Hunter S. Thompson Dead - Probably suicide

[Redsfaithful]

Oh God. That hit me in the stomach. One of my favorite writers.

[pedro]

Hunter S. Thompson was one of my favorite authors.

Here is a link to the Kentucky Derby piece.

http://www.derbypost.com/hunter.html

[KronoRed]

Very sad news

[Crash Davis]

What did he write at the beginning of "The Great Shark Hunt"?

Something like "I have lived more than nine lives. I counted once and there were 13 times I should have died."

[Rojo]

HST always loomed large. I saw him "speak" in San Diego on the eve of a Super Bowl held there. He was 2 hours late and drunk. It was an awesome evening (except for Mojo Nixon).

[zombie-a-go-go]

ASPEN, Colorado (AP) -- While Hunter S. Thompson's suicide shocked many in his out-of-the-way neighborhood, one of his closest friends said Monday the writer had been in a lot of pain after a broken leg and hip surgery.

"I wasn't surprised," said George Stranahan, a former owner of the Woody Creek Tavern, one of Thompson's favorite hangouts. "I never expected Hunter to die in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of him."

Thompson died in his home Sunday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Pitkin County Coroner Dr. J. Steve Ayers said Monday.

Authorities refused to say whether a note was found. Thompson's body was found by his adult son, Juan, later Sunday evening.

Investigators recovered the weapon, a .45-caliber handgun.

Neighbors in Thompson's Woody Creek neighborhood said a broken leg had kept him from getting out as often as in the past, including to the tavern.

But Shep Harris, who now owns the tavern, said Thompson would sometimes slip in for a drink and a smoke if no one else was there.

Patrons normally are not allowed to light up because the tavern does not have a separate smoking area, but if Thompson were the only customer, he got a waiver.

"We called it the Hunter Rule," Harris said.

Mike Cleverly, a neighbor and longtime friend, spent Friday night watching a basketball game on TV with Thompson. He said Thompson was clearly hobbled by the broken leg. "Medically speaking, he's had a rotten year," he said.

But he added that "he's the last person in the world I would have expected to kill himself. I would have been less surprised if he had shot me."

Thompson was legendary for his love of firearms.

"He had a thing about guns," said Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, an acquaintance and a former editor of the Aspen Times. "I was always very worried he was going to shoot someone."

He did, at least once. In 2000, he accidentally slightly wounded his assistant trying to chase a bear off his property.

Hayes said she was present when a drunken Thompson fired three shots into a copy of one of his books and gave it to a friend, saying, "This is your autographed copy."

Despite the gunfire and the wild, drug-addled image he projected in his writing, Thompson was on good terms with the sheriff's department and was friends with Sheriff Bob Braudis and with DiSalvo, the sheriff's director of investigations.

"I would definitely call him a friend," DiSalvo said. "This was not the way I expected Hunter to die."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/book....ap/index.html

[Crash Davis]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...otes022305.DTL

Long Live Drugs And Politics
Hunter S. Thompson is dead. But what about his brand of raw, bloody, beautifully debauched journalism?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, February 23, 2005


I am not nearly stoned enough.
I should at this moment have, at the very least, roughly four Vicodin and three Valium and two giant nuggets of phenobarbital and a few whippets and a canister of ether and a tab of blotter acid and half an ounce of premium hash and a nice snifter of gin playing naked volleyball in my addled brain right now to properly pay homage to the late great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which is why I ain't touching this HST legacy thing with a 10-foot line of premium Colombian blow.

I ain't touching it because it's sad and fraught and would probably fail to do the man and his masterfully debauched writing any sort of true and appropriately inappropriate justice, and given how the fine San Francisco Chronicle, like all respectable newspapers, generally disallows stream-of-consciousness fire hoses of frenetic Thompson-like curse words in its publications, I am, shall we say, a bit hamstrung.

