doctor gonzo

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

No, that’s not Jimbo talking. It’s the first line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The first time I saw the movie made from the book, I went back and read the first chapter because I thought whoever had made the movie had made it seem like a totally drug-induced fantasy. I thought the movie maker had turned it into a satire, but a re-reading of the book confirmed the movie followed the book verbatim. Jimbo was never a doper nor a drinker nor was he a member of the counter-culture, but he was a big fan of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson committed suicide yesterday. We’ll miss him.

What I liked most about Thompson was his “gonzo journalism,” where he inserted himself in the center of the story. When you read his articles and books they were always written from his own twisted point of view. You might conclude that Thompson and Jimbo were as different as night and day, but basically he was blogging fifty years before blogging was even thought of.

I remember when I heard him speak a number of years ago at a major Midwestern University, I was looking forward to his lecture. Instead, he came out on stage and someone in the audience lowered a can of beer on a string from the balcony above him and he said “thank you.” Then he said, “I want the biggest, meanest, ugliest son of a bitch in here to ask me a question.” Someone did. The entire evening people in the audience of a thousand or so shouted out questions. I wasn’t the biggest or meanest, but eventually I shouted to him, “Will you ever run for public office again?”

He said, no, that one met too many dirty people in politics. It was a weird coincidence that I wrote about that night and last week I came across what I had written. That night had sort of faded in my memory, but I have thought about it a couple of times, now, in the last few days. Now, I guess I’ll think about it again.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005.