The Cannon He Requested (Hunter S. Thompson)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You arrived in journalism
the way a car arrives through a shopfront:
fast, sideways, and with no intention
of reversing back out
You went to the Hell's Angels
and lived with them for a year
and they beat you half to death at the end of it
which you wrote about
with the specific clarity
of a man who understands
that the best part of the beating
is the paragraph it produces
You bled onto the manuscript
and the manuscript improved

[Verse 2]
Gonzo was the word —
you invented it
or it invented you,
the distinction dissolved
somewhere between the mescaline
and the fourth rewrite
You said the journalist
was not separate from the story
and the story was not separate
from the chemicals
and the chemicals were not separate
from the desert
and the desert outside Las Vegas
was just the inside of your skull
turned geological
You went to cover a motorcycle race
and came back with the autopsy
of the American Dream
which had been dead for years
but nobody had filed the paperwork

[Chorus]
Fear and Loathing —
two suitcases full of drugs,
a rented red convertible,
your attorney beside you
describing the bats in the sky
that were not in the sky
You drove into the heart of the thing
at a hundred and ten miles an hour
because you understood
that the only honest speed
for examining a lie
is the speed at which the lie
cannot keep its costume on
The truth was not in the story —
the truth was in the telling,
in the velocity,
in the refusal to pretend
that the man holding the pen
was sober or objective
or interested in being either

[Verse 3]
You covered Nixon
and you covered McGovern
and you covered the death
of the counterculture
from inside the counterculture's body
like a war correspondent
who is also the war
You called Nixon a crook
before the evidence arrived
and the evidence arrived
and you were not vindicated
because vindication
requires someone to have doubted you
and nobody who read you carefully
ever doubted you —
they just weren't sure
whether to file you
under journalism or arson

[Bridge]
You lived at Owl Farm in Woody Creek
with guns and peacocks and whiskey
and a daily routine
that started at three in the afternoon
with Chivas and grapefruit
and ended at eight in the morning
with cocaine and the hot tub
and somewhere in between
the pages accumulated
in a handwriting
that got wider as the night got thinner
and the pages were always better
than the life that produced them
which is the cruelest thing
you can say about any writer
and you would have agreed

[Outro]
You shot yourself at sixty-seven
and your ashes were fired from a cannon
shaped like a two-thumbed fist
clutching a peyote button —
the monument was a hundred and fifty feet tall
and Johnny Depp paid for it
and the ashes went up
and the ashes came down
on Owl Farm, on the peacocks,
on the typewriter
that had nothing left to confess
The drawer where they keep your name
is on fire — it has always been on fire —
and the fire is the filing system,
not the emergency,
and anyone who opens it
should expect to smell like smoke
for the rest of their life