And to be perfectly honest, I'm tragically underversed in the Thompson worldview, not really a disciple and not all that devoted to the hard-boiled writer's life and times and the guns and his hellish relationship with law enforcement, the drugs (always, always the drugs) and Aspen lair and the feverish, obsessive devotion to politics and the Wild Turkey and the larger-than-life persona, and beyond the utter genius of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and bits of "Generation of Swine" and "The Rum Diary," I have spent insufficient time with the Legacy to perform the beautifully raunchy verbal epitaph HST so f--ing well deserves.

But one thing must be said, and said again, and repeated ad infinitum, screamed and lamented and slapped across the face of modern journalism in the wake of Thompson's brutal and sudden but somehow morbidly appropriate exit from this bittersweet existence and upon his ceremonial entrance into the next, a place where, we just know, the hedonism runs hot and hotter and the guns are plentiful and the drugs are insanely potent and all the hookers wear Lycra and look like Jenna Jameson and can quote Nixon's resignation speech while casually sucking the rust off a tailpipe.

Forget the legacy thing. Forget the "this man single-handedly changed modern journalism" thing. It's only partially true, anyway, given how the period when Thompson nailed the political world to the wall and held a rusty Bowie knife to its throat was nearly 30 years ago, long before the Internet and way before Nipplegate and far before most cutely agitated bloggers were even born and back when Dubya was just knee-high to a collegiate cocaine habit.

Here's what needs to be said, what's worth lamenting most: there are no new Thompsons. There are no new snarling fierce-eyed one-of-a-kind journalists covering politics and the national agenda with such radical and nasty and brilliant aplomb and with such an explicit and enthusiastic disregard for standard journalistic rules and tropes, all via anything resembling a national media outlet.

In other words, while it's true what all the staid J-school chairs and Thompson's fellow journalists are right now saying about how HST did indeed blow the door open for a whole new breed of blast-furnace writers who merely disguised themselves as journalists to get a goddamn press pass, tragically few have dared follow HST through that door.

There are no new journalistic radicals willing to take such a risky, careening road to fame and glory. There is a tragic lack of HST-style fearlessness in modern journalism. No, we don't need another Thompson per se; after all, the man broke the mold. But we could definitely use a few more heavyweight writers willing to take up arms, tattoo iconoclast on their tongues and scream their defiance of all things decorous and punctual and grammatically decent.

It is 2005. Fear and paranoia and snide FCC crackdowns and what I shall henceforth call the New Trepidation rule the journalism schools and newspapers today. Few if any young writers are willing the rip the breastplate off the political helldog and yank out its dung-blackened heart and hold it aloft for all to see, and then tick off a list of brilliant, drunken and completely accurate descriptive profanities and then laugh a hacking, cackling laugh and slam a shot of bourbon and stomp away to find some good cigars.

You might rightly ask, But is this what journalism really needs? Expletives and guns and drugs? Don't we already have enough of that with the military and Lynne Cheney and the Catholic Church?

Shouldn't journalism, in the wake of so much bland me-too political coverage and obvious liberal/conservative bias and corporate media consolidation and your inability to click on any major media Web site right now and read anything dramatically different than what any other major media Web site is offering right now, strive for accuracy and respect and something akin to that most elusive of slippery hammerheaded snakes, objective truth?

To which I can only reply, you wish. Objective truth is, of course, the great white myth of our time. It simply does not exist. The New York Times and Le Monde and all those CNN/MSNBC/Fox ticker-tape newsfeeds scrolling across the bottom of the TV like some sort of never-ending dribble of drool flowing forth from the mouth of Dick Cheney's proctologist, we know this does not speak of true reality. This is not How It Really Is. Or, rather, these media represent only a fragment, a sliver, a whisper of darker and more complex and insidious truths, far underneath.

The vast majority of modern journalism is, after all, about as dangerous and daring and funky and raw and humanly accessible as Paris Hilton stuck headfirst in a giant pool of blood oranges and Veuve Clicquot. We simply cannot relate.

The stuffed-penguin suits and the prepared speeches and the bad toupees, the bulls-- White House press conferences and the lies about war and the utter lack of accountability in anything BushCo says and does, this is only the surface. This is the gloss and the sheen and the highly reflective coating designed to blind you to the more bitter, debauched, wondrous, cretinous realities.

