THOUGH HUNTER S . Thompson called many places home, San Francisco was clearly his spiritual home. It was here, living in an apartment at 318 Parnassus St., that he hosted the Hell's Angels while researching his book on the famed outlaw cycle club and first came to the attention of the American public. With the publication of Hell's Angels, he took his first tentative steps into what would come to be known as "gonzo journalism" and would yield several excellent works in the ensuing years. From the 1960s until his death Feb. 20, his work was peppered with references to his experiences in the Bay Area. Ripping his motorcycle up and down 101 to La Honda or Los Altos to hang out with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, crawling around North Beach near the sights frequented by his hero, Jack Kerouac, making runs out to Bass Lake, tending the hot tubs at Esalen in Big Sur, working as a night manager at Mitchell Brothers, writing for the San Francisco Examiner – Thompson was a Bay Area fixture. And a drinker.

One of Thompson's favorite bars was Tosca, just across the street from City Lights Bookstore and Jack Kerouac Alley, and there is much lore surrounding his time there. The beats, especially Kerouac, were heroes of his, and he made it a point to haunt their haunts. He was good friends with the owner of Tosca and was regularly seen on both sides of the bar. Another hangout was Zeke's, now a SoMa sports bar close to what used to be the old Examiner offices on Third Street and directly across the way from the original home of Rolling Stone, the magazine that serialized Thompson's seminal Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Years ago I went to Zeke's for a few postwork pops and saw that an old Thompson bar tab was still taped up behind the bar. Unpaid.

Thompson was also a massive fan of Bay Area sports, continuing to follow the 49ers and the Raiders even in recent columns for ESPN. His apartment on Stanyan was a few blocks from Kezar Stadium in the Haight, and he wrote of riding his cycle down there, watching games in hailstorms, and drinking beers with Hall of Fame linebacker Dave Wilcox and other Niners at what was then known as the Stadium Club, a bar right across from the field. The Stadium Club, by my reckoning, is now the Kezar Pub, and it was where I went when I heard the news that Thompson had died.

Thompson drank whiskey and beer, for the most part. He was from Kentucky, after all, and his tastes ran toward the hillbilly. He liked blends such as Chivas Regal and Tullamore Dew, but he also had a penchant for bourbons, including the rough birds of bourbon, Old Crow and Wild Turkey. Of these, my favorite is Tullamore Dew. It's not that it's particularly smooth; I just love saying the name "Tullamore Dew." It puts me in Ireland on a crisp morning looking out over the dew-covered fields and feeling as if the world were brand-new. But Dew wasn't on the rack at Kezar the night I visited, and I didn't need anything comforting and Dew-like. I needed something that would burn like a swamp on fire.

Thompson once wrote that he had a ritual for his whiskey pour. It required much ice. Basically, he would fill a glass with ice (the glasses became taller as he aged), and he'd slooowly pour the whiskey over the ice. Once it was poured, he capped his hand over the top of the glass to form a seal, turned it over gently (not shaking it cocktail-style, just running the whiskey over the ice to chill and lightly dilute it), and turned it back upright, ready to drink. It takes a bit of practice to avoid dousing oneself in booze but otherwise works nicely. I employed the method when I asked the Kezar bartender for a glass of Wild Turkey, 101 proof on the rocks. Man, it burns. It's grim stuff, but I was in a foul mood. It was raining like hell outside, and one of my heroes had just shot himself.

I'm not much for heroes, and I don't respond well to mentors, but I can say that Hunter S. Thompson was one of my personal heroes. It seems trite, in one sense, that a booze writer would name Thompson as a hero, but my love of the man and his work has little or nothing to do with his conspicuous consumption of virtually whatever he could get his hands on. In fact, my major problem is that his antics may overshadow his real legacy, if the standard of his obituaries is any measure. What one gleans from his work, between the binges, is that he was a deeply sensitive character constantly and very consciously creating his own myth. He was an acerbic, brilliant satirist and one of the keenest political and social observers of his time. The fact that he seemed to be perpetually under the influence of some intoxicant was an integral part of his work. It made him the Other, an outlaw. Regrettably it allowed his critics to dismiss him as some drug-addled maniac, yet it also allowed him to be placed in the role of the archetypal truth-telling jester, the shaman who must leave temporal reality to report on it from beyond. As my brother put it, "I've distilled my feelings about him down to this: he showed me that you didn't need to take things seriously to be taken seriously, and vice versa."

Hidden in the inspired lunacy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of the most eloquent remembrances put on paper in the past century. It is Thompson's heartfelt eulogy to the San Francisco of the '60s:

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.... And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave....

I will always remember him at the crest of that wave: young, giddy with optimism, and engineering some brilliant subversion into which we, weakened by a world that often seems nothing but Old and Evil, can escape for a little while to gather our strength and a enjoy a glass of Dew.

E-mail Matt Markovich at mmarkovich@hotmail.com.