The Kitchen Readings

by Michael Cleverly

  Hunter worked. He had been producing a weekly column for ESPN for some time. He always had a book deal going, usually involving more than one expected volume. Then there were magazine pieces. It’s pretty hard to keep a lot of balls in the air if your hands are full of something else.

  People are still reading Hunter, as they have been for decades. I don’t know if his books have ever gone out of print. One reason people read him is because he was very funny. He was very funny because he was very smart and because he was very honest. Hunter was a sixty-eight-year-old man who spoke to young people. He was a boozer and druggie who spoke to people who never embraced booze or drugs themselves. And he was a liberal who spoke to people whose political leanings were far away from his own. We all recognized that there was something in Hunter that we could only hope to see in ourselves: an utter lack of hypocrisy. When Hunter was being brutally honest with those around him it could sometimes be unpleasant, but he was just as honest about himself. He didn’t sugarcoat it. In that sense he didn’t play favorites.

  I announced that I was leaving. “What do you mean you’re leaving?” “It’s late, Doc. I’ve had enough; the girls are back. They can minister.” He wasn’t happy. The idea of being outnumbered by two effervescent females clearly didn’t appeal. Anita and Sue came back into the kitchen, we made some small talk, and they wandered into the living room. “Okay, Doc. I’m outta here.” I hollered goodnight to the gals. Hunter, giving me the stink-eye. “Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou.” I walked through the Red Room smiling and waving goodnight. “Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou…”

  The next day I saw Sue. “How much longer did you stay?” I asked. “Only about ten minutes. We read for a bit then he called me a fucking bitch and told me to get the hell out.” We laughed. No offense meant, no offense taken. The perfect end to a delightful night at Owl Farm.

  By the following evening our friend was gone.

  Epilogue

  A February Sunday evening. Me, the cats, and the woodstove, not much happening, perfect. There’s a knock on the door. My friend and neighbor Joe Fredricks is standing there, and I let him in.

  Joe plows my driveway. I give him a piece of art, and he plows all winter. He’d gladly do it for nothing, but I’m flattered that he likes my stuff, so I don’t mind coughing up. He plows Hunter’s, too, and in the summer takes care of any heavy equipment at Owl Farm. Joe is also a Hunter buddy and attends all the major events.

  This Sunday night drop-in is unusual. Joe is a volunteer fireman and has a scanner in his truck. A gunshot has been reported at an address on Woody Creek Road. We don’t recognize the street number and try to figure out whose place it might be. That a gunshot in this neighborhood should be reported at all is a bit strange; it’s Woody Creek, after all. We figure out nothing, and Joe decides to cruise down toward Hunter’s and report back. I wait with limited interest.

  Minutes later the phone rings. It’s the sheriff. He’s at Owl Farm. He gives me the news. Joe returns, and I tell him that I’ve heard. We have a couple of shots of tequila. The dispatcher on the scanner had the address wrong.

  I didn’t go out for the next few days. I didn’t want to be underfoot at Owl Farm. But when I finally left the house, that’s where I went. Hunter’s family and his closest friends did the same, hunkered down. There were people less close to Hunter who hung at the Tavern holding court and giving interviews.

  Some of us gave phone interviews—the press was going to talk to someone; better, we thought, people who really cared for Hunter than some rummy at the bar. All the time between Hunter’s death and when I finally went over to Owl Farm I very much wanted to be there, to see Anita, Juan, and Jennifer. As soon as I got there, all I wanted to do was leave. I’m not exactly sure why; maybe because being in the house made it official. I’d never be in the kitchen with Hunter and our friends again.

  So my visit that evening was brief. The next day I finally had to go out for provisions. The Aspen Daily News was sitting on the counter at the liquor store with a full-page picture of Doc. Seeing it did something to my chest I’d never felt before. When I got home there were sixty new messages on my machine.

