OUT OF MY HEAD: The Weird Never Die

"I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it - a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures." - Hunter S. Thompson When outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide at the end of February The Carolinian wasn't yet up and running. I ended up writing a personal remembrance for GoTriad - the News and Record's weekly A&E magazine - but this week I'd like to correct the record and get something down in our pages about Hunter. I think he's earned it. Thompson was hard to define. He was a gifted writer, inveterate gambler, admitted drug fiend and political junkie. He was probably best known as the author of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" - and he loved and loathed his celebrity. Unfortunately his public persona as the wild man of American letters came to overshadow his enormous talents and substantive contributions. He always wanted to be his generation's Hemingway - and in some respects (substance abuse, battles with fame, a cult of personality) he certainly succeeded. But like Hemingway the work itself is so much more important than the legend. With Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer Thompson pioneered a first-person brand of "New Journalism" that cut the form's vaunted objectivity with the wit and wisdom of Mark Twain, the sneering contempt of H.L. Mencken and the crusading zeal of Upton Sinclair. But of all the "New Journalists" of the late 1960s and '70s, Thompson remained the most pure and wild. Wolfe chased the Great American Novel, getting further and further from his goal as years wore on. Breslin devolved into a curmudgeon caricature. Mailer disappeared into his own pretentiousness - before becoming a guest star on "Gilmore Girls." But Hunter was always Hunter, which is why he continued to appeal to and inspire new generations of young people who recognized his talent, who shared his passion and saw in him their most unbridled, brightly burning selves. His books have joined a sort of "right of passage" literary list along with "On the Road" and "A Clockwork Orange." He dared to live with the joy, intensity and conviction we all wish we could summon each day and to be himself, warts and all. I found Hunter, or Hunter found me, my sophomore year of high school. I was already writing with a student journalism group from my local paper in Bristol, Conn., but I was struggling to find my voice and was wondering if journalism was really for me. A reporter friend was getting rid of some old books of hers, and her face sort of lit up as she was going through the boxes. "Here," she said, handing me a thick, dog-eared book. "I think you'll like this." It was "The Great Shark Hunt," the first collection of Hunter's magazine pieces from the late 1960s and '70s. There it was: Vietnam, Watergate, drug culture and the horror of the campaign trail in a contentious era of true fear and loathing. I sat up reading it that first night until my eyes burned with exhaustion. His lean, muscular prose and almost erotic obsession with the English language was irresistible. Hunter taught me that journalism is more than stenography. It means something. It means choosing the right word rather than the almost-right word, caring about the world you report on and the people in it and, above all, hanging onto the truth until they pry it from your cold, dead hands. Shortly after my GoTriad piece on Hunter ran I bumped into Rosemary Roberts - a former New York Times writer who now, in semi-retirement, writes a weekly column for the News and Record and teaches journalism classes at UNCG. "I read your piece about Hunter," she said. I wasn't sure what to expect. Rosemary is sort of a journalist's journalist - a product of Carolina's journalism school who's had the kind of career every young punk in a tie with a notebook on some tiny local daily dreams of on the infrequent occasions when he gets to sleep. She was buddies with legendary Times columnist Scotty Reston - which doesn't make her seem like someone who traveled in the same social circles as Hunter, even if they're of the same generation. "I loved it," she said. "I was so glad that someone did something - because I wasn't sure the News and Record would. I was so glad that you did it, and that you did it right." And that's the thing about Hunter. Wild man, gun nut, dope fiend, firebrand - his talent is still apparent to good writers of all stripes, and anyone who really loves journalism. I've been lucky enough, since discovering Hunter, to make my living primarily as a writer and editor. I've gone toe to toe with Rush Limbaugh over my political writing, I've been targeted by Bill O'Reilly, and I've fought for the right of a sex lecturer and adult film star to express unpopular views at UNCG. I've tried to take Hunter's lessons and live with maybe a fraction of the fearlessness and integrity he showed us. Those lessons, in the writing that was his life, are his legacy.