Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Which is excellent, overall, but Benton was somewhat stunned to find his exclusive dealership shot all to hell. I told him it was God’s Will, and besides that it paid my rent—if not my expenses.

  Shit, I see that maybe the time has come to end this letter … no more random points from my accumulation of “RS notes.” I’ll get that xerox about the man who yanked his eyeballs out to you as soon as I can persuade Sandy to take it into the xerox place. Right now she’s impossible to talk to: my Carte Blanche bill for both Vegas trips is $1,289.45—and they don’t take partial payments; I learned this the hard way.

  Anyway …I recall that there was some question in your mind when we talked the other night about whether I had already drawn my June retainer. And I said that I thought I had. But this was only because you had already told me I had—although naturally it never occurred to me that I was asking for my June retainer, in advance, when I sent that telegram from Vegas for the $500. I thought I was asking for expense money—and when it arrived, with no explanation, I figured that’s what it was. So that’s how I spent it … and when I told Acosta about the “Expenses/Denied” disaster, he chuckled and said, “Oh, so what we spent out there was your salary?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what we did.”

  Ah … fuck this. I think the thing to do is for you to lend me the $1K-plus to pay off Carte Blanche. That way we can worry later about who should righteously pay the tab. Fuck. Maybe I should. I’ll never deny the thing was excessive. But I don’t recall spending anything, out there, that didn’t strike me as being necessary at the time. But this is a hard thing to argue or defend; it drags us into the realm of the preternatural….

  All I really care about, frankly, is not losing my last & only credit card—which is the only thing that enabled me to do that whole Vegas thing in the first place. That card is important to me. I must have it. And I will. That $500 you just sent will pay off the first leg—but if I do that it will leave me owing the Woody Creek store so much that Sandy refuses to go in there to argue anymore, which means I won’t get my mail. The WC Store (& P.O.) is effectively off-limits to me …I take my watch off when I go into the place, once a month, of necessity…because I know from long experience that even in brief, unexpected scuffles you almost always knock your watch off … and it’s a bummer to have to go back and ask for it. Which is why I switched to Timex … but now that I have this goddamn rotten Accutron I’d hate to lose it in a flurry of stupid violence.

  Actually none of this is serious right now. It’s all bullshit. The solution, I think, is for me to send Carte Blanche a personal check for $512, or whatever, today, and worry about the other shit later. If RS can lend me enough to pay them off, that’s fine—and this notion of a loan is only contingent on Silberman’s decision to not pay the expenses on Vegas I.

  There is, of course, no reason why he should. At this point I have no idea what he plans to do with Vegas I. It came on him out of the blue. And for that matter, I guess it came on you that way, too. So in truth you aren’t obligated to pay those expenses, either.

  But none of this will matter to Carte Blanche. All they want is a check, which I’ll send them today. We can work out the details later. First we’ll see what Silberman says … and then we can think in terms of a loan as a solution of last resort … the crucial thing is not to lose this card. That’s all I really give a fuck about.

  Meanwhile … let me emphasize that under no circumstances should I ever again be given my monthly retainer in advance. Sandy’s reaction to my intelligence that I had accidentally spent my June retainer in Las Vegas—without realizing it—was something like what you might expect from Janie if you came home one night and said you’d just sent all your available cash for next month to Tim Leary in Algeria, so she would have to make do….

  One other note: I got the bundle of Salazar/issue copies … but they arrived a week or so late, along with my Airmail copy of the current issue, because of that goddamn insane address that must be posted somewhere in the mailroom. I’m enclosing it. What does it take to get the bastard changed? You can be sure I’ll have it done next time I come over—but why should a simple thing like getting somebody’s address straight require drastic measures?

  The obvious problem (see enc. Label) is that sending something to both Aspen and to Woody Creek is the scaled-down equivalent of sending something to both San Francisco and Oakland. The Owl Farm is a Woody Creek address—not Aspen. The WC Zip Code is 81656.

