death, old friend, it's the only trip you hadn't taken.

-Trevor

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