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Shut Up And Listen 206 Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride This past Sunday, Hunter Thompson killed himself. It's been a few days since and it still seems strange. I've been in the middle of reading The Great Shark Hunt since the summer and it's weird to look at the cover and think "Well, this guy's dead now." Just weird is all. I've only been reading Thompson's stuff seriously for a bit over three years, but I've known about him, I suppose, for around four. My first exposure to him was through Warren Ellis and Transmetropolitan. It was a period where I was really into Ellis and had some extra Christmas or birthday money and was buying comics, and thought "What the hell . . ." and picked up six issues of Transmet, issues 13-18 aka the "Year of the Bastard" storyline (which is still my favourite story from the series). The storyline is all about a political convention in The City that Spider Jerusalem covers as his triumphant return back to covering politics. It was in issues thirteen's letters page that I first encountered Thompson, as in that issue, Ellis took it over totally and gave a nice little piece on presidential politics and his love of them, citing Thompson's campaign book Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 as a place to find some good writing on the subject. Jump ahead a few months and it's summer and I'm bored, so I head on down to the library and begin plugging names into the catalogue, looking for anything to read, and in my mad scramble, I remember Thompson's book and look it up only to find that the only copy the system had was overdue long ago--meaning, of course, that some rat bastard out there took it out and never returned it, and I fucking hate that person, oh yes I do (I did find a copy of Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner though, who was recommended in another of those six Transmet issues' letter columns). Some more time passed and I was taking a creative writing course at school and we were assigned this book talk project, and were supposed to pick a book from this list that had come out in 1999 of the top 100 books of the twentieth century. I looked over the list and the moment I saw Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, I knew that was the book I wanted to do. I picked up a copy the next day and read the book over the weekend. From that moment, I was in the look-out for Thompson's writings. Over the years, I've slowly gotten his books (still missing a few) because, well, bookstores don't seem to carry them in large supplies for some reason--and I really can't think of a good reason why not. Actually, getting his books usually made my day. Like I remember the Christmas when I got a copy of Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by that book rather than anything else I got. Or how happy I was when I was shopping one day and a bookstore had copies of Kingdom Of Fear weeks before it was supposed to come out. Not many other things in the world could make me quite so excited--you know, in that lame kind of way. Anyone who's read my column for a while would definitely recognise Thompson's influence on my writing, and if they've read Thompson, probably cringe when they see it. My columns about the State of the Union Addresses or conventions are total Thompson rip-offs, except nowhere near as well done. Hunter Thompson is one of the few people I would list as a major influence on my writing. The funny thing about Thompson is that I know I wouldn't have liked him. In his personal life, he wasn't my kind of guy. He was too heavy in drinking and drugs (nowhere near as much as reflected in his writing, but still . . .) and violence and shit. But fuck, he could write and more than that: he could entertain. Thompson was an excellent writer, but an even better entertainer. I remember this past summer when I was rereading the campaign book and ended up reading out some passages to a friend while we were both killing ourselves laughing. Fuck if I know what he'd written was true or not, but does that really matter? Thompson seemed to have a gift for telling the truth through lies. I mean, which do you think reflected the reality of the time: the trip to Vegas Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta took in real life or the one Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo took in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas? His death took me by surprise. It shouldn't have, as I knew he was probably going to die soon, as his health wasn't the best, but it still did. And as much as I loathe people who get all broken up when a celebrity or something dies, I have to admit that it fucked me up a little. Not a whole lot, as I connected to the writing, not the man, but probably as much as any writer's death could. He's the first one of my heroes to die, you know? I guess I've been lucky like that, so far. Strangely, when I saw some people saying bad things about him, I didn't get mad like others. I don't know, I guess, it didn't bother me, because well, fuck them. Who cares? I don't think Thompson would have. The funny thing about his death is that, for a fan of Thompson's work, it's probably a good thing. His death will mean that over the next five or ten years, all of his unpublished work will probably see print, all of his published-but-rare work will probably be made more available, and shit like that. A selfish thought, I know, but that's the kind of shit I think about. It will be nice to have a bookshelf full of Thompson's work and be able to sit down and start at one end and finish at the other over a summer or something. And now, I'm going to grab that copy of The Great Shark Hunt that I'm halfway through and read a bit more, because even though the man is gone, his work is still here. And fuck, the work is good. Later, Hunter. Chad Nevett |