DISGRACELAND - Hunter S. Thompson: Fear, Loathing, and Gonzo Baby Gonzo

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

The great writer Hunter S. Thompson was nearly beaten to death by Hell's Angels, and then nearly electrocuted in a hotel bathtub when he pissed off the wrong people. He dropped acid with the Merry Pranksters, hunted deer with his car, and carried around an alcoholic monkey in his pocket. He was an outcast, a rebel, and a hellraiser, motivated by anger and the constant need for attention – the latter of which he received in spades when a whole new word had to be created to describe his entirely subjective journalism style. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com. This episode contains themes that may be disturbing to some listeners, including sexual assault and suicide. If you’re thinking about suicide, or are worried about a friend or loved one, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. This episode was originally published on February 29, 2024. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. Stories about Hunter S. Thompson are insane. He was nearly beaten to death by Hell's Angels. He was almost electrocuted in a bathtub when he pissed off the wrong people.

He dropped acid with many people. people, including the legendary Mary Pranksters, hunted deer with his car, and carried around an alcoholic monkey in his pocket. He was an outcast, a rebel, and a risk taker. He was also a hellraiser, arrested his senior year of high school and denied graduation. He was motivated by anger in a world where he witnessed great injustices and even greater bullshit, and he steamrolled all of these things in his writing. Writing that was so great, so unique, that a new word had to be created to describe it. And that great writing was very much unlike that loop I played for you at the top of the show. That was not great. That was a preset loop from my Melotron

called Maybe It was Utah MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to a clip from We Belonged Together by Mariah Carey. And why would I play you that specific slice of emancipation of Mimi Cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on August 20, 2005. And that was the day that Hunter S. Thompson was given a gonzo farewell, as his ashes were shot from a cannon atop a giant fist clutching a peyote button. On this episode, Hell's Angels, bathtub electrocutions, acid, cannons, outcasts, and Hunter S. Thompson. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland.

1966, Mendocino, California. Sunny Barger didn't stop the boys in his motorcycle club from doing whatever they wanted. Right now, that was kicking the shit out of the writer who'd shadowed that. for the past year. Not that Sunny hated the writer like some of the others. If anything, Hunter S. Thompson's take on the Hells Angels, initially appearing in the pages of The Nation, and now expanded into Hunter's first book, made the country's most notorious biker gang appear more mythical than they actually were. But Hunter Thompson wanted to talk a big fucking talk. He wanted to take risks, take life to the edge even.

And some of the guys in Sunny Barger's club thought that Hunter wanted more than he deserved. Taking all that money for his big-time publication, while the boys on their bikes got nothing but someone else's mythology. Hunter S. Thompson may have been born angry. Anger made worse as a poor kid growing up around Louisville's charmed upper crust. But right now, the hell's angels were angrier. They wanted their cut. And if Hunter Thompson didn't have the cash, his blood would do.

The first punch caught Hunter in the face. He felt the cartilage in his nose liquefy. His legs went out from under him, and suddenly he was spread out on the rocky coastline. The angel is swarming overhead like bats. Hunter didn't kid himself that he could actually join a motorcycle gang, even though he was riding with one for his book. But he did see these guys as kindred spirits. After all, it was Hunter who saw similarities between himself, the angels, and the merry pranksters,

Ken Kesey's freak scene that was turning on, tuning in and dropping out over in La Honda. Hunter brought the opposing camps together, the angels with their wine and bennies, and the pranksters with their ass tests. Hunter took his first LSD trip along with the motorcycle club at Kesey's place. He knew his life had been changed forever. After the 72-hour marathon of sex, drugs, and violence came to an end. Long after Neil Cassidy, naked, stood on the side of the road with a pair of binoculars, telling the cops watching them from a distance to fuck off while his ex-wife was being passed around by bearded bikers somewhere inside. Those leather-clad pillagers, their eyes like saucers.

