Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  I’m not sure I want to get that far into it, since victory would almost definitely mean staying here another year, at least, to make sure our new world is properly wired. At the moment, I’m more inclined to finish this goddamn book for Random House & then move out fast to somewhere else, for a year & maybe more. I’d like to keep the house here & rent it out for enough to make payments, then flee to a good beach. Maybe Mexico, or maybe even Malibu. I’m not sure where, but I’ll definitely be moving before the next snow (or next winter). Probably it will all depend on what I can do with this stinking book; it’s another one of these personal journalism nightmares, and thus doomed in terms of a film sale … and all I really want is to get it out of the way and start on something totally new. But I’ve eaten their advances, so now I have to puke up a book … and although it bugs the shit out of me, I guess I have to do it.

  Yeah, and I’ve said all that before. Which reminds me, speaking of film sales and that action, that I think the last thing I told [20th Century Fox’s Lawrence] Turman (on the strength of your intro, as it were) was that I’d send him my novel, The Rum Diary, whenever I had it rewritten to my satisfaction. But that now appears to be a hopeless pipe dream, so if you run into him anywhere along the line, tell him he can have the original ms. pretty cheap. The sale might be complicated, due to the fact that Random House may or may not own the book. I know they have a binding option on it. Ballantine wants to publish it, but they’re bound by the RH option and my sad insistence that I’m sooner or later going to rewrite it. The result is a dead stalemate. My own feeling about the book is that it’s a good story (in terms of having a beginning & an end, etc.) and it has a few very high points … but as a novel, it sucks. There is too much overwritten silliness; and in a weird way it reminds me of Easy Rider.2 I’m not sure what a “Gentile film” is, in your words, but to me that film was badly un-conceived. I recall being shocked by the violent ending—not because of the violence, but because I couldn’t quite believe the fuckers would end it that way, in a total cop-out. I felt the same way one night in Las Vegas at the second [Sonny] Liston–[Floyd] Patterson fight, which I covered for The National Observer. The shock of that fluke victory made Liston seem far larger than he really was—until [Cassius] Clay got hold of him, and that one didn’t really surprise me.

  Anyway, if Turman is looking around for long-shots at the moment, tell him to ring me up. My cash position is grave & last week I agreed to trade my motorcycle for a piece of weird metal sculpture…so I guess I’m on the down side of a bear market on all fronts.

  As for getting out there again, I’m not sure when or how. I financed that last trip on my Diners Club card, which will shortly be seized by the rightful owner; they have already begun to threaten me. Besides, I’d probably scare the shit out of you if we met anywhere except here. I tend to freak out when I go on the road. On that last trip I’d planned to stay at Bob Gover’s3 house in Malibu, but by the time I finally got there I was so crazed on mescaline that he hid from me. I find most writers to be painfully delicate on their home courts … and I’m the same way. So maybe we can get together some night in the Pump Room or the Staten Island ferry. The only writer/person I can deal with in Hollywood is Dennis Murphy, whose wife fears my deranged influence. He derives from the ancient, pre-Esalen, Big Sur culture that will surely survive in history as one of the finer places to have lived in the 1960s. He’s writing something for CBS or something like that; say hello if you run into him on the cocktail circuit.

  And that’s about it for now—seeing 3 pages in the till—I have to wonder at another night gone down the tube. What makes a man write letters, night after night, instead of profitable manuscript pages?

  Right now I have to get back to my option—which means writing something that will give me an honest choice between savage head-on political action and another few years of backed-off writer’s perspective. If I get into bomb-throwing, and that sort of thing, I’d prefer to do it as a matter of conscious choice, instead of necessity. And on that score, I think the fat is in the fire. Indeed …

  Hunter

  TO DENNIS MURPHY:

  Dennis Murphy—author of the 1958 novel The Sergeant and grandson of the founder of the Big Sur steam baths that spawned California’s Esalen Institute—was now a successful Hollywood screenwriter, and as such presumably flush with cash.

  January 8, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Dennis …

  Let’s get on with this Colonel Wong fast food business. I need the franchise to go along with my drive-in theatre. My option expires on June 1, at which time I need $10,000 cash and 80K more in the bag. At the moment I have nothing.

  My best advice to you is get out of that fucking group. If you spent more time in the company of human beings you wouldn’t need those bell-bottom crutches. Frankly, I think you should get out of Hollywood. The proper route, I think, is to convert the Big Sur house into a sort of mysterious high-powered action-farm for drugs, politics, and general sporting prowess. Build trap-shooting houses on the cliff and floating gong-targets out there in the kelp. Put a Dow-Jones ticker in the kitchen and 12 private phone lines, along with AP & UPI in the living room. Grow many peyote cactus on the hillsides, alongside the world’s most savage moto-cross course. A man from Tassajara was here for Xmas, proposing strange alliances; we could work those in, along with heavy dealing in firearms and bogus passports. A printing press would be necessary. Also a first-class chemical lab. But we could work these things out with little effort. Let me know. Ciao …

  HST

  FROM OSCAR ACOSTA:

  Acosta had been wounded by Thompson’s hard criticisms of not only his writing, but his behavior in general.

  January 11, 1970

  Los Angeles, CA

  Hunter,

  …Your most consistent criticism has been directed at my use of the mass media. You’ve not substantively objected to the tactic or the goal—for the simple reason that you don’t know what they are—but merely to my appearing on t.v. and making public statements to the press.

  This seems very strange coming as it does from a former newspaper man and present magazine writer. A writer who’s written a book, who has gone on publicity stints on t.v., radio, etc. A local citizen who writes letters to the editor, organizes a campaign for a mayoralty race. And who shows no signs of doing anything differently in the immediate future.

  I’ll be the first to admit that the whole thing started as part of another “trip.” By some fortuitous circumstance, I woke up in the middle of an emerging struggle for recognition by a large group of persons who had previously been ignored. For three months I sat back and observed their total lack of competence in dealing with the press and with the power structures. If you’ll recall, the level of communication consisted of articles appearing in La Raza … cuss and more cuss. An inarticulate rage, a blind fury.

  They asked me to be one of the spokesmen.

  In 1966–67, when I first started working as a lawyer, I was hounded to death by these same type of groups asking me to speak for them. Perhaps you don’t know, but the cause of my anxiety which led to Aspen was this very demand. For nine months I went to a psychiatrist, took his numerous pills, slept twelve hours a day, all because I could not respond to the demands of … that’s right, my people.

  My answer was the Big Drop, and I got as far as Aspen.

  In many ways, the people in Aspen, the total community of The Ski, offers the best this society can afford. You have money, beauty, smallness and privacy. There is art, culture, intelligentsia and the usual meanness. I found I could drink, smoke, drop acid and play the clown along with the best of them.

  But after six months of unconcern with the world outside that Ski Resort, I could no longer tolerate the isolation which is a form of pure egotism.

  … So, I found myself in L.A., a lawyer, a would-be writer, an articulate man, having gone into the world of drugs, mixed with the comfortable anglo, and still I had no credibility, n
o power and no appeal to broads. … In a word, If I Could Not Make It In This Anglo Society, How In The Fuck Was The Average Poor Person Going To Make It???

  But I didn’t want to be or become simply another politician on the make. Out of self-interest they pander to the system they allegedly despise. I have insisted that I be allowed to develop my own style, speak my own words and live my own life. To this end I dress as I please, speak as I please and advocate the use of drugs as I please … for which I have been permanently excluded from employment with the L.A. County government, the Federal Legal Services Programs, and, most recently, from the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund. Last year, before I started here, I asked for employment with all the liberal-to-radical legal organizations … Zero. These rejections I take as a mark of honor, for I know of no other lawyer who has been so black-balled for speaking his piece.

