Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Which brings us to the matter of my recent unpleasantness vis-à-vis the Williams Energy Company and the now-infamous “Hooley Memorandum.” On my return from that ill-fated trip to NYC for the Big Party you couldn’t crash, I found a long and detailed letter from somebody in the Williams hierarchy. [Enclosed is a] xerox copy of same explaining that the above-mentioned “S. Hooley” was in fact a hapless wretch of a clerk whose name is Mrs. Sandra Hooley, and whose figures (in the memorandum) were as faulty as the apparent intent of her language. In any case, she has taken a temporary leave of absence until her husband has settled my hash, and in the meantime my debt to Williams has been temporarily stabilized at $99 per month, on a year-round “balanced-payment” basis…. So let’s hold any action on that one in limbo, until I can get a better fix on the realities of this goddamn, increasingly-menacing fuel-cost situation.

  According to various “resident experts” on Solar home-heating, my house is almost ideally situated and constructed for easy conversion to solar heating…. So I think I’ll ignore Williams until they jack up their prices again—or until I catch S. Hooley’s husband creeping around the Owl Farm at night with a Bowie knife in his teeth—and concentrate in the meantime on converting to solar heat. Can you give me any specific leads, names or engineering information on this subject?

  Your votes inre: Gouging & De-Regulation continue to haunt me, but I know better than to hassle you on any question I don’t already have all the answers to, so I’ll postpone any drastic action on that one until we can talk about it.

  And … yes … speaking of “talk,” I just made an arrangement with Wenner that will allow me to “cover” the GOP convention on TV, instead of going to Kansas City … and it occurs to me that we could probably have some fun if you wanted to come out here and watch the thing with me: A sort of “guest commentator” gig, as it were.

  Ye gods! I just found this letter in the typewriter and I thought it was mailed three days ago…. How has my organizational discipline gone so lax? … And why? That one is the larger question, eh?

  Indeed … and since I need time to ponder it, I think I’ll chop this letter off right here and get back to work: And since the letter is so delayed, I’ll probably talk to you on the phone before you get it…. But meanwhile, consider the idea of coming over here and watching the GOP brawl with me on TV. (The Owl Farm is an Equal Opportunity Resort—Women & Children are Welcome….)

  Let me know on this ASAP. I’ll need at least 48 hours to prepare myself, metaphysically, if I’m going to have a politician on the premises. …Yeah, and that’s it for now:

  Hunter

  MEMO FROM THE SPORTS DESK: NO. 3/0076108

  Music has always acted as a tonic on both Raoul Duke and Hunter S. Thompson.

  August, 1976

  Woody Creek, CO

  To: The Editor

  From: Raoul Duke

  Subject: The Agonies of Dr. Thompson

  Pursuant to your query of August 1, I am forwarding the entire file vis-à-vis Dr. Thompson’s recent Unpleasantness with the Liberal/Elitist Media. That is the Doctor’s phrase, not mine. To me, they are just a gang of flatulent Jews who took the “D” train by mistake….

  … once again; And you have to wonder just how many times a fragile intelligence can make that sort of mistake, which results in a high-speed, seemingly endless sprint through the sewers, all the way from the Village up to Harlem at 125th (is that right? Or is it 110th? Jesus—does the “D” train still exist?)…. Anyway, I know from experience that nobody except a certified egomaniac or the purest kind of idiot-savant can make that mistake more than twice without suffering an irretrievable loss of self-confidence. There are a lot of small and meaningless mistakes a person can make in this world, but taking the “D” train by mistake is not one of them. Somewhere around the middle of Central Park, about 200 feet under the zoo, a cold and sudden flash that feels like a 40-pound water rat gnawing the coccyx bone off the base of your spine causes every muscle in the lower back to seize up and the knees to feel like rubber bands along with extreme pain—every thirty seconds from spasms of the bladder and the mouth goes slack like the sun-rotted lips of a dead walrus and the bile wells up in the throat and drools viscously out of the cracks between clenched teeth and down on the chest and the shirt in long wet foul-smelling stains and when the brain is finally able to stabilize itself from the first wave of seizures long enough to articulate some kind of dim and desperate emergency-message to the medulla…. When the spasms finally slow down to one every 60 seconds instead of one every 30 and you can finally take a breath between the mindless screams of pain and terror that kept erupting out of the blood-choked throat in long blasts of noise and reddish sputum, you finally hear a voice that you know is your own saying, “Ye fucking gods! I’ve done it again! This thing is … yes … the goddamn “D” train, and the next stop is Harlem: Millions of wild niggers, and all of them crazy with hate. Should I abandon all hope and just fall out when we get to 125th and hope to god I can get to the third rail before the niggers get hold of me?”

