Hunter had bogged himself down in the worst possible place. The giant agricultural sprinklers used to water a hay field are pretty much the same as the back-and-forth oscillating type that you use on your lawn, only much, much bigger. Each one covered about an acre, with the maximum amount of water being dumped at the outside of the arc. In this case, approximately twenty gallons of water were being dumped on Hunter’s Jeep every thirty seconds. The water was cycling back toward the Jeep, and Jesse really wanted to get inside. Hunter had been sitting in there smoking hash since the assistant had left and was feeling a little paranoid. There was a sense of urgency. Jesse finally shined the flashlight into his own semi-panicky face so Hunter could recognize him. Hunter unlocked a door.
So now it was 4:00 A.M. and Hunter and the cowboy were filling the Jeep with hash smoke, and water was pounding down on the roof every thirty seconds. Jesse had to be up to run a ranch in a couple of hours and really wanted this to be over. Of course at this point, he was completely stoned.
Through the smoke, Jesse could see that just out beyond the arc of the sprinkler was dry ground. He reckoned that if he could get his ranch truck to the point closest to Hunter, an area that was still dry, he might have enough purchase to be able to drag the Jeep out. He timed his break between drenchings and made for the truck. He brought the rig up as close to the Jeep as he dared and stretched out the tow strap; it was just short. Rummaging around the bed, he found some old rope with which to make up the distance. He triple-wrapped the rope between the hook on the tow strap and the truck’s undercarriage. Jesse and Hunter conferred, made a plan, and got to work. Soon they were behind the wheels of the two vehicles, tires spinning wildly, mud and hay flying, rope straining. Well, the strap held, but the rope broke. Under the strain, it snapped like a rubber band, and the steel hook flew back over the Jeep’s hood and shattered the windshield. Hunter came flying out of the Jeep as if he’d been shot from a cannon. For some reason he was sure it was a bullet. Pure paranoia. The timing wasn’t good. Hunter flattened himself on the ground, to present a smaller target to the phantom sniper, just as the sprinkler arrived depositing its twenty-gallon load. Hunter, usually as capable of appreciating low comedy as much as anybody, was having a little trouble with this one.
Jesse drove the soaked and livid Hunter S. Thompson home. As Hunter sloshed out of the truck, he screamed at Jesse to never call him again. Jesse could have let it go, but he had a better handle on the humor of the situation than Hunter. He reminded Doc who actually had done the calling at 3:00 A.M. The conversation ended right there.
It was after 1:00 A.M. Christmas morning. Jesse had finished wrapping presents at midnight and had made it to bed to try to get a couple in before the kids got up. The phone rang. Jesse’s wife, Jill, answered. It was Deborah. “There’s a mountain lion in the house!” Jill handed the phone to Jesse.
“Ha ha,” Jesse said. He could hear Hunter in the background; they were on the speakerphone. Considering the holiday, Jesse just assumed that Hunter was giving the gift of “mirth” for Christmas this year.
Hunter came on:
“Jesuschristthisisnofuckingjokethere’sagoddamnmountain lioninthegoddamnhousewillyougetoverhere?”
Jesse patiently suggested that mountain lions were more the bailiwick of the Fish and Game Department, and perhaps that’s who they should be calling at two-something o’clock on Christmas morning. Jesse was pretty sure that Hunter and Deborah wouldn’t have any luck with Fish and Game, but he figured that if Hunter was screaming at their answering machine then he wouldn’t be hollering at him. It might buy him enough time to take a ball-peen to every phone in the house and become incommunicado. This, of course, didn’t play, and Jesse found himself hiking it up Hunter’s steps, .30-30 in hand, not too many minutes later. As it turned out the critter, whatever it was, wasn’t in the house. It was in the peacock cage.
The peacock cage was on the deck built up against the house. Five or six feet square and about eight feet high. It was cobbled together with two-bys, chicken wire, and Plexiglas. On the deck side was a person-size door made out of chicken wire and two-bys. On the opposite wall was a smaller peacock-size door. Inside were shelves and perches running up two walls. Apparently peacocks like banana peels and orange rinds and stuff of that nature, so between cleanings, the interior of the cage looked like a compost heap covered with bird shit.
