My Mother was born and raised in this town and tomorrow she will be buried here. When she turned eighteen she left Rios with some drifter named Sid and wasn’t heard from for years. When she finally did come back home she was crawling back to her parents’ place with no money, no husband, and me.

I think that she was afraid that her parents would want nothing to do with her. I can remember her pulling off the highway just before we entered town. I was looking up at the sky trying to count the stars when I heard her sniffle like she was sick. I looked over and saw that she was crying.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” I asked.

She wiped her face and touched the top of my head, “Nothing, baby. Are you ready to see your Grandparents?”

“Yes,” I answered, unsure if I wanted to see them or not but knowing what she wanted, what she needed to hear.

We drove a little further down a dusty road until we were in front of a beat up looking house. She led me up the walkway to her old front door. There was a large porch with a swing hanging from it that looked like it hadn’t been used in years.

We were standing in front of a screen door and she finally knocked gently on it. The largest man I had ever seen came walking up to the door and I tried to hide behind her legs. I could feel her shaking. The man looked at her for several seconds, he had the look of a man who knows he should know the person standing in front of him but still can’t seem to place them. I peered up at him from behind one of her legs and saw his eyes go wide as he dropped the glass he held in his hand.

“Hope?” he asked in a tiny voice as if he spoke too loudly everything would be shattered.

“Hi, Daddy,” my Mom’s voice broke.

He moved to her and held his daughter like he would never let her go. He led her into the house and I followed them. “Mary,” my Grandfather called out. “Mary, Hope is home!”

Her Mother seemed to explode into the room and suddenly stopped when she was in it. She looked at my Mom and walked up slowly to her as if she was sneaking up on a rabbit. My Grandmother reached out to touch her only child as if she didn’t believe it was really her. Her hand touched my mom’s face, and then she held her like she would never let go again, ever.

Rios seemed to be the polar opposite of Seattle, where I had spent my previous ten years of life. There was a cluster of buildings in the center of town; a café, theater, a restaurant, a church, and a small market that sold provisions. One dusty road ran through the middle of town, it came off the main highway five miles north and continued on to, well, no one really knew where it ran to. It just sort of ran out into nothing.

The town itself felt like a living museum. I couldn’t believe people actually lived here. I imagined that they were paid to be here for tourists and at night they went back to their real homes. But, no tourists ever came through here. Outside of town the desert stretched to the horizon. At the horizon mountains rose from the earth and cut into the sky. To me, it felt like we were living at the edge of Earth.

This expanse made me claustrophobic. I had always known borders. “You can play only between those two light poles and no further,” my mom would always tell me. Here there didn’t seem to be any limits, you could just run and run and run until the light couldn’t find you. There were no light poles in Rios.

Six years later I was sitting outside of our front door under the awning one afternoon waiting for the sun to explode when my mom came running from the house.

“Come on. Come on,” she yelled out at me. “Let’s go, hurry!” I just sat there looking up at her, the heat of the day baking my brain. She stopped and looked down at me quizzically, “Come on! Hurry! There’s someone in town that I want to see.”

“So, who is this that we’re rushing down here to see?” I asked her between labored breathes as we ran down to the center of town.

“I just got a call from Katie. You know Katie, right? She works at the Twisted Fork.” Yes, I knew Katie. I was sure that there was only one Katie within one hundred miles. My mom continued, “She just called to tell me that Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor of Gonzo Journalism is in Rios,” she said, as if this made any kind of sense.

“Doctor of what?” I asked. “Are we finally getting a doctor in this town?”

“No, no,” she was smiling. “Not that kind of a doctor. A doctor of journalism.”

“What in the hell is a doctor of journalism?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure,” she admitted. “Haven’t you ever read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t much of a reader back in those days, which seems strange to me now because there was nothing else to do.

“Well, you should. Doctor Thompson (again with this ‘doctor’ stuff) went on a search for the American dream. He found it too, but he won’t tell any of us what it is.”

“He found the American dream?” I snickered at the naivety of my mother. There is no America dream, I thought. At least not a tangible one that’s waiting to be discovered. And when I saw him, Mr. Thompson, I have to admit, he didn’t instill in me much faith that he had any clue what the American dream was. He was a strange looking man dressed in a blue flower shirt and white shorts. He wore a floppy, nuclear yellow hat that was pulled down low on his head and green sunglasses that couldn’t quite mask his crazy eyes.

“Stay away from me. Stay away from me,” he was moaning out towards the curious onlookers that had gathered around. He was crouched into a doorway, a green beer bottle in one hand, a fly swatter in the other, a burning joint hanging lazily from the side of his mouth. I was willing to bet that nobody in Rios had ever seen a person like this. Well, not counting my mother. God only knows what she’s seen. I miss her.

Watching Thompson writhing in the grips of deranged paranoia, I felt that maybe he did actually find the American dream, and that the dream was so horrible and ugly that reality had been violently stripped from him.

Looking back on it now, it seems to me that Thompson was the broken and abused child who spent his days suffering so that we could live like the residents of Omelas, living out our American dreams blissfully unaware while he suffered through his nightmare.

Twenty years later I’m sitting at the edge of the town cemetery the day before my mother joins the earth. It’s late afternoon and I sit here bleary eyed, thinking about her and how happy she was that day. How happy she was every day and how her happiness infected everyone she met. And I watch as the sun bends down to give the dead a kiss goodnight just before slipping beneath the horizon.

Rest in peace, Doctor.

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