Back in college I shared a couple of classes with a minor-league campus celebrity by the name of John Pecorelli. Unlike most of the people who distinguish themselves enough to stand out from a student body of 25,000, Pecorelli was not an athlete. He gained his notoriety the old-fashioned way, by having a big mouth.

He was the sort of guy who didn’t think twice about standing up in the middle of an auditorium full of students and telling a tenured professor that he or she was full of shit, and if the prof tried to argue the point, Pecorelli would systematically explain exactly how and why that teacher was, in fact, full of shit. I remember witnessing at least one such argument and marveling at the devastating logic Pecorelli brought to bear on his target. He was a jerk, but he was a very smart and skillful one.

As effective as Pecorelli was in a verbal argument, though, he really shone when he wrote his opinions down. He had a column in the U of U’s student newspaper, the Daily Chronicle. I can’t recall any of the specific topics he wrote about, but I can remember his style: acerbic, sarcastic, sometimes just plain mean, but always precisely dead-on-target. He was an iconoclast who respected nothing and loved to shock people. He was also an equal opportunity offender. It didn’t matter how easy-going you might have been, sooner or later John Pecorelli would find your particular button and then he would push it. Hard.

Pecorelli frequently angered me — I denounced him more than once as an asshole and a poser, because no one could possibly be so damn angry all the time — but I kept reading his column. He was the best writer on the whole bloody paper. I envied his talent, his courage, and his seeming inability to be intimidated.

It often seemed to me that John Pecorelli was modelling himself on Hunter S. Thompson. I suspect he would’ve denied modelling himself after anyone, because that would’ve punctured his facade of disdain for anyone who wasn’t John Pecorelli. In my mind, however, the two are eerily similar. They were alike in their volatility, their penchant for confrontation, and their utter disgust for the Establishment, however you defined it. They were both, to use Thompson’s word, gonzo.

I haven’t actually read anything by the original gonzo journalist, Hunter Thompson himself, but I know his work by reputation, and I know his legend. I know that he exploded onto the cultural landscape in the late ’60s and became a genuine star in the early ’70s. I know he wanted to turn all the stale old journalistic conventions on their ear, and that he and contemporaries Thomas Wolfe, Gay Talese, and George Plimpton broke the rules of objective news reporting by inserting themselves into the story. And I also know that Thompson eventually became the story because of his bizarre, drug-and-booze-addled behavior. The word “eccentric” doesn’t begin to cover the genuine weirdness so often attributed to Hunter S. Thompson. And yet, whenever I’ve stumbled across some reference to his antics, I’ve always wondered how much of that freakiness was an act, a persona, an conscious effort to become larger-than-life or to make some kind of a point. I used to wonder the same thing about John Pecorelli’s tirades. Was it all just bullshit, John? Were you just trying to be cool? Or were you maybe trying to break through the complacency you saw all around you and get people thinking about things from a different perspective?

I suppose I’ll never know in either case. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself on Sunday, a sad but somehow fitting end for such a turbulent life. And I haven’t seen or heard anything about John Pecorelli in years. I like to think he’s still out there rattling cages, though…