Just back from an almost unspeakable adventure in Everglades and Key West, and re-packing for the cabin in the mountains. Three hours home. Many miles on my truck.
At a roadside motel, I did read this obituary of sorts that HST did for Rolling Stone many moons ago. The subject was his co-partner in crime, Acosta. This is a fine piece of work, and I hope someone writes about me this way (for the most part) when I turn to dust:
H. S. Thompson “The
Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat”
from Rolling Stone 254;
December 15, 1977
When
the great scorer come to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines
in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently
monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in
that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body
than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size
for the rest of our lives—which are all running noticeably leaner on the high
side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.
He
was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the
street—but it was none of these
things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely
plotted that it amounts to the same thing.
What
finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between
the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of
his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he
was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a radical-chic author in San
Francisco and Beverly Hills…But whenever things got tense or when he had to
work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing
instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom,
a preacher at the typewriter and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked
his head full of acid.
The
Brown Buffalo ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on worship. When his brain
felt bogged down in the mundane nuts and bolts horrors of Law or some dead-end
manuscript, he would simply take off in his hotrod Mustang for a week on the
road and a few days of what he called “walking with the King.”
Oscar
was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl.
Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal
menace for anything it can reach—but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a
profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on
less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at thirty-three—just like Jesus Christ—you
have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is already
thirty-three and a half years old
with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded 357 Magnum in his belt, a
hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a
disconcerting habit of projectile vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the
front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t
handle any more raw tequila.