And now the ass had worn off, but the angel's eyes that were bearing down on Hunter, Bleeding out on the Mendocino coast still looked like saucers. Hunter knew that look, the look of an outcast, a rebel. Sunny Barger's gang were risk takers out there on the open road, pushing it all the way to the edge, just like Hunter himself. And just like the Angels, Hunter did it angry. 195, 17-year-old Hunter S. Thompson was a known quantity in Louisville, Kentucky. raising hoodlum whose dead father was no longer around to keep them in line. He shot up mailboxes,

robbed liquor stores, dumped a truckload of pumpkins in a hotel lobby and flooded the school. Petty arson, petty theft. A shrink would call all this acting out a cry for attention, spurred on by the people who surrounded him, the haves and Louisville's polite society, rich kids who led him into their literary club. Real fancy stuff, fancy clothes, fancy books, But just because Hunter was a member of the prestigious Athenian Literary Association didn't mean he was an equal. He had no money and no father, no future in writing. At least that's what the other kids told him. Hunter, they asked him, why the hell are you typing out the Great Gatsby word for word?

To get the rhythm of the language, he told him, could they not understand? Holy Jesus, not even out of high school and already there were bonehead pig fuckers to contend with? Some of those pig fuckers liked him, even carried out his childish pranks with him, but not enough for Hunter to retain membership in their elite club. Senior year, he was voted out, disgraced. And then not long after, arrested, along with two classmates, accused of mugging some other kids for cigarettes.

Once again, Hunter was reminded of his place in Louisville's social hierarchy. No family lawyer to call. All he had was a record. banned from graduation, expelled, jailed. His sentence lasted only a month. And the judge made sure Hunter understood that he was not being released on probation. In fact, until he turned 21,

he would remain under the watchful eye of the Kentucky law. But until then, the Air Force would do him some good. Maybe he even teach him a lesson or two. But all the Air Force did for Hunter S. Thompson was reinforce a deep-seated distrust, downright hatred even for authority. Trapped under Uncle Sam's thumb for two years, he fantasized about leaving. And when the time came, he'd do it in style, idling like a wardhog's fart on account of the fact that it had no muffler.

It had no brakes either, which meant Hunter had one pedal to press and one option to exercise. Full speed ahead. He was hauling ass on the wrong side of the street, exiting the military campuses offensively as humanly. possible. The caddy spewing black smoke, tires squealing, top down. Hunter with one hand on the wheel, the other holding an unopened bottle of wine. Good vintage, better legs. He tossed the bottle at the Air Force Base's gatehouse as the Cadillac went screaming by. Like a Molotov cocktail launched in the enemy territory. The biker's fist, pulverizing his nose, reminded Hunter that this was no fantasy. The angels beating him into a pulp were all too real.

His battered body still splayed along the Mendocino shoreline, fully at the mercy of the hell's angels who had made it their mission to break him. One angel in particular was hoisting a giant rock in the air, preparing to bring it down on Hunter's head and end him for good. Hunter was thinking of his wife now, his young son. He couldn't die here, not like some gutless swine left to shrivel up in the salt there. The birds would get him soon enough. His goddamn flying rats, ridden with disease, pecking out his eyes after the last of the biker gang had jumped on his Harley and disappeared into the California night.

That's when he saw Tiny, a biker who had shown Hunter some compassion in the past, standing at arm's length behind the group of guys now attacking him. All right, come on, Tiny was saying. That's enough. So Tiny escorted Hunter to his car, told him to leave immediately. Hunter wasted no time. He threw the shipbox in a first and struggled to navigate with the one good eye he now had. It was midnight, dark. Any fear hunter experienced down on the beach had morphed into anger.

He was angry about the excruciating pain he was in, and he was spitting up blood all over the dash. And Jesus Christ, his nose. If he didn't do something about it now, tomorrow it would be hard as the rock that that psycho biker tried to brain him with. He pulled the car over to the side of the road. road, and with the help with the car's overhead light in the rearview mirror, performed emergency surgery on his aching schnaws. But Hunter S. Thompson wasn't a surgeon. He was a writer, and it would be a while before he could breathe correctly again. People who met him and saw his

fucked up nose during this stretch of time assumed he was a coke addict, which was funny to Hunter, because cocaine wasn't his thing. Coke wasn't like mescalant, mushrooms. psilocybin, substances that at the time were still legal in the United States. The best thing about those, the thing that made them better than anything else, was that they took hunter to that place where all the outcasts, rebels, and risk-takers went. The place he wrote about at the end of this Hell's Angels book, the dividing line between sanity and insanity, life and death. Like a biker taking a corner way too fast and sliding into the curve,

a.k.a. going over the high side. A classic get-off, as the emcee called it. And the place where you got off was the edge. Vegas, Saigon, Miami, New Hampshire. Football kickoffs, rumbles in the jungle, fear and loathing, the only constant until that inevitable million-pound shithammer comes crashing down. Wherever he was, and whatever he was writing about,

