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 It's been over a year since Rev. Dr. Mariposa's last posting in his Life on the Faultline series. He and I have bandied a number of article ideas back and forth of the intervening year, but nothing really seemed to grab the zeitgeist of the Ahnoldian occupation in Cullifornia that had sparked the column's inception. That is, until the passing of our mutual idol, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. I didn't even have to ask Felix to share his comments on HST's death - he sent them almost immediately.

A who's who of the world's thinkers and writers have already shared their thoughts on the great Raoul Duke himself, HST - Christopher Hitchens, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe... Their perspectives are valid for historical value, but I think it is the younger generation of writers like Felix and the other Great Hoboes who Hunter affected the most. Hitchens, Mailer, and Wolfe would have existed without him. They wouldn't have been as interesting, perhaps, but Dr. Thompson served as a reluctant mentor, guide and tastemaker to a whole generation of writers who came of age in the 80s and early 90s. Contrary to what he may have expected, his books became textbooks to our new generation of writers and journalists. Without further ado, I'd like to present Felix' obituary for He Who Will Never Be Replaced.

Life on the Faultline, Vol. 3 - (no title)

Wednesday February 23, 2005 - Oakland

by Rev. Felix Roy Mariposa

I bought my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, just like a lot of other people, while I was in college. I found a beat-up paperback with yellowed pages and a heavily creased cover at a used bookstore in rural Massachusetts that had originally been a paper mill. Not as poor as the college student archetype, I certainly could've afforded a shiny new copy, with a glossy cover and reverential blurbs on the back. But my companion on this literary shopping trip, a young woman from the Black Sea with whom I was madly in love with at the time, observed that the worn pulp with the lurid orange cover was the only appropriate edition to own.

She was right.

I remember two things about Monday morning. It was raining. This was not unusual for Northern California. And the Faultline was completely silent. That was unusual.

I stumbled out of my darkened bedroom, into the gloom of the kitchen - the current source of my paychecks was demanding an early morning of me this particular day, and the sun was not yet up. But my dear sainted mother was, and she told me the twin top stories on the Pacifica Radio news that morning:

Patty, Marge Simpson's sister, had come out of the closet. And Hunter S. Thompson was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Doctor Gonzo had done to himself what no combination of alcohol, mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin could. What no bizarre adventure through the restrooms of the powerful and streets of the depraved could.

The first question I had was the one everyone probably had - or at least, everyone who took this man seriously. I'm sure this came as no surprise to the provincial masses that took Thompson to be a novelty act. See the drunken, erratic author! But for those of us who cared, we wanted to know why.

I suspect we may never know the whole truth, because the only person who could tell the story right is also the subject.

The speculation is already in the obituaries, that a combination of depression and pain from a leg injury made him do it. Others thought it might be an accident. I dismiss that immediately - rumors of Hunter's erratic nature have been greatly exaggerated. The man was calculated about everything - his life, his public persona, and especially his words and art. Everything had a purpose, especially the random crazy bullshit.

But depression? Maybe. There's a few things I can see the good Doctor getting depressed about. For one thing, the swine were on the rise again. Our president has been described as "the most undemocratic since Richard Nixon sat, drunk and alone, in the Oval Office." (Some writer in The Nation said that, and I'm paraphrasing, and far too fucking lazy to look up the attribution.) The leader of the free world might as well be the bastard child of the omnipresent Gonzo nemesis named Nixon, conceived in an orgy of deregulation and born of a Jesus Freak's womb, with Dick Cheney as midwife and Henry Kissinger as wet nurse.

Things had gotten so bad that the episode of The Simpsons that aired the night Hunter died opened with a card that read, "Due to discussions"--DISCUSSIONS!--"of same-sex marriage, parental discretion is advised." Of all the things to put a warning label on... I picture Thompson in an easy chair, getting ready to watch Homer's latest madcap adventure, whiskey sour and cigarette holder in hand, reading that and blowing himself away just as the couch gag ends the opening titles.

Maybe I'm projecting.

Or maybe, at 67 years, he decided it was time to die before he got old. This is the way I picture it. What could be a worse fate, to trivialize all the work he'd done, than to end up on some inane VH1 Countdown-Retrospective, summarized in four minutes by blurbs spouted out by C-list TV stars, and stand-up comics no one's ever heard of, and Mark fucking McGrath.

Because, let's face it, our society is extremely cruel for the creative, for the unique, and for the pioneers. And there's two paths to go down - be Paul McCartney, and mellow into such a pop commodity that people forget why you're famous, forget your genius and just buy your product because they think they should, or be John Lennon, and keep true to your path, and to yourself, and almost inevitably be claimed too soon.

Thompson was enough of a control freak, he had to be on both sides of the assassin's gun.

The guns, the drugs, they were all symptoms of the pain of being truly different in our conformist society. Be yourself, we're all told, but don't be different. The two statements are irreconcilable for men like Hunter S. Thompson. There are people who believe that drugs can make people creative - I believe the opposite. That it's so hard to be creative in our culture that many of the truly creative turn to drugs in frustration, for a release that only become permissible with a chemical excuse.

Would Fear and Loathing have been any different with a stone cold sober Raoul Duke? Not substantially, but he probably wouldn't have survived it as well.

Then there's the guns. Frankly, there's no other way Hunter could have died but with a gunshot; they were inseparable from the mythos. And there could be no more appropriate symbol for Hunter Thompson than the gun: It's loud. It's dangerous. It can kill you - or protect you. It's often fatal, but it's report is ultimately fleeting, though it may echo in the distance.

And so it was very quiet on the Faultline that morning, because a voice that had so eloquently expressed the pain and confusion, the sorrow and the joy, and of course, the fear and loathing, of being alive in this sorry world of ours was now silent.

The inscription on the first page of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reads, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Once again, no one could find the right words better than Hunter.

"Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll."
- Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

WEBSITE OF THE MOMENT
http://www.beltbuckleshop.com/page/belt/CTGY/wcg
Commemorate Hunter with something to hold your pants up.

NEWS YOU CAN USE!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/08/14/MNbarstool.DTL
Neither a chapter of Hunter's life, nor an episode of Reno 911.

--Posted on The Great Hoboes of New York on April 1, 2005