The King Is Dead, Long Live the King
“Without heroes,
we are all plain people and don’t know how far
we can go.” — Bernard Malamud
I heard the news in a bar. The story spread quickly
and with the same brutally demoralizing effect of soldiers
locked in battle learning that their beloved king had
fallen. Loud boisterous drunks were struck dumb and
silent, grown men wept and suddenly there wasn’t
enough whiskey in the bar, there wasn’t enough
in the whole goddamn world.
Soldiers usually break and run under those circumstances
and we were no 
different. I personally crawled into
a bottle of rum and tried get a handle on it. Our
king was dead.
And like most
kings, his demise carried a much more terrible weight
and consequence than the mere passing of a great man.
Hunter S. Thompson’s death also heralds the passing
of an era.
He was the last of
a long, distinguished line of drunkard heroes. His
genus included Bukowski, Hemingway, Bogart, Gleason,
Fields, Churchill and Twain, rugged iconoclasts who
distinguished themselves not only as super-functional
drunks who rose to the top of their respective fields,
but also drunks who were entirely up front
about their drinking.
Hunter was undoubtedly
the wildest of the gang, and that’s saying something.
A lightning rod for controversy, his antics were often
portrayed by lesser men as mere self-aggrandizement,
but they served a much grander purpose. He elevated
an ideal, a towering lighthouse with a brilliant guiding
flame for those who decided, like himself and his predecessors,
to live their lives to the absolute fullest, consequences
be damned.
There was always a powerful
comfort in knowing he was out there somewhere in the
night, roaring drunk, guzzling high-octane whiskey
and railing against a world amok with complacency and
hypocrisy. There was always a weird sense that he could
pop up any where at any time to stick it to The Man
and set things straight. Sometimes he appeared a force
of nature, other times a Homeric hero capable of conjuring
excitement and purpose from the most innocuous of circumstances.
Hunter didn’t have to seek out adventure, he was adventure.
Which often meant dancing
with death. Most men spend their entire lives avoiding
that jig, but the good Doctor sought it out, he seemed
to possess a keen understanding of the song’s
deadly rhythm and he boogied down with the
fucker.
And while he always managed
to escape alive, if not unscathed, he knew that he — like
us all — would eventually have to face the music
of that last melancholy waltz that ends in a mortal
embrace.
Hunter decided to cut that
final dance short. It was probably the only deadline
he ever beat.
Of course, the soft and
sensitive crowd were quick to chime in, warbling that
Hunter’s decision to take his own life was somehow
a cowardly act, and if I could get my hands around
all their necks at once I would soon be the biggest
mass murderer in history. It’s akin to a gaggle
of timid schoolboys without the guts to even step into
a rowboat questioning the courage of an ancient sea
captain who, for reasons that are entirely his own
business, decided to sail directly into an approaching
squall.
Making that sudden leap
into the Great Unknown, especially by someone who had
taken the most from life, is anything but cowardly.
He lived his life on his own terms and that’s
how he went out.
Others have chosen to blame
mental illness for his decision, which is patently
ridiculous. By their timorous standards, Hunter was
insane his entire life. You ask me, he was saner than
any of them. He understood we are put on this rock
not to wait out death, but to live, and Hunter
lived more in a week than those punks will their
entire lives.
They also say he had a
problem controlling his impulses, but this comes from
a society that has a problem with suppressing its natural
instincts. Hunter made such a splash when he appeared
on the literary scene because no one had ever seen
anything like it. His sharp, unforgiving prose surged
across the page and he seemed strangely willing to
insert himself into the story to the degree that he became the
story. Instead of observing from the sidelines, he
preferred to jump into the game and look for the truth
from the midst of the action.
Of course, there are certain
risks involved with that sort of behavior. He managed
to make a host of enemies along the way, infuriating
elements running the gamut from the Hells Angels to
Richard Nixon. Not that he seemed to mind. He knew
it came with the territory — that if you wanted
the real story you had to take risks.
Nowadays the main rule
is Play It Safe. Not only should you look before you
leap, you should think very seriously about
attending a Leapers Anonymous meeting and discussing
the possibility that you have a leaping problem. We’re
all told at one point to tone it down, to start behaving
responsibly and settle into that grey lockstep toward
the prison of death. Nearly everyone eventually bows
to that pressure, which is what made Hunter such a
rare creature. He never backed down, he never sold
out the ideals of his youth; instead of toning it down
he cranked it up.
He loped along like a crazy
tiger and I think we all understood that that was how
he was going to go out — at full stride in a
sudden spasm of violence. We knew death wasn't going
to finally catch up with him in a nursing home where
he’d
crawled to die.
People liked to say, and
I was one of them, that Hunter had lost a step toward
the end, that his tidal wave of talent had crested
and broke decades before and was now quickly receding.
Which may be true, though
it hardly matters. His ideals were already
firmly planted in the firmament of society. The lighthouse
still stands and the light still burns bright.
Long live the king. —Frank
Kelly Rich
