Mistah Leary, He Dead
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
I will miss Tim Leary—not for his wisdom or his beauty or his warped lust for combat, or because of his wealth or his power or his drugs—but mainly because I won’t hear his laughing voice on my midnight telephone anymore. Tim usually called around two. It was his habit—one of many that we shared—and he knew I would be awake.
Tim and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “after midnight, all things are possible.”
Just last week he called me on the phone at 2:30 in the morning and said he was moving to a ranch in Nicaragua in a few days and would fax me the telephone number. Which he did. And I think he also faxed it to Dr. Kesey.
Indeed. There are many rooms in the mansion. And Tim was familiar with most of them. We will never know the range of his fiendish vision, or the many lives he was sucked into by his savage and unnatural passions.
We sometimes disagreed, but in the end we made our peace. Tim was a Chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof prints on all our lives.
He is forgotten now, but not gone. We will see him soon enough. Our tribe is now smaller by one. Our circle is one link shorter. Now there is one more name on the honor roll of pure warriors, who saw the great light and leaped for it.