  … Ah, hit it Russell! You twisted little bastard. “… Let me see you dance, oooooohhhhhh baby, let me see you dance. …” Stomp on that bastard! Whip on it!

  Excuse me. Yes. This kind of objective journalism is a hard thing to mix with the Amazing Rhythm Aces and that ballbuster love song that Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown put together … so let’s have a truce for just a minute or two while I get across the room and fuck with those knobs. I have 80 speakers in this room and I can crank 210 big McIntosh/Nakamichi watts into every one of them…. But my work tends to suffer when I weaken and go for The Knobs; there is something in this wild and elegant combination of music, memories, blood-lust and that awesome mass of electronics over there in the corner that tends to knock the edge off my classical training … and I am still not sure what it means; probably it is brain damage; nobody with good sense would try to work under these frenzied circumstances. Every time Russell leans into one of his long, mournful curls I feel a great pressure in my balls and somewhere up in the front edge of my brain I hear a voice that I never even recognize except between two and six in the dark & quiet hours and it’s telling me to get the hell away from this electric pimp and jump across the room to wallow in that maze of hot wires, Azimuth Alignment Beacons and Pitch Control Screws. …Yes, and the big silver Gain Control knobs, the “A” and “B” slope-adjustments on the Frequency Energizer …

  Ah, jesus, here we go again…. “Standin beside the ocean, lookin across the bay … Lights are flickerin all along the shore: People dancin there, but I don’t dance no more….”

  And then, BOOM! the afterburner kicks in, The Crank, and every log in the house rattles with the jackhammer screech of [James] Hooker’s piano, the palm fronds tremble, the big thermopane windows start to bulge, and that pompous brute of a peacock out there on the porch starts screaming and Lazlo the 100 pound waterhead Doberman is trying to get through the wire mesh, un-hinged by the primitive, demented intensity of the peacock’s hellish screams….

  Madness, madness … But there is still a bit of room at the top; there is still about a half-inch of slack behind the Output knob on the Nakamichi; we could pump about 20 more decibels into this situation by screwing that one all the way over, and with a delicate touch on both Gain Control knobs we could peg the VU needle and add maybe 10 more decibels…. Which would get the whole gig humming along at something like 105, ten or fifteen points above the pain threshold, and by killing all the filters and flogging the bass and treble knobs all the way over, we can move things up to 110 without breaking the windows…. One of the bass speaker boxes is starting to emit smoke; or maybe that acrid-smelling blue haze is coming from one of the Universal 3-Way Dividing Network boxes….

  But to hell with the smoke; the first time this happened, I panicked and shut down the whole system—but when I took the back off the speaker box I realized that it was only the insulation burning, which is not a serious matter when you have 80
speakers in one room. According to the human cinder who built this system and then left town without ever giving me a schematic to show me how to put it back together in case some dope addict falls into the wiring, I can afford to sacrifice at least ten speakers to fire and smoke without any serious fall-off in sound quality. The break-point, he says, would be somewhere between 15 and 20. At that point—with 15 or 20 speakers burned into cinders, disappearing one after another in balls of blue smoke—I would start getting some fuzz on the low end, and also a loss in the clarity.

