18 Years of Fear and Loathing: Part 1

a caffeinated excerpt from the Gonzo Diaries of Madison Young St. Jamirez, detailing the frustration & excitement he feels with everything.

Today I was sitting outside Starbucks twiddling my thumbs and talking with a girl about the Great Spiritual Oneness of All Things, preached in song & story and enthused endlessly about by every Hippie, Acid Freak, and Con Man in the world, and how I had never ascribed to that particular theory.

“Ah,” she said, sipping a latte, “you’re a bad drug user then. You should cease using drugs immediately and become a Republican.”

And then I looked at her, through her, and around her all at once, and didn’t notice any of it for I was busy realizing the tremendous weight rushing in on me from all sides—she had struck bare and boneless the fiery nerve that had been pulsing through every waking moment of the last several weeks, coalescing cold blue anger and fury into bolts of jagged lightning that burst from my fingertips & lips. I am a Rich White Man, born & bred with a housekeeper and a $1,000,000 house in Honolulu, with a Trust Fund in my name and $13,000 in a bank account for me to spend on unholy whatnot just for being the grandson of an executive ex-asshole of the publishing industry. This is Madness, my friends; sheer Madness for someone like me to go around smoking marijuana and snorting Vicodin off clipboards in weird lofts in Palolo Valley or taking buses all over town in a stoned haze, walking like some hippie marauder; this is all, I feel, an Act.

What I should be doing is smoking cigars, mind you, mad polluting highfaluting ridiculous cigars on a yacht with a polo team and a bottle of Scotch whiskey, and all kinds of other hateful garbage of which I can type no more lest I work myself into a murderous rage. This is what I was Born To Do, in one sense; yet in another sense I would Die rather than do it. I have read books and seen films—indeed, I have met in the flesh—characters of various strata, the elegant horse-owning types, the jockeys, the madman who cleans up after the horses, but what I really feel in the depths of my soul is the man who had the courage & belligerence & penetrating insight to see that the Kentucky Derby is, simply, decadent and depraved. And through his lens I see the last 18 years of my life—the only 18 years of my life as of yet—and I conjure up two words to describe them, and they are of course Fear and Loathing.

Fear, ladies and gentlemen; the Fear not of the “unknown” in some abstract sense but quite literally; Fear of anyone we don’t know. Don’t Talk To Strangers, especially not if they have a Glint in their eye which may spark of real interesting stories. And it goes past this: Fear of being perceived as having No Money or No Class; Fear of the Dark, which has owned me all my life; Fear of Death, which has owned me an equally long time—I remember twitching and sobbing at Five years of age at the idea that one day I would simply Cease To Exist; and Fear of oneself to the degree that any display of the Soul is cause for alarm, there is no ability to jump & shout, to let out the natural exuberance that stirs in every corner of my body, that wants to give off cartwheels sometimes and other times to wax eloquent on the nature of Charles Manson and his Electric Floating Gumballs—what the fuck does that mean, this is what happens when you give NoDoz to a cat who doesn’t drink coffee—Fear, finally & truly, of Excitement. Life should be Dull, for then it is under control; it is when things truly spark us in the deep clamoring recesses of Whatever It Is that we have within us that we no longer can control ourselves.

But still we try. I have over me now an iron mantle of control to keep myself from running off to the nearest ATM and getting enough money for a great mass of Cocaine which I would sell for inflated prices—and this mantle of control goes deeper than anything you could imagine. It is not only the fear of Arrest or such (very real) dangers—it is the knowledge that I must get up tomorrow, for no other reason than I always do, and that I must sleep here at home at night and I must be here at a certain time, and that I can’t be Too Exhausted because that is something only those blasted Poor Kids from Palolo do; this is how I have thought all my life and no doubt will. Everything is crippling when you’ve got the Fear, as I have, the kind of Fear you can only have when you’ve been cold freezing sober for far too long.

And let’s not forget Loathing, folks, that bitter wolverine that comes skulking around pulling your nerves into knots and slathering them with hot mustard. Loathing of those beautiful holy cats whom I now idolize; if I saw Jack Kerouac walking down the street today I’d have 18 years of madness run through my brain at a clip shouting “Run away, you damn fool, he’s a Dangerous Drunk who’s Living For Real, and we want none of that!” And yet he is the same cat in whose voice I find myself wandering on weird summer days and weirder nights when I rub my hands at the great Dean Moriarties of the Mind that I will someday find thru my journeys of Montreal, Montana, Monaco, and Mescaline. This is the kind of Power that Kerouac has over me, the Power to get me jumping up out of my chair grasping at words that are racing too fast over the blazing desert for me to catch them. But I can’t go chasing after them, for there is Things to be done, always the Illusion of Propriety to be kept up; the Loathing for that kind of free-delinquent lifestyle, for Beer & Cheap Whiskey, for psychedelic camcorders to record all history past present & future, for subversive comedic tales told in bop prosody & fairy-tale giggles and laughter on street corners in New York City where bull dykes and world-class DJs come to swap stories and crip weed; all this nonsense, this high-powered Freak Out, this beautiful expression of the sheer madness & intensity & forward-driven ZOOM of the human soul—fuck all of it.

