Fear and Loathing in America
Page 4
The Matrix, womb of the Jefferson Airplane. They owned part of the club when it still served booze, and maybe they own it all now. They’ve rolled up a lot of points since that night when I reeled through the door with no money, muttering “Jerry Anderson invited me,” and then found Jerry somewhere in back, listening to his wife Signe wailing out in front of the Airplane’s half-formed sound. Signe with the trombone voice, and Marty Balin polishing his eternal signature song that he titled, for some wrong reason, “And I Like It.” I recall telling Jerry, while he paid for my beer, that this Jefferson Airplane thing was a surefire famous money bomb for everybody connected with it … and later calling Ralph Gleason, the Chronicle’s special pleader, to tell him the Airplane was something worth hearing. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “People keep telling me about these groups; I try to check em out—you know how it is.” Sure, Ralph … not knowing if he remembered that about a year earlier I’d pushed another group on him, a group that almost immediately got a record contract without help and then exploded into oblivion when Davy, the lead singer, choked to death on his own vomit in an elegant house on the beach in Carmel.
But about a year after the Airplane opened at the Matrix, Gleason wrote the notes for their first record jacket.
The Jefferson Airplane is another key sound from that era—like Dylan and the Grateful Dead. And Grace Slick, who made even the worst Matrix nights worth sitting through. In that era she was carrying a hopeless group called The Great Society, which eventually made it by croaking the group and going off in different directions. But Grace Slick was always my best reason for going to the Matrix. I would sit back in the corner by the projection booth and watch her do all those things that she later did with the Airplane and for LOOK magazine, but which seemed so much better then, because she was her own White Rabbit. …I was shocked to learn she was married to the drummer. But I got a lot of shocks in that era … my nerves were pretty close to the surface and everything registered. It’s hard to understand now, why “things seemed to be coming out right.” But I remember that feeling, that we were all making it somehow. And the only one around who had already made it was Ken Kesey, who seemed to be working overtime to find the downhill tube. Which he eventually did, and I recall some water-head creep accusing me (in the L.A. Free Press) of “giving away” Kesey’s secret address in Paraguay when he fled the country to avoid a marijuana rap. That was about the time I kissed off the hippies as just another failed lifestyle.
All these veteran heads keep telling me to get off the speed because it’s dangerous, but every time I have something to say to them late at night they’re passed out. And I’m sitting up alone with the music and my own raw nerves hearing Balin or Butterfield1 yelling in every corner of my head and feeling the sounds run up my spine like the skin of my own back was stretched across a drumhead and some burning-eyed freak with the Great American knot swelling up in his head was using my shoulderblades for a set of kettledrums. So I guess I should quit this speed. It tends to make me impotent, and that can be a horrible bummer when it comes with no warning. Like a broken guitar string. A gritting of teeth and thinking, Holy shit not NOW, you bastard. Why? Why?
Speed freaks are unpredictable when the great whistle blows. And boozers are worse. But put it all together with maybe sixty-six milligrams and nine jolts of gin on ice and maybe two joints … and you get the kind of desperate loser who used to crawl into the woods on the edge of Kesey’s La Honda compound and drop some acid for no real reason except that the only part of his body that would still work was his mouth and his swallowing muscle. And the ears, the goddamn ears, which never quit… the terrible consistency of the music mocked the failures of the flesh. That too-bright hour when you know it’s time for breakfast except that only the pure grassmasters are hungry and you want to come alive again because it’s a new sunshiny day, but the goddamn speed is doubling back on you now, and although you’re not going down, you can’t go up either, but just Out, and stupid. An electric eel with a blown fuse. Nada.
So maybe the heads are right. Forswear that alcohol and no more speed … just wail on the weed and go under with a smile. Then get up healthy and drive up the road for breakfast at the Knotty Pine Cafe.
But despite the nature-healthy prospect of a legal grass-culture just around tomorrow’s corner, I think I’ll stay with the speed … even with the certain knowledge of burning out a lot sooner than if I played healthy. Speed freaks are probably the junkies of the marijuana generation. There is something perverse and even suicidal about speed. Like “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”2 Buy high and sell low … ignoring that inevitable day when there’s no more high except maybe a final freakout with cocaine and then down the tube. A burned out case, drunk and brain-crippled, a bad example for Youth. The walking, babbling dead.
And why not. Speed is like sandpaper on the nerves. When all the normal energy is down to dead ash and even the adrenaline starts to vaporize in the dull heat of fatigue … there’s a rare kind of brightness, a weird and giddy sensitivity that registers every sound and smile and stoplight as if every moment might be the next to last, memories carved with a chisel. …
That’s what I see and hear when I look back on those pre-hippy days in San Francisco. I remember a constant excitement about something happening, but only the fake priests and dingos called it the wave of the future. The excitement, for that matter, was all done in by the time the big-league press got hold of those “hippy” spokesmen and guru caricatures like Tim Leary and the press-conference Diggers.3 By that time the Haight-Ashbury had become a commercial freak show and everybody on the street was selling either sandals or hamburgers or dope. The whole area was controlled by “hippy businessmen” who wore beards and beads to disguise the sad fact that they were actually carbon copies of the bourgeois merchant fathers whom they’d spent so much time and wrath rejecting.
But despite all that, and probably because of it—a sense of doom generates a weird, intense kind of light—that whole pre-hippy scene lent a special kind of élan to everybody who blundered into being a part of it. And the root of the excitement was the black certainty of a time limit, a euphoric, half-wild fatalism about the whole thing coming to a bad end at almost any moment. But this was the special light, and it was good while it lasted.
TO U.S. SENATOR EUGENE MCCARTHY:
Although he admired Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, Thompson had turned on the President for escalating America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia. By 1968 Thompson was so drawn to Senator Eugene McCarthy’s anti–Vietnam War candidacy that he offered his services to the Minnesota Democrat’s long-shot presidential campaign.
January 3, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Senator McCarthy:
I just read William S. White’s comments on your potential candidacy—your “grandiose design,” as it were—and I thought I’d send a note to offer any possible help I could lend to this hideous plot you’re unfolding.
I’m not sure how I could help, but given the fact that I make my living as a writer, it would have to be in that area. I see your efforts more as a tactical—and not a determining—factor in the ’68 elections, so I don’t feel any real compulsion to volunteer for Ward duty.
Any ideas about how I could be of help would have to come from you … but if you have any, I assure you I’ll go out of my way to deal with them. At the moment I’m fairly loose, in terms of assignments, etc.—but that changes weekly and even daily. I move around quite a bit, but I can always be reached here in Woody Creek (Aspen), Colo., at (303) 925-2250 … or via Random House in New York (Selma Shapiro).
For your own information and perspective, I’m enclosing a copy of a book I wrote more or less recently. It might help you to know more about what—if anything—I might be able to do. In any case, good luck. …
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO GERALD WALKER, THE NEW YORK TIMES:
The success of Hell’s Angels had brough
t Thompson numerous high-profile free-lance assignments, including “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of Hippies,” which he wrote in May 1967 for The New York Times Magazine. Walker, the assigning editor, next commissioned a piece from Thompson on the Nevada state prisons’ new “therapy retreats,” designed to teach guards and inmates to coexist more agreeably.
January 3, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Gerald …
Like I’ve been saying for months, this is a bad year all around. 1967 is the Year of the Overall Freak-Out. Which is neither here nor there… for now.
Anyway, I found out what my trouble was. I had a serious case of flu and I was trying to cure it with what those in the trade call “speed.” This does not mean methedrine, despite what you read in Newsweek … and I suspect there are people over there who know better.
But back to the general badness. … I talked to Paul Semonin4 the other night and he said the Times refused to publish the “Hell No, We Won’t Pay” ad. I’m a bit surprised, for reasons I should probably examine … desperation makes for strange bed-fellows and a few strange prickteasers in the bargain. And how’s that for a head on the Times’ editorial page: “Desperation Makes for Strange Prickteasers.”
And so much for that. You can apply the $10 I sent against the $366 expense money you sent me. It came on the same day, and in the same mail, with a letter from one of the NSP convicts, asking when the article would be published. That thing has become a terrible albatross around my neck … not a day goes by without somebody claiming that I let them down, and of course they’re all right. That expense check from you was close to the final straw. I told my wife I was going to send it back and she began screaming. She handles the finances and knows our treacherous score. I sense it, but I’d rather not know the details. Things have been rather tense here since the Tahoe article crisis and my simultaneous derailing of two other projects totaling $3700. We are into another one of those nightmarish pregnancy scenes—whacking God in the teeth again—and that helps. Life should be made as difficult as possible … so that the victims might develop more character.
(… Jesus, I just went outside to piss and got whacked in the eyes by the results of what looks like a 7–8 inch all-nite snow, the first of the year … it’s 6:45 a.m. here, with the sun just coming up … everything is fat white, even the sky is white. Dead silence, no color … this is what should happen in Vietnam. It gives you a sense of mortality … like if anybody was unnatural enough to drop a bomb in my clean white front yard this morning, I’d natcherly blow his head off with a 12 gauge shotgun. And then I’d eat all the flesh off his bones, just to teach him a lesson.)
Christ, it feels good to be out of the flu funk. I’d like to go out in the snow and fuck some corpse in the neck. I’m sure there’s one out there. [Outgoing U.S. Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara came last week to check on his new house; he arrived in a black car with six Secret Service men—acting like some humanoid from another planet—and since he had to drive through an area of dope-smoking construction workers who once tried to burn his house to the ground, I’m sure he created some corpses—if for no other reason than to take them back to LBJ, who likes his erotic brunch.
And so much for that, too. The point of all this, I guess, is that those dirty bastards from Tahoe have loaded me with so much guilt about that failed article that I might, despite my better judgement, attempt to resurrect it. I don’t know exactly how, because it’s obviously no longer a news item and in fact it never was. But I still think it’s one of the best subjects I’ve dealt with in several years. It reminded me of the first article I did, somewhat reluctantly, on the Hell’s Angels—which gave me an incredible amount of trouble because of all the confusing action it kicked off in my head—which wouldn’t fit into an easy 20-page article, and which eventually wound up as an 800-or-so-page manuscript that had to be cut in half (by me) to fit into book covers.
But … back to the point: How do we deal if I actually do a rewrite on that article? I assume you should have first reject rights … and I also assume it’ll be rejected, since I don’t have the vaguest idea how to make the thing work as an acceptably contemporary news item. But I might try, and I stress that word “might.” Probably I will, so give me a guideline about how to proceed diplomatically. The only other markets that seem even possible right now are Ramparts and The Nation, but considering the circumstances and the onus that settled on me, I’d much prefer that any resurrected article appear in the Times—if only because that’s how I represented myself in the first place.
In any case, send a word or two as to etiquette. And obligations. And possibilities. My agent used to handle these things, but he’s now suing me or at least forcing me to sue him for not leaving me alone. That’s Scott Meredith, in case you’re curious and even if you’re not … that evil pigfucking skunk. For the past year he’s been hounding me like some sort of cop out of [nineteenth-century Russian novelist Feodor] Dostoyevsky. It’s a nightmarish story—maybe even a book. Yeah: “Only You, HST—Or, How to Make a Million Dollars by Taking Scott Meredith’s Advice and Identifying with Norman Mailer, the Only Meredith Client Who Lives in the Black—And Any Punk Who Don’t Like It Can Sue.” There’s another good title for you. Maybe I should get a job with Time, eh?
Yours in deep snow,
Hunter
TO VIRGINIA THOMPSON:
A few days into the New Year Thompson flew to New York to negotiate a deal with Random House for a book on “The Death of the American Dream.” At this early stage Thompson envisioned it as a scathing exposé of the U.S. armed forces’ Joint Chiefs of Staff.
January 5, 1968
Delmonico’s Hotel
Park Avenue at 59th Street
New York
Dear Mom …
I’ve just about finished here—& things seem to have gone as well as possible—although no contracts are signed yet. Wednesday night I had a five-hour dinner with the Vice-President of Random House, the editor-in-chief of Ballantine (& my lawyer) at the Four Seasons, the most expensive restaurant in N.Y. That’s a good omen. Especially since nobody blinked when I wore my boots & my shooting jacket. I’m still being sued for $5.5 million in Calif.—I thought that had collapsed. But the other legal problems seem manageable, at least for the moment.
In all, I have a hell of a busy year ahead of me—three & possibly four books. The big one is being referred to as “The Death of the American Dream”—which makes me nervous because it’s so vast & weighty. Hell’s Angels is past the 500,000 mark in printing, not sales—but if they all sell, that’s a lot of nickels for your black-sheep son. I keep borrowing against earnings—to the point where I stay about even—but after April I should be able to send Jim5 a few dollars if he gets in trouble.
The Xmas visit was good—sorry my nerves were so edgy, but the miscarriage thing had me worried ever since we left Aspen—that’s why I decided at the last moment to go to Florida—I didn’t want Sandy to be alone in planes & airports if the thing was going to happen any moment.
Anyway, it was good seeing all of you—I enjoyed the stay more than I expected to—& it was good getting to know Jim again. It was even better to see that you’ve got the drinking under control. I’m proud of you.
That’s it for now. I still have to re-write that N.Y. Times article.
Love
H
TO BERNARD SHIR-CLIFF, BALLANTINE BOOKS:
While in New York, Thompson pitched his idea for a savage fictional attack on President Johnson to Bernard Shir-Cliff, who had edited the paperback of Hell’s Angels for Ballantine Books. Shir-Cliff asked to see a written proposal.
January 12, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Bernard …
Here’s a Lyndon Johnson idea. I was talking to Peter Collier at Ramparts tonight, trying to buck him in on a Super Bowl bet … and somewhere along the line I mentioned our Johnson project. He suggested a serious, non-fantasy preview of the Demo convention, based on
his “certain knowledge” that all manner of hell is going to break loose in terms of critical protests, demonstrations. Ramparts has numerous connections with SDS6 and other radical types, and Collier says they’re going to freak out the convention. At first I said no, but then I added the fantasy element and saw a possibility … which is fading almost as fast as I can type. Maybe a good pamphlet, but probably not a book … unless you can figure out a new twist.
What I came up with, and this was just a few minutes ago, was a very straight-faced—and very night-marish—handbook for convention delegates. Like when the 10,000 rats are going to be released on the convention floor, and which organization is planning to kidnap an entire state delegation in order to degrade and humiliate them for the purpose of making an underground film. We have to keep in mind that various outrages are in fact being planned, and that I probably wouldn’t have much trouble getting a vague battle plan …but of course that wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to mix up fact and fantasy so totally that nobody could be sure which was which. We could bill it as a fantastic piece of root-hog journalism—The Thompson Report, as it were. This courageous journalist crept into the sewers of the American underground and emerged with a stinking heap of enemy battle plans—and just in time, by god, to warn the good guys what to watch out for. Oh, I could have a rattling good time with it. …I could even compose a fictitious interview with Guru Bailey, the Demo chieftain, during which I try to warn him of this impending disaster and he reacts first in anger, then with tears, throwing down hooker after hooker of gin during our conversation. And a private chat with Johnson, who heard of my dread information and summoned me to the White House for a toilet-side interview with two recording secretaries—a prancing fag and nervous old lady from New Orleans—taking notes on a voice-writer(s)—echoing my words, and Lyndon’s, for the private record.