And Thompson, maybe more than any journalist in the past 50 years, did more to write those realities, grip them by the throat and pin them down with a high-powered rifle and threaten them with Asian genital torture and vicious armpit tickling, all while smacking them upside the head with his personal thesaurus wrought from the secret love den of H.L. Mencken and Ambrose Bierce and Jim Beam.

Thompson may have died lonely, in pain, miserable. He may have lived a bitterly restless life, lost and unhappy and ever seeking some sort of solace, a reprieve from a world full of cretins and snakes and river rats and Richard Nixon and all of Nixon's evil flying-monkey spawn, many of which now inhabit the White House. We don't really know, and maybe never will.

What we do know is, the door Thompson helped blow open is now nearly completely sealed up again, spackled over with the fresh concrete of fear and reinforced with iron bars and snide FCC regulations and heavily guarded by the least accountable and most secretive and violent and warmongering government in American history. The radical free speech HST embodied, the biting and ferocious (and ultimately insightful and telling) interrogation of the various thugs of government, this approach is no longer tolerated.

Only the tiniest openings remain. Only the slimmest slivers of light eke through. The era of raw open-mouthed bitingly hilarious New Journalism in major media is giving way to one of fearful reportage and shrugging sameness and prim adjective clauses sans wit or kick or rigid middle fingers, all undercut by the uptight quasi-religious hypocrisy of the Right, worse than Nixon, worse than Vietnam, worse than you want to imagine.

So then. Do yourself a favor, reread "Fear and Loathing," flip through "Generation of Swine," realize how relevant, hilarious, debauched, glorious, sodden with crazed half-truths and drunken epiphanies and wicked observations HST's observations still are. Wave high the flag of indignation. Scream the need for more iconoclastic voices. And laugh your ass off. This much you can do.

Oh yes, and make sure you do it all very, very stoned. Surely, the good doctor would've wanted it that way.

[Crash Davis]

From HST's longtime cohort and illustrator Ralph Steadman:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0...419584,00.html


Depraved and decadent: adventures with Thompson

Thompson's co-conspirator, the artist Ralph Steadman, recalls the barmiest of their barmy exploits

Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian

I knew all along he was pretty damned important. I was naive, an innocent abroad. He corrupted me in a very special way. I took his gleeful, demonic spirit on board and took out of it what I needed for my own work. But he was the original.
I first met him in 1970, at the Kentucky Derby. The editor of Scanlan magazine, which was named after a little-known Nottingham pig farmer, had seen my first book, Still Life With Raspberry, and concluded I was the guy to do this story with Hunter S Thompson, an ex-Hell's Angel who'd just shaved his head. On the way to the airport I lost my pens, pencils and inks. Luckily the editor's wife was a Revlon representative and she gave me a pack of lipsticks and rouges and whatnot. And that's what I used for the story, The Kentucky Derby is Depraved and Decadent.

When I finally found Hunter, he said: "Holy ****! I was told to look for a matted-haired geek with stringwarts!" I had a goatee beard. I still don't know what stringwarts are, but anyway, I had them too. "Uh, well, let's take a beer," he said, "Do you gamble?" I told him I didn't. He'd never seen a character like me before, who said "terrible, this is terrible" (which he pronounced "tirrible") all the time. He realised that I was looking through a glass darkly, seeing things I'd never seen before, like southern people enjoying themselves in a weird and wonderful way. It was fresh and alien to me, so I became a conduit for him. That's how Gonzo started.

In 1974 we went to Zaire to cover the "Rumble in the Jungle" between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali for Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone publisher Jan Wenner called it "the biggest, ****ed-up journalistic adventure in the history of journalism". Hunter never delivered the story and the art director didn't like my drawings. Hunter sold our fight tickets to buy drugs or something, and told me: "If you think I've come all this way to watch two ******s beat the **** out of each other, you've got another think coming." This wasn't a racist remark. It was gonzo. He said it to be provocative. Then he snuck off to the pool with the whisky and a big bag of grass.

