We’re writing this book to show the many sides of Hunter—the Hunter Thompson who was unavailable to anyone but those closest to him. Even if other writers thought that these were qualities of Doc’s they wanted to explore, they couldn’t have; they wouldn’t have had the access, and now never will.
Two Beginnings
CLEVERLY DISCUSSES COCAINE AND TITS AS BIG AS TEXAS
It’s funny that I don’t remember the first time I met Hunter. I had read Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas before moving to Aspen, so I was well aware of who Hunter Thompson was. I remember seeing him on his stool at the end of the Jerome Bar. But for all that, I can’t remember our first real encounter. Maybe I can blame this memory lapse on the seventies; maybe someone was on something. It’s likely we were introduced by our mutual friend Tom Benton. Tom is the artist who designed Hunter’s GONZO fist logo and also the original cover for Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, the one with the stars-and-stripes skull. Tom worked on Hunter’s sheriff’s campaign and created the “Aspen Wall Posters,” which were a large part of the PR blitz for that campaign. Tom and Hunter were very good friends and had a mutual respect. As it turned out, Tom and I spent a lot of the seventies and eighties driving the same galleries out of business. It was hard work; we became close. It’s likely that at some point he was the one who first put Hunter and me together.
My first real recollection, my first Hunter story, was an encounter that took place at the far end of the Jerome Bar in the mid-1970s. Hunter was perched on his stool; I was on the stool next to him. By now we had become friendly. Friendly enough to share drinks, conversation, whatever else. We were doing just that when a young couple approached with caution. Hippies. I thought I’d left you guys back in Vermont.
It was mid-afternoon on a beautiful sunny day. It was far too nice out for good people to be in a saloon. So it was just Hunter, me, the bartender, a couple of real estate agents scheming in a distant corner, and the hippies. The guy was a furry little fellow, standard hippie-issue fare. The girl was hot. She had great Texas-size breasts swelling out against her hippie top, which did a terrible job of covering them, cleavage to the wind. Hunter chose not to ignore them, the hippies, for two obvious reasons.
“Hi,” the hippies said. It turned out that they were on a pilgrimage, and Hunter was it. They had traveled some distance to meet the great man, and now they were here. And here he was.
“Hi,” Hunter responded. “No, no, not disturbing us at all, just having a little lunch,” he said, eyes glued on Texas.
Hippie ears were cocked, trying to figure what the hell Hunter was saying. This was a classic response for those chatting with Doc for the first time. Or the thousandth. There was plenty of adoration to go around, and Hunter graciously accepted every ounce of it. He even went so far as to show some interest in them, while mentally willing those young breasts closer and closer to him. He had somehow maneuvered the hippie girl between us and now had his arm around her. I was enjoying her smell. The target area was pointed directly at Doc.
Suddenly the guy edged very close. “Hey,” he whispered, “you guys want a bump?”
Only one answer to that question.
“Where do we go?” the hippie asked.
“Right here’s fine,” Hunter said.
It was the seventies in Aspen. We thought the stuff was legal; we thought it was good for you. None of our friends had been hauled off to rehab yet. Hippie boy produced a vial, chock full. Yum, yum. Hunter reached out and snatched it from his hand like a striking cobra. Lightning fast.
He unscrewed the top and held it up to the light, then proceeded to dump out a large pile of cocaine onto the top of each of the young lady’s breasts. Both hippies were frozen, mouths agape. I watched, waiting for Hunter to produce a bill to roll up, or some other cocaine-snorting device. None was forthcoming. Hunter proceeded to place a finger over one nostril and bury his face into one of the breasts, making loud snarfling sounds with liberal flashes of tongue. The pile of cocaine disappeared. He repeated the process, covering the other nostril and snarfling the other breast. When he pulled his face away from the girl’s bosom, his nose and upper lip were smeared with the white powder. Saliva glistened around his mouth.
He held the vial up to the light again: about a quarter full. He handed it to me. I dumped the remainder of the substance onto the back of my hand and snorted it the same way Hunter had, but unfortunately sans breast. My pulse quickened and there was a pleasant sensation, though I still was pretty sure that Hunter had had the most fun.
