The clenched red fist, made symmetrical by a second thumb, towered 153-feet above the mourners below. The fist clasped a multi-colored flashing button which battled the full moon to light up the Colorado landscape. As a troupe of Japanese drummers finished their choreographed performance, the guests passed flutes of champagne and gazed skyward. At 8:46, the first wave of fireworks rocketed from a cannon hidden within the fist. To the blasting strains of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, bursts of red, white, and blue broke the night. A delicate snow of gray ash drifted to the ground and the earthly remains of Hunter S. Thompson floated to their final resting place.
The details of Thompson’s suicide are as grisly, savage, and depraved as the subjects of his writing. Around 5:30pm on February 20, 2005 Thompson called his wife, Anita, at the gym. She spoke with him, but in the middle of their conversation she heard a click. She thought it was her husband hanging up the phone, making some kind of joke. It was a kind of joke. Thompson had put down the phone, but only so he could put a semi-automatic Smith and Wesson .45-caliber handgun into his mouth. Anita hung up before she could hear the shot. Thompson’s son, Juan, was in the other room with his wife, Jennifer, and their 6-year-old son, Will. They were visiting for the weekend. They did hear the shot. When Juan went into the kitchen, where Thompson worked, he found his father slumped over a typewriter. A note that had been hanging on the refrigerator read “Never call 911/Never/This means you/HST” so Juan called the family friend and sheriff, Bob Braudis.
As Braudis, along with several deputies, approached Thompson’s squat, brown house they heard several gunshots. Reaching the building, they found Juan Thompson outside with a shotgun. The young Thompson explained that he had fired three shotgun blasts into the air to mark the passing of his father. Inside, the authorities took stock of the scene. Hunter was wearing a striped shirt, sweatpants, slippers and glasses. A soft gun-case was at his feet, a spent shell at his side. A .45 caliber slug was later located in the hood of the stove. On the type-writer in front of him, Thompson had, at some point, written the word “counselor.” After recording their observations, the authorities allowed Juan to place a golden scarf around his father’s shoulders. Jennifer Thompson said they had gotten the scarf in Florence, Italy and given it to Hunter the night before. “He just loved it,” she said.
February was always Thompson’s worst month. An avid football fan, the Superbowl was the highlight of his year. In fact, the apparent suicide note he scribbled four days before his death was titled “Football Season is Over” and began with his complaint that there were “no more games.” In retrospect, there were clues of Thompson’s planned suicide in the days leading up to it. He would mutter an old mountain man saying: “This child’s getting old.” He gathered his family around him and decided to scrap plans to sell his archives piecemeal to the highest bidder in favor of withholding them to go as a complete set. “It wasn’t clear last week suicide was imminent, but now it adds up,” said George Tobia, Jr–Thompson’s lawyer and correspondent for the last 15 years. “This was definitely not spur of the moment,” Tobia said. “He wanted his family close by, but he didn’t want anyone to know–he didn’t want anyone to try to stop him. . . In a weird way, he wanted it to be, I think, a celebration.” Including his six-year-old grandson in the affair doesn’t seem celebratory, but then, Thompson had a knack for the savage, the terrible, and the violent. An anonymous source, claiming to be a longtime-friend of Thompson, said she was not surprised but was “just glad he didn’t take Anita with him. . . He was a raging addict and an abusive man. He had so many guns and they were always loaded.” In 2000, Thompson accidentally shot an assistant while chasing a bear from his land. The assistant wasn’t seriously injured, but it was an embarrassing episode for Thompson. He didn’t know he was loaded,” lampooned a local newspaper. Louisa Davidson, Sheriff Braudis’s estranged wife and friend of Thompson, declared that with Thompson’s suicide “the party is over . . . Maybe for people he had the coolest life ever (but) our generation is so full of addicts. This valley glorified his lifestyle.” Thompson’s death was an extension of his life. He was a brutal, violent man and chose a brutal, violent end. But he chose it on his terms. His “mind was firing on all eight cylinders and his humor was there,” said Sheriff Braudis.