  I cannot seriously believe that you really believe that I either enjoy the public appearances or that I have become a pawn in their own game. … Once every month I take acid. I question myself, under acid, about the value of my situation in East L.A. Several times I’ve left with the idea of not returning until I was absolutely convinced of its value. … I’m still here.

  … For me to drop out this time would be the last cop-out for me. Were I to turn my back on this challenge without giving it my best of college tries would lead to suicide. … In a sense, I have no choice. I must make every effort to become a leader of men. The time will come when I can go sit on an island, sipping suds, dropping acid, chasing after broads and comfortably writing my memoirs and other such pleasantries.

  No man can become a leader without a base of support. My natural base is with the Mexican American. I cannot hope to “reach” them without the use of the mass media. And the mass media only caters to “newsworthy events,” as you should know. Reporters simply will not take down my words, my ideas, without some “event” around which they can “tell a story.” And so I stage an event, be it picket, sit-in, walk-out, three day fast … or what have you.

  The score to date: Some of my writings are being used in college courses. At least a hundred Chicanos are in law schools under some scholarship or another, because they want to “be like me.” Literally, thousands of Mexican people feel a bit more secure because they have “their lawyer” to defend them. Hundreds of men and women are no longer afraid to get up and speak to anglo administrators, having seen me—a lawyer!—rap at and bad mouth them publicly. There is without doubt an awakening, a questioning, a MOVEMENT in the Chicano communities throughout the country; both the N.Y. Times, The Nation (once again) and other persons who are not as easily fooled as some have asked for material. The L.A. Times is considering my writing a weekly collumn [sic]. I’m teaching at UCLA Law School, the first Chicano teaching at law school in the country. To some extent, Fidel Castro is taking us seriously. To some extent, the leaders in Mexico are beginning to take notice of us. I have many, many men and women whom I can trust, whom I can turn to if the going really gets bad. If I really wanted to, there are many broads who would gladly pull down their pants for me. …I am writing more and better shit than I was before East L.A.

  And you want me to build a retreat!

  You dumb motherfucker, I’m trying to build a society, a country, a land where we can live in peace without having to pay taxes to and be jailed by those petty, little men. … Do you think my vision is so limited? Do you think I merely want a broken down barrio? And do you seriously believe that a ranch, however big, would satisfy me? So I buy a ranch in Mexico and a few hundred persons can flake out or work on it. What in God’s name makes you think that that government would leave us alone? Haven’t you heard what happened to [Timothy] Leary? Or to all those other socialist reformers who got their little communes going? Shit, look at Drop City. In fact, look closer to home, look at Owl Farm. Can you freely plant grass? Can you really keep the cops off your property? Don’t you still have to pay taxes in support of a government that is bent on destruction of the human race?

  I’ve told you before, your sanctuary is nothing more than a temporary prison. Your dissatisfaction with the world around you has, unfortunately, led to more drugs and more rage. If you were not before, you are now simply an anarchist, the lowest form of politics. It is easy, simplistic and totally without value to merely curse the darkness … in fact, you remind me of the hippie and the militant. The former wants to be let alone and the latter, to destroy, so he can be alone. Your desire to “build a personal fort” is, at best, infantile.

  Your involvement in the campaign was the first thing you’d done since I’ve known you for which I had some respect—I know nothing of your writing, having only read that one unfinished article for Esquire and Hell’s Angels you had already done. It seemed to me that at last you were coming out of your shell. The letters to the editor, including the article about Aspen, I consider only a “trip.”

  And that is what has bothered the shit out of me for the past two years. On the one hand I have felt that of all the people I have known, you were the closest to being a man, my equal. But still you were my opposite in terms of ACTION, without which no person can be a man. At first I ascribed the different life styles to different cultures, different predicaments. But as I came to see the reality of the world-wide conspiracy of destruction, then I realized that it was the good guys against the bad guys, and not merely the racial/ethnic minorities against the white imperialists. All of which meant that the struggle was just as much yours as it was mine … But still you sit on your ass and look forward to football on t.v.

