Goodbye Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, great journalist, world-class consumer of recreational chemicals, and a man who was almost elected a county sherriff in 1970, shot himself today. Maybe the drugs had something to do with it. He will be survived by his books, by his columns, and by surreal accounts of his escapades. For instance, here is one of HST giving a speech at Duke:
The representative who met him at the airport had offered him some hashish. He had taken it. Back in the motel, he felt the day begin to slip away. He poured himself a couple of shots of Wild Turkey. He kept his audience waiting for forty-five minutes. When he walked out with his glass in front of a large velvet curtain in the university auditorium, he got himself in a further state of belligerency with the crowd by starting off, “I’m very happy to be here at the alma mater of Richard Nixon.”
“That did not exactly put them in my pocket,” Thompson told me. “(Nixon) went to the law school there, which they were either trying to forget or were proud of, and my telling them that truly stiffened them up. The questions began. They asked me if I thought Terry Sanford was going to run for the presidency in 1976. I said that he had been a party to the Stop McGovern movement and that he was a worthless pig f—er. I didn’t realize that he was the president of Duke.
You should celebrate Hunter S. Thompson’s passing by getting totally wasted, watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and glancing through his sports columns — like this masterpiece.