  During the next few days, patterns began to emerge. I’d stop by Hunter’s intermittently; friends would drop off food there, the frenzy at the Tavern settled down, and the phone stuff tapered off. There was security all over Owl Farm. Guys taking themselves really seriously, which was their job, I guess. I wondered what Hunter would have thought.

  From the evening of his death, those closest to Hunter wanted to get together for something small and informal. My favorite idea was to gather at Bob Rafelson’s house and order a bunch of pizza. That had legs for a couple of days, but as time passed things inevitably got bigger, until at one point there was the thought of having a “come one, come all” at an Aspen nightclub. Bob Braudis felt that was a spectacularly bad idea and a recipe for chaos on a biblical scale. Bob Rafelson’s voice got low and serious. “I’ve seen these things,” he said. “There’ll be helicopters; there’ll be no way to control it.” The man charged with public safety emerged. Sheriff Braudis suggested that people clear their heads and try again.

  A couple of days later I was alone in the kitchen with Juan and he gave me a handwritten list. He said there was going to be a very private memorial at the Hotel Jerome a couple of weeks hence. He explained that the guest list didn’t include everyone Hunter had ever known or worked with, just the friends he saw and called regularly, and with that in mind, he wanted my opinion. The list was several pages long. Hunter liked to call a lot of people. I added a few names, people I knew had either canceled trips or were flying in, to be here for whatever sort of memorial did happen. I also mentioned that I thought I owed it to Hunter to personally bring as many beautiful women as I could round up. Juan concurred.

  The gals I usually hang out with were all on Juan’s list anyway, so I was free to bring any date(s) I wanted. Despite my glib comment to Juan about herds of beautiful women, I really wasn’t in the mood for that kind of hunt. I ended up taking Kallen, one of the great beauties from the golden age of the Jerome, an old friend whom I now saw rarely, a good example of the people who had been close to Hunter in the seventies and eighties but who had fallen away in recent years. She wasn’t on the list. Anita had never met Kallen but knew of her from a famous photograph of Hunter, Kallen, and other luminaries taken at Doc’s end of the bar at the Jerome back when that was the place to be. Anita was glad that she was going to get to meet Kallen at last.

  I stopped by Kallen’s place of work to discuss some details. We figured stuff out, and then she went on to tell me that she had channeled Hunter the evening before. “I beg your pardon? Channeled?” She told me how she and a friend had hooked up with Doc in the hereafter and proceeded to relate the conversation and revealed new and interesting facts. Naturally, I was pretty excited that my date had spoken to my dead friend. This was an unforeseen development. I gave Kallen a peck goodbye, and for the next few days imagined a number of scenarios in which Kallen broke the “channeling” news to Anita during the memorial, with tears, anguish, and general hysteria ensuing. I was not looking forward to witnessing any of those scenes being played out.

  The event was nearing, and I was sitting with Anita trying to figure out how to tell her about this “chatting with the deceased” situation. I wasn’t having much luck. Finally I just started in. “Listen Anita, I have to tell you something.” I proceeded, with much trepidation, to lay out the channeling thing as I understood it. When I finished, I looked at Anita and this huge smile was spread across her face; she was beaming. “Me, too. I channeled Hunter just last night!” she gushed. I realized I had nothing to worry about. Clearly she and Kallen would get along just fine.

  The memorial at the Jerome looked as much like a Hollywood red carpet event as a gathering for a man of letters; the celebrity count was over the top. In addition there was plenty of local security plus Secret Service guys with wires in their ears, all there to preve
nt anything unpleasant from happening to the big-name politicians. It was a mixed crowd.

  There was an open bar, of course, and a beautiful buffet in the middle of the ballroom. I’d never seen so many intelligent, successful, talented people so wasted. These truly were Hunter’s friends. As an Oscar-winning actor was passing through the buffet, he noticed a pair of feet sticking out from under the tablecloth. He grabbed the ankles and dragged out a local reporter, obviously a Thompson buddy. The reporter didn’t come to until the next morning. He was disconsolate for days at having missed so much of an excellent party. Laila Nabulsi, a Hollywood power player, producer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and one of the best women in the world, introduced me to a handsome actor. We found some chairs and sat down and talked and drank. Purely by coincidence, every woman in the building who had previously met me for at least five seconds came over to say hello and see how I was doing. It was lucky timing; they also got to meet the actor. Yeah, he had an Oscar, too.

