Fear and Loathing in Princeton

We were somewhere around 1879 Arch, on the corner of Prospect, when the drinks began to take hold.

The ringing in my ears rose to a shrill pitch, and suddenly I was surrounded by what looked like a choir caught in a maelstrom, their voices mixing into some frightening harmony, and a voice was screaming, "Holy Jesus, we've stumbled into A Chorus Line!" The voice, I discovered, was my own, and the singers were no hallucination but rather a group of perturbed a cappella vocalists whose performance I had ruined. I was wearing an Acapulco shirt, squinting through amber-colored aviator sunglasses, and brandishing a cigarette holder. Standing at the center of the concertus interruptus, I looked more like a drunken fool than a genuine Doctor of Gonzo Journalism.

Twenty-four hours ago I had been at my desk with headphones on, hiding from the brutish realities of this foul Year of Our Lord 2005. However, the Communication Age, like global warming or world socialism, has always been inevitable, and it was only a matter of time before the Maginot Line protecting my Benedictine sanctuary collapsed beneath a blitzkrieg of email. Numerous messages informed me that the great journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose drug-laced commentary had lent eerie lucidity to everything from sports to politics for the past few decades, had taken his own life in his Colorado home.

I remembered watching "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" a thousand times during my freshman year. The book and subsequent movie were meant to be a satire of "the American dream" and the over-the-top, "grossly primitive" culture of Las Vegas. Thompson refers to one horrendously tacky casino as "what the world would be doing every Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This was the Sixth Reich." In a classic post-neo-infantile mistake, however, all I learned from the movie was how cool a person looked when stumbling through society under the influence.

With a mind for paying final respects to the great doctor, I excavated my "Fear and Loathing" costume from my closet, laid my hands on large quantities of alcohol (I was never brave enough to try the extreme drugs from the movie, like raw ether or human adrenaline or marijuana), and set out to channel Thompson for the evening. Not that any of this was necessary — but once you get into a serious tribute column, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

My compatriots advised me to flee the Arch before the authorities were summoned, and we stumbled down Prospect Avenue in search of the Princetonian Dream. We proceeded to scour each club in search of illumination (or at least inebriation). We found that the Ivy Club did not have a good bathroom for us to do drugs in, and that golf shoes were necessary for wading through the Tiger Inn taproom.

As I descended into the depths of the Charter Club, I lost my balance, struck my head against the wall, and cascaded down the remaining steps. When I looked up, I saw Thompson standing before me like Obi-Wan Kenobi in the mist. "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man," he told me. "But can you still cling to the desperate assumption that someone is tending the light at the end of the tunnel?" Then the figure faded into the cigarette smoke.

There was only one road back to Princeton: Prospect Avenue. Then past the Frist Campus Center, into my dorm and into my bed, where I could swim into sleep, blissfully unaware of the hangover that awaits all of Thompson's disciples when the rapture wears off. Perhaps this is what happened to the great writer: the driving energy of the 60s had finally faded so far that he feared the light at the end of the tunnel was extinguished. As I slipped out of consciousness, I recalled Thompson's defiant character fleeing from the police, screaming, "You better take care of me, Lord. If you don't, you're gonna have me on your hands." This week, Hunter S. Thompson has journeyed to the land of the heroes. I hope he doesn't cause too much trouble there. Powell Fraser is a politics major from Atlanta, Ga. He can be reached at pfraser@princeton.edu.