  Which is not what I want. It has taken me too long to lash this monster together to just sit here and watch it go up in smoke for no reason except to drive that goddamn brainless Doberman into such a frenzy that he will hurl himself right through the wire and into the peacocks’ turf. … I have been trying to push Lazlo around that bend for about two years now, but he still resists. He will sneak in there and suck an egg once in a while, but only when some kind of full-moon kinkiness like blueballs or meat-hunger has lured the Main Squeeze off his perch and out into the fields to look for something to eat, kill, penetrate or maybe just rip into shreds for no good reason at all.

  I have lived with a lot of mean, weird animals in my time, but I have never seen anything even half as mean and weird as a male peacock when he finally gets a fix on whatever it is that looks like an obstacle between him and whatever he wants to do. A peacock might brood for three days about whether or not to walk across the driveway and eat a wild strawberry—but once he has pondered all the factors, weighed all the risks, measured the distance and analyzed every centimeter of the terrain between him and the strawberry that he has watched long enough to be sure it is really there and that he really wants to eat it, the only two beasts on this earth that might be crazy or vicious enough to deliberately try to prevent the peacock from getting to the strawberry would be a wolverine or a hammerhead shark.

  Lazlo, the brainless Doberman, will jump out of a speeding car and run right through a glass door to get his teeth around the eyeball of a 200 pound Great Dane—but somewhere deep in his twisted Prussian genes is at least one wise and rational chromosome that short-circuits all his natural instincts whenever it looks like he might be on a collision course with the peacock. There is a vast potential for treachery and genuine savagery bred into the brain of most Dobermans: One of the problems with using them as guard dogs, for instance, is that you can never be sure that a Doberman—unlike a German Shepherd—will bark or even snarl at a human intruder before he gets the target lined up and springs off like some kind of noiseless, black torpedo on that final eight or nine yard sprint that ends with a long, silent leap in the general direction of the head and neck area of some poor bastard who might be idly lighting a cigarette or adjusting the handkerchief shrouding his flashlight about half a second before he gets hit with what is referred to in the psycho-medical profession as “extreme trauma.” Anybody who has ever been attacked by a Doberman in the darkness, with no warning at all, will spend the rest of his life feeling just a little more nervous and fearful about almost everything than he felt before “the trauma.” There is a realm of psychic peace in the human brain that, once violated, is gone forever.

  TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:

  Portions of this thoughtful letter to Thompson’s editor at Random House were published in 1990’s Songs of the Doomed.

  September 1, 1976

  Woody Creek, CO

  OUTLINE: “F.O.B. GALVESTON” (WORKING TITLE)

  A NOVEL BY: HST … IN FOUR PARTS, 26 SCENES, APP. 80,000 WORDS

  Capsule comment & description

  The spine of this story is short, tight and flexible. It has taken me about six months of brooding and plotting to lash it together—in my mind & on tape & in various notebooks—and now that I have a working skeleton, I’d like to keep this outline as short as possible. But I can make it as long as necessary, so feel free to let me know if what follows doesn’t make the nut. I have a two-pound file of news clips, U.S. Treasury Dept. internal memos, confidential sources, personal contacts and five or six progressively tighter plot-lines that I can cannibalize and hurl into the breach, on short notice…. But, given the general nature and traditional fate of “book outlines,” the only point I want to make with this one is that I am finally committed to this story on a level that I only flirted with until about two months ago. Eight years of intensely personal involvement in political journalism is a hard habit to break: There is always the tendency and/or the temptation to want to keep at least one hand in that game, if only for the promise of movement and instant action—but there is also a point of clearly diminishing returns, and I think I reached that point about two years ago, for good or ill. That was when the idea for a book set in Texas first occurred to me—but at the time I was still thinking in terms of journalism, and it was not until very recently, when I was finally faced with a choice between going to Texas to work on this story or going to Plains, Georgia to work on Jimmy Carter, that I made a conscious decision to work with both hands on a novel, instead of keeping my left hand in journalism, my right hand in fiction, and my head in a mean-tempered limbo….

