Football Season Is Over
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.
Hunter’s last words.
I wrote this the day he died.
Words on the Death of Hunter
So he’s gone, that self-mythologising old bastard. The man who churned up the febrile sod of my imagination years ago. The crazy fool who showed me that no it can be done like this and for me nothing was ever the same again.
To me Hunter represented the exhilarating freedom of writing. That rush of the creative thrill to throw open the locked encrusted doors of the id and let loose what you find there. As an angry, bitter young man; reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I understood for the first time what could be accomplished. You could write like this? I found in him a hero of sorts. For all his faults, all of them, Hunter still makes me feel giddy with excitement when I read his work. When he is on form there is no one to touch him. That searing blasting talent to which all of us who scribble in his shadow must pay deference. There are few people I have ever tried or wanted to emulate in my life but Hunter was one of them. Not the drugs nor the guns or the bad craziness but the sheer willpower and audacity of the man. I unashamedly desired the power to write like that man.
His limitations as a creative artist, his struggles to achieve greater heights after that blistering debut touched a personal chord. All the stories I have written since that moment in my life, all the characters I have let on the page The Gurrier Murphy, The Bastard Kesey, Heinous, Dirty John et al owe as much to Hunter as to the friends from whom they sprang. I have loved writing about them for the past decade. They have entertained me greatly and it’s been wonderful to share them with others. They live because I learned from Hunter how to let that tone into my writing and to embrace it. The Fear.
Suicide is a stark harsh end to this man’s life. A life lived both intensely privately and in the public eye. We have lost a great writer today and that will be the general consensus. Yet a man whom for the past 20 years was almost universally reported as burnt out, past it, and a wasted talent. Perhaps Hunter was an anachronism, a writer and journalist who outlived his era and oeuvre. I say we never needed him more than we do now. We need the young Hunter, the raging, screaming Hunter shooting guns at the Whitehouse press core and denouncing the President as a rabid beast in the national press.
I would have liked to see Hunter live on into advanced old age, circa 2025 motorised wheelchair equipped with shotguns and cretin seeking pipebombs, liver replaced by a mutated Ukranian bought stemcell meatorgan grown from the replicated DNA of John Wayne chasing Republican presidential candidates through the convention hall dragging a naked screaming Karl Rove behind him on a strips of barbed wire, the ghost of Nixon cackling in the background.
But I think Hunter lived his life always as he saw fit. He shared just some small part of it with us in his writings and for that we should be thankful. He ended it now as he saw fit also. I will not speculate on my thoughts on why he did so. Hunter never needed nor asked permission for anything in his life and I doubt he felt he needed anyone’s permission to end it. He’s gone now Dr. Gonzo has left us to join the pantheon.
Godspeed Hunter.