The peacock cage, sans mountain lion, bobcat, lynx…whatever.
Jesse was plenty nervous when he started easing the cage door open. He noticed that Hunter was standing behind him with a shotgun. Jesse pleaded with him to go somewhere else. He didn’t want it to turn into a shooting gallery. He peered in; the birds were all huddled together on a top perch. He looked to his right and realized he was nose to nose with an extremely large, agitated bobcat. Backing up slowly, he left the door wide open. The cat’s butt was pressed up against the chicken wire. Jesse figured that if he gave him a poke with the barrel of the .30-30, the frightened cat would run out the open door and be gone. Jesse poked; the cat hissed. Kind of like a house cat, only basso profundo. It was a toss-up as to who was more anxious, Jesse or the cornered cat. Jesse poked again, harder. The cat sprang, bounced off a window, hit the floor running, out the cage door and in through the living room door where Hunter had been standing. Now there really was a wildcat in the house.
The decor of Hunter’s house was what you’d call eclectic. A little cluttered in some areas. There must have been a million places for a cat to hide, half a million in the living room alone. The stuffed wolverine, the skulls, the gator heads. This wasn’t going to be easy. The two intrepid hunters stood in the middle of the room peering and pointing the barrels of their guns in this direction and that. No bobcat to be seen. They flung the front door open all the way and decided to open all the windows to make it easier for the cat to escape. After opening the last window as far as they could, they turned back to the search. Suddenly they heard a sound behind them and spun around. It wasn’t the cat. It was the last window they had opened. It was newly installed; the carpenter had set it in the rough opening, but hadn’t yet nailed it in place. This sort of thing wasn’t totally uncommon at Owl Farm. Sometimes workers would feel the need to leave in a hurry; sometimes they’d ingest something that would leave them confused. Jesse and Hunter watched, paralyzed, as the window, frame and all, slowly tilted in, crashed onto the living room floor, and shattered. It was December 25. Hunter’s house was becoming pretty chilly. Snow was flurrying in through the huge new hole in the wall.
The good news was that the crash had frightened the cat, too. Driven from its hiding place, it sat perched on the back of an easy chair. Jesse had had enough. He raised his rifle. The bullet went through the bobcat, the wall behind the bobcat, Hunter’s bedroom, and into the back wall of the house. Later Hunter never let anyone dig it out or patch it. He liked having stuff around to remind him of the good times.
One summer a few years later, the phone company was trenching along the side of Woody Creek Road, burying fiber optic lines. It was a long project, and Jesse had befriended the guys working on it. He might have thought twice about doing this, though, if he had known that it would mean he’d become the unofficial liaison between the crew and the neighborhood. Specifically, Hunter.
One day, when they’d trenched their way fairly close to Owl Farm, Jesse hooked up with the guys after work. He pointed out that there was a lot of stuff buried under Hunter’s driveway: electric conduits, security gear, and more. There was also a large water line that came down from the Salvation Ditch behind Hunter’s, crossed under the road, and provided irrigation water for the hay field (the one Hunter didn’t drive around in anymore). The 8-inch line carried water under about 143 pounds of pressure. At the time, it seemed that the boys had taken due note of these facts. Unfortunately these guys were enjoying all that Aspen could offer, partywise. It was a rare treat for their work to bring them so close to a sexy resort town, so they tended to show up for work a little hu
ngover.
Jesse’s helpful tips apparently slipped their collective mind. When they hit the water main, it blew the trenching machine clear out of its trench. The geyser was forty feet high. People could easily have been killed. Eventually, replacing the pipe was going to require digging a ditch thirty feet long, fifteen feet wide, and seven or eight feet deep. Fortunately, the force of all that water had created a sinkhole almost that size. Unfortunately, that sinkhole was formerly known as Hunter’s driveway.
The event roused Hunter from his slumber.
Jesse got wind of the crisis and rushed to Owl Farm. He headed up to the ditch and turned the water off.
