Wednesday August 17, 2005

On the Death of The Good Doctor

            Every person has a different way of dealing with death.  Some people cry, some people drink, and some people fly to Antigua for a week of relaxation and reflection.  One thing that everyone has in common is telling stories about the person that died; whether they are good or bad representations of how the person actually lived.

            When I entered high school, I was one of those kids that did not believe in the righteousness of education and thought that reading was for math-club nerds.  I hadn’t finished a legitimate book cover-to-cover since my mother read me “Hop on Pop” in the second grade, and I had no desire to do so. 

            It was during this time, early freshman year, when one of my new found private school friends turned around and handed me a book.  This happened to be in the one study period we got a day and I was in dire straights to get my Algebra homework finished for next period.  I didn’t have time for casual reading at the moment, and if I did, I would have probably gone to sleep instead of doing anything academic.  Yet, my friend wasn’t having any of it.  He told me that if I began to read this book, and didn’t like it, he would do my Algebra homework for me.  Considering my lifelong loathing for math, I made the deal. 

            As I opened the book, the first line grabbed me and never let me go.  “We were half a mile outside of Barstow when the drugs took hold.”

            Up to this point in my academic life, I was only exposed to the dry and lifeless literature taught in the pre-high school years.  I made no connection with these cheesy mystery novels or boring epics about life for rich people in the 19^th century.  And the literature that I was exposed to in school made up my entire knowledge of literature at the time.  I was unaware that there might be writing out there, actually generally accepted and embraced writing, that reached out to my closed-minded 15 year-old sensibility.  Yet, the writing that followed that one hallowed line changed me as a person forever.

            I now sit here as a Junior at a respected University, majoring in English.  I get more joy out of reading and writing then just about anything else I do in my life.  I owe finding this passion to one person with many aliases:  The Good Doctor, Raoul Duke, the High Priest of Gonzo, and his Christian name of Hunter Stockton Thompson. 

            Many people think many different things about Dr. Thompson.  Some think him a rambling acid-head moron with such a clouded perception that he wouldn’t be able to pass a road test.  Yet, others find him to be one of the most insightful, ground-breaking journalists in this century.  No matter how one feels about The Good Doctor, it is an undisputable fact that he was an incredible talent.  He grabbed the English language by the balls and threw it around like a rag doll.  His style was clear, concise and directly to the point.  The reader knew exactly what he was feeling because he came straight out and said it; regardless if you liked it or not.  Whether he was calling you a pig-fucking fascist of the savior of humanity, there existed a respect by all for the way he said it. 

            Not only did Dr. Thompson help shape his craft by a unique mix of very aggressive and opinionated ideas, but he changed the way reporting was looked at and approached forever.  His first person, self-injected, story-telling style was what he called “Gonzo Journalism”.  The first “official” piece of Gonzo journalism was written for Scanlan’s Monthly in 1970 entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”.  In this essay, Thompson was behind on his deadline (which was a constant theme throughout his career) and instead of trying to put together a makeshift last-minute article, he just ripped pages from his journal and sent them to the printer.  In these pages lay the true beauty of Thompson’s style; it was cleaver, witty, and most of all, entertaining.  He sucked the reader into a world that was filled with psychedelic drugs, constant alcohol abuse, and wild adventures which straddled the lines of believability.  And that is what made it fun; Thompson made the reader think, and made the reader question the bounds of reality.  Nothing was out of bounds for Hunter S. Thompson as he chased the American Dream around the country for 67 years, all with the vigor and spite of a bull chasing the trainer who just tied his testicles together.  The American Dream was his religion; Horatio Alger his Pope. 

            Sometimes I hold Dr. Thompson in saint-like reverence.  To me, after reading that first work of his that I got my hands on, I was a changed person.  As I closed the back cover of that novel, only five hours after opening the front cover, I had an actual, physical epiphany.  Maybe the epiphany was an on-going experience as I ripped through page after page, drooling all over myself because it was the first time I had ever felt that an author was actually speaking to me.  I never understood what literary voice meant before I picked up that work by Dr. Thompson, and since then I have yet to see anyone even come close to penetrating the page in the style and grace that he did.  You can fall into a Hunter Thompson piece head over heels, and before you know it, you’re in a dream world; a world where it seems like it is just you and The Good Doctor, sitting in around a fire in the hills of Colorado, watching college football, pounding glasses of Wild Turkey, passing a hash pipe and listening to him ramble about how Nixon was the Devil incarnate.  He brought you into his world, and made you feel comfortable.  He told you his ideas, and didn’t care if you like them or not.  He was an original voice, and voice that will resound through the cosmos for ages to come. 

I will miss Hunter Stockton Thompson and I know I’m not the only one.

-Mahalo-

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