The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  “I just hope to Christ you’re ready,” he’d say when he had me on speakerphone. “It’s about the end of fun, and it’s going to cost you.”

  “Good, you deserve to be rich.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Have you got any new pages?”

  “I said, ‘Fuck you!’ ”

  This went on for months until, as if by sympathetic magic when we decided to scrap “Year of the Wolf,” Polo Is My Life arrived at Esquire. But it was not the manuscript of the secret novel. Packed in a huge wooden crate tight with bubble wrap, Polo Is My Life was a four-by-eight-foot plywood sheet with crossed polo mallets in the middle; ammunition belts with live .50-caliber rounds had been hung on it, and the whole thing weighed a couple hundred pounds. Hunter had titled the collage in red spray paint across the top and attached numerous personal totems (photos, press cards, bar napkins, X-rays, notes, quotes, lipstick, a joint or two, letters, court records…) so that most of the plywood was covered. It took two UPS freight guys to carry it into my office.

  The phone rang next to my bed at about three the next morning.

  “Now it’s really going to cost you.” Laughter again in the background.

  “Who’ve you got there with you?” I asked. “Joseph Wood Krutch?”

  “You think I don’t know who the fuck that is, well…”

  I mounted Polo Is My Life on a wall in the conference room next to my office, where everyone who came through could get an easy look at it if they asked about Hunter or, more often, when an editor started bragging about it to a visiting writer. It was Hunter’s verdict of guilt on all editors, like the black spot he had sent George, and it hung as a major attraction until I left the magazine. It cost $1,500 in 1993 dollars to ship it back to Woody Creek.

  —

  ALMOST EVERY TIME I saw Hunter, he was in shorts and white Chuck Taylors, but he liked expensive, wild-ass shirts and owned several for special occasions. I figured Hunter coming to New York for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would be one of those. The book had sold well all along and had been made into the movie Where the Buffalo Roam, which had goosed book sales. A new Johnny Depp version was in preproduction. Modern Library was publishing an expanded edition, and a book party was being planned.

  Hunter would be staying at the Four Seasons, on Fifty-seventh Street, because there had been too many misunderstandings at the Carlyle, where he usually stayed—the most recent having to do with Hunter throwing a blow-up sex doll out the window onto Madison Avenue. The book party was going to be a huge affair at the Lotos Club. Afterward we would be going to George’s house.

  “We need to get George better drugs,” Hunter told me on the phone before he left Aspen.

  The party was badly organized, with only two bars for more than two hundred guests, and the scheduled speakers—including George, Jann, myself—would have to stand on a chair in the middle of the room. There were supposed to be some readings too, but you knew that wasn’t going to happen. No one cared, least of all Hunter, who arrived late.

  “Who are all these fuckers?” he said.

  I had expected him to maybe be wearing his bright red Lakota shirt with the embroidered turtles, but he had on a new, white button-down with a paisley tie he had borrowed somewhere—a surprising nod to the occasion. More important, I thought, he had a can of lighter fluid in one hand and the gold Dunhill lighter he always carried in the other, as if he were about to pull his trusty spitting-the-flaming-fluid trick. But he didn’t, and there we all were, standing around waiting for him to do something outrageous with his Nixon mask or the boat horns or the trick hammers that made the sound of breaking glass. Sometimes he liked to put on lipstick in the middle of conversations—much subtler, he said, than banging his Samoan war club. But he loved all of it: banging those hammers and blowing those horns and asking women he had just met if he could borrow their lipstick. All three moves worked especially well in restaurants. In this moment he made everyone nervous just standing there in the tie with the lighter fluid—clearly his intent.

  When a third bar was opened, the room relaxed and the speakers started. Hunter listened closely, toying with the Dunhill lighter. I don’t remember what I said, but George mentioned “acid golf.” When it was Jann’s turn, he explained with great wit that he did not have one thousand pristine first editions of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in storage as Hunter had been claiming for years. The crowd booed.