Normally Hunter could go days without leaving the farm. He could go days without looking out the window. The fact that it was now utterly impossible to get a vehicle out of the driveway made for a new, urgent, desire to go for a spin. He swelled to twice his normal size with righteous indignation. He set Deborah to alerting the media, his attorneys, and the police—in that order. She did this, and they all showed up.
Hunter’s house is on a narrow bend on Woody Creek Road. All these people, plus the work crew, converging at the same time created their own traffic jam. Possibly the first in Woody Creek history, if you don’t count cows. It was chaos: with Hunter yelling, reporters reporting, photographers photographing, cops taking statements, lawyers computing billable hours, and trenching crew skulking and sulking.
Since Jesse was the only one who had any kind of rapport with the crew, in Hunter’s mind, this was all his fault. What was he going to do about it? Hunter was frothing. He wanted blood. Heads must roll. Things were becoming unpleasant. There was no question there’d been a mistake, and no small one. Hunter had pointed this out, and continued to do so. The crew was freaked out; they were in deep shit and it was getting deeper. It was a good gig and they were in serious danger of losing their jobs, plus there was the matter of whatever happened next. What happened next could be a lot worse than mere unemployment. Hunter’s behavior was making that clear.
Eventually, Jesse couldn’t take it anymore. At the closest possible range, he reminded Hunter that Hunter Thompson was traditionally and famously a champion of the little guy, and that his insistence on tacking these fellas up on crosses wasn’t consistent with that policy and that maybe he could back off just a little bit. Hunter actually listened to reason. The repairs took the rest of that day and all the next. Hunter was nowhere to be seen.
The crew was understandably eager to put Owl Farm behind them. With the driveway repairs complete, they continued trenching along in front of the Owl Farm yard. They still had a way to go before Hunter was a thing of the past. Between the crew and Hunter was Hunter’s split-rail fence. Behind that was the long row of cordwood, which acted as another fence, and behind that, a row of beautiful cottonwoods. It seemed like sufficient insulation.
The work crew reached and passed Hunter’s property line on a typically pleasant Woody Creek summer afternoon. Surely there was a lot of relief going around. A nice little wind kicked up. Deborah was on the deck when the first cottonwood came down. When it hit the lawn, the uppermost branches were eight feet from the deck. Deborah was rooted to the spot; the trees weren’t. A second tree came down. Deborah’s mouth hung open, frozen with fear. A third toppled. The crew had trenched right through their root systems and the trees were just standing there waiting for a stiff breeze.
Deborah had been with Hunter long enough to pick up a few of his personality traits. Hence, she wasn’t given to understatement. Hunter’s slumber was once again disturbed.
Neither Jesse Steindler nor God Almighty could chill Hunter out this time. “There’s one other thing about little people: they shouldn’t be incompetent” was the phrase that echoed in Jesse’s ears for some time to come.
The phone company bought Hunter not three but six lovely new cottonwoods. Along with the trees, they sent a crew of non-English-speaking Latinos to plant them, the idea being to keep verbal intercourse between the workers and the homeowner to a minimum. Hunter watched them like a hawk. He didn’t sleep, probably didn’t eat. His interest was so up close and personal that the laborers, even without language skills or knowing the history of the situation, were getting edgy. The idea of the workers not speaking the language was a good one from the phone company’s point of view, but not great for Jesse. Hunter had things to say and he wanted them understood. Jesse spoke Spanish, so he was once again in the middle. Deborah was constantly on the phone to him to come over to translate for Hunter. Once the Latinos got a load of what was on Hunter’s mind, and saw the inventory of weapons that he was sporting when he came out on the deck to glare at them, they worked in a state of abject terror.
They finished the project in record time and did a fine job. The feeling in the neighborhood was that the Latinos’ next move would be to make a break across the border…straight back to Mexico.
When the temperature of the indoor pool at the Flying Dog Ranch wasn’t to Hunter’s liking, Hunter would call Jesse. Jesse had nothing to do with the pool.
When Hunter’s car wouldn’t start, he’d call Jesse. Jesse was good with machinery, but his job description at the ranch was “cowboy.” He suggested that Hunter call him when his horse wouldn’t start.
