After another slow, lidless scrabble game we were recruited to support a "Part V" viewing in a Star Wars marathon. Interestingly enough, I guided Brooke through the exact marathon only three weeks earlier. Sometimes you're in the mood. Last night was not such a time, but we had ducked a couple of other engagements recently and I had a twinge thinking about my resurfacing anti-social tendencies.

Maybe this story should have started when we hung up on our phone conversation last night. Brooke asked me who He was. I explained about Hunter and the gonzo journalism phenomenon, to no avail. I suggested that she probably had heard of Fear and Loathing . . . (I probably should have started there with my explanation). Now she was on the same page. I proceeded with this ill-advised lecture about how "J. Depp played Hunter in the movie, but Hunter had also written several blah blah blahs, and Did you know the movie Fear and Loathing . . . was a combination of blah, blah, and blah?"

By the time we left the apartment, my feelings about the suicide were next to nil--closer to nil.

There's no way could I express to you how much the gonzo revolution speaks to me, me being a certified and licensed madman, me knowing and writing through the swirling, rhythmic depths of lysurgic acid and the honesty and majesty of Psilocybin, all the while struggling to appear sane for the benefit of my society.

However, the IDEA of Hunter Thompson, the craze, dies when I open one of his books. The root of gonzo is self-indulgence rather than insight or even "Searching for Truth". Not that it would have happened, but a chronicled interaction between Hunter Thompson and, say, Flannery O' Connor or Ernest Hemingway would have filled out an archive for the ages. I'm not an absolutist like those two stately nutjobs, but imagining either of the two staring one Hunter Thompson between his blurry, bleary eyes, and articulating every syllable of a declaration such as "Self-indulgence is the murderer of fiction" or "There's not one true sentence in your heart" overflows my soul with self-righteousness. Not pretty, I know that. But it's true.

The irony of the fact that Hemingway shot himself, too, isn't lost on me, but I havent had time to sort it out, yet.

The point is that, often, when someone mentioned Hunter, like you did about 1 1/2 years ago tellling me that he was holding down an on-line ESPN column, my first reaction was surprise. The guy is alive and capable of turning on a computer? Again, about a month ago you mentioned the "speech at U Penn" story. He shows up an hour and a half late, shwilled, tripping over himself and smelling like Victory Gin. He speaks for twenty minutes then prepares to leave, and someone asks, "Do you really have the nerve to stumble your way in here, drunk as a lord, spew your nonsense for twenty minutes and then leave without an apology?" He shouts "Guilty!" and the crowd cheers for joy. And I thought "Wow! The guy is still alive!" Yes, the speech took place before the column began, but that changes nothing. The fact that the guy was alive wasn't proof of the power of will or an uplifting triumph against the Man. His survival was simple surprise, as in "I'm surprised the guy isn't dead" or "that guy should be dead" or "that guy gave away everything--I thought he was dead. What the hell ever happened to him?"

So I wasn't affected too deeply, at first. But as Brooke and I walked to our Star Wars engagement, I considered your response to his death. I wondered whether it was the suicide, whether it was the fact that a writer you once loved was dead, or whether you were very drunk. I wondered if a public figure's death would move me like that. When Cash died, I was sad in a nostalgic way. If Bob Dylan rubbed himself out I might commit myself to institution. Seeing R. Pryor looking the way he does now makes me feel terrible, but in a generalized, "a great one is going" sort of way.

Recently, one of my favorite short story writers of all time, Andres Dubus, died. After a few days had passed, a shadowy unnamed feeling took root inside me--not sadness, not loss, not depression or shock--an emotional chemical compound resembling fear or anger but with a difficult ratio to define.

Nobody knew Andres Dubus. No-one. He wrote unironic, nonwitty stories at a time when irony and wit carried the day. Vonnegut and Gardner ran the show, but he didn't care. Older, lifelong authors who knew him . . . well, they loved him and pimped his works for him. But now, if you give him a google, you get three engine-result pages about Andres Dubus III--the House of Sand and Fog (which I refuse to read or see--until, at least, someone remembers his father) guy.

So that guy dies, nobody knows, and I get the jeebies.

When we arrived at our friend's place, I mentioned that Hunter was dead. Picture it: there are four other college-edumacatedly smart adults in the room. Responses: Who? Wait, I know that guy. What was he in? Pipe it, Dickweed; he's a writer. He's the Fear and Loathing guy. How did he die?

"Suicide," I say.

Holy shit, they say. Suicide, really? Unbelievable.

Taboo's Ezine Navigator: Article Index
Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey
Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.