Homage to an Outlaw

Bill McKeen on the Late, Great Hunter S. Thompson

By John Hood

It’s tempting to say that when Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out with a shotgun in 2005, the event marked the end of an era. The problem is his death didn’t mark the end to anything but his life. See, Thompson belonged to no era, unless you’d care to consider him an era all his own.

You already know the gonzo details: Journeyman reporter breaks big after hanging with — and getting stomped by — the Hell’s Angels and turns his newfound notoriety into a mad dash of a career, first at Scanlon’s, with The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, then at Rolling Stone, with the Fear and Loathing reports. Along the way are whisky by the barrelful, drugs by the score and guns galore. There also is celluloid immortalization, first by Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam, and then by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

More though, there is the work, which not only rips the scabs off a wounded nation and pours salt into the new cuts, but does so with wit, style and violent honesty.

Which is much of the point behind William McKeen’s Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson (Norton $27.95), an homage which explains that if Thompson were not first a talent, he’d never have become a legend.

McKeen makes for a good source on the subject; after all, he did cover the cat back in ’91. And if the two weren’t exactly best buddies, they were close enough for Thompson to have given McKeen an essay gratis — and to have threatened McKeen’s life. Then again, HST threatened to kill just about anybody he came across, especially biographers, so being threatened was really a badge of honor. People who knew him well knew he wouldn’t kill a pal (though he was certainly equipped to do so). It was the recurring threat of suicide that was the concern.

According to McKeen, Thompson “was obsessed with death and wrote about it his whole life.” Better yet, “[h]e even had a place in mind”: Iron Mountain, Ala., a summit just about halfway between Eglin Air Force Base in Florida (where he was stationed early in his life) and downtown Louisville (where his family lived). McKeen quotes HST saying he would “‘come down that mountain road doing a hundred and twenty and keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier … and there I’d be, sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whisky sitting next to me, and a case of dynamite in the trunk.… It’d be a tremendous goddamn explosion.’”

Be that as it may, reading back through Thompson’s life, one can’t help feeling that he spent it all taunting death — the drugs, the liquor, the guns, the bombs, all a big “Fuck You!” to whatever’s out there. Till one day he decided that the only way to really cheat death was to choose when it would come, so he took out his trusty .45 pistol and did what needed to be done.

To McKeen’s credit, the author doesn’t dwell on Thompson’s death, or his antics, or even the antics that took place after his death; instead he delivers a copiously chronicled account of an extremely lived life. It’s the reportorial equivalent of cracking open a fifth of Wild Turkey and sharing it with a grave. Had Hunter’s ashes not been blasted by cannon all over Owl Farm, one gets the feeling he’d be kicking back in his coffin, penning yet another death threat.

William McKeen discusses and signs Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, 8 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 15, at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 305-442-4408.