Ribbons

I had a soft spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth, and also because his wife gave the best head in Hollywood.

Hunter S. Thompson, 2003

Reading Hunter Thompson's "Hey Rube" at the same time as McKinley's mountainous hockey book got me to thinking about Ronald Reagan. The punk rock community hated Reagan's fascist guts at the dawn of our Wretched Age. We thought he was going to get us all drafted and machine-gunned to ribbons of shit.

When Hinckley shot the president I was in my record store in Fort Royal browsing through their small but well considered import section. That's where I bought the Vibrators' second lp. Besides records, the store sold lots of tvs. The tvs covered a whole wall of their store. There was a commotion of suits on the tvs. The guy who ordered the records I was looking at before I got distracted said, "Someone shot that asshole Reagan."

All the customers and all the staff stood staring at the wall of television. I was not the only one who was smiling. It was vintage violence, the assassination of a hateful man. I did not buy any records that day. I went home, did some dope and listened to the Dead Kennedys on my stereo while my little transistor radio my grandparents had given me as a child crackled reports from distant American AM stations on the grave condition of Fucked Up Ronnie.