A Day with F. Scott Fitzgerald and "Gatsby"

Yesterday I walked to a small Mexican cafe and had "huevos Mexicana" with beans and potatoes, sitting next to two Mexican police. I had a book with me so I figured they'd think me harmless.

Then I walked to the local coffee shop and and read a couple of chapters of "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald (he was named after his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner," but he was called only "Scott"). Turning each page I was just awed by his lyrical prose. It's so deft and smart and pleasant to read that "lyrical prose" doesn't do it justice. And Fitzgerald wrote this in his twenties! He died at 44 and I just kept thinking how far behind I am, how I will never catch up, and how, maybe, I should just forget about writing at all.

Walking home I thought that if I work at it hard, things will be different in 10 years.

Most people don't know that Fitzgerald lived in New Orleans for a while. In 1920, he took a room at a cheap boarding house on Prytania Street, in the historic and grandiose Garden District. With $600 from winning the O. Henry Prize (by the way, short story writer O. Henry fled to New Orleans to avoid embezzlement charges from a bank in Texas) he bought his future wife Zelda a platinum and diamond watch and went to Montgomery to propose. But she wouldn't marry him until, "This Side of Paradise" was published the following spring.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were ex-pat friends in Paris, and Hem had great respect for Scott's writing. But they argued, as writers do. I heard a story that after Fitzgerald wrote a long written critique of a new Hemingway novel, Hem scrawled, "Kiss my ass," after it. But I'll bet he re-read the critique and took it to heart and improved his writing.

Later Hem wrote elegantly about how natural and effortless Fitzgerald's talent was. He wrote this in the preface to, "A Moveable Feast" one of my all-time favorite books:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

Fitzgerald was destroyed by drink and his crazy wife Zelda, who was in and out of mental institutions, and who encouraged him to drink and write short stories for fast money, rather than to focus on novels (a source of contention between Hem and Scott). Zelda was a Southern Belle, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, but a real firecracker who later was recognized as a leader for women's rights. Scott called her the"golden girl," and "the original flapper."

Scott and Zelda were always drinking and fighting. Tennessee Williams wrote the play, "Clothes for a Summer Hotel," about Scott and Zelda's tumultuous relationship. It takes place when Scott takes a visit to see Zelda at a mental institution in North Carolina, where she later burned to death after Fitzgerald's untimely death of a heart attack. It was Tennessee's last play to debut on Broadway but was a critical and financial failure (although it sounds interesting, doesn't it?)


Back to my day: After a stop at the grocery, and few glances from Mexican housewives, I walked home and took a short nap.

My neighbor, a defrocked lawyer (who is just another one of the miscreants who have landed in Tijuana), stopped by and brought a quart of beer so we split it. We talked about how he's been working hard on his Spanish and meeting a lot of girls and that I should learn more, and he taught me a new word. Then we talked about how crazy it is that they caught the leader of the big drug cartel, and that 150 people had been killed in TJ in the last 2 months. But that it doesn't affect us here at the beach. In fact, it doesn't affect anyone unless they are in the drug or police business, except that fewer people go out to nice restaurants after a recent slaughter (of drug runners) at one.

He headed back to cook dinner for his roommate, and I went over to the local seafood restaurant to watch the sun set over the ocean and return to "Gatsby." I read while I drank a few more Tecate beers and ate three shrimp tacos. I didn't bother with telling them that I prefer them not to be fried, since I was pretty hungry. I read as much as I could, between glimpses of the salmon-pink sunset and shimmering waves, and then I just closed the book and thought.

After a short stop at home I walked up to a little smoky dive bar, had a couple more beers with limes, ate some peanuts and looked over at the two incredibly cute and young senoritas.

"I really gotta learn Spanish," I thought.

Leaving Las Vegas--and Hunter S. Thompson

Last week I was in Vegas. I could've been anywhere, since I didn't do much of the Vegas scene, except for the free drinks at Happy Hour and the one-armed bandit at the airport. But whenever I'm in Vegas I think of Hunter Thompson, you know, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

My take: Hunter wrote a few wild, all-out "gonzo" books early on, then he named everything, "Fear and Loathing xxx" after that. Sort of took the originality out of it. But he does get credit for pioneering the term and style, Gonzo journalism.