Hunter S. Thompson inserted himself into his journalism, if he could call what he did, journalism. Just as he inserted himself into the most feared motorcycle gang in the world when he rode with the Hells Angels for a year. By making himself part of the story, Hunter was making himself seen and heard, like he always did. Instead of setting fires and knocking over liquor stores like he did as a kid, now as an adult, he dosed the unsuspecting with LSD, set off Roman candles in close quarters, stuck a severed boar's head in a toilet, all gags, all for attention. He wrote as he lived, wild, feral, one moment bleeding into the next.

Some moments deliberately exaggerated to ensure that his audience's eyeballs stayed glued to the page, and others so saturated with truth that you could hardly believe what you were reading. His style, which in its infancy didn't have a name, was the product of his lifestyle. And Big Sur, Hunter whipped his car through the twists and turns of Route 1, hunting deer at night, alongside a whip-it with balls the size of California oranges. 49 attempts, the 50th being the charm, only because the dumb animal found itself caught like a, well, a deer into the headlights and ran headfirst into hunter's vehicle. The dog was better at catching cats anyway.

A hunter simply had to issue the nonverbal command and the whip-it with the mega-nuts sprang into action. Hunter didn't make friends with the folk singer Joan Baez on that particular evening seeing it was her cat on the wrong end of the whip its jaw. In South America, hunters struggled to maintain a steady byline while simultaneously struggling with dysentery, while some fucking bell-told non-stop outside his room. The National Observerer refusing to pay him, those weasled dicks, then stung by some poisonous insect, now forced to spend his beer money on cortisone and antibiotics, which many had to steal the beers two at a time so that the monkey living in his pocket wouldn't go without.

I'm serious. is 100% true. Look it up. The monkey's thirst for alcohol was as unquenchable as hunters. So unquenchable, in fact, that he, the monkey that is, suffering from a bad bout of the DTs, jumped from a 10th floor window ending it all, just as Hunter would end it some 40 years later, not by leaping from great heights, but with the great power of a 45, but I digress. In Chicago, Hunter found the true meaning of America in a cop's nightstick. Mayor Daly's horde of bloodthirsty thugs committing acts of brutality of innocent civilians that would have made the angels blush.

Far more civil was Hunter's one and only meeting with his nemesis, Richard Nixon, in the back of a car as the presidential hopeful was driven to a lear jet waiting for him in New Hampshire. The one stipulation, politics were off the table. Nixon wanted to talk football, which was all the same to Hunter because he already knew he hated Nixon's politics and he'd gladly talk football for hours with anyone, even his enemies. Hunter assumed the feeling was mutual, that he was on Nixon's infamous enemies list. A list that had grown to include Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, the Black Panthers, and Scamlins the anti-authority magazine that hired Hunter to cover the Kentucky Derby.

Hunter took the Kentucky Derby gig without a second thought. He'd cover anything if there was a paycheck attached. Even better if his expenses were paid. He had a wife and a young son. He needed the money. But when it came to the Derby, to Kentucky, his home state, the state that rejected him years earlier, locked him up, kicked him out, publicly humiliated him

while all the other wannabe fuck-ups ran home to their rich daddies. Hunter wasn't just writing an assignment. He was settling a score. Or so said Ralph Stedman, the Welsh artist hired to cover the Derby alongside Hunter for Scanlans. 1970, Churchill Downs. Ralph Stedman had never met Hunter S. Thompson before, but he was easy to spot in the derby crowd.

He was the one in the striped polo, tinted sunglasses, his watch threaded through a leather biker bracelet, white tube socks pulled up to his knees just below his short shorts, sitting at the bar starting a rumor that the Black Panthers were on their way to protest. Anything to rile up the greed heads spilling birds, filling bourbon all over themselves and pretending as though Jackie Robinson had never put on that Dodgers jersey. Hunter had more than his fair share of wisdom concerning Louisville's high society to impart to Ralph, as well as a few extra doses of psilocybin.

Ralph had never done anything like that before. It didn't matter. He was working with Hunter now, so he had to get on Hunter's level. The drug was a truth serum for your eyes. and when you were on this stuff, you were able to see who these southern gentlemen, these southern bells, truly were. Beneath the veneer of respectability was the underbelly.