Hunter would take Jesse’s girls on high-speed convertible rides in the Shark. The girls were growing up hot. Jesse would ask where they were and be told that Hunter had taken them for a ride. He’d wring his hands and be unable to concentrate until they were returned. They’d come back full of McDonald’s, bearing souvenirs autographed by Doc, making statements like “Gee, I’ve never driven so fast in a car. I thought Julia was going to blow right out of the backseat!”
Hunter placed a high value on Jesse’s friendship. Of all the skills that Jesse possessed, the one that Hunter valued most was his talent and creativity with explosives. Anyone can speak Spanish or get a car started, but blowing the crap out of stuff—now that was something special.
The boys got an inner tube from the tire off a John Deere 966 loader. The tire on that loader is about five feet high. When you take the tube out and inflate it, without the tire to contain the thing, it can swell beyond all expectation. The guys were counting on this because they were going to fill the tube with acetylene, which they did. A risky and technically demanding process, it involved hoses that had to be flushed with water afterward and a total absence of combustibles. Once inflated, the tube was huge, a giant black doughnut eight feet across and four feet high, full of acetylene. Acetylene requires an open flame to ignite. They duct-taped a dynamite fuse to the tire, which would burn down and when it got to the tire, would melt the rubber and…
An enthusiastic crowd gathered at Owl Farm for the event; this was to be a first. No one knew what would happen. No one had even heard of this sort of thing being attempted before. Jesse lit the fuse before the assembled congregation of conflagration aficionados. He had used four feet of fuse to make sure that he had sufficient time to get a safe distance away. Nonetheless, it took all his willpower to turn his back and walk away. Every fiber of his being said run.
Jesse joined the crowd and watched the fuse. It burned slowly, and the audience, as one, inched farther back as the seconds passed. When the fuse disappeared under the tire, they waited. It seemed like long seconds were passing. They began craning, jockeying for position, slowly inching closer.
One of the gang was running late. He was four miles away when he saw a massive orange glow in the sky. Then the concussion hit him; he felt it even though he was in his car.
Back at Owl Farm everyone was flat on their backs. It was beautiful, a fierce orange-pink glow rising fifty feet into the air. No smoke, just the glow rising straight up, and incredible heat. The bottom half of the tube was melted into the lawn in a scorched circle.
Nobody got hurt. The only one who counted the broken windows at Owl Farm was the guy who fixed them.
Growing Up Across the Street from Hunter
THE FREEDOM TR
ACTOR
Zeno Beattie is the son of Bob Beattie, sports commentator and former U.S. Olympic ski team coach. The Beatties moved to Woody Creek in 1976, the year Claudine Longet, singer, actress, and ex-wife of crooner Andy Williams, shot Spider Sabich, former Olympic skier and well-liked local. The murder was national news, and Beattie had been very close to the victim. Woody Creek seemed peaceful compared to what had been going on in Aspen.
Zeno was raised across the street, a stone’s throw from Owl Farm. He grew up with a love of the outdoors, including hunting. Zeno and Hunter shared a common appreciation of firearms, though to different purpose (if it can be said that Hunter’s love of firearms had purpose). They were buddies from the get-go, and as Zeno got older he became increasingly helpful to Hunter around the farm, usually with guy stuff, tractor stuff.
At one point early on, what used to be Hunter’s two cabins and acreage became a farm, “Owl Farm.” If his spread was a farm, then Hunter was a farmer, a gentleman farmer of course. As this idea took hold and grew in his mind, he began to think about the accouterments of farming and began to lust for a tractor. Zeno and his dad had purchased a John Deere in 1983. The John Deere became the object of Hunter’s desire, and it was just across the street. Hunter could see it, he could taste it. The idea of Hunter’s needing a tractor wasn’t totally frivolous. Doc had a lot of yard to mow, and sometimes things, once blown up, needed to be buried. Sneaking a backhoe up to Owl Farm to bury evidence wasn’t always convenient or easy; having a tractor on hand could make stealth disposal a relative snap. There are entire motor vehicles buried on Owl Farm. As far as I know, none is occupied.
The Kitchen Readings Page 11