I handed the vial back to Hunter. He held it up again, empty. He screwed the top back on and tossed it to the hippie boy. The hippies stared, mouths hanging open, the girl’s cleavage soaked with Hunter’s spit. What had just happened?
Hunter turned to me, his back to the hippies, and resumed our conversation at exactly the point where the young couple had interrupted it. They lingered; they had only Hunters back. Then the boy took the girl’s arm, and they slowly retreated. Backing up, then turning to the door. They had met Hunter S. Thompson. Did we get their names? Did they get mine? Did we know where they were going, where they came from? They were gone, perhaps off on their next quest.
BRAUDIS REMEMBERS ROUGH AND TUMBLE: PAVEMENT AND POLITICS
My earliest memories are of pavement. South Boston, 1948. Concrete sidewalks and tar streets. Blacktop playgrounds. In the winter people scattered ashes from their coal furnaces on the ice so they wouldn’t slip. I remember one cold day being pulled on a sled by my mother. I remember the metal runners screeching over the ash and clinkers. I was bundled in a hooded snowsuit with one ear sticking out. My mother took a shortcut across a vacant lot and a twig got stuck in my eye. As I cried I saw my mother’s guilt.
Today, as I gaze out the window at the Elk Mountain range, there is no tar in sight. I came here to ski. Back in Boston, we played hockey on a frozen pond at Farragut Park. Shin guards were copies of the Boston Globe friction-taped to my legs. I was a good skater and a good fighter. When I first tried skiing in Vermont I was a natural.
I outgrew the gangs and the juvenile crime. I briefly believed in our government. I married and sired two daughters. I copped a corporate job and thought I was happy. We owned a Ford Country Squire station wagon and a VW bug.
Wasn’t this the life everyone wanted? Maybe, but I had this coppery taste in my mouth because of the war in Vietnam.
Instead of baiting cops for sport in Southie, I was shedding the three-piece pinstripes on weekends and getting tear-gassed in antiwar demonstrations. The seeds of rebellion from Boston bloomed in New York. Dope replaced Beefeater, Levi Strauss supplanted Brooks Brothers, and my rail out of the East was greased. I arrived in Colorado to ski. No purpose was the new purpose. Tell me not to do it and I’ll do it. Good Jesuit gone awry.
The Teutonic establishment in Aspen was postwar Swiss and Austrian. Never German by admission. We were the newcomers, the outsiders, postgrad hippies and a threat to the status quo and the bottom line. Our growing ranks might hurt real estate values. We thought we could save the Rocky Mountains from those who saw only the bottom line.
Young Braudis, as a rookie, taking advantage of Aspen’s social scene.
I had seen Hunter at the bar in the Hotel Jerome. I had read about his battles against the city council and the municipal court. His group was a loose alliance of artists, lawyers, writers, and shady imports with no visible means of support. They had their end of the long bar.
My bunch skied every day and self-medicated with whatever was handy. We all converged at the Jerome. Without any clear introduction, Hunter and I started calling each other by name. Osmosis by whiskey. Eight nights a week.
Jesus! It seems as though everyone who knew Hunter met him at the Jerome. Its high ceiling, tile floor, and grand Victorian back bar made it a great place to drink. As the sides were forming in the Battle of Aspen, the office of sheriff was Hunter’s choice for his first beachhead. In the United States of Amer
ica the office of sheriff is the only chief law enforcement position controlled by the voters.
That spring the snow was melting, the lifts were closed, jobs had ended, and relationships were difficult. As frozen horse shit thawed, not a tourist was to be found. The climate for conversation was good, and I found my stool was getting closer to Hunter’s. I listened to Doc and his brain trust formulate a plan. Hunter saw the opportunity. Power resided with the people. Freaks were people, and more of us arrived every day. If we registered and if we voted, we just might outnumber the complacent conservatives in November. “Freak power” was the surge, and HST had the courage to ride that wave.