  There were speeches, lots of speeches. Historian and author Doug Brinkley was the de facto MC and kept things moving along. There’d be a break after every two or three speeches so people could hit the buffet, bar, head, whatever. There were touching speeches; there were funny speeches; and that evening, some of the most articulate people I knew were so fucked up they could barely work their lips. The speeches were a mixed bag.

  The event was scheduled to end at ten or eleven, and there were two or three after parties scheduled. One person had rented out an entire restaurant, one of the “inner circle” was having people down to his house, and there was something else at a local night spot. Two of them never happened. The Jerome was so good no one left. It was still going when I lurched off at 2:00 A.M. People did eventually head down to the friend’s house and party till dawn, but without me. I dropped Kallen off and considered myself extremely lucky to make it home. I was almost in the sack when the phone rang. It was a beautiful woman I had met during the course of the evening, asking me where the party was. Every man on planet Earth knows there’s only one answer to that question. But Genius gave her directions to the party.

  When Johnny Depp arrived in Aspen for the Jerome memorial he was carrying something large. When Sheriff Braudis saw it he commented, “That must be interesting to travel with.” Depp replied, “Hunter was interesting to travel with.”

  Almost from the beginning there had been scuttlebutt about a blastoff. There was talk of using one of the cannons from the ship in Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Aspen Daily News actually sponsored a contest for people who owned cannons. They were to send in a videotape of their cannon and explain why theirs should be the one to send Hunter off. There was also a rumor that something was already being fabricated in L.A. All this was engendered by a scene in a BBC documentary in which Hunter talked about, and even described, a cannon that would shoot his ashes into space. The scene was included in the boxed set of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and was also in Wayne Ewing’s documentary When I Die. In the end, there was no need for the contest. Depp had been carrying an architectural model; behind it was a curved diorama almost four feet high and about as wide. The model was of a tall stainless-steel column, the top of which turned into a dagger and a giant gonzo fist. It sat on a contoured topography of rolling fields with little scale-model people; in the background on the diorama were mountains and sky. The people were tiny, to scale; the actual thing would have been enormous. The scale-model people were gazing up in awe at the fist, and some were taking pictures. There was an actual presentation that went along with the model. It plugged in and you turned it on. There was a large piece of silk that shrouded the entire column. The music started and as someone slowly pulled the silk off the fist, the music changed and suddenly the peyote button lit up and began to change colors. The music changed, the colors changed and whirled; it was all very theatrical, very impressive. Word on the street, Woody Creek Road, was that Johnny Depp had pledged four million dollars to the project. None of us had ever been to a four-million-dollar party.

  In fact, the monument was to be 153 feet high, a little taller than the Statue of Liberty. One person noted that there probably weren’t any buildings that tall between Denver and Salt Lake City. When the “fist” went from rumor to reality, there were lots of questions. Was this thing to be permanent? If so, did rural Woody Creek want to live with such a thing? If so, how did Pitkin County, the most regulated county on the planet, feel about it? Was it so tall as to pose a danger to aircraft? There were meetings, lots of meetings. What about the blastoff itself? One of the most prestigious fireworks companies in the country was contracted, people who do things at the Washington Monument. Colorado had been in a drought for years. Wildfires were springing up all over the Southwest every summer, and every summer it was touch and go whether the sheriff could allow the Fourth of July fireworks display on Aspen Mountain. What about burning down Woody Creek?