And I do mean bellies, bloated bellies, shouting, crying, puking, and pissing themselves, losing more money than Hunter or Ralph would ever see in their lives while the horses rounded the track down below. Hunter didn't care about what was happening on the track. That's not why he was here. He was here for the slobber on. on some old fat man's cigar.

The decorum circling the urinal drain. Odorous lizards, all of them, their eyes black, their tongues forked, hissing, screeching, chanting my old Kentucky home like a coven circling a pentagram etched on the floor. And on that floor, in the middle of it all, bloodied and defiled, lay the derby crowd's sacrifice,

the American dream. When it was all said and done, Hunter scrambled to make sense of it all. He was barely able to submit his article under deadline. He felt like he had failed, so stoned on hallucinogens, just like his genteel subjects were stoned on their own bullshit, that his final draft didn't even mention the race itself, which is what Scamlins paid him for in the first place.

But when the magazine published Hunter's article, the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved in their June 1970 issue, it hit a nerve. It felt new, daring, a singularly. work from a unique mind. The phone at Scanlens rang off the hook, and people really responded to it. A writer at the Boston Globe sent word to Hunter that his article read like a missive from the only man to make it through an all-night drinking session with his wits still about him. The townies in South Boston had a word for that kind of guy. Gonso. Hunter soon put his

Gonso stamp on other American events. Marty Graw, New Orleans, the Super Bowl in Houston. America's Cup in Newport, New Year's Eve in Times Square. Wherever the American dream was supposedly thriving, Hunter knew better. The American dream was not thriving anywhere. In fact, the American dream was fucked. It was fucked in Chicago in 68. Fucked the minute Nixon stepped off that leered jet in New Hampshire. Fucked when Hunter ran himself for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado on a ticket that promised to legalize grass,

publicly shamed, dishonest drug dealers. and disarmed the entire police force. Hunter's bid for sheriff terrified the status quo so much that the opposition brought people on stretchers from the hospitals to go vote in the polls. They made sure Hunter lost by a wide margin. It was a political failure that now seemed to mirror what he was seeing as his imminent professional failure. Because even though he'd managed to coin a new style of journalism

with his Kentucky Derby article, that didn't mean his life had suddenly changed. If anything, the attention merely gave way to more hustling for bylines and paychecks. Add to that, the fact that it was the dawn of the 1970s and the United States was coming apart at the seams. Kids were being murdered at Ken State. Nixon was sending troops into Cambodia. On the home front, Hunter's wife suffered a string of miscarriages. The going was getting tougher by the day.

But this is Hunter S. Thompson we're talking about. which meant that the going didn't just get tough. The going got weird. And when the going got weird, that's when the weird turned a pro. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. He was somewhere between his hotel room and the lobby when the drugs began to take hold.

He remembered saying something like, Oscar, Oscar, where the hell did you get off to, man? While all around him, the sights and sounds of a casino at 4.30 in the morning, assaulted his senses. Suddenly, he realized that Oscar wasn't there, not in the hotel, and not in Vegas, not even in Nevada. Oscar was gone, and he was left behind, stuck carrying Oscar's briefcase, which at last glance contained about a pound of weed, a loaded 357 magnum, and some extra bullets. And if they caught him with this stuff, it was all over. Christ, they'd feed him to the wolves, maybe to the lions that did that act over at the Tropicana.

Not because they knew what was inside his suitcase. You'd have to have x-ray vision for that. But because he had no money left and thus was unable to pay the bill for his room. It was why he was here now, broke, high, and skipping out on his tab like some reprobate. He had to move fast. Well, not too fast. He didn't want to raise any eyebrows. Not that the red Cadillac convertible waiting for him outside was doing him any favors.

But it was like he told Jan Wenner when he asked the editor of Rolling Stone to get him the car specifically for this assignment. You can't cover the American dream in a goddamn Oldsmobile. Right now, though, he'd give anything for an Oldsmobile, anything to look inconspicuous as he made his escape, lugging a suitcase full of contraband through a casino lobby as the drugs began to take hold. Who was he kidding? The drugs had taken hold hours, days, weeks earlier. He was permanently under their sway at this point. That was the whole point.

