Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20,
2005)
The "wave
speech"
“
|
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 music 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 down101 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.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment