Waiting Life

Words on a serviceable life from a working man near Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Yesterday, I read The Washington Post's two page article on Thompson, written by Henry Allen. I noticed that not only did he quote the same passage I referred to--the "high-water mark"--he also made mention of young Thompson typing out The Great Gatsby. And there's also the reference to Thompson ending his life like Hemingway, a writer Thompson admired.

I think of the scope of Thompson's life, all the things he did, people he met, stories he wrote, and it just seems odd that in the space of a few short pages, the same seemingly minor events would appear. It's like once a person dies, all that's left of him--the man himself, not his work--is a series of trivial events, like in the Biography section of any actor on the IMDb.

I found my fisherman's hat and aviator sunglasses in a box yesterday and wore them while I edited (didn't buy any liquor, 'cause I wasn't in the mood). I randomly recited certain memorized passages and poems of the man, doing my best to imitate his mumbled, gutteral drawl. Honestly, it felt equal parts foolish, stupid, and pointless. Maybe because I didn't have an audience. Maybe because even if I had an audience, they would wonder why I was talking so weird and acting so strange and would you give me back my fucking beer, you asshole.

I put the hat and sunglasses back in the box and returned to editing. It looks like a two page write up in major newspapers is all the eulogy Thompson's gonna get, and he'd probably like it that way. Thompson, the man, doesn't need to be analyzed. He just needs to be read.

Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Swan Song of the Doomed

Last night I shot a short movie I've been writing for a while. I took some scenes from my old movie about waiting tables that folded partway through production and wove a narrative around it. It plays okay for a ten minute short and it was a lot of fun to do. I had a good time acting with John again, and Chris ran the camera for us.

We shot from about seven to eleven. When we finished, we grabbed some burgers and went over to John and Chris's place to watch the footage. John and I sat on the couch while Chris moved back and forth from the computer room where he was chatting on-line to the living room (since he held the camera, he'd already seen everything).

About half way through the tape--laughing more at the screw ups than the successes, which makes me wonder how this movie will turn out--Chris came back into the room and said, "Hey, Dan." I looked at him. People in groups of three only use first names if it's to get one's direct attention. I waited for it. "Hunter S. Thompson is dead. He shot himself."

After a pause, John said, "Jeez, Chris, you really know how to kill a room..."

I first found out about Hunter's writings like I found out about most things in my young life, through being a big fan of Saturday Night Live since shortly after I started walking. I watched everything the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players did outside of the show. Some time in the early eightes, I saw pieces of a movie that ran on late-night television (probably one of the cheaper cable channels, because I know I saw various parts of this film over the course of several months) where Bill Murray wore sunglasses, smoked cigarettes out of a filter, and threatened to beat the crap out of everyone. The movie didn't make any sense to me, but I always enjoy watching Murray in any role and thought it was funny. The movie was "Where the Buffalo Roam." I found out later that Murray was playing a real person called Hunter S. Thompson. The name stuck with me.

Shortly after I started smoking at the end of 1990, then eighteen years old, I took a trip to visit my sister in Memphis. Driving around the dirtier sides of town (sadly too young to enjoy the finer points of Beale Street), I walked into a tobacco shop and saw a cigarette filter much like Thompson's. It was black with a silver tip, but close enough, so I bought it. There was no reason for me to buy it other than I thought it looked cool. I had never seen anyone else use a filter for their cigarettes, and I was still in that "If no one else is doing it, it must be cool" phase. Ah, to be a teenager again...

I probably would have only used the filter for a couple days as a novelty if not for a few practical considerations. I had just given up my "commercial/comic book artist" major and switched over to writing. I got a Canon StarWriter word processor and wrote a novel in two months (and it has all the flaws a novel written by an nineteen year old kid would have, although I still like reading it every few years). I liked having the filter to hold cigarettes as I typed. And since I was spending so much time driving from St. Louis to Memphis to Chicago in those days, I liked the way the ashes flew out the cracked window, so I didn't have to use the ashtray so much. Mostly, I think, I just got used to the taste (It's not just a holder; it filters the tar and gives the cigarette a different taste.).

But as I found out, using a cigarette filter is not at all considered "cool." Most people just wonder why the hell I use it. I've heard all sorts of comments about it, like being told if I was "three feet shorter and six feet wider" I'd look just like the Penguin, and general questions about that "half a fag" filter. Not too many people, surprisingly or not, have asked me if I'm gay.

None of this stopped me from keeping my filter. Popular opinion doesn't hold much for the adult version of a solitary child. I wear socks with my sandals because it feels better. I rarely take my jacket off in public, even when sitting down to dinner, because I like having all my stuff with me. So the filter has always been with me.

And every once in a while, someone would say, "Hey, you have a cigarette filter like Hunter S. Thompson!" (Sometimes, I would get "You have a cigarette filter like Bill Murray in that movie..." In the last few years, it's been "that movie with Johnny Depp.")

After hearing that enough times, when I happened upon a copy of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," I read it. I thought it was great. Can't say I got that much out of the drug stuff, though. I never used drugs, didn't know the allure, and always thought using drugs just to use drugs was boring, both in fiction and in the real world (Anyone who's gone to a party with a drunk knows there are few things less interesting than the drunk himself, unless he gets arrested, in which case wacky antics can ensue).

But reading the book, I thought, "The prose is so damn good!" There are some great passages in that book. I loved Hunter's take on being alive in the sixties and how America was starting to change in the seventies. The section about looking west and seeing "the high water mark" especially struck me when I read it (they used that bit--almost word for word--in the Johnny Depp movie version). Here was a guy who knew how to draw you in and see the world as he saw it, making the trivial seem important, and knowing that danger could be anywhere (real or imagined).

I picked up a few other Thompson books over the next few years. I liked most of "Songs of the Doomed," but not so much of "Generation of Swine" (His political stuff is only interesting if it's fairly new. In the mid-nineties, who still cared about Gary Hart?). I read his collections of old letters.

I also read three biographies of the man. They all seem to be written with a sense of awe, as if the authors knew their subject was more than a man, almost godlike in his ability to create himself from such a young age. His persona was almost fully in place by the time he was twelve. That could just be retroactive invention, but most people seem willing to accept it.

I had a good idea of the man Dr. Thompson was. I no longer saw him as a Bill Murray type charicature, but almost as a force of nature (Jack Nicholson called him a "baffling human iceberg." A fine description of the man.). Being an impressionable youth, I adapted some of his writing style into my own (I've come to believe that every writer is simply a composite of the styles of the writers that impressed him the most, mixed with personal experiences. I've had all the late night arguments and discussions that this belief brings, both from those who agree and disagree.). More than that, his general mindset seemed almost alluring to me, possibly because he was so much different than me. I'd almost go so far as to say we were polar opposites. Regardless of the meanings, I liked to try to view life through his eyes, on his terms. I was big into acting at the time, taking on characters, and I'm sure that played a good part in it all.

For Hallowe'en of 1996 and again in 2002, I dressed as Thompson for the celebration at whatever restaurant where I was working. I had the fisherman's hat, gold sunglasses, Hawaiian shirt, white pants. Even a bag with grapefruit, Wild Turkey, and large knives. Always getting into character, the whiskey was real, and added a fine sense of danger to a shift (drinking on the job will always get you fired unless you're one of the valued few, and even then you're issued a corrective of some kind). In '96, the costume suited the way I was living at the time, going through a bottle of whiskey a day while writing my thesis paper for my degree. The paper was about the drug culture in modern society and, in true Gonzo mode, I spent weeks following my coworkers around to various parties and raves, making notes as they got as fucked up as possible. I contrasted it with my own drinking, comparing illegal drugs to legal ones and asking if one was really any worse than the other. The paper, as originally written, could have been written by a lesser-experienced clone of Thompson, with doomsday sayings and all the heightened drama of fairly ordinary situations.

After six or so months, I got bored of the new addiction (constant drinking) and gave it up. The paper, when I finally turned it in, had very little left of me as an active participant. I had turned it into a more or less standard research paper. I wouldn't pass it off as art, but it did eventually earn me my degree.

But those six months as the alcoholic writer (who also waited tables) stuck with me, and whenever I decide to socialize with people, whether I'm a full time smoker at the time or not, I buy a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey, grab the filter and sometimes even the hat and sunglasses, and proceed to be as incredibly bizarre as possible. It's sort of childish play-acting, but it comes out so naturally that most people only think I'm somewhat drunk. Fact is, I hardly ever get past buzzed, but at a party it's sometimes fun to act that way, if only to guage people's reactions.

