Stoned, drunk and with both hands on the grips of a full-throttled hog, Thompson leaned into the long wind of a Pacific Ocean straightaway doing 100 miles per hour. Knowing the next invisible divot in the asphalt could be his last, he held on tighter, accelerating to speeds he would never know, too careful to take his eyes off the road.
He was determined to live, or die trying.
Somewhere in the backwoods of America, Hunter S. Thompson is riding with the Hell’s Angels, wearing a gigantic .50 caliber revolver openly, and making smart-ass remarks to simple-minded townspeople. I know this because I have seen it with my own eyes. I talked to him. He told me he wanted to be the first celebrity to actually fake his own death.
“The news’ll write anything,” he said, shifting a cigarette around in his teeth. “Those fucking savages ran the story before anybody had a chance to call the cops. YOU DIRTY ANIMALS.”
I can’t say for sure if HST was the first famous person to fake his own death, but he’s definitely the last.
In 1965, members of the Hell’s Angels beat Hunter savagely for material found in his book Hell’s Angels. After all these years, he has finally decided to pay them back for their share of his writing. Thompson says each year, he and his motorcycle gang, of which he has become the “zombie” leader, drive by the Aspen Sheriff’s headquarters and take several rides around the block.
I know this because I met him. He had the shooting glasses and the cigarette, and was entirely out of his mind on Amyls. There was no way it couldn’t have been him.
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