This is the life bohemian: the man who gets up, smokes a bowl or three, goes to work—one hour into two, eight, sixteen, seventy-five and a half—in a mad delirious haze of hangover, marijuana, cynicism, and pure ADRENALINE....leaves his cubicle or his cash register or whatever Altar he is forced to kneel at and goes off into the hazy blue/black twilight to snap fingers and bump knees with the cream of the ever-growing Crop of mad bums and degenerates he meets wherever he goes, Poets & Playwrights & the kind of cats who write articles for Erowid, people who draw Chairman Mao on the backside of street signs, and chemistry students at Yale University who make acid all summer and dance to Fatboy Slim when nobody knows. All these cats are LIVING, I tell thee: alive with not some particular Oneness of Soul, as I was saying earlier, but each with their own personal fire and half the point is to find out what color and texture and sweet apocalyptic taste each fire has. Taste each other’s fires in the poolhalls and backyards of the world. One cat digs Louis Armstrong, another Coltrane, another hasn’t heard of either one and the fourth cat is too stoned on drugs to hear music as music at all—it’s all some kind of blue hailstorm & clouds of lightning as far as he’s concerned—and all these cats, aside from digging their own holes halfway to the end of the Universe they can dive into each other’s and swim around there for a while, carry some of what they see back into their own bag and swish it around a little bit and see what happens. Because part of what passion means, at least the kind of passion I’m trying to describe, is that it’s always in flux, it’s always searching itself out. All these thrills—music and drugs and art and films and swimming and sexual intercourse—it’s all about chasing the gigantic monster HIGH you get when something pierces through your navel to the electric core of your being. And when something moves you THERE—well then, brother, you just have to go wherever the fuck it takes you.

But that’s not what I can do. If something moves me THERE, I have to shut it out, for I Fear and Loathe it; these two things are not at all synonymous but they are symbiotic. It is hard to have one without the other. And hand in hand they march me down the path to miserable slobbering self-hatred and Senility at the age of 18, twenty-three minutes to midnight on Saturday June 9, 2007, Anno Domini. I am ashamed to stand where I do and converse the hip talk jive and passionate tomfoolery with any cat who’s ever tripped DMT or candyflipped off of nowhere into a giant molten puddle of Everywhere—because the bag of my whole useless and angry Culture is to keep these cats down. I am THE MAN, of whom you have heard so much. And I can’t just throw out all of what I’ve ever learned & loved in my life as a straight shooter—my own blessed parents for God’s sake, and the material amenities that surround me: this holy laptop, speaker system, hundreds of CDs, a crip knife from India, a video camera, one of those 80GB iPods on which you can play Solitaire till your eyes no longer focus properly, books & books & DVDs, clothes and a fine roof over my head the likes of which most of the cats I admire most have never been blessed with. I don’t deserve these things, and the cats that do don’t have ‘em—and lately I find myself wondering if the very having of these material blessings make one undeserving of them, and vice-versa. But surely not vice-versa; there are some plain Shitty People about, rich or poor, and surely some bums deserve everything they get, which is nothing. But what of Postulate Number One—that is, does the rich man, by virtue of being a rich man, not deserve his riches? Or can the camel get through the eye of the needle after all? Anything’s possible when you have enough drugs.

In conclusion, ye merry gentlefolk, the time is ripe & ready for Madison Young St. Jamirez to come into his own and for Henry A. Thornhill to cease to exist altogether, at least for the time being. Time will be bidden for a little while longer—but soon enough I’ll sever all connection with what I have now, which is the antithesis and antagonist of all that I have come to admire and adore. What’s with the big words, man? I don’t know. I’m getting pompous and overblown—and it’s beautiful. Hopefully all this will go down in time to prevent me having a Total Nervous Breakdown, and hopefully I’ll make it through college without bounding thru the quad on methamphetamine trying to take down an elk. Or something equally absurd. Mahalo.