Hunter had crafted a platform that might have seemed an odd match for the office he was seeking. He spoke to land use, zoning, and greed control. The sheriff in Hunter’s model would become an ombudsman. He declared that as sheriff of Pitkin County, he would change the name of the city of Aspen to “Fat City.” Everything he said that summer appealed to me. I enlisted as a foot soldier in my first real crusade. I understood guns and badges, but what the hell did growth control have to do with a sheriff? Hunter knew the answer to that question. He was a highly evolved student of essential political matters. In 1958, in The Rum Diary, he described the threat posed by greedy land developers by stating that, unchecked, they “spread like piss puddles in a parking lot.” At age twenty-one, he grasped the reality that it was always greed versus the environment.
Bob’s campaigns have been consistently more successful than Hunter’s.
The brilliant artist Tom Benton designed posters for both Hunter and Braudis. Both are much-sought-after collectibles.
What might have appeared to an outsider in 1970 as Thompson’s brainless rant against the machine was actually his refined statement about the art of controlling one’s environment. That year Hunter already had the powerful magnetism that lasted until his death. As the nucleus for an embryonic political force that shook Aspen’s establishment, Hunter infected a small group of future candidates with a fever that eventually led to victories that we shared with him.
For most of us, that campaign, filled with passion and some tears, was the political apogee. But the friendships and loyalties that Hunter cemented gave some traction—not unlike those ashes on the ice in my old ’hood—to subsequent campaigns that gave life to the original agenda that the Doc connected to the concept called quality of life.
Following his loss in November, I remember Hunter asking me about the informal power-up model of gang structure. It was as if he were taking mental notes. I had gone from dean’s list to dropout; but now Hunter told me that his foray into politics had exposed weaknesses in the comfortable oligarchy of Aspen. I was starting to feel my part in what Hunter foresaw. Despite the “Carpe Noctum” existentialism and the denial of death and tomorrow, Hunter persuaded me and other supporters to view his loss on Election Day as the beginning, not the end, of “Freak Power.”
The curtain was rising on the Gonzo Years, the hyperbole and craziness, but the pendulum was creeping toward its position of natural repose, with the Doc’s hand in touch. He was to become, for me, a polestar and a conscience. Thirty-five years later he was a sharp twig in my eye.
Cleverly Chats with the Doctor
There’s really no other way to put it. Facts are facts. Hunter mumbled. In short staccato bursts. The way they teach you to use a fully automatic weapon. A quick spray, then another, then another. Covering the field. His mind was so quick that he had his words processed and considered before he could get them out. When the rest of us speak before we think, it gets us in trouble. For Hunter it was just the opposite. He couldn’t get the words out fast enough, and his pauses were semicolons, not commas. Besides, he didn’t give a hoot and a holler what anyone thought anyway.
Our ability to comprehend Hunter—or not—was our problem, not Hunter’s. I don’t think that I ever witnessed him make an effort to clarify himself. For some reason, none of this deterred TV hosts from courting him for their talk shows, or colleges from begging him to come lecture. Though these weren’t Hunter’s favorite activities, it wasn’t because he was worried about people not understanding him—like I said, he really couldn’t care less. What he didn’t like was the structure of the things. In agreeing to them, he actually had to be somewhere at a certain time. You might say that tardiness was a shortcoming of Hunter’s. People constantly forgave him this small flaw, I think, because it was so remarkable that he showed up at all. I suspect that the reason that he showed up was because he had some sort of agreement with his publisher—you know, the kind of agreement that’s in writing, attended by lawyers, and signed with blood. That, plus I think the dough was pretty good on the lecture circuit. Money is always a wonderful motivator. Hunter tried to keep his lectures down to questions and answers; the way most people end their talks was how Hunter began his. He usually ended them by felonious assault with a handy fire extinguisher.
A few years ago I was sitting in a state of non-Zen nothingness and it occurred to me that at some unknown point I had become able to understand every word that Hunter said. How long had it been since I leaned closer in an effort to turn the sounds into words? I couldn’t say. This epiphany kind of unnerved me. What did it mean? Was I spending too much time at Owl Farm? Was my ear–brain continuum evolving in some strange way? Was it the drugs? Nah. Couldn’t be the drugs. I concluded that it didn’t mean anything. I come to that conclusion a lot. It’s safe.
