Aspen – It was the third week of February, and despair was in the air. President Bush had been re-elected, football season had come to a halt, and temperatures were regularly retreating into single digits.
Sitting in his Woody Creek home, Hunter S. Thompson grabbed thick, white paper and, using a combination of pen, highlighter and black Sharpie, wrote what Rolling Stone is publishing today as his farewell note.
“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won’t hurt,” Thompson wrote in the note, titled “Football Season is over.”
Four days later, on Feb. 20, Thompson shot and killed himself.
In the Rolling Stone article, historian Douglas Brinkley, who is Thompson’s official biographer, wrote:
“An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year. February, by contrast, was doldrums time. Nothing but monstrous blizzards, bad colds and the lackluster Denver Nuggets. This past February, with his health failing, Hunter was even more glum than usual. ‘This child’s getting old,’ he muttered with stark regularity, an old-timey refrain that mountainmen used to utter when their trailblazing days were over. Depressed and in physical pain from hip-replacement surgery, he started talking openly about suicide, polishing his .45-caliber pistol, his weapon of choice. He was trying to muster the courage to end it all.”
Anita Thompson, the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” author’s widow, said she discovered the note in a collection of papers less than a week after the suicide.
“It was a tough thing for me to find. He had torn it out of his notebook and put it in his personal papers,” she said Thursday. “He was in extreme pain. I think he decided he was going to do it, and this note explains why he’s doing it now – not why he’s doing it, but why he’s doing it now. There’s a difference.”
Anita Thompson said she didn’t intend for the note to be widely publicized.
Brinkley could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Rolling Stone publicity director Nora Haynes stressed that the note is only a small part of Brinkley’s broader piece, which details last month’s ceremony when Thompson’s ashes were blasted from a cannon.
