ONE YEAR AFTER HIS SUICIDE, HUNTER S. THOMPSON IS REMEMBERED: THE GREEN LIGHT IS PASSED TO US AS A TORCH

By Thomas Brennan

A year after his suicide on February 20th, 2005, I've come to realize that Hunter S. Thompson was like a father to me. I was a fatherless 15-year-old trying to find a place in the world where I fit when I first read "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas," in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. I had already read "Hell's Angels," which I thought was going to be a sleazy exploitation paperback on a subject that was de rigueur for male teens in those years. It turned out to be a book that read as clean, as well, and as smart as J.D. Salinger and Camus and Fitzgerald, all of whom I had just started to read.

So, when the issue of Rolling Stone containing Part 1 of "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" arrived, I knew I was onto something big, and I deliberately waited to buy Part 2 and then read this new piece all at once. It was an autumn Saturday night/Sunday morning in 1971 when I finally set both issues down and cracked the first one open. Rolling Stone was a compact, foldable tabloid in those years, with good thick paper, and the tactile process of turning and folding and unfolding the pages soon became a feast of laughter. I couldn't believe it. I was laughing aloud in the middle of the night in a way that I hadn't laughed since I'd seen "Dr. Strangelove" for the first time a few months before on the ABC Sunday Night Movie.

And for the same reasons. I was laughing unrestrainedly at a satire that dared to name unnameable things and speak unspeakable thoughts. But underlying it all was such a sure and coherent structure that I knew this man reverenced the written word, and that he burned to heal others by teaching them to laugh at things that most deserved it and people who most deserved it. I knew I had found a code, and I knew millions of others out there in the night must feel the same way about this writer. It was a private treasure you'd want to find more of.

Now that he is one year dead, that is what really matters. Not the suicide and the similarity to Hemingway's, not the excesses, and not the persona. What matters is honoring a man who would work so hard at finding this rare form of prose and all of the work that he created. And most of all, the sacred compact of any writer-reader relationship; the fact that he opened up my teenage mind to how language can be used. Thompson's lesson was that one could construct a Vital Voice. One that takes root in people.

Now, the funny thing is, I hated drugs as a teen. It was an all-out, all-drug era, and I saw so many friends and their older siblings becoming drugged-out and drugged-down. I also hated guns as teen. I was raised by a totally non-violent single mom. So why Thompson?

I loved Thompson because of that Vital Voice. When you read him, you hear the music of the keys of the typewriter striking paper. Striking the paper with a precision of language.

He hailed not far from where the Kentucky Derby is held, and maybe this is an apt simile. In his best pieces, Thompson's prose shoots from the gate like a pure thoroughbred, with the propulsion of the insights and words hitting like hooves. The velocity of inspiration carries you forward, barely hanging on toward a finish that urges you to yell for more.

And that is what I really mean about being my father. Thompson's prose provided the best kind of comfort food for the millions of us starving on the flaccid platitudes and turgid cliches of the ever-dumber Official Language of Government, and the ever-dumber Official Language of TV. Providing comfort food is what a father should do.

Hunter Thompson's favorite novel, he would often say, was "The Great Gatsby." He would even at one point say that to learn to write well in the English language, just type the entire "Gatsby" as a project, and you will learn the possibilities for rhythm and depth in expression that the English language holds.

I will not quote the entire ending of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," but in this passage toward the very end of the book, as I read it again, I realized in my soul two distinct facts: That you can substitute the name Hunter Thompson for Gatsby, and that Fitzgerald's Green Light is the Awe-Inspiring Promise For America that Thompson bravely, mercilessly, and fully tried to instill in all of us who read him.

"I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further--and one fine morning..."

Hunter S. Thompson now passes that Green Light on to us all as a torch.

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Thomas Brennan is a Santa Monica, California, resident and co-owner of Tom Brennan Media, a media placement firm based in Santa Monica.

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