A Gonzo Goodbye

A Gonzo goodbye

UP FRONT

David Edwards

"THE MENACE IS LOOSE AGAIN, THE Hell’s Angels, the 100-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and 90 miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches...like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter’s leg.

So it was that Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson was introduced to the world, on a motorcycle. The year was 1966, the book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.

Thompson, King of the Gonzo Journalists, fulfilled many observers’ prophecies this past February 20th when he selected a .45-caliber handgun from his vast arsenal, cocked the hammer and proceeded to redecorate his kitchen walls. The man described by novelist Tom Wolfe as “the century’s greatest comic writer in the English language,” was dead at 67.

This magazine tried to off Thompson a decade ago when we provided him a Ducati 900 Supersport and asked him to write us an essay. Originally the idea had been to plop him down on a more pedestrian Harley-Davidson, but Hunter would have none of it. An unrepentant café-racer at heart, he used to bomb Pacific Coast Highway on a hopped-up BSA 650 Lightning he described as “four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise,” and so demanded that we come up with something sporty.

His reasoning was laid out in the resulting story, “Song of the Sausage Creature,” first published in our March, 1995, issue:

“Some people will tell you that slow is good-and it may be, on some days-but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba... ”

Not coincidentally, Thompson’s friends and family are attempting to fulfill one of his last wishes, that his ashes be blasted from a 100-foot cannon.

All due respect to the recently deceased and about-to-be ballistic, but getting words out of Thompson was a chrome-plated pain in the rectum. That “Sausage Creature” happened at all is due to Brenda Buttner, then CWs feature editor, now senior business correspondent for television’s Fox News and host of the weekend show “Bulls & Bears.” Brenda is the only bike-mag staffer I know ever to be a Rhodes Scholar, but her Oxford smarts weren’t the only qualities that helped bag Thompson. Being female certainly didn’t hurt, and the woman gave good phone.

But Brenda’s hard work started after the good Doctor had ridden the Duck. Over the course of several weeks, she cajoled disparate jottings out of him, a series of midnight faxes that had to be stitched together into a rough draft-this despite his commanding a fee five times our usual feature rate. Finally, she’d done all she could and handed off the manuscript to me. Memory fails me now (and the pages have mysteriously gone missing), but several acts of debauchery just weren’t going to make print, at least not in Cycle World. I do recall that nuns were somehow involved.

“You can’t edit Hunter S. Thompson,” Brenda fretted. “We guaranteed him final approval. He won’t go for it.”

Either way, the story couldn’t be published as-was, so out came my red pen and the final draft was sent back minus the offending screed.

We waited.

Early one morning, I checked my voicemail. Thompson had passed judgment. “Hey, Dave, this is Hunter,” he mumbled almost incoherently onto the tape. “Okay, print the f___ker.”

And so the most controversial article CW has ever run was let loose on a poor, unsuspecting public. An avalanche of letters soon arrived at our doors, half nominating him for a Pulitzer, half angrily demanding refunds on their subscriptions. Given the following excerpt, count me in the former camp:

“If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.”

Pure gold. But toward the end of his life, those 100-carat passages came fewer and farther between. His body hobbled by recent hip surgeries and his mind no doubt feeling the effects of a halfcentury’s worth of pharmaceutical fryups and whiskey drownings, Thompson had become a sad parody of himself, like the Ralph Steadman illos that often accompanied his words or cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s mocking Uncle Duke character in Doonesbury. Thompson’s last published works were either compilations of old letters and essays, or the semi-autobiographical Rum Diary, a 1959 novel previously unpublished. He hadn’t actually penned a worthwhile original book since Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1973.

Unable any longer to pull the literary trigger, Thompson ate his pistol. It was simply time to go.

Rest in peace, HST, as if that’s even a remote possibility.