  The Aspen zip code is 81611. These hamwit geeks go crazy when they get something addressed to two different postal areas. Everything gets to me eventually, but for fuck’s sake let’s get my address right. It’s:

  Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

  Owl Farm

  Woody Creek, CO 81656

  I have another address in Aspen, which is actually the Wallposter box. This is K-3, but I only use this one for dope & other things that can be properly addressed to the Wallposter. This address should be stricken from all RS records; it is not listed in my name & the box is checked infrequently. And rarely by me. For various reasons …

  Anyway … jesus … I’ve interrupted this letter so many goddamn times—having 4 two-week-old Dobermans in the house is not easy … christ, I keep forgetting what I was bitching about.

  Probably the point about that $500 expense thing got ahead of the others … but don’t worry about it. Like I said, I know my Vegas expenses were excessive by any normal standards. But the terrible excessive truth is that they were genuine out of pocket expenses.

  (I just checked my bill-stub again and the valid Carte Blanche figure is $1089.45—or $200 less than the figure I had on pg. 3, above. $492.26 is the corrected, final adjusted figure for Vegas I … and $597.19 for Vegas II….)

  This is horrible; I admit it—but it’s also for two people, two car rentals, two separate trips, etc….

  Which is neither here nor there at the moment. As I said, let’s wait & see what RH does with the lunatic bill I sent them. If they pay it, I’m home free (with Carte Blanche, at least) … although we still have the specter of that $500 June retainer somehow dribbling thru my fingers. (Actually, $70 of that was for a good portable radio—which I had to get because the one I bought at the Chicago convention was finally & inevitably ripped off.)

  Which doesn’t matter either. I think I’m going crazy. It’s 10:33 in the morning & this is the longest letter I’ve ever written. It began as a quick note to wrap up loose ends.

  Don’t let the money thing hassle you—unless you have $500 or so extra lying around. I don’t want to be the asshole who stomps across the editorial budget, demanding more than anybody else for things like white Cadillac convertibles. But on the other hand I’m fucking well tired of losing credit cards so that editors can pay their bar tabs. If the money’s there, I honestly think you should pick up the tab for Vegas I—despite the obvious fact that the whole thing got bogged down in terrible excesses & bad misunderstandings about what various monies were for (like that $200 I drew in SF, for instance, I really thought was for SF expenses …).

  Anyway, fuck it. If the money’s not there—or if it’s any kind of real problem—I’d be a fucking idiot to keep yelling about it. So I won’t mention it again unless I need some kind of emergency loan to pay off Carte Blanche—and I won’t mention that unless it’s necessary.

  OK for now. My brain is drifting back to politics. It should be drifting to bed, but for some reason I think I’ll stay up and go looking for elk on the bike. I did another one of those airborne over-the-hump & crash in the water gigs last evening … but this time I didn’t stall; I just hung on and came boring out, drenched with mud & gasping for breath … and it was a wild high feeling to go screaming off across the meadow instead of lying there on the bank.

  Maybe there’s a lesson in this. Never let off. Keep it screwed on—for good or ill.

  Ciao …

  H

  TO JIM FLUG C/O U.S. SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY:

  N
ow a salaried “national correspondent,” Thompson had official Rolling Stone letterhead suitable for making requests of Senator Ted Kennedy’s legislative aide.

  June 1, 1971

  Woody Creek, CO

  Jim Flug

  c/o Sen. Ted Kennedy

  U.S. Senate Office Building

  Washington, D. C.

  Dear Jim …

  It feels weird for me to be writing on any kind of corporate or institutional stationery—but this one doesn’t really bother me. I still live here in Woody Creek, and my “editorial” involvement consists of periodic trips to the coast, primarily to deal with projects like the (enc.) Salazar gig. I’m listed as a “contributing editor,” but that doesn’t really explain it—and at this point I doubt if any real explanation is necessary.

  What I have to do for the summer is finish off a book for Random House, then leave for Saigon in September—to cover “The Retreat & Total Dissolution of the U.S. Army.” My current arrangement is to spend six months there, then to get back here for the ’72 campaign. So in the unlikely circumstance that you might want to rent a big house about 12 miles out of Aspen next winter, let me know….

