I wandered up behind Hunter. I smiled at a counter guy. “Do you think you could just give us the paperwork.” The counter guy grinned back. I could see him thinking, English, one of them speaks English. He was clearly relieved. He slid the papers to Hunter, who was happy that these people finally understood him. The tension that briefly raced through the crowd dissipated. Hunter breezed through the forms and returned them with a credit card. It was almost over. The counter guy reached for some keys and gave us a concerned look. “Which one of you is driving?”
I lean over the counter. “Which one of us do you want to drive?”
He was a little sheepish. “You?”
“That’s fine.” I snatched the keys. Hunter gave me a knowing look. Anything to keep these fools happy. We left the building. Hunter lunged for the keys. “Hey Doc, let me take it. You’ll have it all week.”
Hunter, the picture of generosity, acquiesced. “Sure you go ahead.”
What I was thinking was, “Jesus Christ Almighty, if I get stopped driving Hunter’s car, with all the stuff in there, I won’t see the light of day or breathe free air for twenty years.” I headed for a bright red Jeep Cherokee in the rental lot.
We caravanned back to Woody Creek, remarkably without incident. Hunter, clearly first in his driver’s ed. class, now doing postgraduate work. Advanced degrees upcoming. We passed the Woody Creek Tavern, ten miles per hour, bright red Jeep, dark green Jeep, both of us waving as if from floats in a parade. We pulled into Owl Farm. “It’s great Doc, you’ll love it,” I exclaimed, gesturing at the shiny new Jeep. “Aren’t you coming in?” Hunter asked. “No, no, it’s been a long day, a little tired, gotta feed the cats,” I responded. “I’ll see you down the road…. I’ll drive.”
The Sheriff Reflects on the Neighbor
The term neighbor ran deep in Hunter’s veins. A good neighbor, in Woody Creek, posed no threat, might help out around the farm, and would, in some situations, be invited to the kitchen. Many kitchen regulars were Creekers, but not all Creekers were welcome in the kitchen. The “hood” was fairly stable, not in the psychological sense by any means, but in terms of residency. The low-density zoning and the premium cost of living, even in a mobile home near the Tavern, resulted in low turnover.
The valley still had the fading memory of its agricultural roots, and a few ranches and farms were still working. Some of them were of the “gentleman” genre, but the creeping castleization of trophy homes, a malignancy abounding in and around Aspen, was also invading Woody Creek.
Hunter had condemned the flow of “excrement” from the “Merchant Fortress” of Aspen in the “Woody Creek Manifesto,” a one-pager that made its debut at the home of Ed Bastian (HST’s next-door neighbor) during a summer picnic. The paper was read aloud to a group of twenty by Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame, a neighbor and a regular at Owl Farm. Don often read from Hunter’s work in the kitchen and was damn good. On this day he poured his heart into the Manifesto, which condemned the sprawl from Aspen that was entering Woody Creek. He stumbled on trigonometric, though, having had neither to memorize nor to deliver many polysyllabic words in his acting career.
Ed Bastian with Bob and Hunter on Ed’s porch, where more than one manifesto first saw the light of day.
The poster child of the imminent sea change in the neighborhood was Floyd Watkins. This corpulent transplant from Miami bought a beautifully rustic spread spanning about a mile of Woody Creek and transformed it into what looked like a gated Kentucky bluegrass horse farm, without the horses. White fences replaced the split rails, the ancient ranch house was supplanted by a stone chateau; Woody Creek itself was contoured by bulldozers into ten or twelve linked cascades and two manmade ponds, which were stocked with non-native trophy trout.
Hunter tried to accept Watkins and the specter surrounding him, but Floyd just didn’t fit in. We speculated occasionally about whether he had made his fortune breaking legs for shylocks in Florida. This would not normally be a fatal flaw for Hunter. In fact, under different circumstances, Floyd’s history might have added to his cachet with HST. But his total disregard for the environment laid a stigma on him that was only to spread and fester in his relationship with Hunter. Floyd wanted acceptance but just didn’t know how to make it happen. Change after change to his land led him to acquire bête noir status with the Doc. And the Doc loved having a target in his crosshairs.