Still, it did get me thinking, and took me back to the Jerome Bar years before, to what might have been my first one-on-one conversation with Doc, when we were just getting to know each other.
I walked into the place in mid-afternoon. Hunter was sitting at the bar having lunch. As usual he had ordered half the menu and was picking at the food. He had all the beverage bases covered as well: a Bloody Mary, a beer, a glass of water, and a tumbler of Chivas. Apparently some doofus had spotted Hunter just before I arrived. The doofus was dancing around the room, table to table, pointing out, “That’s Hunter Thompson over there.” Everyone loves that stuff. Figuring me as his only potential ally, Hunter asked me to join him. I sat down, and he said to help myself to some lunch. He had enough in front of him to feed two or three. He ordered me a beer, and I started picking around the different plates the same way he was. The doofus began to hover closer and closer and finally sat down next to us. Doc explained how he and I were in the middle of an important meeting and could really use some privacy. The guy actually took the hint and drifted off.
Doc and I started chatting, both of us relieved that we didn’t have to deal with the fool. We talked and drank and grazed over the food, with me occasionally leaning close to make sure that I wasn’t missing any Hunter Thompson wisdom. I thought it was going all right; sure, I’d miss some stuff here and there, but I believed I was keeping up. That is, I thought that I was keeping up until Hunter really took the ball and started to run with it. Now he was doing all the talking; I was merely audience. I listened carefully to every word, straining to understand, with only intermittent success. Nodding and smiling when I hoped it was appropriate, half comprehending, half bluffing. It seemed to be working. Hunter went on and on. One of us was having a great conversation. I started to get nervous about what would happen if, all of a sudden, Hunter required a reply from me. No need to fret; Doc was happy. He continued.
Finally he stopped dead. He fixed me with a hard, searching look. “Michael,” he said, “you’re the most unflappable person I’ve ever talked to.” I am? My God, I thought, what the hell have we been talking about? The possibilities raced through my brain. Everything from sedition to loaning him my wife. “Hunter,” I confessed, “I’m sorry. I haven’t understood a word you’ve said for the last five minutes.” Hunter gave me a kindly smile. I knew it was all right because it wasn’t about me.
The doofus was gone, and we had finished our drinks and Hunter’s lunch. We bade each other a good afternoon and promised to do this again soon.
; Bob Tells Us About Maria and Lost Love
Hunter and Maria lived together for several years; but by 1987 Maria Khan had left the farm. A beautiful girl of Pakistani descent from a prominent Phoenix family, Maria finally decided that she had completed her enlistment as Hunter’s live-in, sleep-in administrative assistant. Her black hair and gray/blue eyes probably accounted for part of Hunter’s attraction to her, but she was also very smart. Smart enough to know it was time to return to Phoenix to continue her education.
Her parents despised Hunter, and although he knew it, he had difficulty accepting it. He retaliated by writing a gonzo exposé of the Khan clan in the Sunday supplement of a prominent Phoenix newspaper. This resulted in a serious widening of the Thompson/Khan chasm. His charges against the Khans were borderline libel, but in some sense funny—particularly if you knew that part of Hunter’s motivation was revenge for the family’s supporting Maria’s escape from Woody Creek. She had moved out unexpectedly, and Hunter was having trouble locating the particular straw that broke the back of the relationship. Certainly there had been some behavior issues, but nothing that dovetailed with the time immediately preceding her departure. Perhaps he deserved it, but in a just and fair universe there’d be an explanation, a measure of understanding. There’d be a straw.
Maria and Hunter in happier times, joined on the links by David McCumber, Tex, Deb Fuller, and a pro.
After Maria left him, Hunter had been sent to Phoenix on assignment with the San Francisco Examiner to cover the Evan Mecham impeachment hearings.
Evan Mecham had run for governor of Arizona three times before finally being elected in 1986. After one short year in office, a recall effort was under way. An archconservative with megalomaniacal tendencies, he had canceled Martin Luther King Day, defended the use of the word pickaninny, along with other racist slurs, and had declared the editor of the Phoenix Gazette, John Kolbe, a nonperson.
The Kitchen Readings Page 2