Motorcycle clubs had been chum to a media frenzy since 1947, when LIFE magazine ran Barney Peterson’s faked-up shot of a badly listing Eddie Davenport aboard a Harley-Davidson in Hollister. Thompson could ride bikes, shoot guns, and swallow drugs on par with any Angel, and his internal bullshit detector guided the story on this gang of romanticized losers. Thompson during his stint working as security at Esalen, 1963, aboard his 1948 Triumph Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other.” Reasons to live. His early (but honorable) discharge in June ’58 might have been a summary of his whole life – “this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy. Hunter capped his high school career in Louisville with a month in jail for car theft, so never graduated, enlisting in the Air Force instead…but not until shooting every boat in the local marina beneath the waterline, sending most to the Ohio’s muddy bed. Thompson’s father Jack croaked a week before his 15th birthday, and Virginia washed her pain with booze. His authenticity was born of character, and not as in –acting a charismatic little provocateur, he led a local street gang, who all agreed Hunter could ‘out think and out perform you’. Long before a cartoon doppelganger overlapped and sucked the mojo from his real life, Hunter S Thompson was a ballsy and original human, the ‘pole around which trouble would occur’ according to a schoolboy chum. He exited in the same state in 2005, taking a cue from Papa Hemingway and pulling the trigger on his inability to live up to a reputation for drink, drugs, mayhem, and – decades prior – the writing brilliance that secured a place in literary history. He was a bitch from birth, or so said Virginia, the first woman to suffer Hunter Stockton Thompson, by pushing him complaining and bald into this world in 1937.
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