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“That poor old man. He used to walk out there on the road in the evenings. He was so frail and thin and old-looking that it was embarrassing to see him. I was always afraid a car would hit him, and that would be an awful way for him to go.”

Hunter S. Thompson “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” National Observer, May 25, 1964

By now it has taken a couple of laps around the 'net so it should not be news to you that Hunter Stocton Thompson has killed himself. Obituaries delicately note that he "died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound" but I wonder if any obituary writers pause when they write that, and wonder if Thompson himself would have used such antiseptic terms.

Thompson, you see, had a fascination with obituaries for scoundrels. How many of these obits are applicable in his case? He even wrote about his favorite: that of William Jennings Bryan, written by H.L. Mencken (the Thompson of HIS generation). This was a scathing hatchet job written shortly after the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and it still scathes across the better part of the last century and into this one:

“It was plain to everyone, when Bryan came to Dayton, that his best days were behind him – that he was now definitely an old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen.”

“But that was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see. The next day the battle was joined and his face became hard. By the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my place in the courtroom, standing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes fascinated me: I watched them all day long. They were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.”

“Imagine a gentleman, and you will imagine everything he was not.”

Too soon after writing about his admiration for this obituary, Thompson was presented with the opportunity to eulogize his famous sidekick Oscar Zeta Acosta. Acosta was his party buddy during the Las Vegas freak-out, and vanished in mysterious circumstances. At some point Thompson accepted the preponderance of evidence that the “Brown Buffalo” was indeed dead. “When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions.”

“We are better off without him. Sooner or later he would have had to be put to sleep anyway….So the world is better place, now that he’s at least out of sight, if not certifiably dead. He will not be missed -- except perhaps in Fat City, where every light in the town went dim when we heard that he’d finally cashed his check.”

I was turned on to HST when I hit college and found that his sense of humor was imprinted in all of the people who seemed cool to me, for better or worse. Clues that somebody had read Thompson pervaded the air wherever wry jokes and a weary but good-natured paranoia prevailed. This was the Reagan era, lean years for HST, but soon arose a Southerner named Clinton, the great white Democrat hope who left Thompson with a bad taste in his mouth (nyuk nyuk). Apparently Bubba had “no sense of humor”. Not long after that the other shoe dropped and in this case that shoe was named Nixon, and Thompson got the chance to write another obituary. His career-long obsession with the California Quaker found the apex of its trajectory with an oddly anticlimactic meditation that was not nearly the philippic anybody could rightfully expect.

“The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the president of the United States. Awkward questions may be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. “

“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles.”

It was with that article, written in 1994, that I began to wonder about this whole business of writing obituaries, and wondered what Thompson’s would be like. Certainly, a chain-smoker who downed at least a fifth of Bourbon a day (from what I could gather) was an imminent set-up for an aerodigestive cancer, liver failure, or violent death. “Unfortunately for Bryan,” Thompson later wrote, “he died before Mencken, and he paid a terrible price for it when H.L. Mencken wrote his obituary in the American Mercury.” Because of his stature as an American icon it is possible that Thompson will escape this fate. It is possible that he is so popular and well-regarded that nobody will muster a single poisonous drop of digital ink to envenom his headless corpse. And that would be a shame because the man envisioned himself as some type of warrior, battling the forces of right-wing evil. If your enemies have kind words to say about you on the occasion of your death, how badly did you hurt them while you were alive?

In his dotage, HST was confined to writing barely coherent one-pagers about sports on the ESPN2 website. These fragmented e-mails of his barely related the weekend exploits of his buddies at his Woody Creek “salon”. He desperately dropped names in a fading effort to maintain a façade of relevancy. He continued to publish anthologies which duplicated many of his older columns, as the thin gruel of his decreasing output would not stretch far enough to span the covers of a decent-size book. This reminded me of the days Frank Zappa was on the wane, when album after album of already-released material would preserve the illusion of productivity until you cracked the wrapping of your new purchase. He is not the first man to outlive his usefulness, and not the first to solve this problem by taking the coward’s way out. The cowardly streak may have been present from the beginning, based on Sonny Barger’s 2001 memoirs:

“But as time went by, Hunter turned out to be a real weenie and a stone fucking coward. You read about how he walks around his house now with his pistols, shooting them out of his windows to impress writers who show up to interview him. He’s all show and no go. When he tried to act tough with us, no matter what happened, Hunter Thompson got scared. I ended up not liking him at all, a tall, skinny, typical hillbilly from Kentucky.”

His writings have been compared to Burroughs, Mencken, Twain, Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. His tangential style has touched them all to a greater or lesser degree, and certainly his ultimate demise echoes Hemingway in more than just word. He might have heeded these echoes of bells tolling as related by Hemingway, but that would have been out of his intemperate character. To restrain his words would have been to restrain himself, and I doubt he ever had that ability. We are the richer for it.

“Like many another writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt like he was standing on something solid – like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.

“Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn’t. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him – not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.”

RES IPSA LOQUITUR.