  Finally: If I had really wanted to, I could have written a thing for t.v. some time ago. I have not because I am what I am. I’m going to try to write what I want. If I can’t, then fuck them. I did not write the play as propaganda. If it’s no good, it fails not because of my ideological beliefs, but merely because I am not yet a good dramatist. My attempt was merely an attempt to describe the rage which acid has produced within me in the land called Elsinore: Mankind Is Doomed. Period.

  Enclosed you’ll find the final draft of Perla Is a Pig, which theme, in my opinion, is not much different from the play. Merely a different style.

  Z

  TO WILLIAM J. KENNEDY:

  Kennedy had sent Thompson a copy of his first novel, The Ink Truck, published in September 1969 by Dial Press.

  January 12, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Goddamn, I was certain I’d written you—but then my desk is full of things I was “certain” had already been dealt with or solved … and the awful truth is that I can’t seem to get anything really done. It’s beginning to look like a serious problem. My income has fallen to nothing and my daily realities are more and more chaotic. I write a vast number of pages every night, but they add up to nothing. Very depressing.

  Your Dec 22 letter was full of weird news … although not really, I guess, since nothing is really weird anymore. The Agnew wind is on us for real, I think, and this year’s horrors will seem like cotton-candy by 1971. The cock-suckers are going to want to settle a lot of old scores—not so much with individuals as with a whole presumptuous lifestyle that calls them ugly. And of course they are; they are a gang of old fucks who will leave a lot of scars on this world before they go.

  And so much for that. Your bad fuckaround at the T-U [Albany Times-Union] sounds nasty but entirely predictable, in light of what I just said. We dumped on Nixon’s people for 10 years, and now they’re going to dump on us. Fire this one, evict that one, jack up the interest rates, fill the jails—teach the scum a lesson. You may have the answer, in the form of academic sanctuary, but I think they’ll start closing that one down, too. And even if they don’t, I’ll never make it in that league, so I don’t give it much thought. Frankly, I look forward to a grim and mind-smashing downhill slide on all fronts.

  Right now, next to my typewriter, is a letter from Random House, wanting to know if I’m still alive … and implying very strongly that I might be closer to dead tha
n I think, if I don’t send them a manuscript very soon. This stinking book just sits here in the form of a huge pile of junk paper. It makes no sense at all. I have no interest in getting it published, except for money—and that’s what it’s come to now. I am stone broke again, owing 2 publishers something like $17 grand, and with most people under the impression that I died from drugs at least two years ago. My interest in books is so close to nonexistent that I wonder if I’ll ever write another one. The temptation is to say I’d rather write a film, but the ugly truth is that I don’t feel like writing anything at all. I don’t feel particularly lazy—just hopelessly cut off from the kind of people who read things. Or edit them. Or publish them. I don’t even want to talk to those people, much less work with them.

  But my options are somewhat limited, I guess, so in spite of this stinking angst I suppose I’ll have to play that game again—give the jackals another word-toy, to keep their machine going. The only decent thing that’s happened to me on the writing front in two years arrived in the mail today—a letter from Warren Hinckle, former editor of Ramparts, saying they’d bought my Jean-Claude Killy article for his new magazine, Scanlan’s Monthly. The first issue is due in March, and I assume it will be something like the old, fire-sucking Ramparts. If their taste for my Killy article is any indication, I’d say it will be a boomer. For one thing, the piece ran 110 ms. pages—for which they paid $1500, or better than Esquire. For another, the piece in print will be prefaced by a letter, from me, detailing my troubles with Playboy—calling the editors a gang of scurvy fist-fuckers and saying a whole lot of ugly things about the back-stairs action that led them to first assign the piece, pay all my expenses for three months, and then reject it with incredible venom. I figure they don’t deserve the luxury of black-listing me in private—they should come right out and say it all in public, and that’s what the article is all about.