When we got back to New York, Hunter was determined to get his elephant tusks back from customs where they were impounded. He had paid $300 for them in non-negotiable American Express travellers' checks. "Just stay at this bar, and have a drink," he told me, "I've gotta get my tusks back." Then, in one beautiful action (he would have been a wonderful footballer if he hadn't screwed his knee up), he leapt over the customs desk, picked the tusks up, hid them under my bag in the bar and ran into a telephone booth. The customs officers never found him, but the tusks were impounded again at Colorado, where he lived. I later heard that all they'd wanted from him, if he'd only bloody well listened (he never did), was $28 duty. But that was him. He always said he raged against the coming of the light, rather than the dying of the light.

We got drunk a lot together but the only drug I ever took with him was psyclobin, a hallucinogenic, in Rhode Island, when we went to screw up the Americas Cup. It scoured my innards, in a way that I cannot deal with.

When I woke up the next day, the first thing I wanted to do was spray "**** the Pope" on a boat, because when Hunter had asked, "What are you gonna write, Ralph, with your spraycans?", it was the first thing that came to mind. But we got caught shaking the spraycans noisily. Someone asked what we were up to. "Oh, just looking at the boats," said Hunter. Then he whispered: "We've got to get out of here Ralph, we must flee. We've failed. We've failed, Ralph." He set off two distress flares in the harbour and set fire to some boats to cause a distraction so we could get away, which meant going to a coffee bar and pretending we were ordinary people.

When we made a BBC Arena film called Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood in 1977, Hunter said: "Ralph, we've got to go to a funeral director's. We've got to plan the monument for the event of my death." I said: "How about some 100ft upright stainless steel tubes gathered into one bunch, and on top there'll be the fist of gonzo?" "Two thumbs!" said Hunter, "always remember, two thumbs!" God knows why. It was just gonzo. You can't explain it any more than you can explain why certain phenomena happen in the world.

The funeral director was taking it all seriously. The plan was that after he'd been cremated, some sort of cannon or explosive device would fire his ashes from within the fist, across the valley that he could see from his house in Colorado. It was all romantic and lovely.

At this moment Johnny Depp is trying to figure out how we can do it.

· Ralph Steadman was talking to Amy Fleming

[Crash Davis]

HST's wife:

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...575306,00.html

'Loving' farewell to writer
Wife details family gathering with Thompson dead in chair

By Jeff Kass, © 2005, Rocky Mountain News
February 25, 2005

ASPEN — Hunter S. Thompson heard the ice clinking.

The literary champ was sitting in his command post kitchen chair, a piece of blank paper in his favorite typewriter, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot through the mouth hours earlier.

But a small circle of family and friends gathered around with stories, as he wished, with glasses full of his favored elixir — Chivas Regal on ice.

"It was very loving. It was not a panic, or ugly, or freaky," Thompson's wife, Anita Thompson, said Thursday night in her first spoken comments since the icon's death Sunday. "It was just like Hunter wanted. He was in control here."

Anita Thompson also echoes the comments that have been made by Hunter Thompson's son and daughter-in-law: That her husband's suicide did not come from the bottom of the well, but was a gesture of strength and ultimate control made as his life was at a high-water mark.

"This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure," Anita Thompson said by phone, recounting that she was sitting in her husband's chair he called his catbird seat in the Rockies.

She added: "He lived a beautiful life and he lived it on his own terms, all the way from the very beginning to the very end."

Anita Thompson, like her husband's other close relatives, understood how Hunter Thompson wanted to make his ultimate exit.

"I always knew that Hunter was going to die before me," Anita Thompson, 32, said of her 67-year-old husband. "I'd accepted that. I just did not know it was going to be like this. I would rather have him back."

Yet Anita Thompson quickly came to embrace Hunter Thompson's gesture with a .45-caliber handgun.

She was at the gym when her husband took his life. And when family friend and Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis confirmed the news, her mind raced. "I have enough will power," she thought. "I can turn back time. No, no, no. This is not right. This can't happen."