Not of the article he was cooking off for Rolling Stone now, but coming to Vegas in the first place, to blow off steam, to avoid yet another deadline, to get the hell out of L.A. L.A. was all darkness. Even on the outskirts, as far away as Pasadena in a Holiday Inn near the Santa Anita racetrack,

where weeks earlier Hunter S. Thompson hold out working on an assignment. The more Hunter investigated, the closer he got to that darkness. Ruben Salazar, a reporter for the L.A. Times, was dead, killed by a tear gas round fired by a sheriff's deputy during the National Chicana Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. The story had all the things that got Hunter's blood pumping, war, protests, corruption, the haves and the have-nots. But when it became clear to Hunter that Salazar's death was likely not an accident but a premeditated assassination. That's when the darkness metastasized. This was heavier than the stuff Hunter typically covered. This wasn't the derby or a football game or a

campaign trail. This was something else. Blood had been spilled and blood would be spilled again. Hunter needed to think about his next move. He needed a moment. He needed a shower. He walked into his hotel bathroom only to find that there was no shower to take. It was just a bathtub with a copper wire running across it, a copper wire that was plugged into a socket. He didn't know when they'd gotten access to his room, but the message was clear. If Hunter wanted to peer into that darkness, if he wanted to go right to the edge, he was going to fall in, then that would be the end. He thought of the beating he'd endured at the hands of the angels a few years prior. He didn't want to go through that again. So he got the hell

out of dodge. But not alone. He brought with him Oscar Zeta. Alcosta, his primary source for the Salazar's story, who also just so happened to be Salazar's lawyer. And their agenda was simple. Get away, blow off steam, talk where they could be alone. And now, Hunter was all alone, abandoned by his traveling companion, carting around a suitcase loaded with drugs and firearms while trying to skip out on his hotel bill at 4.30 in the morning. He was more paranoid than ever before as he made his way outside into the Cadillac, shocked. that he hadn't been apprehended, even more so that he was able to haul ass out of Vegas before the sun even came up. And that sun was blinding. Hunter S. Thompson was a night owl, born a night owl,

just like he'd been born angry. He let those traits guide him as he furiously typed away. Just finishing and filing the Salazar story and then getting to work on his experiences in Las Vegas. But his trip with Oscar Acosta would not be written like any other story. He rechristened himself, Raul Duke. Oscar became Dr. Gonzo, Duke's 300-pound Samoan attorney. And some things in the story were true, like the Vegas motorcycle race that Hunter covered for Sports Illustrated, a piece of the magazine outright rejected,

or the National District Attorney's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which, yes, no shit, Hunter, and Oscar attended, presumably under the influence of all the things the conference organizer sought to eradicate. When Hunter's larger narrative of these experiences was finally published, first as a series of articles in Rolling Stone magazine, and then as a 1972 novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a savage journey to the heart of the American dream, it was a revelation.

Hunter's sense of humor, the way in which his drug-soaked narrative commented on the previous decade, on the so-called revolution that had failed so spectacularly, not that Hunter was a revolutionary, or that he was anti-drugs, quite the contrary. Hunter S. Thompson advocated for paying as much for your morning paper as you did for a hit of good mescalant. He also embodied what was coming down the pike, what was already here. The cynical misanthrope who gleefully exposed liars and hypocrites, no matter if they called themselves liberal or conservative, no one was safe when Hunter S. Thompson

was around. 1971, California. Hunter shifted up the gear and merged into traffic on the PCH. Rolling Stone staffers filled out the rest of his Mustang, including the magazine's chief photographer Annie Leibowitz. Hunter gave the gas pedal no quarter. California Highway Patrol clocked him easy. And the cops black and white dodge hit the lights,

and Hunter pulled over. One of the fellow staffers was freaking out in the backseat, and the Mustang was packed to the gills with weed and acid, and they were all going to jail. The cop made his approach on the driver's side and Hunter told everyone to remain calm and then told Annie to get her camera ready. The cop ordered Hunter out of the car.

He wanted to know if Hunter had been drinking. Hunter didn't answer yes or no, but instead asked the cop if a drunk man could do this. Standing there on the side of the road, Hunter swung his head back, launching his sunglasses off his face, which he then caught with ease behind his body. back.