Forty-one years earlier, Thompson had traveled to Ketchum, Idaho to investigate the suicide of his literary hero Ernest Hemingway. His question wasn’t why the writer killed himself, but why he did it in Ketchum. The resulting article–“What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?”–contains a prophetic vision of Thompson’s own suicide. “Hemingway has acquired quite a few friends since his death,” Thompson wrote. Everyone he talked to claimed to know the man. Following Thompson’s own death, everyone in Woody Creek, Colorado had something to say about the reclusive journalist. “The most news we heard from him was when a pack of dogs killed his peacock, Attila,” resident John Hoag said, then claimed that “there’s no one in the world these days who writes the truth … as he seems to.” Al Mac, who lived in a nearby trailer park, said Thompson “was pretty nice to a lot of people, but he could be pretty rude too.” He related a story of how Thompson donated a buffalo head to a local tavern, but took it back when the owner asked him to pay his tab. George Stranahan, a former owner of the tavern, said only that he “never expected Hunter to die in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of him.” In Thompson’s article, written for the National Observer, he concludes that Hemingway was “an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him.” Forced out of his playgrounds in Africa and Cuba by violence and revolution, Hemingway went to Ketchum wondering “why he hadn’t been killed years earlier in the midst of violent action on some other part of the globe.” In his apparent suicide note, Thompson lamented that he was “67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring.” He’d escaped his love of hard drugs and hard alcohol with his life, and he wondered why. Hemingway, the man Thompson admired and emulated, provided an escape.
After his death, family and friends began making plans for a proper send off to the over-the-top Thompson. In a 1977 BBC documentary, Thompson suggested that his ashes be shot over his ranch from a double-thumbed fist containing a cannon. He would occasionally remind his family of the plan, and after his death they decided to honor his last wish. “He wanted people to celebrate,” Anita Thompson said. “No crying, no tears, only celebration.” The cost of building a 153-foot tower (two feet taller than the Statue of Liberty) installing a cannon, and filling fireworks canister’s with the author’s ashes approached $2 million. But Thompson, worth millions himself, had even richer friends. Actor Johnny Depp, who played Thompson’s alter-ego Raoul Duke in the movie adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, funded most of the expense out of pocket. In researching his role, Depp corresponded with Thompson and the two became close friends. Fuck you, Hunter,” he said after Thompson’s death. “You want a Gonzo Cannon? We’ll give you a Gonzo Cannon.” In a more serious moment, Depp added that he “loved him and wanted to make sure his last wish was fulfilled. It’s that simple.” Anita described how Thompson envisioned his funeral “to be a beautiful party. . . His friends would celebrate his life. And he was even specific that there would be clinking of ice and whiskey.”
Thompson’s funeral was held six months to the day after his suicide. Attendees included Depp, Sheriff Braudis, actor Bill Murray, CBS News anchor Ed Bradley, former presidential candidates John Kerry and George McGovern, Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner, and Colleen Auerbach, who’s daughter had recently been released from prison thanks largely to the attention Thompson brought to her case. The wide range of guests illustrated the wide range of Thompson’s influences. There was no drinking during the first half of the funeral, and there were tears as Thompson’s wife and closest friends read eulogies. Then the bar was opened and the celebration began. “So here we go,” Juan Thompson declared at the chosen moment. “Let’s do this thing . . . . Let’s shout, let’s laugh, cry . . . . Let’s honor the great fallen warrior. . . The king is dead. Long live the king!” The huge, red fist was unveiled as Spirit in the Sky played over the loudspeakers. Inside the double-thumbed monument were thirty-four shells packed with ash and fireworks. On each one, Anita had written “I love you.” They were fired in three waves, and Hunter S. Thompson made his final assault on heaven before falling, Icarus-like, back to earth.
Works Consulted:
-. “Hunter S. Thompson Dead at 67.” CNN.com, posted Feb. 21, 2005. Available:
-. “HST Found in Front Of Typewriter.” Aspen Daily News Staff and Wire Report. March 3, 2005. Available:
Abel, David. “After Thompson’s Suicide, Attorney Saw Clues.” The Boston Globe. Date Unknown.
Aguilar, John. “‘Gonzo’ Writer Hunter S. Thompson Dies.” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 21, 2005. Available:
Aguilar, John and Deborah Frazier. Death Came Instantly.” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 22, 2005. Available:
Brinkley, Douglas. “Football Season Is Over.” Rolling Stone, Sept. 8, 2005. Available:
Elliott, Dan. “Final Send-off in Colo. Today for King of Gonzo Journalism.” The Boston Globe. Aug. 20, 2005.
Kass, Jeff. “Literary Gang Gathered for Farewell.” Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 19, 2005. Available
Kass, Jeff. “Preparation for ‘Gonzo’ Funeral Nearly Complete.” Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 20, 2005. Available
Kass, Jeff. “Writer Lights Up Crowd in Grand Finale.” Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 22, 2005. Available:
Salvail, Andre. “Guess You Had to be There.” Aspen Daily News, Aug. 21, 2004. Available:
Thompson, Hunter S. “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?” National Observer, May 25, 1964. Compiled: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, 1979. Ballantine Books, New York
