perfidy

DATELINE: WOODY CREEK, CO., 20 FEB 05

Surrounded by a retinue of giant lizards, fever-dreams, and hulking relics from his checkered past, Hunter S. Thompson, writer and professional drug voyager, revealed today his latest work of what he long ago dubbed "shotgun art.". His latest piece consists of his dead body, decorated by a single bullet hole to the head and whatever parts of his insides were carried with the bullet to the outside. It is currently believed that this art was self-inflicted.

He will be missed.

[wik] Depending on how you look at it, Hunter Thompson descended into schtick about the time Reagan re-upped for his second tour of duty, or he never transcended it in the first place. If there is anybody in the world who did not see this coming - at least in retrospect - then that person has rocks for brains. Thompson was one of the few artists who successfully parlayed their own self-destruction into a vital part of their own output. Rimbaud, Wilde, and Burroughs spring to mind, and even if you throw in the half-competent drug addled "transgressions" of Jim Morrison, all the names I just mentioned are all classifiable as poets (Morrison technically so, I guess). Thompson is one of the few "straight" writers - in the sense that he was considered a reporter and a writer of non- (or at least quasi-non-) fiction - to equal these exponents of the Grand Romantic Poetic Tradition (what with the drugs, garretts, starvation, ridiculous situations &c &c &c) in the quality of both his art and life. That he lived so long is fairly surprising.

His best work, like Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail manage through their wildness to scrape away at inner truths that more sobersided analyses could not possibly hope to touch. But the same distance that separates the Fear and Loathing books from later hackery like The Great Shark Hunt or Better Than Sex is the same distance that separates Beggar's Banquet from Black and Blue. The most dangerous thing in the world for an artist who relies on actual personal peril and chaos to fuel their creative process is to figure out how to bottle it without the hangover. Thompson certainly did this. Rather than doing as Christopher Lemann-Haupt feared and "laps[ing] into good taste," he lapsed into routine: drink Wild Turkey => take some pills => stay up late => wait for THE FEAR to come => shoot something with a high powered rifle, narrowly missing friend/spouse/dog => pass out at typewriter and wait for dawn. Once you can put this routine on your dayrunner, it's no longer creation. It's wanton self-destruction.

Moreover... suicide? Although my first instinct is to excoriate him for the cravenness that suicide usually suggets, I'm not so sure that's the right thing to do here. By rights, Thompson should have been dead a hundred thousand times over already if even a tiny fraction of his self-described exploits are true. If he hadn't already ended up as a long red streak on a highway somewhere intermingled with broken pieces of a Vincent Black Shadow and reeking of whiskey, then nothing was going to kill him. Thompson's way was to paint himself into a corner then bolt like a rabid wolverine. I guess this time his own indestructibility offered him only one way out.

Hunter S. Thomson was 67 years old. Now he is just a sack of meat.