Hunter

Here's something I think no one but me can say honestly:

Back when I had a brain tumor, Hunter Thompson visited me in my hospital room and autographed my Bible.

I was in college and the brain tumor was a misdiagnosis.  Hunter was speaking on campus and a shameless group of my friends went up to him after and made what was apparently a Make-a-Wish-Foundation kind of plea: Come see our dying friend.  He strolled into my hosptital room with a bottle of Wild Turkey in his hand.

By the time he got there I didn't have a brain tumor anymore.  Repeats of tests revealed that what had been a life-threatening handball in my left temporal lobe was, in fact, a flaw in the x-ray film.  (My aunt, who is a Christian Scientist, believes I was healed for a purpose.)  We had a little party to celebrate, and before he left he wrote this in the Bible my mother had brought me:

Yes...ahem...well...we all have our churches then, don't we.

Then he did some bizarre signature that sort of folded into itself that included his first and last names, and then a bigger version of his first name, and then his initials, as if he kept changing his mind about how he was going to sign while he was signing.  I remember wondering how he ever finished anything.

I read just about everything he ever published.  I spent a couple of years working on a college paper trying to be him.  Like hundreds or thousands of other writers, I fucked up my style completely trying to write the way he did.  (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail may have been the first blog, filled with opinion and rumors and innuendo.)  I stopped reading his stuff on purpose so I could get back to writing like me.

I can't say, in all honesty, that I'm surprised he killed himself.  What else was he going to do, clean up his act and become an elder statesman?  I don't think so.

Thanks, Hunter, for stopping by.

Comments

[michelle]

Cool story. Glad to know your brain's not filled up with anything other than your own wacky thoughts.

[Nate]

Very cool. I read HST as an impressionable 20 something. Re-read most all of it later. I think I even have a couple of his books stashed around, saved for my kids, as history of what those eras were like. In reality, they might have only been like that to HST but I think he found a way to express a lot of the weirdness that were the 60s and 70s. Neither of my 20 something kids seems the least bit interested though...