Belltown Messenger

Gonzo journalism was always as much about how you carried yourself as it was about the words you put to paper to describe the Sick and Vicious ways of the world. And now that Hunter Thompson has chosen to end his life at the age of 67 with a self-inflicted .45 caliber blast to the head, it's proper to wonder: Are all of us self-described disciples of Dr. Gonzo doomed to the same Violent and Disgraceful Fate? Is this the logical endpoint for his kind of participatory journalism that the only Proper Response to a World Gone To Shit is to End It All?

I'd like to think not. I've got an investment in this titan of the "New Journalism." There's a picture of Thompson in my wallet that I've been carrying around for almost 20 years. It's an Annie Leibovitz photo from Rolling Stone, taken during the 1972 campaign season, which I cut out of Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus. When I look at it, I'm reminded of the time I've spent "looking for where the real winds blow." I'm reminded of Election Night 1988, when a bunch of college buddies and I put together a kit bag of dope and booze and came down to New York City to be with Thompson as he growled his way through the unfolding Dukakis Disaster at the old Ritz. I remember the part of that story where I lost my ticket to the show en route from the parking lot to the theater, retraced my steps, and, miraculously, found the ticket and got into the show. And I remember the part of the story where I stood up during the question-and-answer period and asked Thompson if he'd heard the rumors about Ed Meese, George Bush and, I believe, Dan Rather having a three-way sex festival during the Republican National Convention. I recall Thompson's bewilderment at my question, his shaking his head and saying, no, he hadn't heard the rumor. And now I'll always remember that I was touring Arlington National Cemetery in D.C. and watching the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the day Thompson took his life at his heavily armed compound in Woody Creek, Colorado.

Gonzo is about taking risks, about letting a piece of writing unspool as it will, about not shying away from your opinions, even when they are Beastly and the Product of a Derangement of the Senses. As much as it is about point of view, Gonzo is also about the Language Itself the liberatory violence of language, the stringing together of words in such a manner as to render a reader punch-drunk from the power of your uppercut observations. Language, Thompson counseled, should assault the reader at his quivering and uncertain core, not soothe him with a Heinous Snoutload of Received Wisdom.

For those of us who subscribed to the belief system, taking the Gonzo pledge was like the first time you heard punk rock: It gave outcasts, misanthropes, freaks, losers, dorks, dweebs, dingbats, dopers, orphans, the abused, the sick, angry, anonymous and ugly refuge from an annihilatory status quo that rewards the weak of spirit; the lived Gonzo experience takes you away from soul-crushing complacency and toward an engagement with the world that is at once Intensely Outraged and Provisionally Hopeful.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro is a timeless affirmation for the freaks among us, but Thompson warned that there was also a responsibility to pursuing the Larger Truth that went along with the plunge into the Gonzo breach, summed up in his aphorism Buy the ticket; take the ride.

There's a lot of lame Gonzo journalism out there. I've written some of it myself. I've been Viciously Slandered as a "second-rate" Thompson for saying Certain Unfriendly Things about this year's inauguration protesters. The letter writers had their say, and I'll let them have it.

I'll only say that I'd rather be a flailing jackass full of Abject Menace than a shrill and oversensitive numbnuts adrift in ideological preconceptions. I'd rather be Hideously Wrong than Profoundly Uninteresting. Thompson taught me a lesson about that, too: Never apologize; never explain.

To that end, I wonder if we'll see a suicide note. Was there a final Gonzo screed that summed it all up? That explained that the Pain and Suffering Thompson was enduring he'd recently had hip-replacement surgery and had damaged his spine and broken a leg had just gotten to be too much, and that he'd never intended to spend his final years chained to a hospital bed? Was this his contribution to the debate over Social Security "reform"? Indeed, Thompson might already have written his note, some 30 years ago when he eulogized Ernest Hemingway:

"He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him.... So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun."