Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  In the meantime I have a big house and about 20 acres, all the amenities, more room than I can use, local credit … a bike, a horse, 12 guns and, in general, a good place to hide. You’d like it around here… give a bit of warning before you come, and if you’re serious, hang onto this phone number (303) 925-2250; I’ve taken great pains to make it unavailable by any public means. If worst comes to worst, however, the keepers of the Woody Creek Store will always finger me … or the Aspen Times—no man is safe from his friends. And, speaking of that, tell Charley [Kuralt] I just donated one copy of his book (I have two) to the local library—but they rejected it on “literary grounds.” And hello to Ann. Ciao …

  Hunter

  TO LAWRENCE TURMAN, 20TH CENTURY FOX:

  Thompson’s brutal appraisal of his own first novel— The Rum Diary, written in the early 1960s about the escapades of an American reporter for Puerto Rico’s daily San Juan Star—can’t have helped the odds that 20th Century Fox would make the yet-unpublished book into a movie.

  October 3, 1968

  Woody Creek, CO

  Lawrence Turman

  c/o 20th Century Fox

  Box 900

  Beverly Hills, Calif.

  Dear Mr. Turman:

  Steve Geller suggested that I send you a note about a novel (my novel, titled The Rum Diary), which is currently lost in weird limbo. … Weird, in that Random House and Ballantine have already bought it; weird in that two years ago I sold it to Pantheon and had the sale croaked by RH … and weirder still in that I sold the book on the condition that I’d be allowed to rewrite it, and since then I’ve never even read it. Mainly because neither RH nor Ballantine seems to give a hoot in hell about novels (or at least mine); they’re pushing me on a non-fiction book about “The Death of the American Dream” … giving advances, due dates, heavy questions … like “Hunter, me boy, when are you going to send us The Wisdom?” I can’t escape the notion that I’m about to erupt with some sort of ultimate bullshit; the other day I went into town to rent a chain-saw and the man asked me, “What’s going on in this country? What’s happening?” And today a potter from New Jersey showed up on my porch and asked, “What does it mean?” I took him inside and made him listen to a SW Voice of America broadcast on Wallace’s choice of [Curtis] LeMay as VP … then I put on Tom Paxton’s album for him—the Vietnam Pot Patrol song, and “1000 Years.”94 And after that he left, mumbling about getting his passport in order.

  None of which has anything to do with either my novel (The Rum Diary) or my effort, titled Hell’s Angels, which I’m enclosing for any purpose you might want to put it to. Maybe a wedding present for your daughter. We live in strange times.

  In any case, I find myself suddenly jacked up—once again—on the possibilities of fiction. I’m not sure why, except that I’m now trying to make some sort of long-term journalistic sense out of that fascist freak-show that RH sent me to cover in Chicago—The Cauterization of the Duped, The Whipping of the Wounded, Half-Mad in the Streets of Love City, etc. … etc. …

  Which brings me back, in a half-mad sort of way, to my current NY-focused subject: The Death of the American Dream—and the fact that I think I should sit and watch it jell for a while, until Nixon gets in … that’s the ending I think I need, a fitting climax to the second-saddest story of the last 2000 years.

  Which also means I’ll be in my own kind of limbo until election day; I want to watch it happen, ponder and savor the madness, let it swim around in my vision like a frog in a deadly grease-trap. And in the meantime I thought I might read my Rum Diary again, and maybe try to do something extra with it—like selling it to Hollywood for a Million dollars. And also re-writing it, for good or ill.

  I haven’t seen Pretty Poison yet, so I don’t know how you handled Steve’s book. When I read it I thought, Goddamn, there’s a pure weird and steady tone here, a man with a good eye … but the ending bothered me, so I wrote Steve and said he’d blown one of the best strange stories I’d read in ten years. I felt the same way about The Graduate: it was a third-rate story, stale bullshit in the main, but on film it somehow flowered and grew … I recall at least a dozen scenes that I envied, as a writer, and to my mind that’s the highest kind of praise. Even the ending of The Graduate had élan—a beautiful sort of Walter Mitty95 hype. It was bullshit, of course: I saw it right after I got back from Chicago, where Walter and his friends got their heads and illusions cracked by a gang of uniformed white-trash swine … who were also human, like the rest of us, and just as honest, in their stinking vengeful wrath, as any McCarthy staffer.

  All I meant to say, there, was that I was amazed—after seeing The Graduate—to realize that not all stories lose in the translation to film, and that in fact, some gain. I guess I saw that first in The Pawnbroker96 (which I’d read, a year or two earlier), but that was such a powerful story that it was a long time, many months, before I could deal with it on a technical, nuts-and-bolts sort of basis.

  And to hell with all that rambling. I began this letter as a quick note to ask if you might be interested in reading The Rum Diary. I couldn’t tell you much about it, except that it’s a very inept, very honest tale of very young “vagrant journalists” converging to work on a new english-language paper in the Caribbean. I wrote it about five years ago, and when I start the rewrite I can’t help but change it immensely. The first 100 pages are worthless, the characters lack the essential major/minor sort of focus that a good story needs to stay on its feet … but, every now and then, as the book reels along, there are scenes that I’d match against anything in The Graduate, and maybe even against one or two of the best in The Pawnbroker. And there are others that I could never do, on paper, as well as I know they could be on film … like there’s one with a bunch of young/cynic, hard-traveler types from various U.S. backgrounds, playing touch football with a coconut on a Saturday afternoon beach near San Juan … a wistful, underhanded salute to the Great God Football and all those Homecoming Tallahassee/Boulder/Bloomington Saturdays that seem, in retrospect, as a chain of innocent frauds, leading to … what? A coconut football game in a world that mocks Homecoming in every way except finally.

  Maybe that sounds useless, but I see it as one of the best scenes and comments that anyone could make on the permanent roots of the American Head. But what the hell? Maybe you went to NYU, or some other place where a word like “quarterback” was a bad “Pathology 2x” joke. How many flankers flood a zone? How many receivers mean the passer is left naked? How many dope/drunk drifters will pick up a coconut from some beach in a new and free-style world they can’t tolerate? Just last weekend a freak showed up here (coming off a 30 pounds in 3 weeks beat-the-draft diet—which failed), and he said he was too weak to do anything more than sell hash on commission … but suddenly there were people throwing a football around in the yard, and within 10 minutes this Bitter-End Fuck America Dope Dealer was out on the grass, pumping like quarterback Roman Gabriel,97 and grinning like a fool … throwing long spirals and catching that weird, off-shaped ball as naturally as he’d light a cigarette.

  And fuck all that, too. I got carried away with the possibilities of a scene I haven’t rewritten yet—which is already there in the ms., but not properly rendered, as they say. Probably I’m talking to myself, more than you. The freedom of fiction is incredible, compared to journalism. I’m just letting my mind run a bit … why not?

  Why not, indeed? All I meant to ask was whether you’d like to look at the book before, or after, I do the rewrite? Or—for that matter—if you’d like to see it at all? Because, in all good truth, it’s a hopelessly naïve and half-conceived book—as it stands now. I know I can make it better, but I might also make it worse—by killing a lot of valid notes that tend to embarrass me now, in my balding wisdom. My current Random House project is keyed on the death of innocence—the flat opposite of The Rum Diary—and I’m not sure if I can do them both, at the same time, without going mad. So if the novel interests you, in terms of film, I think I’d pref
er to do that first—to deal with the Beginning, before documenting The End. It seems like the right way to do it.

  Well … I seem to have carried on, here… a bit of good rambling, as it were. But the fucking carpenters are coming in an hour or so to wail in the basement; they are making my writing cave down there, a soundproof room with a big fireplace and redwood walls, a blue floor like a rubber tennis court or an acid freak’s golf green … to hide from President Nixon, or maybe Wallace … and Curtis LeMay, a man whose time has come—and the devil take the hindmost.

  Beyond that, and to temper the jangled tone of this letter, I should probably say that I’m going to be working on The Rum Diary anyway—if only to save my head from the terrible realities of journalism, at least for awhile. So if you want to see the book in its present, embryo, state—that’s fine and easy. If you want to wait and see it finished … well, I can’t be definite in terms of time, or even content (and not even context, for that matter), but I can say for sure that it will be a tighter, more functional story, with a heavy emphasis on plot and absence of bullshit. But, after seeing The Graduate, I can’t take plots very seriously and I find myself thinking more in terms of scenes, high points, moments … and these are the things I might cut, change or fail to develop in my rewrite of The Rum Diary, and it worries me.

  I wrote a very bad book five years ago, but I wrote some very good things … which I might or might not recognize in the course of rewriting a novel to fit the new Random House list. Perhaps I can make it a goddamn bone-connection masterpiece. Or maybe I’ll blow it completely. I see it mainly as a salvage job, and they’re always tricky—for a lot of reasons, including the market.

  And so much, again, for all that. It occurs to me now that I’ve had a definite boot out of writing this letter, and it also occurs to me that I’m not sure what it says … which should concern me very deeply, I guess—in a professional sense—but for some reason it doesn’t bother me at all. That’s the luxury of writing to total strangers.

  … Oh christ I hear the carpenters, pushing their ancient VW bus up the gravel driveway; I know they have hammers and power-saws, goddamn them—their noisy smugness, smoking pipes and fancy handmade tool aprons (hair on their faces, mumbling about how it was in New Haven before the world went mad and they quit, drinking wine for lunch and shooting flies out of the air with sawed-off BB-guns), a very weird type … at this stage of my chemical frenzy, and with a long day ahead, I think I’ll have a bit of sport with them, jangle their heads with some happy talk about LeMay’s candidacy, play some old Hitler records. Good fun. And an end to this letter. If the novel interests you, let me know. If not, I’d have blown this night anyway, and probably in some rotten anguished style fit only for burning. So I’ll close on that note, and in fair humor …

  Sincerely,

  Hunter S. Thompson

  TO DON ERICKSON, ESQUIRE:

  October 16, 1968

  Woody Creek, CO

  Don …

  Lynn Nesbit tells me we have a tentative agreement on a piece on the NRA. I’ll call you in a day or so, to hear what you’re thinking, but in the meantime I thought I’d sketch out a plot, of sorts. To wit:

  I thought I’d go to Washington and ask the boss-shooters exactly what they are doing for us members. There are 900,000 of us out here, chipping in $5 a year—for what? My own suspicion is that the NRA is a harmless swindle, a massive con job, a rich and well-publicized lobby that isn’t doing a fucking thing either for or against anybody except the handful of people on the NRA payroll.

  Maybe I’m wrong … so I thought I’d ask the folks in Washington to put me onto a really successful NRA gun club, preferably in Southern Calif. One of those patriotic groups that gets govt. ammo and other “special advantages.” I’d like to drop in on one of the shoot-outs and see for myself why all us gun freaks in Woody Creek are missing out by not hooking up with the NRA. Just the other day, for instance, I blew a huge hole in my living room floor with a 19 gauge shotgun load—a hideous accident caused by a mixture of gunpowder and LSD. The carpenters working in the basement left at once and haven’t returned. The Magnum load tore through the hardwood, the sub-flooring, and made hash of the acoustical tile they were installing in the basement. #5 pellets were imbedded in the power-saw table. They said it was like a bomb dropping on them … so they left, to go duck-hunting. “That’s what you get,” they said, “for fucking around with the NRA.”

  My point, I think, is that the real gun freaks dump on the NRA. They’d sooner join an Elks’ Club than a formal shooting group. I doubt if Eldridge Cleaver, for instance, was a member of the NRA. But again, maybe I’m wrong—maybe there are benefits I’ve been missing. If so, I want them. I want to know exactly what the NRA can do for me. I want to know what they do with all that money—who gets it, and why.

  Well … I think you see the drift. I’d like to spend about 3–4 days at the NRA Hq. in Washington, then another 2–3 days at one of their model gun clubs—none of which exists out here in Marlboro country; all the gun freaks I know view the NRA as a tool of the federal govt. This raises several questions … which I’ve already mentioned.

  So I think you see where I’m looking. If you have questions of your own, keep them in mind and I’ll call in a few days. I’d like to get started on this thing soon.

  Ciao …

  Hunter Thompson

  TO DAVISON THOMPSON:

  Without saying so directly, Hunter Thompson lamented the Death of the American Dream to his younger brother.

  October 16, 1968

  Woody Creek, CO

  Davison …

  Your letter arrived a few days ago, was read, sat around for a while, read again, digested … but it’s still hard to cope with. All personal letters are hard for me to cope with these days, increasingly hard … because everybody I hear from sounds wretched and screwed up. 1968 seems to have been a really awful year for everybody except maybe Nixon, that evil scheming bastard. My mail is a snowballing nightmare; there is no good news. And no hope of any. Nixon is going to win and then implement the Wallace program—like Johnson became Goldwater. [Republican vice president–elect] Agnew is the wave of the future, a stupid shithead, so cheap and useless that he can’t understand his own failure. My depression with current politics in this country is so vast that I can’t find words to express it.

  Your letter, needless to say, didn’t change any patterns here. Your sketch of corporate fear and the “terrible twenties” makes me wonder what kind of letters you’ll be writing when you’re 35. I wonder the same thing about myself, for that matter. And everybody else I know. Maybe it’s because we’re all around 30 and the game is beginning to look more serious than we realized. The scoreboard looms huge, and nobody seems to be winning. Maybe this year of black politics has showed us a mirror of ourselves—a gang of aging bullshitters and incompetents, like Humphrey & Nixon. That’s the best we can cough up, to speak for us. I seriously believe this country deserves everything that’s going to happen to it. War, revolution, madness, the whole bag. I’m looking around for another country to live in; it’s only a matter of time.

  Jim’s visit was a pleasant break in my long, downhill funk. He seems oblivious to all the stinking realities, and it’s nice to have somebody like that around now and then. But right after he left I took off for Chicago and the convention—and that was pure horror, much worse than it looked on TV. It was a real Hitler scene, the air smelled of fear and desperation. I’m trying to write about it now, as part of my alleged new book, but it’s hard to explain except as a final loss of faith in whatever this country was supposed to stand for, all that bullshit in the history books.

  Well … I hate to write such rotten letters. I wish I could say something cheerful, but I can’t find it to say. The other night, for the first time in more than a year, I ate some LSD and relaxed for a while … everything was fine until I wandered into the kitchen about mid-morning and found Juan watching Spiro Agnew doing a TV interview. Jesus, w
hat a horror. He’s bad enough when you’re straight and sober, but on acid he’s a babbling, pus-filled nightmare. His eyes are slits and his skull is like a rotten pear—everything he says is a stupid lie. I felt terribly sorry for Juan, growing into a world that can take a man like Agnew seriously.

  And so much for all that; I feel sorry for all of us. Your Chagrin Falls culture is amazingly similar to a big chunk of Aspen. About half the town is in hock for their souls to the Ski Corp. and the Tourist Bureau. “Independent” businessmen live in fear of “bad publicity,” a “bad winter,” “bad people in town,” and god only knows what else. And they’re all trying to screw each other out of every possible dollar. Never saying it quite like that, of course, but doing it all the same. A gang of cheap whores … again, like Humphrey and Nixon. I’ve about given up in my efforts to buy this house and meadow I call home for the moment; the price went from $30,000 in May to $80,000 in September … and I figure I can do a lot better than that in Canada, without having to worry about being put in some kind of detention pen, as a dangerous anarchist heretic. Which I am, and I hope to get worse. If it comes down to a “Which side are you on?” crunch, I think I’ll go with the human beings. In clearer terms, I look forward to a split between the Corporate Nazis and the Desperate Freaks, with no middle ground … and, as much as I dread that kind of choice, it seems pretty clear and unavoidable. What do you think?

  I sent Mom a sour note the other night (I can’t seem to write any other kind), but there wasn’t much to say. I gather that Jim is going to need some cash around Feb, and I said I could come up with some—although my situation right now is bleak. I have never, for instance, collected a dime on Hell’s Angels paperback sales, despite sales approaching 500,000. I can’t understand why; if I understood these contracts, I think I’d be rich. As it is, however, I can’t even get a gasoline credit card. For a free-lance writer, it’s always cash on the barrel-head. You people with jobs can at least get a loan. Anyway, let me know when Jim needs a cash transfusion; I’ve developed a weird talent for producing cash out of nowhere… although I’m getting tired of having to do it.