What I Learned From Doc
As soon as the word got out that Hunter S. “Doc” Thompson had shot himself, obituaries and retrospectives poured out, online and in print. Some were shitty (The Village Voice). Some were fantastic (Tom Wolfe for the Wall Street Journal). All spoke to the creative force of his demiurgic persona, to his self-characterization, and to his embodiment of Nixon-era counter-culture. But all paled in comparison to the full-throttled elegy he would have scribed.
Thompson never held himself at arm’s length from his subjects; he bear-hugged them (even the druggies and rapists) and then wrote about it. His journalistic philosophy was rooted in the existential philosophy of Heidegger, who posited the collapse of the subject and object; Doc believed that the observer of a situation necessarily becomes an agent in that situation. He wrote himself into his stories, and gave birth to gonzo journalism. He’s still the only Rolling Stone writer cooler than the cats he wrote about.
I believe that Doc would have been disappointed with the articles that celebrated his life and work. The writing was measured. Flattering. Boring.
I put the appreciations away and made a drink. I decided he needed something better than The Village Voice was giving. He needed to be elegized as he would have elegized himself.
Anybody who covers his beat for 20 years—and my beat is ‘The Death of the American Dream’—needs every goddamned crutch he can find
I have a press pass, but I get there early. Jack, my truant brother, doesn’t show, so I sit on the pavement outside the Ballroom (a tiny, tired converted roller rink) in North London with a kid from Peterborough. His red hair is shellac-ed, and he talks about Welsh rap. He’s wearing white shoes shaped like elongated diamonds. He smokes rollies.
It’s freezing, so me and the kid from Peterborough start drinking from little green bottles that he gets from a convenience store. The scalpers show up. They don’t look the type to tolerate a bunch of teenage detritus still worshipping the Quadrophenia years. They look like filthy, cracked-out thieves.
Particularly this short, wrinkled bastard with tattoos on his earlobes. He nods at us and then trades tickets for smack with two chattering Scandinavian girls in skirts.
[Belinda was] an all-knowing, dissolute slut horse
Doc won’t be remembered for his characterization of (and participation in) a culture, his uncovering of facts and exposing of wrongs. He’ll be remembered for spitting invective.
He was a Shakespeare of the sound-byte, the sucker punch, the hyperbolic epithet. His 1994 Rolling Stone obituary for Richard Nixon, whom he loathed, was titled “He Was a Crook”; his catchphrase was “Fear and Loathing.” With language, he was a fetishist, a libertine, drunk on whiskey and the utter extravagance of his writing.
And he was funny. An article on the high-brow world of polo players was titled “Polo Is My Life: Fear and Loathing in Horse Country.” In the opening section, he describes being trapped in a stall while his ‘Uncle Lawless’ beats a rabid horse with a two-by-four; the horse “commit[s] suicide” by biting the trigger on Lawless’ gun.
Any writer should use words so well.
This is a Political Trial, and I am nothing if not a politician. I understand vengeance
Jack shows up and I tipsily berate him for leaving me alone in this wasteland of dirty warehouses. (Lucky the Peterborough kid was there.) Jack’s writing for an upstart magazine. I’m there under the pretense of writing for someone or something. I have no plan to do so. I just wanted the ticket.
It’s getting darker, and a crowd of dressed-up scenesters queues. Lame kids, admittedly. A skinny-tied Scandinavian joins the end of the 100-person line. He has a black eye and is shouting into his mobile phone in broken English. Some kid had hit him in the street and run off. I hug the cracked plaster frame to the entrance and tell Jack to hurry up and sell his extra.
Problem is, the scalpers have extras also. Jack circles around a bunch of likelies before the tattooed scalper can get to them, just to get the bloody ticket off his hands.
“What the fuck are you doing,” the tattooed scalper sneers.
“Fuck off,” says Jack, staring him down.
The scalper’s a midget, but Jack was raised in a house of women and weighs about 140 pounds soaking wet. I motion to Jack to back off.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism - which is true, but they miss the point
The two greatest journalists of the last 50 years owe their success to lies and bourbon. Really. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer working for a no-name syndication agency when he heard a tip, blagged his way into a military attorney’s office (a tactic he has since called “smarmy”), and hunted down Lieutenant William J. Calley. He broke the story on the My Lai Massacre after he bought Calley steak and bourbon.
Doc owes his fame to his self-lionizing, hard-drinking ways as much as he does to his infiltration of the lawless Hell’s Angels or his chronicling of Nixon’s campaign.
Hersh was singularly committed to digging up the truth, to exposing lies. Thompson was committed not only to exposing lies, but to shaming the liar. When he was writing his best—when he was writing about Nixon—he wasn’t a journalist. He was an avenger and an elegist.
His writing was mournful, wounded, and intensely personal, even though the invective he hurled was superficial and the drugged-out trips painfully clichéd. He didn’t have the cold, analytical mind of Hersh (who admitted that he broke the My Lai story mostly because he lusted for the Pulitzer). Doc had the necessarily disappointed ideals of Kerouac and Bukowski. His writing always turned the knife, but never forgot the beating heart.
I was proud and goddamn happy for the chance to dance with you.
Jack fronts some dumb shit to get the scalper out of his face. The scalper pushes his shoulder and Jack pushes him back. At this point, the 200-strong line of people starts staring and mumbling.
The red-headed Peterborough kid saunters up to the scalper. The drink probably had something to do with this. In Dieter-accented English, he says, “If you fight him, you fight all of us.”
The preening adolescents in the line outside the venue clap and form a circle. The scalper mumbles a few swears and skulks off to his three-legged dog. I’m drunk and Jack’s thrilled because he nearly got in a fight.
Inside, we listen with the drunk and stoned Swedes. But now, we roll deep. We’re a family of strangely dressed, drunken, threatened kids. People hug each other. The band seems boring in comparison.
This article at least justifies the press pass I lied my way into.
So, this is what I learned from Doc.
Write with adjectives, a narrative, a story. Let other people write the dry news shit. Write yourself into the story if you were a participant. (Lord knows if I weren’t there, Jack would have fought, and I could have an eyeless brother.) Write what’s interesting, because sometimes the crowd is more interesting than the band.
Most of all, write with heart and sadness, because journalism is photographic; it captures a moment that has since slipped away.
Annie M. Lowrey is an Associate Editor for FM. She is sad that Hunter S. Thompson is dead.