As I said earlier, I don't like drunks. They're loud, irritating, and incoherent. But when you gain that shield of irresponsibility for your actions (Everyone forgives a good friend for a single night of drunkenness), you can pull off some pretty damn funny situations. That's usually my goal in any social setting, seeing how far I can push people, but still not come off as a total jerk off. Besides, social situations where everyone sits around gossiping are damnably boring.

So I've long had a disposition to "act like" Thompson. It's like he's a role I played on stage and had trouble completely shaking off. When the mood hits me or the situation calls for it, Thompson can always quickly come out to take charge and make for a very lively evening.

If I had some weird urge to act like a Festrunk brother (Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin on SNL), people would get that I was doing an impression. It's not like that with Thompson. A lot of people don't know who he is ("Ain't he a poet or somethin'?"). Both times I dressed as him for Hallowe'en, a few people said, "Are you supposed to be Gilligan?" This allows a certain freedom, and not just because I'm being judged on the success level of the impression. To those few who do recognize who I'm going for, they seem to feel like they're in on a joke, and woe to the poor bastards who don't know what to expect. I try to only spend time with those who welcome any change from the ordinary.

To my closer friends, they've always accepted that I'm simply a fan of Thompson, with a weird habit of falling into his character from time to time (again, no one close has ever told me not to do this, reinforcing the idea that it's worth doing). This explains Chris's almost reverential tones in telling me that Thompson died. I've already recevied two calls today asking me "How I'm doing."

Honestly, I don't know how I'm doing. Death always sucks, yeah, but it's not like I ever met the guy. I haven't read all of his books or all his articles, but I keep tabs on him, like I would an estranged uncle who gets into trouble with the law and whose name pops up at the dinner table every once in a while. I always paid attention when Thompson's name popped up in the news. I just liked knowing that he was around, out there, keeping an eye on things, and always able to bring back a story.

And now he's dead.

Hunter read a lot as a child. People interviewed about him have said that he was at a college-age reading level by the time he hit high school. He loved the giants of American literature, like Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway (If I remember correctly from one biography, when he was a kid he once typed "The Great Gatsby" verbatim on his typewriter "just to know how it felt to write great words."). Maybe the connection was greater than he knew, which is why he, like Hemingway, decided to kill himself. Hemingway had good--or at least understandable--reasons for wanting to die (a crapload of health and mental problems), but Hunter seemed fit. The piece he wrote last November in Rolling Stone backing Kerry was just as well-written as anything from the seventies, and I had the impression afterwards that he seemed eager to ride Bush's ass for the next four years, gleefully pointing out his inadequacies and failings.

But it won't happen. No more reports about how the world is doomed. No more hard stories about the excesses of minor celebrities and major politicians who will soon lose their hold on the spotlights they crave while pretending to hate. It feels like one more strong, independent voice is gone, to be replaced by the crappy blandness of CNN-style coverage. No heart or insight, just the facts as they choose to show them. No emotional frame of reference. No anger and outrage. No voice to tell you that this is wrong.

People complained that Thompson was getting repetitive in recent years, and I agreed with them, but I knew that he was still there. He had all the potential. Like a shitty season of Saturday Night Live, where you can say, "Yeah, that sucked, but mabye next year it'll be better," and sometimes it does improve. Sometimes it doesn't. But it gives you something to hope for.

I can't imagine anyone taking Thompson's place. There's no one readily available, but maybe with the hole death has created, a new voice will appear. It'll probably come from a high profile web site. Thompson ventured into film and the internet, but he was mostly at home on the printed page, where his most profound works appeared. This new guy will have to have all of Thompson's singleminded determination, strong will, experience and knowledge, and the added bonus of being internet savvy. Yes, I know I sound like a comic book dork trying to come up with a mythical creature who could possibly take down Superman. But we do need someone slightly on the outside of mainstream culture, looking in, and, while not telling us what to think, showing us that certain events are important and need to be questioned, considered, and acted upon.

I'm not feeling pessimistic or angry. Mostly, just sad at the loss, and left with the feeling that if George Carlin dies anytime soon, we will all be doomed.