Hunter pointing out to me the skill of his shooting, somewhere in a California forest, 1964. He is holding his .44 Magnum, probably his favorite gun.
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2016 by Juan Thompson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hanging Loose press for permission to reprint “Forgiving Our Fathers” from Ghost Radio by Dick Lourie. Copyright © 1998 by Dick Lourie. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press.
All photographs are courtesy of the author, with the exception of images appearing on this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page that are courtesy of the Hunter S. Thompson Archive.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thompson, Juan F.
Stories I tell myself : growing up with Hunter S. Thompson / Juan F. Thompson. — First United States edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-26535-7 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-101-87586-5 (eBook)
1. Thompson, Hunter S. 2. Thompson, Hunter S.—Family. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Thompson, Juan F. I. Title.
PS3570.H 62Z 89 2015
813’. 54—dc23
[B]
2015006934
eBook ISBN 9781101875865
Cover photograph courtesy of the Hunter S. Thompson Archive
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
v4.1
a
With deepest gratitude to my wife, Jennifer Winkel Thompson, and to Deb Fuller, who together showed me my father’s hidden language of love. It has made all the difference.
To my son, Will, whom I have loved with all my heart from the moment he was born, and will always love without condition or limit.
FORGIVING OUR FATHERS
Dick Lourie
for M.K.
maybe in a dream: he’s in your power
you twist his arm but you’re not sure it was
he that stole your money you feel calmer
and you decide to let him go free
or he’s the one (as in a dream of mine)
I must pull from the water but I never
knew it or wouldn’t have done it until
I saw the street-theater play so close up
I was moved to actions I’d never before taken
maybe for leaving us too often or
forever when we were little maybe
for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous because there seemed
never to be any rage there at all
for marrying or not marrying our mothers
for divorcing or not divorcing our mothers
and shall we forgive them for their excesses
of warmth or coldness shall we forgive them
for pushing or leaning for shutting doors
for speaking only through layers of cloth
or never speaking or never being silent
in our age or in theirs or in their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it—
if we forgive our fathers what is left
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PREFACE
ONE My Father as a Young Man
“Nothing but a smart hillbilly”—The Air Force or jail—The writing life: New York, San Francisco, Big Sur, Aspen—Partying with Ken Kesey and the Hells Angels motorcycle gang—Elk liver in an unheated shack
TWO Memories Begin: ages 2 to 10
Owl Farm—The Success of Hell’s Angels—Early working habits—Guns, motorcycles, friends in the kitchen—The Jerome Bar—Washington, D.C., the Free School
THREE Awakening: ages 10 to 13
A young horseman and his lamb—Building fires, hauling firewood—Trouble with guns—I was a teenage hit man—The Beating—My fear, bitterness, and shame
FOUR The Breakup
“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”—Broken glass in the morning—Victim, witness, judge—In the Bahamas with Buffett—California, the Promised Land—Police in the night—Leaving for the last time
FIVE The In-Between Time: ages 13 to 18
The ugly divorce—Drugs and vandalism—Andover, Concord, the call of the East—Movie night with Dad—Cleaning the guns—Hawaii
SIX Independence: ages 18 to 24
Tufts—The cub reporter—Priorities—Rolling Stone—Al-Anon in earnest—The letters—A year abroad—The correspondent’s coat—Graduation with honors
SEVEN Getting Straight: ages 24 to 30
The ashram—Jennifer—The burning of the ham—The Bomb—The wedding—“I never liked you anyway.”
EIGHT Reconciliation: ages 30 to 41
The hidden language—Better Than Sex—The letters books—Still cleaning the guns—Building the fire—“Ace” and the birth of a grandson—Celebrated in Louisville—The titanium spine
NINE The Last Day
TEN The Funeral
ELEVEN What Changes, What Remains the Same
Lawyers, guns, and money—Symposium—Documentaries—The medallion
HONOR ROLL
PREFACE
THIS IS A MEMOIR, not a biography, a highly subjective and unreliable memoir of how my father and I got to know each other over forty-one years until his suicide in 2005. It is filled with exaggerations, misstatements, faulty recollections, obfuscations, omissions, and elisions. It also contains a lot of truth about my father and me, more truth than falsehoods, I think.
If I am deceiving you, though, I am deceiving myself first of all. It’s just that all I have is memory, and memory is a treacherous thing, treacherous, as in unfaithful and perfidious. Double-crossing and underhanded. Memory is not objective. It is not an impartial recorder, but instead a selective, changeable, and unreliable record being constantly revised and edited to suit our needs and desires. Yet our lives and our identities are largely built upon our memories, and we trust them implicitly so we can draw our conclusions about our lives and the people in them. So we do the best we can, knowing we are fooling ourselves a good part of our lives. We go forward in spite of it. I go forward in spite of it. These are the stories I tell myself.
