Gonzo journalist’s maverick voice is missed

Michael Lindenberger says Hunter S. Thompson, one of his literary heroes, had a knack for doomsday prose, fitting for this past year.

Sixteen years ago today, one of my literary heroes took his life in the kitchen of his ranch in Woody Creek, Colo., outside of Aspen. Hunter S. Thompson — leg broken, ill and depressed — left a note. This won’t hurt, he wrote.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. His family was heartbroken and friends and admirers worldwide mourned.

Thompson was from Louisville, Ky., just like Muhammad Ali and just like me. All my life, the fact that those two had grown up on the same streets I came to know so well has been a point of pride. Thompson’s work as a foreign correspondent in his twenties inspired me. His mature work, especially the 1970s political journalism, awed me. His invention of Gonzo journalism — manifesting his belief that to really understand things, a writer must get Subjective, as he put it — had an explosive impact on journalists for years.

Three books — “Hell’s Angels,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72” — are among the best in their genres.

When he died, I was writing for our hometown paper — and the loss felt personal.

A few years later, I was commiserating with Thompson’s friend, the famed Welsh artist Ralph Steadman. He told me he hadn’t stopped thinking about how dozens of sheriff ’s deputies gathered in Thompson’s kitchen after his death.

“As a remark of respect, you know,” Steadman said. “Because as much of a bloody nuisance he could be, he was also respected. He wasn’t just any old writer.

He was leaving a mark behind. You know, a man leaves a mark.”

Leaves a mark.

I was thinking about that Friday. We’ve all been through so much this past year. Death, disease and worry.

In his note, Thompson explained that he was 17 years past age 50, which is all he’d expected. I turn 50 next month. Who knows how much time life will afford me after that — or any of us. What mark are we leaving behind?

On Friday, I called Douglas Brinkley, the Rice historian who edited Thompson’s astounding collection of letters. Sixteen years? Can you believe it? I said. Then I asked how he saw Thompson’s legacy.

“Our American culture misses the voice of Hunter Thompson,” Brinkley said. “His voice was so hilarious and frank and doomsday-focused. He would have been a perfect oracle in 2020. He was neither Democratic nor Republican. He was an independent, a maverick voice and I think that’s part of his appeal.” Doomsday prose. He had a knack for it. “Who knows?” Thompson wrote in 1988’s “Generation of Swine.” “If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get...”

Take what you can get. What option did he leave us? We had 67 years of Thompson. It’ll have to do.

Besides, as Brinkley reminded me, writers leave behind so much of themselves. Thompson was far from perfect. The more I learned about him, the more times I met him, the more difficult he appeared to me. He gave both fans and critics reasons aplenty to overlook his genius, and they often did. On stage, he frequently played up his fascination with guns and drugs.

Behind all that buffoonery, though, was a writer’s writer, an obsessive stylist who insisted on both rhythm and meaning in his work.

Besides, despite all the grating showmanship of his latter years, he knew himself pretty well — and what he was after. He’s gone now, but he’s still having the last word.

“Maybe,” he wrote in 1988, “this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.”