My office got the call. Floyd’s trout had been found floating belly up in his two ponds one morning, and he insisted that they had been poisoned by Hunter, following a string of ugly verbal encounters and threats.
I loathed investigations of Hunter. His activities were rarely criminal, and when they were, they were usually borderline misdemeanor in quality. But being Hunter’s friend and being Hunter’s sheriff was a balancing high-wire act. If Floyd was to be believed, these trout were worth up to a thousand dollars per copy, and the dead school could be worth a major felony, if indeed a crime were involved. Floyd started his rant with an allegation that the crime would not get a fair investigation because of his persona-non-grata status and my friendship with Hunter.
There might have been a few species that Hunter would poison—skunks under his house or foxes that were threats to his domestic peafowl—but he preferred to shoot four-legged pests, so the poisoning of trout was way outside his M.O., even for revenge. He respected most life.
As my staff started the trout poisoning investigation, they learned that the Colorado Division of Wildlife laboratory was not equipped to do a “needle in the haystack” search for any toxin that would have caused this massive death toll of the “golden” or other precious trout. We identified a private lab that might assist us and sent several specimens of fish tissue and pond water to their scientists. Floyd told me that he was going to amp up his homeland security by bunking with his son, Lance, in the back of a Chevy Suburban just inside the driveway leading to his property. Of course they would be heavily armed. They would be the night watch.
I had already linked certain occurrences of alleged aberrant behavior on Hunter’s part with the arrival of new female candidates for the “live-in/sleep-in” editorial assistant job slot. Like a lad in junior high, Hunter would try to impress these beauties with childish pranks that lived up to many of the crazy acts he had written about, whether true or not. This was the gonzo way.
The day of the report on the “trouticide,” my wife, Ivy, and I were dining at the Woody Creek Tavern. Hunter walked in with a young blonde, and the two joined our table for drinks and chatter. They had arrived in Hunter’s red convertible, top down, and Hunter was frisky and animated. When I informed him of Watkins’s enhanced security measures, Hunter listened with interest. He declared his innocence vis-à-vis the poisoning, but being accused piqued his revenge reflex and I could see the wheels grinding. “I think this situation calls for some full automatic,” he said to the three of us, while sipping on a tall Chivas and water. I shrugged, with a smile. Ivy and I went home, and Hunter and the assistant candidate lingered on.
I was paged before sunrise—never a good thing. This one sounded bad. Floyd had called 911 at “zero dark 30”—cop-speak for the wee hours before dawn—to report machine gun fire at the end of the driveway where he and his son were sleeping in the big SUV. Floyd reported that he had opened the electric gate to his drive with the remote control and seen taillights receding downhill from his location. A chase commenced. Floyd was gaining on the lights when he saw the vehicle ahead turn to the right in a four-wheel drift into the driveway of George Stranahan, another prominent Woody Creeker. Floyd followed the unidentified vehicle into the drive, which dead-ended at George’s house. Later, George stated that at 4:00 A.M. he was awakened by a commotion outside. He said that he looked out the window and saw Hunter and a blonde in a red convertible being screamed at by Floyd and his son. He said that both sides were armed in some fashion. George’s wife, Patti, joined him at the window, assessed the situation, and went outside. She intervened, and things co
oled down. Both teams left the field. Hunter went to Owl Farm, and Floyd went to his telephone.
I had always advised my staff to treat any suspects, including my close friends, with the objectivity, fairness, and suspicion that our policies dictated. I checked in with the night shift and found out that the deputy who had responded to the Watkins residence had taken statements from Floyd and his son. He then walked the road near its intersection with Floyd’s driveway and found a fairly large pile of “brass,” expended cartridges, of the nine-millimeter variety. He gathered the evidence and tagged it. The case was open and active.
Hunter called much later in the day and asked if anything was going on, just an innocent, general inquiry. “Of course there’s something going on, Doc!” I gave him an abbreviated version of the Miranda warning and advised him to lawyer up, advice that I would give to anyone in the suspect category.
