Hunter S Thompson Ends the Ride

Hunter Thompson's last ride...

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the bats began to take hold. This time I let them.

Selah.


The ride is over. The ticket was paid in full.

I read much of Hunter Thompson's output, from the Hell's Angels stuff back in the 60's to the very last column on the ESPN website, dated February 15, 2005. Like many writers, he outlived his best work, losing energy and fire as he grew older.

I don't know the circumstances that led him to punch his ticket out himself, what demons and torments physical or mental caused the last collapse into self and withdrawal from those around him. Suicide is the last victory of self over living with and for others, it is true.

The retreat to that brink of nothingness is as individual as the man, however, and I will not speculate on Thompson's worthiness or otherwise based on his end alone. When I was younger, I did not hesitate to render judgement in such a case. In the summer of 1961, I was driving on the sands of Daytona Beach when the news crackled over the AM car radio that Ernest Hemingway had died at home in Idaho, victim of what the announcer called a "shooting accident." Later reports filled in details; Hemingway had gone downstairs in his house early that morning, while his wife was still getting dressed, and placed the muzzle of one of his shotguns in his mouth and tripped the trigger.

His wife rushed downstairs to find the room spattered with the brain that had created characters from Jake Barnes to the old fisherman fighting the shark. The shark had beaten Hemingway, more completely than it did the old fisherman. It was a horrible thing to leave his wife to deal with the wreckage of his body and mind. In 1961 I judged Hemingway most severely for that.

I was seventeen.

Now, a life away from that hot Florida day, I am sixty, and of the few things I have learned, the most certain is that each life is unknowable to others, at its most basic. We share much with others, our family, our lovers, our friends, but there is a last redoubt where we keep our deepest self. When that self crumbles, from whatever cause, everything else will collapse into nothingness, and no consideration of love or duty or decency enters into the final act.

After the fact I learned from biographies the sad story of Hemingway's decline into physical and mental decay, the suffering he and his family endured. I don't know what Hunter Thompson's last years were like, other than his writing powers were waning. For me, the jury is still out. I will hope that clemency is more justified than condemnation in Thompson's case, as in Hemingway's.