Hunter S. Thompson was a complex man, far too complex for me to completely know or understand. He was famous, almost worshipped in some circles, unknown in others, brilliant, a grand master of the written word and one of the great writers of the twentieth century. He was an alcoholic and drug fiend, a wild, angry, passionate, sometimes dangerous, charismatic, unpredictable, irresponsible, idealistic, sensitive man with a powerful and deeply rooted sense of justice. Most important to me, though, he was my father and I was his son. And no son can escape the claim of that relationship. Good or bad, weak or strong, alive or dead, close or distant, our fathers are with us. This is the story of how my father and I went very far away from each other, and over twenty-five years managed to find our way back before it was too late.
ONE
MY FATHER AS A YOUNG MAN
“Nothing but a smart hillbilly”—The Air Force or jail—The writing life: New York, San Francisco, Big Sur, Aspen—Partying with Ken Kesey and the Hells Angels motorcycle gang—Elk liver in an unheated shack
A STORY NEEDS a starting
place. In this story, the starting place is my father’s early life, because he, like everyone, was to some degree a product of his upbringing. The very brief biographical sketch that follows is intended to familiarize those readers who haven’t heard of him before and to lay out some essentials of his early life before and following my birth in 1964.
Hunter was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His family had been in Kentucky for generations, and there are names like Semeranis Lawless and America Hook in our Thompson family tree. He sometimes called himself “nothing but a smart hillbilly.” He was born in 1937 and had two brothers, Davison and Jim, both younger. His father was an insurance salesman, and his mother was a stay-at-home mom until his father died suddenly when he was a teenager and she had to go to work. He attended public school, read constantly, spent time with the children of Louisville’s Old Money families, and scraped through high school not due to lack of intelligence but because of boredom and hostility to authority. He also got into a fair amount of trouble, so that at age seventeen he spent thirty days in the county jail for a bogus petty robbery charge. It would have been sixty days except the judge gave him the option of joining the Air Force in return for the reduced sentence.
He enlisted and was initially trained to be a radio technician. He despised everything about the military and probably would have spent four years in solitary confinement for chronic and unrepentant insubordination if he hadn’t managed to lie his way into a job as the sports editor for the base newspaper, The Command Courier. This made all the difference. He worked his own hours (slept late, worked late), came and went as he pleased, did unauthorized freelance writing for a local civilian paper, and wrote entertaining, flattering, and wildly exaggerated articles about the base sports teams. This curried favor with the base commander, who in turn excused Hunter from the customary airman duties and shielded him from the constant complaints of other officers. In this way he survived three years of the Air Force, got an early honorable discharge, and gained some solid experience as a journalist. He also understood that he wanted to be a writer, and a damn good one. Not a journalist, but a novelist, like Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
Hunter fully intended to go to college as soon as he was out of the Air Force on a journalism scholarship. Somewhere along the line, though, that became less important, and he never did attend college, with the exception of a couple of night classes at Columbia University in New York in 1959. He told me much later that he realized that in order to be a great writer he needed to write, not go to school. After I had graduated from college, he said the only reason to attend college was to have four years to read.
After his discharge, he held a couple of brief jobs on newspapers on the East Coast, including a stint as a copy boy at Time magazine. He was either fired from or quit each of these jobs, and soon realized he would never be able to work in an office for a boss, that he wasn’t wired for it. It became clear to him that working as a salaried journalist was not going to allow him to be the kind of writer that he wanted to be. So, he became a freelance journalist, at starvation wages, but with the freedom to work on his own terms.
Not that he was lazy. He worked hard on his first novel, Prince Jellyfish (never published), cranked out freelance articles, and wrote a vast number of letters to friends around the country. He looked at letter writing as not only a way to keep in touch and debate ideas, but as a writing exercise, so that when he wasn’t sleeping or in the bar with friends, he was writing. He moved constantly, went through a long string of old and worn-out cars, slept during the day and worked at night, borrowed money (and lent it when he had it), stayed one step ahead of the bill collectors, and left a trail of small-time debt across the country. He also kept carbon copies of everything he wrote in neatly organized and carefully labeled folders.
In New York City he met my mother, and then spent several months traveling around South America as a freelancer for The Nation and The National Observer, a weekly paper published by Dow Jones. He and my mother lived in Puerto Rico for a while (which provided the raw material for his first and only published novel, The Rum Diary), got married and headed west to California, lived in Big Sur for a bit, headed to a happening place in the Colorado Rockies called Aspen that some friends had just discovered, spent a year or so there, then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963.