Meanwhile, reports from the forensic fish lab came back. The poor finned bastards had died of a copper OD; the tissue samples revealed a copper content a bazillion times the lethal level. Nobody at Watkins’s Beaver Run Ranch was talking. “We don’t know anything about copper, and these trout were healthy for months” was their line. But an informant who insisted on remaining anonymous (and eligible for a piece of the reward put up by Floyd) said that he’d seen Floyd’s kid, Lance, and Roberto, the ranch manager, out in a rowboat on one of the ponds the day before the massacre pouring liquid out of a five-gallon can into the pond. Follow-up investigation yielded the discovery of empty cans of Cupertine, an algaecide with an active ingredient called copper. Case closed. Case number one, anyway.
Floyd wasn’t nearly as talkative anymore. But Hunter, temporarily out of the spotlight, reveled in Floyd’s chagrin. In addition to falsely accusing him of killing the trout, Floyd had proven that his failure to meet all the criteria for simple decency should be combined with his misstatements and he should be driven from Woody Creek Valley entirely.
My detectives called the Denver office of the United States BATF—Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Our questions centered upon whether HST had filed any paperwork indicative of possession of fully automatic weaponry. “Two,” the agent said. Innocently, he had released confidential IRS info, and he called back shortly to retract his statement. The investigators came to me for some direction. I called ATF and asked that an agent come to Aspen in person.
Meanwhile, Hunter’s lawyer was trying to control his client. “Floyd’s credibility should be scrutinized and he should be neutered and impeached as a witness,” Hunter complained. “He knew that his child moron killed those fish and he caused precious public funds to be wasted in investigative costs. I say we bill that pig-faced cocksucker!” In a small town with two daily newspapers and Thompson-worshipping journalists, Hunter was grooving on this Kabuki theater.
Two young ATF agents arrived from Denver the next day. The facts, which they had provided the day before, illegally, were central to any affidavit in the quest for a warrant to search Owl Farm for a machine gun. I couldn’t believe it when they said that they would perjure themselves before copping to the mistake. They went so far as to suggest that, in the right hands, semiautomatic pistol fire could be as fast as a submachine gun. I was still loathing the case, but learning more about my friend Hunter’s chronic paranoia.
The deputy DA in Aspen, Mac Myers, was our legal advisor. The firing of any weapons near or at an occupied residence constituted felony menacing and/or endangerment. The circumstantial evidence was borderline, but Mac was already in a dialogue with HST’s lawyer. Hunter was publicly posing the possibility that he had been attacked by a “giant killer porcupine, a beast without a back,” while driving in his open car. The press ate it up. They were apoplectic with joy: GONZO JOURNALIST ATTACKED BY GIANT PORCUPINE, screamed the headlines.
Hunter asked me for a man-to-man, men of the world, off-the-record meeting. I consented. At the Tavern, he bitched about Floyd, the ATF, me, the DA and his lawyer. It was his nature to deny culpability in any and all events when negative eventualities knocked on his door. He deflected all blame and was a firm believer in conspiracy theories. He knew that I knew that he owned a machine gun. He knew that, if asked under oath, I would attest to the existence of that type of weapon at the farm. He knew that he had miscalculated badly; he knew it the very instant that the Suburban came roaring out of Beaver Run Ranch. He knew that he was pissed off and he knew that the elected DA, Milt Blakey, hated his guts.
“Couldn’t you do better than a killer porcupine?” I asked. The man was a creative genius. A killer porcupine? He deflected the question. “Bob, why did you grin like a Cheshire cat that night when I said Floyd needed a dose of full auto?”—suggesting that, by grinning, I was an accomplice. I didn’t think I had.
In the end, Thompson’s lawyer and the deputy DA crafted the deal. If HST delivered and surrendered a machine gun to the district attorney’s office, no charges would be pursued.
The following day Hunter walked into Mac’s office with a heavy garbage bag. In the bag was a Schmeuser nine-millimeter World War II–vintage machine gun hacksawed in half and smeared with naval gel, a rust remover. “A perfectly good weapon had to die to resolve this bullshit case. You pigs have prevailed, this time.”
Floyd accused all of us of a cover-up, but made no further comments about gunfire or the trout kill.
I told Hunter that any further investigations of his misdeeds would be referred to outside agencies. He nodded in acceptance of my decision. I was disturbed but felt clean. The next case lay waiting. Grinned like a Cheshire cat? I don’t think so.