  In the meantime, I wonder if you could get me a copy of that “Drug Report” that AP says was “prepared for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, by Rep. Robert Steele, R—Conn.” I’d also like to have another document mentioned in the same AP story (5/27/71—D. Post), to wit: “An earlier report from the House Armed Services Committee also described corruption in the drug trade among South Vietnamese officials, but stopped short of indicating how heroin gets into Vietnam….”

  Could you possibly get me copies of these two reports? No author or Congressman is mentioned, by AP, as a primary source for the Armed Services Committee Report. Steele is named as the “principal author” for the FgnAff Comm. Rpt (House), and there is also mention of a “Morgan F. Murphy, D—Ill.” He worked with Steele….

  What I’m trying to do is arm myself totally for a heavy six-month gig in Vietnam—two articles a month for Rolling Stone, then putting all the articles into an instant book in time for the Nov ’72 election. I suspect we’ll be running something heavy out here about that. How about you?

  Yeah, I know that one’s loaded. But I’m naturally curious. Keep me in mind if you want to do something Serious. Camelot20 won’t make it this time around. This time it’s going to be heavy … and that’s it for now. Send word.

  Thanx—

  Hunter S. Thompson

  TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:

  In 1970 Thompson investigated the tragic death of journalist Ruben Salazar, a writer for the Los Angeles Times and leader in the East L.A. Chicano community. Thompson’s provocative article was dropped by Scanlan’s but later published by Rolling Stone.

  June 2, 1971

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Jim …

  Here’s a copy of my Ruben Salazar article (RS 4/29) for your personal files—just in case nobody sent you one. It’s a long fucker: 19,200 words, and it should probably be read straight through.

  One of the interesting technical aspects of this one is that it’s two first drafts, both written at high deadline speed, but almost six months elapsed between the writing of the center section (done for Scanlan’s) and the color/culture update that was done for Rolling Stone to bracket the actual Salazar story. But an odd mixture of circumstances made them both first drafts—the Scanlan’s section was actually written by hand, about half of it done on TWA’s “redeye express” from SF to NY one night in September of ’70.

  But that evil fuck, Sidney Zion, didn’t like it. So it was croaked … for a while, anyway.

  Anyway, I felt it was the kind of thing I should get into print—for a lot of weird reasons that got tied up, somehow, with personal friendships and the paying of personal dues and that sort of gibberish. But in the end it was done, and for all its flaws I like it. When those scurvy pigfuckers shoot me, I hope some biased geek from somewhere like Woody Creek does the same thing for me—flaws and all. The way I saw it, Ruben Salazar was a journalist, not a Chicano—and I personally believe they shot him intentionally, but I couldn’t prove that (all of my research and interviews were done before the inquest—before the cops would talk to the press—and the only reason I resurrected the story was that the result of the inquest incredibly confirmed the story I’d put together in the first days after the murder …).

  Anyway, I think you should read it. Particularly right now, since we don’t have much time to put all this American Dream bullshit together. In that context, I think Salazar’s last utterance is a very special thing: “That’s impossible; we’re not doing anything.” Then he stood up and caught a tear-gas bomb in his temple.

  And by any “normal” standards, he wasn’t doing anything. But Restrepo,21 who was with him, said Salazar had been talking all day about … but shit, now that I write this for the first time, I see again that I’m sure Restrepo couldn’t possibly understand, for sure, the kind of thing he claims to have understood in Salazar. (I recently had to intervene with the KMEX-TV management to keep Restrepo’s job … a wild threatening letter to Danny Villanueva.22 …)

  Which hardly matters, for now. I was savagely pilloried in print by the heavy street militants—but oddly enough the editors of the Chicano paper at UCLA came to my defense & reprinted 30,000 or so copies of this article in La Gente. It began on the front page & consumed almost the entire issue …and yesterday I picked up The Denver Post & saw my name mentioned by a Chicano columnist as the only gabacho journalist who wasn’t like the others….

