I'm saddened and chastened, but not surprised. I wish I was surprised, but when we met HST last month, something was obviously, physically very wrong. He wasn't drunk or otherwise intoxicated, but he couldn't stand up by himself. He had to lean on other people, or prop himself up on the clothes counters at Perlis. Though his mind seemed as sharp as ever (and I believe it was sharp, always, incredibly so, through all the bourbon and mescaline and adrenochrome and other things none of us has even heard of), he was completely dependent on others for his basic physical well-being. I can't imagine anyone used to fighting and scamming and shooting his way through life wanting to live like that. I didn't like to say anything at the time, but I tell you this now in hopes of letting at least a few people know that he most certainly did not take the easy way out.

I don't know what was wrong with him. I don't know if it had anything to do with the years of excess. If it did, I see nothing particularly wrong with that: we make our choices and set our priorities in life, and he got 67 years, spending at least part of most of them high, which was obviously one of his great joys.

Thanks to everyone who called and e-mailed me, wanting me to hear about this from a friend. You do me the honor of considering me somehow connected with the good Doctor, enough to deserve that anyway, and I am grateful.

I wonder if people who dismiss him as "just a druggie writer" have read him. I wonder if they've read his Saigon coverage, or his letters, or Screwjack (dateline 1991, for those folks who think he "useta be good in the '60s and '70s but burned out"), or the hilarious "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," or even this gorgeous piece of writing from his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ... but no explanation, no mix of words or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant ...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history," it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that ...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ...

And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.