But upon seeing Hunter Thompson's body, she embraced him. "Since he'd done this, I did not want to make it difficult for his spirit," she said. "I wanted to make it loving."

Anita Thompson believes she will stay on at the expansive property and famous house that was an ever-changing archive of political, literary and name-your-category items. And she will continue to help administer Hunter Thompson's works.

"I'm going to keep on working for Hunter," she said. "He wanted this. He made sure that I was in place to continue on. I'll just do my job until I can be with him again."

She adds, citing the property's nickname: "It will remain Owl Farm. It will remain Hunter Thompson's Owl Farm."

The last book they had read out loud together was parts of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a dense classic that explores the fragility of civilization by one of Hunter Thompson's favorite authors. Yet, said Anita Thompson, "He thinks Conrad is funny."

Anita Thompson and her husband had a small tiff that afternoon. Hunter Thompson told her to leave the kitchen that was known across the world as his funky and sacred work space. A weird look came across his face.

"I don't know why he wanted me to leave the room," she said. "It's all speculation. He'd never asked me to leave the room before."

But Anita Thompson did not go to the office with Hunter Thompson's son, as he had requested. Instead, she left the house.
"I'm going to get my gym bag. I'm going," she recalled. "He said, 'I don't want you to leave the house.'"

But she went to the gym. At 5:16 p.m., according to her cell-phone display, she called and spoke with Hunter Thompson for 10 minutes and 22 seconds.

Hunter Thompson put almost everyone on speakerphone. But he picked up the handset to speak with his wife.

"I knew it was odd, first of all, that he picked up with the handset ... I thought, 'That's sweet,'" she said.

The talk was good.

"He said, 'I want you to come home after you work out. Come home and we'll work on a column,'" she recalled.

The conversation, however, never really ended. Before formal goodbyes, Anita Thompson heard a clicking sound. She thought Hunter Thompson might have put down the handset and was typing. Or maybe it was the television. She waited. Maybe a minute passed.

"He did not say anything about killing himself," she said.

The official time of death is 5:42 p.m.

But did Hunter Thompson shoot himself while on the phone with his wife?

"I did not hear any bang," she says, noting that Hunter Thompson's son, who was in the house at the time, believed that a book had fallen when he heard the shot.

Anita Thompson can imagine what was going through Hunter Thompson's mind before the fatal shot: My beloved son, grandson and daughter-in-law are here. I'm in my perch. The fireplace has fire.

"I don't know if it mattered if I was here," Anita Thompson says. "I just like to think, and believe in my heart, he felt happy in his life."

A woman at the gym saw Anita Thompson in the bathroom. She asked if Hunter Thompson was OK. Anita Thompson pretty much blew it off. Rumors about Hunter Thompson were always in the air. Anita Thompson replied, "Oh yeah," but added, "he's been pretty stressed out lately."

A strange look was on the woman's face. She told Anita Thompson to check her phone messages. The woman said she would stay at her side.

Now she was shaking, and could barely dial.

There was a message from Juan Thompson, Hunter's son. "Anita, you have to come home now, he's dead."

Anita Thompson then spoke to the sheriff on the phone.

Had Hunter Thompson intended for his wife of two years to be in the house?

"I don't know, and it's not that important," Anita Thompson says. "I know he loved me. There's no question ... I know he did not want me to find him alone. He knew I was opposed to it."

After wading through the police officers outside, Anita Thompson recalls seeing her husband's dead body for the first time. "He was sitting in the chair when they brought me in, and I got to hug him and kiss him and rub his legs," she said. "All the anger was gone when I saw him."

Anita Thompson does not know why Hunter Thompson chose the .45 from his vast collection of guns. But he was deft with his death. "He did not destroy his face," Anita Thompson says. "He did it in his mouth. His face was beautiful. It was quick. It was not grisly or gruesome by any means. That's probably why he took that gun. He spared us a gruesome scene."

She adds: "His face did look calm and peaceful. He looked content. Like he wanted it."

For Tuesday's cremation, Anita Thompson dressed her husband. He was wearing a light blue, seersucker suit, a Tilly hat and his reading glasses, which he had on when he died. He had asked her to include a lock of her hair with him on this occasion. She complied, and more, cutting off her one-foot long blonde ponytail.