  None of … wait … yes, here’s another Chicano matter. Oscar Acosta, the Chicano Lawyer, is currently writing his memoirs. They are being published by Con Safos, a Chicano quarterly, and he’s half-mad to get them published in book form. I have the first installment, in the current issue of Con Safos, but since it mentions me I’d prefer to wait and send you the next installment, which I assume will not bring me into it …anyway, it’s called “Memoirs of a Brown Buffalo” and the theme is that “everybody’s trying to kill the buffalo.” This is how Oscar sees himself, and it would take too long here for me to explain the validity of what he’s saying. Right after the RS article came out, for instance, six of these heavy militant street crazies showed up at his apt. and said it was time for him to go out to the desert and die—they had guns, and they were ready to do him because he “said too much” to the gringo writer (me) … so now he’s up in Berkeley for the summer, writing his book and lecturing one hour a day in the Chicano Studies program.

  It might be a good book to publish. Oscar is definitely a writer. I sent his first novel to Margaret [Harrell] a few years ago … & she said it needed work … which was true … but with a little help from a good editor this new thing he’s writing might be very good. Certainly worth looking at—if only because it’s an intensely personal statement from a main figure in the mushrooming Chicano/Aztlan movement.23 Let me know if you’d like to look at it….

  ***

  The other thing I’m enclosing is a Memo (22 pgs.) I just sent to Bert Schneider at BBS—regarding a film based on The Rum Diary. The chances of this working out are much higher than anything associated with a standard commercial relationship—for reasons I see no point in explaining now. It’s a personal thing, a quirk of fate. I explained it to Lynn. But let’s wait & see what happens. My private guess is that we’ll get a film out of it … but?????

  OK for now. Send immediate word inre: Vegas. And also I must have that expense check for the Vegas trip. Time is important. Crucial. I am dancing on the edge here. Send word….

  Thanx,

  Hunter

  TO BERT SCHNEIDER, BBS PRODUCTIONS:

  Thompson wrote Bert Schneider in great detail about the logistics of making The Rum Diary into a movie.

  June 2, 1971

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Bert …

  Barbara just got back from the 88th leg of her odyssey and told me you people
were feeling overdue about getting some kind of working chunk of The Rum Diary from me … which made me wild & nervous, because Michael didn’t make this deadline entirely clear to me before he took off for Guatemala.

  Consequently, I’m enclosing a few bits of things I’ve been working on—not in the sense of sending you anything official, but mainly to assure you that I am indeed grappling with the fucker … along with a lot of other things, at least one of which might also turn into a good film (see enc. Sample of “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas”…).

  Anyway, my problem on The Rum Diary is not in the grappling—which is easy & fun, for the most part—but mainly in the fact of my own ignorance about what we need, on paper, before we can start talking seriously about a film. I told Michael I’d “write five scenes,” but that was before I got into it and realized that I’ll probably be writing 10 pages for every two minutes on film … which means a minimum of 450 pages of fairly tight script/dialogue and that’s a bastard of a thing to just dash off and stick in the mail, on the odd chance that somebody at BBS might take a liking to it and perhaps send a cheque for the rewrite….

  I started off doing a few scenes (see enclosed yellow pages), but it was instantly apparent that I couldn’t just sit down & rip them off, out of context. That one shot about the airplane hassle, en route to San Juan, where the protagonist asks the old man to sit on his hand, is a scene in itself—visually—but on paper it needs a lot of explanation. Our protagonist, C. Barn, is in an extremely crazed, wired, state of mind—this can be established by about 33 seconds worth of facial expressions on film, but in print it’s a bastard to explain quick. How fucked up would you have to be to ask your PanAm seat-mate to sit on your hand?

  Anyway … what I’ve done (enc.) is wrap up the few brief shots I’ve done here—in addition to the 370 page novel that Random House bought a few years ago, on the basis of my assurance that I was right on the verge of rewriting it—and for now I thought I’d just send them along, for good or ill, and on the general assumption that they’ll probably weigh more than nothing at all.