One Of God's Own Prototypes

"Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time."

It was August of 1999, and I had just woken up with both the mother of all headaches and a stomach that felt as hollow and dry as the tongue that was glued to the roof of my mouth. It was ten-thirty in the morning, and I had gone to bed less than three hours before. I rolled over and snatched up my phone.

"'Lur?"

"C."

"Murk? He coughed and then spat away from the phone, though not so far as to prevent me from suppressing a dry heave. "Mike?"

"Yeah. Me."

"The last thing I remember about last night was leaving the Long Island Iced Tea Shop."

"Never mind that. We're going to Chessington."

A beat of silence, and then: "Right. See you in ten minutes."

Seven minutes later I was out of the front door and falling into his car, sucking at the first cigarette of the day and gurning as its harsh flavour mingled with the Colgate I hadn't quite washed out of my mouth, making me feel sicker than ever. C, half-drunk and manic, was hunched over the steering wheel. With his eyes hidden behind shades, his teeth clamped around a cigarette holder, and a hat pulled down over his head, he looked the spitting image of Raoul Duke. Without saying a word, he leaned over and popped open the glove compartment. I reached inside and pulled out an oversized pair of aviator shades. C smiled and started the car, and Johnny Depp's voice exploded from the speakers at a quite incredible volume.

"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert," he said, "when the drugs began to take hold."

In the summer of 1999, C and I had been acquaintances for around six months. That week, we forged a bond that will last until one of us dies. Why or how it happened is difficult to recall now, but we decided to take a week's holiday from work at the same time, and we decided to spend it getting out of our heads and charging around the country in C's knackered old Peugeot. Those days run into one another in my memory, but I'll always remember the spirit of that week, and the feeling we shared that we were a lunatic partnership walking in the footsteps of the characters from films like Withnail And I, Fight Club, and especially Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

Funny to think of it now, but I started out roleplaying Dr. Gonzo to C's Raoul Duke because we got incredibly drunk one night and watched Terry Gilliam's adaptation of a Hunter S. Thompson novel neither of us had actually read. We didn't care for the era the story was set in or the protagonist's search for the American Dream. What we cared about was the idea of two complete maniacs with 'two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers...and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls'. It didn't really matter to us that Depp and Del Toro as Duke and Gonzo had been on the way to Vegas in a red Chevy convertible while we were generally on our way to the West End on the Northern Line. It was the principal of the thing. We were losing our minds and tempting our demons and it was all okay because we were riding for the Gonzo brand.

Except we weren't. Like a lot of people, we grasped the salient points of Thompson's journey into Fear And Loathing without ever considering context or attempting to read between lines that, after all, were covered with beer, vomit, and a fine dusting of cocaine. No, we bought into the 'violent iconoclast' vision of Hunter Thompson that is even now the most common definition, and we - like many before us and many after - considered him a peerless superman whose special power was his craving for illegal substances, a guy that snorted and smoked and drank and ran wild without fear of the consequences.

I finally sat down and read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas about a month later. By the end of the year, I'd read everything Thompson had ever written, and I'd quit pretending to be Dr. Gonzo except when I was really drunk.

Since then, I've referenced HST more often than I care to remember. He's been a powerful influence on my prose, my politics, and my worldview. I've riffed on his style and tempo more than a few times, and I've quoted him where I felt my own words were less than adequate. If you're familiar with Thompson's adventures in Aspen politics and the pieces he wrote regarding the Freak Power movement, then you might have seen very definite echoes of the views he espoused in my essays on the current political climate. All this is not to say that I've emulated or plan to emulate Hunter. I just feel that reading his work gave me a sense of hope that the gap between the music I hear in my head and the words I eventually use to describe it could be bridged. That isn't something you learn at school, and it certainly isn't something that people who claim they know the rights and wrongs of writing prose really understand.

There's a lot about Thompson that people will never really understand. He wouldn't have been the celebrity he was were it not for his hard-earned Outlaw and Iconoclast badges, but by the same token, it was descriptions like those that coloured any reading of his work and meant that a descent into self-parody was almost inevitable.

Thompson and his alter ego Raoul Duke were creatures of the sixties and seventies. His natural allies were guys like Ken Kesey, and his natural enemy was Richard Nixon. That era's atmosphere of opposition and upheaval was the perfect springboard for Hunter's cutting opinions and graphic, lyrical prose. He was never better than when he was allowed to run free amongst the straight media and the politicians, reporting back with a sort of weary naivety interspersed with brutal trips into crazed fantasy that were frequently bought to hideous life by illustrator Ralph Steadman. This partnership arguably peaked with the seminal novel Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and then Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, in which Thompson follows George McGovern and Richard Nixon to the dark heart of the American Dream and comes back with what I think is the funniest, truest, most tragic chronicle of modern day politics you will ever read.

Then came Watergate. Nixon limped away to San Clemente and a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter passed the time until Ronald Reagan stomped into office and a lot of people got fat and rich. The story of what changed between the limp climax of Watergate and the election of Ronald Reagan is a novel in itself, but it's fair to say that there wasn't much room for a man like Hunter S. Thompson in this brave new world. He went on writing throughout the eighties, nineties, and even the noughties, but while the style, the outrage, the wry humour, and the talent for lunatic parody were all present and correct, you can't read some of that work without a feeling that Hunter was becoming increasingly irrelevant. His time had passed, and it was senseless for him to cover what had always been his beat - the death of the American Dream - because it was too late. As Thompson himself admitted, the dark tale of the American Dream died with Nixon.

I was up in Bedford, at N's, when my phone buzzed and I looked down at the screen and saw the words 'Hunter Thompson has died'. I said "Oh," and that was all. I sat down and stared at nothing, feeling hollow and slightly breathless. I was thinking of Jenn and I and our pilgrimage to Vegas, of C and I and our seven day drunken rampage, of the first time I read Midnight On The Coast Highway (from Hell's Angels) and realised I'd finally found a writer with the words to reach inside me and twist my heart.

All the obituaries, it seems, are mentioning the same books and the same quotes, using the same adjectives they always use when it comes to Hunter S. Thompson. Seeing that press-pack approach used for a writer so talented, influential, and unique just about broke my heart. Hunter once wrote of his friend Oscar Acosta: '[he] was one of God's own prototypes - a high powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die'. He could, I'm sure, have just as easily been writing about himself. There will be greater writers and there will be lesser writers, but there will never be another Hunter S. Thompson. It's only when you lose such a beautifully discordant note that you realise how much everything else sounds the same.

Res Ipsa Loquitor. Rest In Peace, Hunter.