The tempestuous writer nicknamed Dr. Gonzo and Duke once said the only way to learn the boundary of The Edge is from people who have gone over it. He finally went over himself, but not like he imagined when was younger. Back then he thought he would buy it pushing a motorcyle over 100 miles per hour on some lonely moonlit highway. When the time came, he ate a .45 pistol instead.

As Don Meredith used to sing when Monday night football became a blow-out, turn out the lights, the party's over. Hunter S. Thompson is gone and it will be a very long time before we see another writer as original as he was.

The founder of gonzo journalism would have approved of stretching a football metaphor to describe the end of his life. Thompson was a football fanatic who often ignored writing deadlines to watch important games. In football he saw the American game of life in all of its graceful splendor and bone-crunching ugliness.

Thompson's last Sunday game was a different kind of blow-out. At his 100-acre Owl Creek farm near Aspen, Colorado, he extinguished the floodlights of his life and left millions of fans in the dark. He was pushing 68 and his physical health had been deteriorating for the past year: spinal surgery, hip replacement, constant pain, in and out of a wheelchair — not to mention the likely degenerative effects of his legendary use of alcohol and drugs. To top it off, he broke his leg during a recent vacation in Hawaii. "Big Darkness, soon come" was his verdict on the second term of President George W. Bush, but it also applied to Dr. Gonzo's own state of mind recently.

Thompson never expected to see 40, thought he would die young and leave a good-looking corpse like James Dean. Approaching middle age, he made a pilgrimage to the grave of one of his favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway, to see if he could reach an understanding of why Hemingway had killed himself. The residents of Ketchum, Idaho, had one thing to say about Hemingway's condition in those last years: "That poor old man."

Dr. Gonzo was a large man (six-foot, three-inches tall) with a large appetite for the pleasures of life. Being pitied was not for him. He lived six years longer than Hemingway and cashed in his chips for the same reason as his hero. When a man grows too old and frail to enjoy the things he loves to do, the things that give his life meaning, it's time for him to say goodbye. Thompson lasted to within a year and a half of the average American male lifespan — no shabby feat for a man who lived perpetually on The Edge.

The sprawling Colorado homestead Thompson occupied for many years was officially named the Owl Creek Farm, but he sometimes referred to it as "The Compound" — as in bunker seige mentality. Was Thompson paranoid? Or were "they" really after him?

A case could be made for actual persecution in some instances. The Guardians of Normal Society once tried to railroad Thompson into prison on trumped-up charges which he beat with the help of influential friends. The critics were not kind to Thompson's last couple of books. Some used hairy phrases like "hopelessly out of date" and "has been." In these neo-conservative times it has become fashionable to ridicule icons like Thompson who emerged out of the wild 60s movement. Thompson chose to hunker down in his Colorado retreat to weather the new political storm raging across America. He stayed out of the limelight as much as possible and even stopped visiting his favorite watering hole, the Woody Creek Tavern, as often as he used to.

But since his death, I have been surprised by how gently the press has treated the memory of Dr. Gonzo. Now that he is safely gone and can cause no more trouble, it seems he is suddenly worthy of all kinds of praise. I'm convinced Thompson would have a sarcastic remark to make if he could read his obituaries — just like he would find humor in the fact that he died on the same day as Sandra Dee. The former movie princess with a squeaky-clean image concealing a tragic case of alcoholism and the madman who flaunted his excesses out in the open for everyone to see. The comic irony would have drawn a belly laugh from Dr. Gonzo.

My own introduction to Thompson came 30 years ago when I picked up a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was ostensibly about Thompson covering a motocross race in the southern Nevada desert, but the subtitle gave hint to the book's true message — "A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream." I thought it was the most outrageously funny book I ever read. I laughed so hard and long I actually got a stomach ache. Who could ever forget the "medicine"-induced desert bats or the 300-pound Samoan attorney staring at a knife blade with a wild gleam in his eyes or crawling to a hotel room closet to puke into a pair of shoes? It was madness on a grand scale, and it was bizarrely hilarious for all the wrong reasons. After I finished the book, I concluded that Thompson possessed some sort of skewed genius for darkly absurd humor.

As I soon discovered, that was only one facet of his multi-dimensional writing. Since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I have read literally every word that Thompson ever published and some of it multiple times. I wanted to get to the bottom of what actor Jack Nicholson called "the most baffling human iceberg of our time." Aside from ordinary curiosity about an author I enjoyed reading, I had personal reasons to explore the life and work of this mysterious wild man.

Like his favorite boxer Mohammad Ali, Thompson grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, home of the high-society Kentucky Derby which irritated him enough to perfect his new kind of journalism when he covered the horse race in 1970. Thompson got into trouble with the law when he was a fatherless teenager. Details of the incident are sketchy and obscured by the mythology Thompson loved to create about his personal life. Suffice it to say that from an early age he didn't believe policemen were his friends. Following high school, he attended Columbia University, but dropped out after a short time.

Thompson began his professional writing career in his early twenties as a newspaper reporter in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nearly four decades later he wrote about his San Juan experiences in The Rum Diary, a laid-back narrative that included a glimpse of his friendship with future fiction author William Kennedy.

After Puerto Rico, Thompson took a job as a roving correspondent for the National Observer in South America. For a young man with scant formal training in journalism, his National Observer reports were amazingly perceptive and well-written to an experienced journalist like myself. While in South America, Thompson became ill and took some medicine that caused his hair to start falling out, resulting in his trademark baldness.