Anita Thompson is depending on mundane chores, but also family, friends and the estimated 50 messages a day.

"Being alone with Hunter in our bedroom, and I've been reading his letters to me," she added. "They have a different charge now. He wrote the most beautiful love letters I have ever seen ... I'm so lucky."

Then there was the flag. Hunter Thompson is an Air Force veteran. And following protocol, according to Anita Thompson, a deputy coroner from neighboring Garfield County presented her with a U.S. flag. It now hangs on a storyboard in the kitchen area, normally used for Hunter Thompson's works in progress. A white, silk scarf that the Dalai Lama presented to Hunter Thompson — the two men looked alike — drapes over the flag.

The house is filled to the brim with flowers — especially orchids, Hunter Thompson's favorite.

"It's nice in here," says Anita Thompson. "He would like it. He does like it, I guess."

Yes, Anita Thompson says, the landmark writer is nearby. "Mainly in moments when you're quiet, you can feel him; it's a different energy than when he was in his body," she says. "It's in the chest. It's all encompassing, but just for a second. It's beautiful."

Hunter Thompson was huge on swimming for his exercise. But he was also known for his love of fine whiskey, and to put it far too mildly, for experimenting with most every intoxicant known to man.

"He loved his body, look what he did to it," Anita Thompson jokes. She then adds a line that maybe even she fails, on its face, to grasp the significance of: "He gave his body everything it wanted."

[Crash Davis]

Fox now reporting HST shot himself while on the phone with his widow:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,148720,00.html

ASPEN, Colo. — The widow of journalist Hunter S. Thompson (search) said her husband killed himself while the two were talking on the phone.

"I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and he did it. I heard the clicking of the gun," Anita Thompson (search) told the Aspen Daily News in Friday's editions.

She said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly ESPN column — but instead of saying goodbye, he set the telephone down and shot himself.

Thompson said she heard a loud, muffled noise, but didn't know what had happened. "I was waiting for him to get back on the phone," she said.

Hunter Thompson, famous for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (search) and other works of New Journalism, shot himself in the head Sunday in the kitchen of his Aspen-area home. He was 67.

His son, daughter-in-law and 6-year-old grandson were in the house when the shooting occurred.


Anita Thompson, 32, said her husband had discussed killing himself in recent months and had been issuing verbal and written directives about what he wanted done with his body, his unpublished works and his assets.

His suicidal talk put a strain on their relationship, she said.

"He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision," she said. "It was a problem for us."

[Betterread]

the epigram to "Fear and Loathing..." quoting Dr. Johnson

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man"

R.I.P. Hunter S. Thomson

[Crash Davis]

For those of you who have the Biography Channel, VCR alert tonight:

http://news940.dserv.ca/news.php?cat=7&id=e03059A

Hunter S. Thompson, Osama bin Laden highlights of coming week's TV fare
at 14:56 on March 5, 2005, EST.

When Hunter S. Thompson's body was found in a chair in front of his typewriter, the word "counselor" was found typed in the centre of the page. Coming from this legendary "gonzo" journalist, the dispatch was unusually concise. But its presentation was typically flamboyant.

Thompson, who committed suicide Feb. 20 at age 67, is now the subject of a Biography Channel portrait. Airing 9 p.m. EST Monday, Biography: Hunter S. Thompson explores the life of this combustible reporter and the gonzo style he invented: a volatile mix of reporting, self-reflection and outright fiction.

It was Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - his 1971 account of a drug-fuelled trip to cover a district attorneys anti-drug conference for Rolling Stone magazine - that earned him stature in both journalism and pop-culture circles. But along with prose, his life was riddled with erratic behaviour, automatic weapons, illegal substances and a run for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., on a platform of decriminalizing drugs.

Biography includes interviews with Thompson as well as historian Douglas Brinkley; E. Jean Carroll, author of Hunter; Anita Thompson, his wife; and son Juan Thompson. (Monday, March 7, Biography)