When things were good in New Orleans, before Katrina around the end of 2004, Hunter was there and went for drinks with his "literary executor" Doug Brinkley, at Lucky's Bar on St. Charles Avenue. Lucky's is a 24-hour dive with a pool table, fried food, and a new bartender every other week. I've spent many a night there, but usually I was at Igor's or Avenue Pub up the street. Lucky's is certainly a misnomer, since it's usually half-full of losers (other than that night I spent with a talented Cajun gal who lived upstairs).

Brinkley was a New Orleans writer, known as a very serious sort, even if he did migrate to Houston by way of Rice University. I've met Doug a few times at New Orleans literary events, before he made a million bucks on his Katrina book. I even sent him an advance copy of my manuscript (for a blurb) not knowing he was penning his own story. He was teaching at U. of New Orleans, evacuated to Houston and then taught at Tulane for a year or so. He's a very busy guy, and he cranks out books and spits out facts like a machine.

This comes from Wikipedia:

During the early 1990s, Brinkley taught American Arts and Politics out of Hofstra University aboard the Majic Bus, a roving, transcontinental classroom, from which emerged the book, The Majic Bus: an American Odyssey, published in 1993. In 1993, he left Hofstra University to teach at the University of New Orleans and taught this class again, using a natural-gas bus. He also worked with Stephen Ambrose, then Director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. Ambrose chose Brinkley to become Director of the Eisenhower Center for five years before going to Tulane.

Brinkley is the literary executor for his friend, the journalist Hunter S. Thompson. He is also the editor of a three-volume collection of Thompson's letters:

• Volume 1: The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967. Published April 7, 1998.
• Volume 2: Fear And Loathing In America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist. Published December 13, 2000.
• Volume 3: The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop, 1977-2005. Schedule delayed until February, 2009.

As well, Brinkley is the authorized biographer for Beat generation author Jack Kerouac, having edited Kerouac's diaries as Windblown World. He has also written profiles of Kurt Vonnegut^[9], Norman Mailer, and Ken Kesey for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Anyway, Brinkley invited Andrei Codrescu to come along to Lucky's, and as Andrei tells it, Hunter Thompson's utterances that night were barely understandable, then a couple of months later he blew his own brains out declaring that he'd lived "17 years past 50" and that was long enough. He never wanted to be that old. I'm just hoping to make it there (next year).

As a Tijuana ex-pat who runs a cancer clinic (one of many) tells it, they propped up Hunter for one last party before his cremation. I doubt that, since he was in pieces by then, but then again, this guy cures cancer. Oh, late note--the clinic closed last week since the founder has dementia.

But Brinkley tells the story of Thompson's funeral elegantly in an article for Rolling Stone, which is a great tribute:

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final.
-- HUNTER S. THOMPSON, 1937-2005

February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year. February, by contrast, was doldrums time. Nothing but monstrous blizzards, bad colds and the lackluster Denver Nuggets. This past February, with his health failing, Hunter was even more glum than usual. "This child's getting old," he muttered with stark regularity, an old-timey refrain that mountainmen used to utter when their trailblazing days were over. Depressed and in physical pain from hip-replacement surgery, he started talking openly about suicide, polishing his .45-caliber pistol, his weapon of choice. He was trying to muster the courage to end it all.

Then, on February 16th, Hunter decided to leave a goodbye note. Scrawled in black marker, it was appropriately titled "Football Season Is Over." Although he left the grim missive for Anita, his young wife, Hunter was really talking to himself. Here, published for the first time, are perhaps his final written words:

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt.

At the bottom of the page, Hunter drew a happy heart, the kind found on Valentine's cards. Four days later, on February 20th, he committed suicide by firing his pistol into his mouth.

You can read the rest of it here:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7605448/football_season_is_over