The legend of a rampaging killer porcupine endures in Woody Creek. Sometimes on moonless nights, one can almost feel its presence.
Cleverly Explains How Hunter “Goes Off” Occasionally
Hunter’s short fuse was a thing of legend. No one liked it, but those of us who were around him all the time took it for granted and did our best to overlook it. Most of us could just leave if it got to be too much, and people who lived at the farm had their hiding places. The thing was, it never lasted long. It was kind of amazing to see someone go from normal to a rage and then back to normal again in such a short span of time. That’s why it wasn’t so bad; you knew he’d be back.
Unfortunately, people who weren’t in the know could become the object of his wrath. They took it a little harder. (If you want a good example of this, watch Wayne Ewing’s Breakfast with Hunter and enjoy, or watch in horror, as the Doctor takes off on a movie director who was auditioning to work on the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)
Hunter was basically a decent, good-hearted human being. He didn’t have to worry about his buddies, but once in a while, after he’d taken off on a stranger, he’d feel terrible afterward, especially when the individual didn’t deserve it, which was usually the case. That was what happened in the case of the stuttering professor.
Hunter’s two “letters” books, The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America, were the last books that he did any substantial publicity for. When The Proud Highway was published in 1997 a publication party was held in New York, complete with Doc’s celebrity friends, old and new, and the usual phalanx of nubiles and VIPs. There were also TV appearances, the whole deal.
One sunny afternoon that summer, Hunter and I were sitting in his kitchen. He was back in Woody Creek on a break from these publicity efforts. The peacocks were wandering around the grounds, squawking at the occasional passing car or furtive chipmunk. There was a random assortment of firearms lying around the kitchen, just in case anyone had a sudden impulse to run outside and blast the crap out of something. The women weren’t anywhere to be seen, perhaps in town on errands.
Owl Farm and Woody Creek were beautiful that time of year. All greens and yellows, foliage and sunshine. On any given day at that hour the blinds in Hunter’s kitchen could be closed or open, depending on whether it was the end of one day or the beginning of the next. The blinds were open that day, letting the sun
stream in on us. The television was on, as it was 24-7. This particular afternoon, the sound was off, but the TV itself had to be on in case current events conspired to interfere with our meditations. One has to stay current at all costs.
We were both in fine humor, discussing matters of importance, when the phone rang. Hunter’s phone was always on “speaker” so that all present could eavesdrop. The caller was a teacher from a major university. This guy either taught a course on Hunter, or taught a course of which Hunter was a major part; I don’t remember which. Apparently the prof had booked a speaking engagement for Doc at a large venue in his university town and he wanted to discuss some details. Clearly he held Hunter in some sort of awe. Just as clearly, they’d never met. Not that Hunter didn’t merit the awe; it’s just that those who knew Doc knew that an attitude of awe rarely paid off.
After a bit of discussion, Hunter allowed that he had a few questions for the professor. Now, this guy had booked Hunter into exactly one gig, while Hunter had been booked into countless engagements in his career, which gave him a huge edge. Hunter’s mind worked faster than most people’s, including your average academic. He could be an impatient man. He never suffered fools gladly—at times he didn’t suffer anyone gladly. This was evolving into one of those times. Hunter was peppering the prof with questions, demanding details that weren’t immediately available. As the grilling continued, it was clear that this guy was becoming increasingly upset with himself for disappointing the great man. Hunter in turn was becoming more agitated. I guess it was inevitable: Hunter went off.
A cloud passed over the sun in Woody Creek, the peacocks fell silent, and a chilling breeze came through the window. Now, I knew this pyrotechnic display was a state of mind that would pass—and a fine, affable gentleman would soon enough be restored to us. But for those who didn’t know Hunter, there was no reason to think that his rage—so towering and so deep—would not last forever. In this particular case, Hunter’s rant was phrased in the form of a question, so he stopped and waited for a reply. We waited, and we waited. There was only silence from the despairing professor. Finally, Hunter loosed another barrage of invective at peak volume, hoping, you know, to jump-start the conversation. More pregnant moments passed, and then out of the speaker came what sounded like a random assortment of vowels and consonants, maybe some syllables.
The Kitchen Readings Page 14