Annie's camera flashed, and the cop smiled. He told Hunter to hit the road, but try and lay off the gas a little. Hunter, a cynic, a misanthroat, still managed to possess a charm that never failed to work its magic. Even in the company of authority figures that pissed him off, especially the people who truly made him angrier than anything, Richard Nixon, for example. He famously became good friends with Roxanne Pulitzer after describing. her in one of his articles as, quote,

a jaded Pan Am stewardess, unquote. This is a kind of person that does not exist anymore. Not in the world we live in today. Try going on Instagram or acts as a card-carrying member of the NRA who also wants to defund the police while tripping balls on the regular. You can't. You can't be all things to all people,

not like Hunter Thompson once was. Now, unfortunately, there are sides and there are lanes, and you don't cross over to someone else's lane unless you want the rest of the world to drive you off the road. However, this is what Hunter did, and the more he did this, the more he emptied the contents of his brain onto the page and his rapidly evolving Gonzo style, the bigger he became. John and Yoko, CCR, Little Richard, Elton John, Jimmy Hendricks. They may have been on the cover of Rolling Stone, but there was no question that the words running wild, on the pages within were the work of the magazine's real golden god. Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stones, one and only rock star.

Hunter S. Thompson chased his breakfast of ham and eggs with a shot of whiskey. Sitting next to him at the kitchen table in his Woody Creek. Colorado home, Hunter's son was eating dinner. It was almost 6 p.m. Hunter's day was just beginning. The night called to him as it always did, the hours when his creativity was at its peak. The only hours that his gonzo brain would acknowledge, the dawn approaching at an alarming rate. Daylight was the great motivator, well, that and the drugs which were beginning to take hold as they always did. The routine got Hunter writing, and that run.

writing gave him what he always wanted. Attention. Over the years, his legend simply grew larger, even when the quality of his writing began to decline. Until, just like the hell's angels that he'd written about decades prior, Hunter now appeared more mythical than he actually was. College girls came banging on his door, drug buddies, naked women, autograph hounds, Keith Richards, you never knew who was going to show up at any given time. Truly a rock's our life, a life that Hunter lived half the time while simultaneously living as a family man during the other half. But the halves weren't equal. Hunter's first wife grew tired of it all, of not knowing what was truth and what was bullshit, just like the gray area in Hunter's writing. And by the 1980s,

divorce seemed the logical choice. But she knew the thought of it would anger Hunter, so she called the cops for peace of mind. Does he have a gun? The cops wanted to know. Yeah, he's got a gun. He's got 22 guns and they're all loaded. Guns were a fascination. Guns passed the time.

They broke the tension. Machine guns were cathartic as fuck. Firing those out back was like watering the lawn, as Hunter said. When it came to home security, though, a 12-gauge short-barrel shotgun was the way to go. Hunter had a couple of those. But today, Hunter didn't know. have a shotgun in his hand. On this day, decades after his first wife divorced him, on February 20th,

2005, Hunter was holding his 45-caliber pistol. Hunter had his guns, his booze, food, drugs, fame, attention, but he also still had his anger. He was angry that Jan Wenner seemed incapable of paying him on time anymore, angry about yet another debacle of a presidential election. and perhaps most of all, angry that once again it was February, and that meant football season was over. Football, the one thing Hunter could talk to Richard Nixon about, the only place where the American dream was still alive, if only for a few hours on any given Sunday.

But now, Hunter was staring down months of Sundays with no football, staring down the edge, somewhere between sanity and insanity, life and death. The thought was depressing as always. But for some reason, this year, right now, at 67 years old, it was too much. One toke over the line, sweet Jesus, just like the song said. And with that, Hunter S. Thompson, sitting in his favorite chair at the kitchen table of his Woody Creek home, stuck the barrel of his 45 in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Six months later to the day, at the top of a 15-story tower shaped like a clenched fist holding a peyote button. The logo created years earlier when he ran for sheriff. Hunter S. Thompson's final wish was carried out as his ashes were shot out of a cannon. This was followed by a fireworks display while Norman Greenbaum's song, Spirred in the Sky, played at maximum volume. Hunter Thompson had gone over the high side, like an angel's bike, sliding into the curve, to a place the rest of us have yet to see. A place where, as Hunter himself once wrote, there is no honest way to explain it

because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. Can you imagine how Hunter Thompson would explain the afterlife? That's one piece of Gonzo journalism that we'll never get to read. That and that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan. And this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis.

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