By Tim Redmond

The beat he staked out for himself, he said, was "the death of the American Dream." Interviewers later suggested to him that he in a way embodied the dream. They said he exploded in profanity, but ultimately conceded that perhaps he did.

San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 21, 2005

But for just a moment, I'd like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o'clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own collected works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a terrace looking down at the Plaza Fountain.

Very strange.

I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone ... and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right off this fucking terrace 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.

Nobody could follow that act. Not even me....

Hunter S. Thompson

Introduction to The Great Shark Hunt (Summit Books, 1979)

I CAN'T TELL if Hunter Thompson would be furious or just sickly amused to realize that he was going to have to share the obituary page with Gidget. But it's oddly appropriate: the good doctor and Sandra Dee were five years and one giant, festering American dream apart, teens of the 1950s who came to represent two very different ends of an era.

Thompson came out of Louisville, Ky., went into the Air Force ("according to one account, as part of a parole agreement," the San Jose Mercury News noted), and was discharged after only a year because he clearly wasn't military material. By the mid-1960s, he was in San Francisco, where his savage distaste for authority mingled with the emerging High Hippie ethos, the Hells Angels, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and the New Left in a way that changed American journalism forever.

Thompson was never really a part of the Summer of Love crowd – in many ways, he was more comfortable with the outlaw bikers than the flower children, whose behavior was way too mellow and tame for his taste. Thompson liked an edge. He wore his hair short, put his cigarettes in long holders, and was prone to and excited by violence.

• • •

By the mid-1970s, after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, he had also become a pop culture icon. Hollywood optioned his stories. College kids paid money to hear him talk (and half of them tried to write like him). He became a character in Doonesbury. He both loved and hated the attention: Like most writers, he was something of an egomaniac, and the royalties and speaking fees helped pay for his somewhat expensive lifestyle. But he was also a deeply private person who seemed to hate being bothered by his fans, most of whom he dismissed as idiots.

In all of the endless mainstream press obituaries, Thompson is described as having invented "gonzo journalism," a form of reporting where he, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "inject[ed] himself so much into the narrative that he became the story." True enough: in fact, in most of his reports, he portrays himself as a bumbling, drunken incompetent who barely makes it through life – which was, along with his wicked sense of humor, a large part of his charm.

But beyond the image, Thompson wasn't incompetent at all: He was actually a first-rate political reporter. Campaign Trail '72 is one of the best books on a political campaign ever written, and it's full of insights that none of the other legions of brilliant reporters covering the Nixon-McGovern race had.

And what's been lost in most of the obits was the fact that "gonzo" wasn't just about first-person adventures. As Thompson once put it, "Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism – and the best journalists have always known this. Which is not to say that fiction is necessarily 'more true' than journalism – or vice versa – but that both 'fiction' and 'journalism' are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end."

And that end, for Hunter Thompson, was The Truth, in capital letters. He came to it from a weird direction, and wandered around it in strange and sometimes ugly ways, but in the end, that's where he was always headed.

• • •

I met Thompson only once, back about 10 years ago, when he was promoting one of his later books, the ones that sold because he was Hunter S. Thompson, not because they were terribly good. They mostly weren't: Thompson once said that he'd never intended to live beyond 27, and I think it's safe to say that by the time he was 40, he'd said all he had to say, and there wasn't much more after that except the reruns.

But I had to agree to do the interview; this was the guy who made me want to be a journalist. He was registered in a posh downtown hotel under the name of Benjamin Franklin; he told me he used that one because he could usually manage to remember it even when he was really, truly fucked up. When I got there, a local doctor was treating him for serious cuts and bruises on his face; his personal assistant told me that he'd leapt out of the car at some point late the previous night and decided to dive into the water near Seal Rock and commune with the seals. The tide and currents were bad, and he wound up getting smashed pretty badly against some boulders. He almost drowned.

By the time I arrived, though, he was in pretty good spirits, shouting at the poor doc ("You are all quacks, all of you!") and eating his way through a truly massive room-service meal that seemed to include several pasta dishes, at least one sandwich of some sort, various bowls of fruit, and an entire pizza. He was sucking some hash out from under a glass and drinking tequila. We hit it right off.

The thing that impressed me most was that the guy was genuinely funny. Everything was a goof. He tried to trick his assistant into making a really bad bet. He tried to tell me all sorts of lies about what he was doing. He really wanted to call a bunch of my friends and make up bizarre stories about me and see if they could figure out who was on the phone. This was not someone who seemed to be tired of life.

• • •

I don't know why he shot himself. Maybe he was just done. I can imagine it would be hard to be an 80-year-old Hunter Thompson, hobbling around and hearing doctors tell you to stop drinking and smoking. I suspect that, like Edward Abbey, Thompson wouldn't have wanted to die in a hospital.

But he leaves a great hole in the warp and woof of my reality. The world is a smaller, cheaper place without him.

And to quote my favorite new dead writer, I know all the lights went dim in Fat City the night they heard he'd finally cashed his check.