Birmingham bit

The Birmingham bit was writer Hunter S. Thompson's oft-referenced suicide fantasy.

While serving in the U.S. Air Force in 1956 and 1957, Thompson regularly drove between Louisville, Kentucky and Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. A turn on Red Mountain along his route inspired in him a vivid thought of driving off the road and crashing into Jones Valley.

Thompson provided a description of the notion to George Plimpton, which is quoted in his 1977 book Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring:

Back in the U.S. there was a mountain I used to drive over in the sixties[sic] on the way down from Louisville past Birmingham to the Elgin[sic] Air Force Base—Iron Mountain, I guess they call it: a lot of big houses upon it and rich people from Birmingham and the road is sort of scenic, with big entranceways and fine views, and there’s one place where you come around a sharp curve to the left, and straight ahead, down beyond the cliff, is the city, acres of steel mills and Bessemer furnaces and smelting yards below—and my concept of death for a long time was to come down that mountain road at a hundred twenty and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that in… well, it was important that it was the right sort of car, the Jaguar XK120, though later on I began to connect the XK140 with the fantasy, painted white, though sometimes I vacillated between white and British racing green, which is very nice too, and it had to be a convertible, of course, because you’d want to feel the air against you… and there I’d be, sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whiskey next to me, and a case of dynamite in the trunk, or boot, it would be in a Jaguar, honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit out there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and then fall on down into that mess of steel mills. It’d be a tremendous goddamn explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt. I’m pretty sure, unless they’ve changed the highway, that launching place is still there. As soon as I get home, I ought to take the drive and just check it out.

The idea already had a long history, though. In a February 3, 1961 letter to Paul Semonin, he referred to the "Birmingham bit", then speculating that to accomplish the suicide in a Triumph motorcycle rather than a sports car would be "less impressive, but more personal".