Gonzo, not forgotten

Gonzo, not forgotten

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/gonzo-not-forgotten/2005/07/23/1121539189130.html

Rich Tosches
Aspen, Colorado

July 24, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson's memorial service will be as unusual and dramatic as the writer's life.
In just a few weeks a cannon will roar a few kilometres down the road from this Mecca of Mink, a cannon that sits atop a bizarre 47-metre metal sculpture of a fist. The big gun will launch half of the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson hundreds of metres into the air above his rustic Woody Creek home.

Thompson's wife and his only child will keep the other half of the author's ashes. They sent the rest to a Hollywood explosives expert who packed them into a mortar shell, above a layer of gunpowder.

His memorial service, like his life, will be very loud.

And if the weather charts hold true, the wind will blow from the west or north-west as usual and carry the whacky journalist from his backyard into the majestic White River National Forest to spend eternity in peace and harmony.

In the short term, until there's a good cleansing rain, he might spend some time in the thick hair of a bewildered elk that might still smell the scotch in Thompson's ashes.

Thompson, whom the BBC called "an unflinching and acerbic chronicler of US counterculture", was riddled with disease and confined to a wheelchair when he shot himself in the head at his home on February 20. He was 67.

The cannon-blast of his ashes through his trademark gonzo fist will mark the six-month anniversary of his death. It will be part of a private service because his widow, Anita, does not want it to be like a circus. This means, presumably, that when he is blasted from the cannon, there won't be a net.

Thompson became famous with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a 1972 work that the New York Times Book Review called "the best book on the dope decade".

Here is what Thompson wrote in that book — just on the first page — about a trip with a lawyer friend from Los Angeles to Nevada: "The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured 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. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge."

He wrote 14 similar books. The Curse of Lono in 1983 and Songs of the Doomed in 1990 still have legions of followers, mostly in the waiting rooms of methadone clinics.

Then he killed himself and now they're going to fire the brilliant, funny, politically incorrect scribe's ashes out of a cannon in his backyard, three kilometres from the Woody Creek Tavern where he often sat, his right hand seemingly glued to a glass of Chivas Regal.

Among those invited to Thompson's last blast is Bob Braudis, sheriff of Pitkin County.
Sitting in his office in Aspen, Braudis talked about the man who was, for 35 years, his best friend.

"It will start, I think, as a solemn memorial service and funeral, and eventually become a celebration of Hunter's life," said Braudis, 60, a big man with really bad knees from too many years of attack skiing.

He came to Aspen from Boston in the mid-1960s, a ski bum reporting to duty, and met Thompson in 1970 in a local bar. They shook hands. The next thing Braudis knew, he was drunk, and the two men became inseparable.

In a few weeks, he will stand in the same yard where, for more than three decades, the two friends drank, talked and laughed.

"I think of Hunter as a clown and a jester, and a polo star and a man with a good conscience," Braudis said.

"When he talked about the cannon and his ashes he was serious with a smirk. But Hunter was always serious with a smirk."

And when the cannon goes off, Hunter S. Thompson will vanish on the wind into the national forest.

The wind could gust from the south-east towards the neighbouring town of Basalt and its many open-air-patio restaurants, which makes for the reasonable chance that a tourist could get an extra topping on their pizza.

- Denver Post