It’s a bleak start to the day when the news of the death of one of your all-time favorites hits you like a sledgehammer before you’ve even sipped your morning coffee. Such was the case when I saw the ESPN front page today, where it’s reported that gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. He was 65 or 67, depending upon the sources I’ve seen so far.

Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is on my short list of desert island books; I never tire of reading its hilarious, harrowing, savage prose, and it certainly inspired the occasional rant and reference around here. His collections of Rolling Stone columns and other essays, such as the The Great Shark Hunt, are some of the most astute and acerbic political commentary anywhere. I’ve got an unfinished copy of Hey, Rube!, a collection of his post-millenial columns for ESPN’s Page 2, sitting not three feet from my desk as I type this.

Given his hard-driving lifestyle and outrageous behavior, it’s amazing that he lived this long, and quite apparent to even his most ardent fans that his best work — a unique and indelible mark on journalism based on injecting the reporter headlong into the story — was behind him. That such an injection (no pun intended; he wasn’t a needle man) was often fueled by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol that would fell a herd of rhinos is beside the point, mostly, because when he stared into the heart of darkness, that crazy bastard felt like the last sane reporter on earth.

Of his style’s genesis, the New York Times has this to say:

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

“I’d blown my mind, couldn’t work,” he told Playboy. “So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.”

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it “a breakthrough in journalism,” an experience he likened to “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.”

Thompson was never better than when he was writing about Richard Nixon, his arch-nemesis, and one of my favorite pieces of his is his scathing eulogy of the disgraced former President:

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing–a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”

…If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

The truth never sounded more brutal than when it came out of Thompson’s typewriter, and the fear and loathing he reserved for the men in the corridors of power is all too absent in today’s reportage. There are a few more of his presidential eulogies I’d like to have read, and perhaps his demise’s timing with today’s holiday is but one more (final?) ironic twist to his tale. Alas it will be left to somebody else to pick up that particular baton, but as Thompson would say, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

The San Francisco Chronicle has a lengthy obit. ESPN’s Page 2 has an archive of his columns, while Salon has several pieces about him, and his unofficial home page, The Great Thompson Hunt, has a trove of pieces by and about him as well. I suspect Rolling Stone will have something weighty and worthwhile to say in short order, as he was hands down the most important writer to grace its pages back when that mag was a true (counter)cultural force.

Farewell, HST. Thanks for the laughs and the inspiration, but more importantly, thanks for telling the terrifying truth as only you could.