An era passes
Hunter S. Thompson is dead.
I've been rereading HST over the past several months. I recently finished his second collection of letters, Fear and Loathing in America; and right now Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 is on my bedside table. A screwup for sure, albeit an incredibly talented one. One of the most distinctive prose stylists of the twentieth century, he was heir to the grand tradition of American invective, in the footsteps of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken.
However, his career was, at best, uneven. His battles with editors and publishers are legendary, and he may well have been America's most famous recreational drug user. In recent years he returned to his roots, as a sportwriter for ESPN.com's Page 2. His first job, fresh out of high school, was as an enlisted U.S. Air Force sportswriter at Eglin Air Force Base. In the interim he chronicled, in his wholly unique fashion, the inherent ironies of American culture in the last half of the twentieth century. Never content to be a mere observer, he famously defined the parameters of participatory journalism, though the result often bore no resemblance to the traditional craft.
Thompson's thing for motorcycles is what brought him to my attention in the first place, as he infiltrated the Hells Angels in 1965 and lived to tell and sell the tale. Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga launched his career. He spent the rest of his career trying to find a niche, although he invented the one for which he's best known, "gonzo journalism." Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner essentially subsidized HST's perfection of this form of performance art, which almost incidentally defined 1970s drug culture with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream. Thompson's meticulously detailed accounts of nearly incomprehensible levels of substance ingestion still spark discussions of whether the book was fact or fiction, and his body of work continues to confuse book store clerks when confronted with having to choose a genre under which to shelve his books. Fiction? Journalism? Politics? Literary criticism?
His writing covered all those bases, and more, often in the same book. Throughout his work, Thompson cultivated a finely tuned sense of outrage based on, however improbable for a man one of his biographers labeled "the greatest degenerate of the twentieth century," a very conservative set of values and ideals concerning what this country is supposed to be about. He predicted the rise of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who supplied him with years' worth of material. Indeed, he dedicated one book to Nixon, "who never let me down."
HST's most notorious legal passion was for firearms. His last column, from Tuesday, detailed a proposal for team shotgun golf. The manner of his self-directed death is surprising only in that he didn't die of gross cumulative substance abuse at nearly any point in the previous forty years. As Hunter would have said, cazart. Selah. Res ipsa loquitur.
Back to the motorcycle connection. For some reason, there is some sort of persistent existential disconnect between the modern literary mind and the ability to render the motorcycling experience in prose. A mere handful of people have ever been successful in enunciating, however tangentially, what it is about motorcycling that is so deeply and sublimely engaging and satiating--its soul, if you will--and HST is one of them. A couple of passages in particular stand out in my mind: his postscript to Hells Angels--"Four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise"-- and his essay, "The Song of the Sausage Creature," that appears in The Art of the Motorcycle. An excerpt:
Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....
[ ... ]
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that.... But there is also Fun, in the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant takeoff, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm. ...
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature. ...
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I wnet into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho ... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird. ...
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Travelling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.
Truer words were never spoken. And that is the crux of Thompson's appeal; as he once said, the best fiction is truer than any form of journalism. If you want to get a more rounded flavor of his writing, check out The Great Shark Hunt, an excellent sampler of his work over the years.
In early 1995, I suddenly reacquired an interest the music of the Grateful Dead, a taste that had been dormant, for various reasons, since my college years. This interest grew as I collected and traded show tapes, and culminated in my attending one more show, at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Three weeks later, Jerry Garcia was dead. I hope I didn't curse HST by reacquiring an interest in him here of late.
Speaking of late ... [yawn] The irony of HST's life and death continues to grow in me. From the late Sixties to the mid-1970s, Thompson's often frustrated focus, or lack thereof, was producing a book for Random House with the loose concept of "The Death of the American Dream." Many of his essays during that period, including his forays into gonzo-land, were in search of a unifying theme to this concept.
It now appears that his biography may well serve that purpose.