Hunter S Thompson remembered, by proxy

or Judge a man by his acolytes? Why sure.

I didn't know him in any meaningful way, so I think the best way to eulogize a guy who recently ate a bullet, but who had previously been a fairly influential writer--nay a pop-culture juggernaut, the god-head of a self-indulgent one-man literary movement--would be to map out the effect he had on my life and the lives of other people I know. Frankly, other than two pretty decent movies based on his life, there's not much good to report.

I liked his writing well enough, and he's anti-Bush, but he just didn't grab me by the any of the meaningful places his work often seizes others by. The friends [only one really] who have done most of the drugs Thompson listed, chronicled, and re-listed are dubious about just how good a time he was having while on them. "That's just bullshit, you don't feel like that" I believe, was that friend's reaction. For other friends [still only one really], too scared to actually do any of the things Thompson did, but still possessed of a pointless malaise and an addictive personality, Thompson's effects were more disastrous--mostly on my pocketbook and my personal stash of cheap booze [remember: letting people see where you stash your booze defeats the purpose of having a stash at all].

So my run-ins with Hunter S Thompson will really be recollections of one moronic friend [K] who, somehow, identified with the man despite sharing none of his experiences or predilections above the passing desire to be a journalist. I've always assumed he wants to be a journalist because his other favorite author is Hemingway. More likely he enjoys seeing alcoholism romanticized by productive people.

I rented a house with K right after coming home from a year in Italy. He'd spent his in a shithole towneshippe south-west of London. This house was to be shared with three other people, one of whom K'd dated briefly many years previous and whom he still carried a torch for. Soon after moving in, it was clear that this girl had no intention of getting back together with K, despite his best efforts. Before the last of his things was even moved in, he'd set about moping and ho-humming and acoustic-guitaring Clash songs. He buffered all of this with staggering amounts of drink. Self-defeating as it sounds, I knew these acts were thematically encoded transmissions to the girl, letting her know that he still liked her and that life without her just weren't no good. She responded in similarly oblique fashion: she started sleeping with K's brother for a while.

Just about then, give or take the day he ritually destroyed all of his books [and a few of mine] and broke that innocent but hopelessly-out-of-tune guitar, he set about cobbling together a costume that allowed him to more closely mimic the man whose books he'd left in tact. From then on, with crusher and boat shoes, a pipe empty of tobacco, aviator sunglasses, Rum Diary and Hell's Angels tucked into trouser pockets, K set about making my life utter goddamned hell. I suppose he made everyone's life hell, but I'd been stupid enough to put all the utilities and what not in my name, so my hell involved real earth dollars, not just purloined alcohol and cigarettes.

Hell was five of us in an old house with a crumbling foundation in a bad neighborhood full of methamphetamine and intimate partner violence. The back yard was large and supported roughly a hundred thousand rosebushes that [magically] bloomed almost 10 months out of the year and added a fake austerity that somehow transcended [for me personally] the cat-piss reek indoors. The whole situation would have been more than manageable, the rosebushes were high enough and dense enough to keep the neighborhood out, mostly, unless we wanted to let it in--to go slumming--and watch our neighbors kick and scream and stab each other while we, behind bushes and barred-windows, watched with giddy terror. But the false-bottomed sanctity of that rosey wall was obliterated when, less than a week into our tenancy, K took root on the stoop, swaying and cussing daily, from six in the morning until whenever the booze ran out.

From there it was all stumbling off to sleep in neighbor's yards, crashing their graduation parties, passing out in a Honey Bucket at Hoopfest, getting mugged then felt up in Mission Park and, eventually, the DUI that probably should have come much sooner.

K displays a little hurt still, when talking about the mugging and mild sexual assault, that he'd come to me at 4 in the morning scared and piss drunk without a wallet or a clue about what to do, and I turned him away. I locked my door. Then I get a little sad too, but just for effect, then tell him to go to hell.

I found a job by late June, about a month after I got back. He found one in September. That is, I had my parents cash in some favors and find a job for him so that I wouldn't have to drive him to the blood bank or hold him down while he called his parents and asked for money or sleep with my wallet. Slowly, after he got the job and the girl moved out--kinda--and he started paying his bills, the costume went away and he became, more or less, the K of old, who was still a walking scandal and a unrepentant thief and a goddamned sad sap, but he wasn't drinking as much, and he'd put those damned books away, so it was okay to be friends with him again.

I still sleep with my wallet.

So that's my view of Hunter S Thompson. People who know about drugs think he was a little optimistic about them, people who don't think he was some kind of messiah. Such people usually go on to ruin my life. On par, I didn't really like him.

K remains the only person I've slapped out of malice [Jeremy Jordan, who kicked my ass in 8th grade, doesn't count because I was trying to make a fist].