  “Besides,” Jann said, smiling, “we all know Hunter cares more about art than commerce.”

  Hunter was smiling too, and they hugged when Jann stepped down from the chair. Some of Hunter’s best moments were like that, shockers of kinship when he knew you were getting the joke.

  —

  WHEN HUNTER PAID ATTENTION to you, it could feel like a gift, or currency that could be spent telling stories about him. Some people were greedy about this or, worse, condescending, as if they knew Hunter better than whomever they were talking to. Every new editor he ever worked with bragged about going through Hunter’s paces with him, and usually it was like watching clowns unpacking from a tiny car long after you had outgrown the circus. The unsurprising truth was that Hunter was tightest with the people he got high with and/or had sex with. His numerous admirers who didn’t do one or the other could never quite get their heads around this.

  Much later, there were so many posthumous Hunter-and-me books that you wished he hadn’t gotten high with so many people. This was not true of Ralph Steadman’s The Joke’s Over, because of the personal subtext the illustrations carry, or of The Kitchen Readings, by Hunter’s Aspen friends—the writer and artist Michael Cleverly, who lived down the road, and Bob Braudis, who had been the sheriff of Pitkin County since 1986. The title refers to Hunter’s writing process in later years: he would write; his friends would read it back to him; he would edit; and on into the night.

  As a young writer, Hunter had read his writing aloud as he worked. Now it was easier hearing friends read it, and more useful than making his pilgrims read work he had already published. It was a technique he used to see how his sentences played. He said he had taught himself to write by reading The Great Gatsby aloud as he typed out the entire novel. His son Juan’s middle name is Fitzgerald.

  Hunter would say that there were far fewer good editors than good writers, and that he had learned some very harsh lessons from their incompetence. He had a riff about it, how he used to suck editors into his pieces as conspirators, all of us wanting to prove ourselves good enough—hip enough—to edit him. When he got you on the phone in the middle of the night to listen to someone in the kitchen read to you what he had just written, all you could say was that it sounded great and that he should send it to you.

  “Ho ho,” he’d say. “So you can fuck it up before it’s finished?”

  But he knew he needed editing. When he filed, the pieces often came in as a series of false leads. They were typically all good fragments, but they didn’t connect. So you ended up having to string them together to make a piece, and you knew the work in the kitchen with his friends was invaluable, even if it stretched out the deadlines. For Hunter, if he had pages at dawn, it had been a good night. When he was writing, he said, he measured his life in those pages, perhaps not unlike Prufrock did with coffee spoons. Hunter knew the poem, too.

  —

  BY THE TIME I GOT to Sports Illustrated, Hunter was writing a weekly column for ESPN.com, called “Hey, Rube.” It was conceived to be about sports and gambling, but the columns were full of politics and whatever else he found interesting in the news. He often bcc’d me on these pieces, which were uneven, and didn’t get him the attention he was used to. We had not spoken about any of this when he called my office to ask “what the fuck” was wrong with me and to say that my new job should make me a better gambler, ho ho, and that SI still owed him money for an assignment in the early 1970s to cover Nevada’s Mint 400 motorcycle race—the blown assignment that had inspired Fear and Loath
ing in Las Vegas.

  “You filed a piece?”

  “You fuckers killed it.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “We can gamble for it,” he said. “But not like the golf you welshed on, ho ho…”

  “What’s the bet?”

  “I’ll bet you the measly three grand kill fee that you can’t get me paid.”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “No power, eh…”

  “I’ll worry about that.”

  “You can bring the cash when you come out, ho ho. Maybe your golf has improved.”

  He sounded strong and occupied, the way he always did when he was making plans or gambling on the NFL, but he seemed to be looking for something from me. I told him I admired his 9/11 column, which he wrote the morning of the attack predicting that we would be at war with a mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives…a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

  When we were hanging up, he said we were all “marching on a road of bones.”

  —

  IN 2004, THE YEAR BEFORE Hunter killed himself, I went to the Kentucky Derby. SI had a box then, on the finish line, and I had never attended the race but I had been interested in the scene around it since reading Hunter’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” in Scanlan’s Monthly, the short-lived, unfettered magazine edited by Warren Hinckle back in 1970. This was the assignment where Hunter found his voice, and worked for the first time with the ink-splattering illustrator Ralph Steadman, whose work would become emblematic of gonzo. Back at their motel after their first day of reporting and relaxing before dinner, they talked about where they were from—Wales, where Ralph had grown up, and Hunter’s Louisville.

  There was no way either of us could have known, at the time, that it would be the last normal conversation we would have. From that point on, the weekend became a vicious, drunken nightmare. We both went completely to pieces. The main problem was my prior attachment to Louisville, which naturally led to meetings with old friends, relatives, etc., many of whom were in the process of falling apart, going mad, plotting divorces, cracking up under the strain of terrible debts or recovering from bad accidents. Right in the middle of the whole frenzied Derby action, a member of my own family had to be institutionalized.

  When I told Hunter I was going to Louisville for the race, he insisted that I visit the house where he had grown up. Just drive by and take a look, he said.

  “Why?” I asked, baiting him. We had never talked about his childhood.

  “Jesus, I thought we were friends,” he said. “Take a fucking picture.”

  The morning of the race, I drove to 2437 Ransdell Avenue. The address was in the Highlands Cherokee Triangle, close to downtown Louisville, on a hilly street lined with leafy, mature trees and large Victorians and stone Tudor Revivals with sloping lawns. Hunter’s house was small by comparison—poor, even, next to its neighbors. Hunter’s father died when he was fifteen, and his mother raised him and his two younger brothers there, working as a secretary and a librarian.

  I got out of the car and took a photo to send him. He and his boyhood friends had published a two-page mimeographed newsletter, the four-cents-a-copy Southern Star, out of that house, with Hunter covering sports like children’s “trench warfare” in the neighborhood. He had painted an elaborate “Gates of Hell” tableau on the floor of his small upstairs bedroom. Money was tight and his mother was a drinker. She was the institutionalized relative he had mentioned in the Derby piece. All of which he told me when I called to say I was standing in front of the house. It was about eight a.m. in Woody Creek and Hunter was still up. He said it had been raining.

  −ENDIT−

  Weather Report (454)

  HUNTER LOVED WEATHER and used it in everything he wrote. Hells Angels with their stripped Harleys rolling past you on the highway like a burst of dirty thunder. Palm trees were lashed by wild squalls from Florida to Hawaii. His ledes were often weather reports from wherever he was writing. It was what he called “fundamental reporting,” before you got to “the Wisdom.” Lightning at night meant fear in the morning.

  There were hurricanes of changes and details of weather throughout the pieces. Freezing cold outside; patches of ice on the road and snow on the sidehills in New Hampshire. The rain and gray mist at Super Bowl VIII in Houston. A big window in New York City looking out on the savage, snow-covered wasteland of Central Park. The paper in his notebook limp with the humidity at 3:55 on a hot, wet Sunday morning in Saigon.

  Strange behavior set up and amplified by dramatic weather was even better. Hunter driving in a drenching, blinding rain on U.S. 40 east of Winnemucca, his fingers like rotten icicles on the steering wheel. Hunter in a fast red car on a moonless night in a rainstorm roaring through a flock of sheep on the sleazy outskirts of Elko. It was like running over wet logs. Horrible, horrible…

  Hunter wasn’t alone in this among writers, and as an editor I couldn’t get enough. I even loved the stretched metaphors: Hunter enduring a shitrain of perjury that led to a blizzard of strange publicity. Weather, I thought: use it as often as you can. The Other Bob Sherrill had insisted I open my eyes and appreciate the opportunities. He’d once stomped into the LA newsroom and waited for attention. It was just after Thanksgiving and unseasonably hot, which he emphasized by shouting at nobody in particular, “Hot enough for you?!”

  About fifteen of us looked up, waiting for some folksy, rustic public-announcement-style humor, but it turned out to be anger we had not seen before from him. It was searing, uncomfortable language delivered in a kind of growl. He’d just seen “a great big fat black street-corner Santa Claus” ringing his hand bell for charity, and this Santa just happened to be visibly and heavily “sweating in the hot fucking sun, under a white fucking sky”…did that mean anything to any of us young and supposedly observant chroniclers of the local culture? Did it strike us as in any way meaningful or perhaps the least bit unusual? When none of us answered, he glared at us one by one around the room before sitting down at his desk in the corner, where he started typing with his back to us.

  −ENDIT−

  Hunter and George (1,723)

  WHEN GEORGE DIED IN 2003, I called Hunter after Sarah Plimpton called me. It was about eight-thirty in the morning New York time, six-thirty in Woody Creek. Hunter answered on the first ring.

  “No!” was all he said. I took a breath and gave him the details I had. George had come home late. When Sarah woke in the morning, George was lying beside her dead.

  Neither of us spoke. In the background I could hear him operating the grinder he used for coke, then banging it down on the countertop.

  “Fuck you!” he finally screamed.

  “I know,” I said, and hung up.

  —

  HUNTER AND GEORGE RECOGNIZED each other as allies immediately, although they did not agree on what had happened when they first met, except that it was on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman fight—the Rumble in the Jungle. They were seatmates.

  George remembered that Hunter was worried about not getting paid for a calamitous lecture at Duke where his alter ego, Raoul Duke, had run amok on Wild Turkey. Hunter said he and George had compared boxing notes like the professionals they were. George remembered Hunter talking about secret weapons (“huge torpedoes!”) being constructed by revolutionaries in the Congo to disrupt the fight. Hunter remembered George being greeted by the promoter Don King as a “prince of the realm” when they landed in Kinshasa. George remembered that while he embarked on a week of serious reporting, Hunter smoked hash in the hotel pool and wound up missing the fight. Muhammad Ali loved them both.

  Back in the States they talked about each other as if they were old friends, which was easy because they had much in common. They were the same height (close to six foot four), loved sports and were
evenly matched—George was a better athlete; Hunter was stronger. They both had “served,” as Hunter put it (George: army; Hunter: air force). Neither of them liked wine at all. Both loved cocaine, which George called the chemicals, as in “Do you have the chemicals?”

  Their career-establishing books, Paper Lion and The Hell’s Angels, were published within months of each other in 1966–67, both praised for immersive reporting and original voice. Hunter loved the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music. George played the piano on short breaks when he was writing.

  Hunter’s middle name was “Stockton.” He never explained why, only that his father had been born in the last century in Horse Cave, Kentucky, a place-name full of spookiness for him. George’s middle name, Ames, was from his great-grandfather Adelbert Ames, a Civil War hero. George had met “the Boy General” when he was six, and had thus “looked into the eyes of a man who faced Pickett’s Charge—imagine what he saw.” It was a story George told often. He liked talking about his family. As always, Hunter wanted to know more, especially about this Boy General.

  “He was very severe and I was afraid,” George said. “We were in the garden of his house and he picked up a twig, snapped it in half and said, ‘Life ends like that, boy!’ ”

  Hunter loved that.

  George was always looking for expeditions, like his scheme for Christmas 1998 to go “green hunting” elephants with his pal Iain Douglas-Hamilton. It was to be an old-fashioned hunt, except with tranquilizers, to tag the elephants for research. Hunter would come too, of course, and we would all celebrate New Year’s Eve in Lamu.

  Hunter made an expedition out of just going into town, not that he wasn’t full of ideas like the “First Annual San Simeon Feral Hog Tournament”—a plan to hunt the always dangerous pigs on foot with .357 Magnums in the canyon brush on Will Hearst’s ranch at San Simeon when he was writing a column for Will at the San Francisco Examiner. Hunter said he thought George would enjoy the collateral birding. We had stationery printed for that one.