  And so much for all that. The cord is cut now: I have quit that outpost of progress called the National Affairs Desk that I founded at Rolling Stone, and in the slow process of quitting I drifted so far from the backstairs complexities of national politics that I couldn’t go back to it now, even if I wanted to … and that, I think, is a point I had to reach and recognize on my own, and for my own reasons. As long as the constant speedy lure of political journalism seemed more essential and important to me than the ugly, slow-burning reality of writing a novel, any effort to write fiction would have been a part-time, left-handed gig (like my recent journalism)…. And in any other line of work except writing, people who try to deal with the world and life and reality off a split-focus base are called “schizoid” and taken off the streets, as it were, for their own and the greater good.

  Now, after more than a week of extremely disorienting conversations regarding the ultimate fate of this story—(a novel? a screenplay? or both?)—I feel in the grip of a serious confusion, to wit: The story as I originally conceived it, more than two years ago, was a first-person “journalistic novel,” set in Texas and rooted in a genuine conflict between Innocence and Violence that seemed to be the source of a unique and classically “American” style of energy that I hadn’t felt since my first visit to Brazil in 1962, or to California in 1959. It was the same level of energy that I sensed on my first contact with the Hell’s Angels, my first visit to Las Vegas and my first few days in the frenzied vortex of a U.S. presidential campaign…. But I knew that, in order to deal properly with any story set in Texas, I would have to move for a year to Houston or Dallas or Austin and actually live there; and this was the harsh reality that I wasn’t quite ready to face two years ago. There were other stories to get involved in, other places to go, and the sudden millstone of personal notoriety that caused so many unexpected changes in my life-stance that I still haven’t regained my balance…. It was one thing to slip into Texas as an anonymous young journalist with a subsistence-level book contract, and quite another to boom into a state full of boomers with a national reputation as some kind of lunatic felon, a journalistic Billy the Kid and a cartoon-character that appeared every day in newspapers all over Texas. That kind of act is known, among boomers, as a “hard dollar”—and anybody who thinks otherwise should try it for a while.

  In any case, that and a few other good reasons is why I kept postponing the book on Texas…. But I continued to brood on it, and one of the people I brooded with from time to time was Bob Rafelson, a film director and personal friend who listened to my gibberish about Texas and violence and energy for so long that he eventually began brooding on the story himself, and finally suggested that it might work better as a film than as a book.

  At that point I was still thinking vaguely about writing a book on the ’76 presidential campaign and taking all the 5
0–1 bets I could get on my own lonely dark horse—some yahoo from Georgia named Carter—and so for all the obvious reasons that seemed at the time to mandate another HST/Campaign book, my “Texas Project” remained in an oddly-intense state of “talking limbo” for most of 1975. Rafelson was totally involved in the making of Stay Hungry,26 and since there was nobody else to prod me along inre: Texas, I ignored my own fast-rising conviction that another HST/Campaign book would be a fatal mistake that would lock me for life into Teddy White’s footsteps, and fell prey to the natural gambler’s affection for his own long-shot—and it was not until I went up to New Hampshire to cover the first primary that I understood the finality of the choice I was drifting into. The New Hampshire results were all I needed to prove my point as a gambler and a seer, but the personal notoriety I’d accrued since 1972 had changed my role as a journalist so drastically that even the Secret Service treated me with embarrassing deference, and I couldn’t walk into a bar without total strangers wanting to argue with me or ask for my autograph…. And for two days after the New Hampshire primary I sat around Charles Gaines’ house on a hill near a hamlet called Concoontook (sp?), trying to decide whether I should keep on covering the ’76 campaign and adjust to my new persona, or to quit political journalism altogether and get seriously to work on a novel—which is something I’ve been planning to do ever since I finished my ill-fated Rum Diary almost 15 years ago. I have never had much respect or affection for journalism, but for the past 10 years it has been both a dependable meal-ticket and a valid passport to the cockpit(s) of whatever action, crisis, movement or instant history I wanted to be a part of.