  It was spring when these questions arose and Johnny Depp’s front man arrived in town. The event planner, a relentlessly officious twit, showed up at his first meeting with county officials wearing an Armani suit. This didn’t impress the guys in jeans and cowboy boots. You don’t get to be an upper-level Hollywood suck-up by being totally unconscious, so he got with the dress code pretty quick. His Armani attitude remained, though. News of the blastoff spread and was picked up by the media. To say that the guest list was exclusive, a hard ticket, was something of an understatement. What of Hunter’s legions of fans? The more ardent of them had had no respect for Hunter’s privacy when he was alive and dangerous; there was no reason to expect any from them now. Anxiety was abroad in the land.

  The event planner thought a Jumbotron, the kind of huge screen you see in football stadiums, could be set on the mesa across Woody Creek from Owl Farm. They’d just build a road where there had been none, erect a huge screen, truck in lots of porta-potties…you get the idea. Important people on one side of Woody Creek at the event, the unwashed masses on the other side. He approached a member of the Craig family, who owned that property. His pitch was pretty poor. He tried to wow them with dollar signs and celebrity name-dropping. Gee! They’d even get a whole free road out of it. The Craigs had a good deal of affection for Hunter, and probably would done what they could purely out of that affection, but they couldn’t have cared less about Hollywood celebrities and Hollywood money. They had no need for a free road to nowhere.

  The Jumbotron idea then migrated to Buttermilk Mountain. This was a little more realistic. The base of Buttermilk had been used for Jazz Aspen concerts and had seen tents, screens, and porta-potties before; there was precedent. Unfortunately, once you start talking about something like that, the bureaucrats really get into things with both feet. It takes about a year of bureaucratic wrangling to erect a birdhouse in Pitkin County. The hope that something of this nature could be pulled together in time was basically pie-in-the-sky. The Jumbotron idea was scrapped, and there was also no live feed to a local nightclub, as had been proposed toward the end of things. Ultimately, all that was done for any Hunter hunters who might have made the pilgrimage was a few porta-potties across from the Tavern. The Sheriff’s Department, city and county officials, and the local papers took every opportunity to broadcast the fact that it was a private event and that no one was welcome.

  The other issues remained. It became clear that all but Hunter’s most loving neighbors might have a problem with a permanent tourist attraction. Especially considering the type of tourists it was likely to draw. It seemed that permanence wasn’t feasible. As soon as the monument became a temporary structure, a lot of things got easier. Zoning and building permits were no longer a big issue. If aircraft couldn’t avoid the thing for a bleeping week, screw them. As far as a special event permit went, people in Aspen had parties with hundreds of guests all the time. The fireworks and possible torching of Woody Creek were still on people’s minds. The fireworks company sent a representative to hunker down with the Aspen Fire Department. Together they
came up with a plan that was pretty much workable even if it never rained again. The plan involved mowing the meadow around the monument, soaking it, tankers full of water on hand, pyrotechnics that would be extinguished long before they came close to the ground, and more. Fortunately, there was rain the week before the event, and any lingering concerns there might have been about conflagration were laid to rest.

  There were signs of life in the field behind Owl Farm toward the end of July. First, just a stake with an orange ribbon tied around it. Then workers began to repair the old rail fence and installed a steel ranch gate. Gravel was trucked in, and a road was built back up into the field. A large area was leveled off and covered with more gravel. Minor repairs were made to the entrance of Owl Farm, and security stations were created at that entrance and the entrance to the field. A new group of L.A. guys showed up. These were the people who were responsible for seeing that the thing got built. They were the polar opposite of the event planner and his crew of self-important weenies. Regular guys, they would work out in the “field of gonzo” all day and then head into Aspen at night to show folks how they partied in L.A. I have no idea how they made it through the summer.

  A gigantic crane arrived, then generators and other heavy equipment. I encountered the first truck when I was coming out of the Woody Creek post office. A flat-bed semi, the biggest I’d ever seen, was stopped in front, the driver scratching his head, lost. With several huge cylinders as a load, it could only be one thing. You could see where the wrapping had pulled away from one of them that they were stainless steel. Another neighbor of Hunter’s offered to lead the driver to the site.