I was born in March of 1964. At that time Hunter and Sandy were living in an unheated shack in Glen Ellen, California, about sixty miles north of San Francisco. He was traveling quite a bit, freelancing for several newspapers and magazines and making hardly any money. My mother did secretarial work, providing a minimal steady paycheck to compensate for Hunter’s irregular freelance income. For food, he would occasionally shoot a deer or an elk. My mother told me that for the duration of her pregnancy she lived on elk meat (especially elk liver), salad, and milk.
Hunter and Sandy on the tarmac in Bermuda in 1960 with his typewriter, pipe, and horsewhip
Hunter, Sandy, and me in the front yard of the shack in Glen Ellen, California, 1964
Six months after my birth, we moved from Glen Ellen to 318 Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco near Golden Gate Park, where Hunter wrote a big chunk of Hell’s Angels, a book-length nonfiction account of the several months he spent with the infamous motorcycle gang in 1965. The Angels had been getting a lot of sensational press in the mid-1960s in which they were represented as evil, crazy thugs determined to destroy everything good and right in America. Hunter was curious to know the real story, and proposed that he write a magazine article on the Hells Angels. He ended up spending around six months with the Oakland chapter, not as a member but as a journalist who wanted to know their story. Though he ended up getting stomped by the gang for allegedly betraying the terms of the financial deal he had with them, he had gotten the material he needed. In his book he portrays them as neither devils nor revolutionaries but as mostly small-time hoodlums and drifters with very limited options, unallied to any ideology or greater movement. Though the book was nonfiction, it wasn’t purely objective. It was a story about Hunter and the Hells Angels and how he met them, dealt with them, rode with them, and learned about them, from his point of view.
Hunter teaching me to swim, 1964
Hell’s Angels was published in 1966. It got good reviews and sold well. Hunter would remain a freelance journalist and author his whole life, and in the eight years from 1966 to 1974, he wrote the three books that cemented his reputation as one of the great American writers: Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
While Hunter was traveling and working, my mother kept the family ship steady with her conventional day job that paid the rent and bought the food. However, now and then Hunter would bring my mother and me into his world. He had crossed paths with Ken Kesey, a noted writer and drug enthusiast who was known for throwing wild parties at his place in the woods south of San Francisco. The two of them thought it would be a good idea to invite the Hells Angels to one of Kesey’s parties, and naturally my mother went along and brought me. I can only imagine the scene: dozens, maybe hundreds of people in various stages of undress, stoned on pot, tripping on LSD, drunk on beer—maybe all three at once—wandering around in the forest while music blared from the house and the colored lights strung among the trees flashed. At one point during the party the Hells Angels gang-raped a woman in a small cabin, an event that haunted Hunter for a long time afterward. In the midst of the madness, there I was, maybe a year old, maybe younger, asleep in a corner of one of the cabins, absorbing wild sense-impressions, probably safe enough but in a situation that violates all my notions of safe and responsible parenting.
In the family lederhosen running through the San Francisco Zoo, circa 1967
With Sandy in California, 1964
In 1970, Hunter covered the Kentucky Derby for a short-lived magazine called Scanlan’s and wrote what turned out to be his first piece of Gonzo journalism, a word coined by a fellow writer to des
cribe Hunter’s unique combination of first-person subjectivity, factual reporting, and hyperbole written in raw, powerful prose. The word “Gonzo” eventually became synonymous with both Hunter’s writing and his lifestyle.
His next book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, stemming from an assignment for Rolling Stone, was Gonzo taken to new heights. Not quite fiction, not quite nonfiction, very funny, but with serious themes, it is ostensibly the story of my father’s and his attorney’s adventures while under the influence of many different drugs, all told from Hunter’s very subjective point of view. This book established his reputation as a master of satire as well as an unapologetic consumer of an impossible quantity and variety of drugs.
Two years later, he wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, also a subjective story of his experiences covering the 1972 presidential campaign. As he wrote in the preface, he didn’t intend to write a factual account of the campaign. Instead, he wanted to capture what it was like to be in the campaign, capture essential truths that so-called objective journalism cannot grasp, and then write about it without concern for alienating sources or contacts, since he had no intention of becoming a Washington political correspondent. This book showed Hunter to be an extremely perceptive observer of American politics and a deeply idealistic man who wrote passionately and fearlessly about the real and foul nature of politics and politicians.
However, the persona that took root and flourished over the next forty years was that of the drug-crazed Wild Man of journalism, more rebel hoodlum than iconoclast, more buffoon than satirist. He was portrayed as such by Bill Murray in the 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam. In 1998 Terry Gilliam directed Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which, though it did capture more of the complexities of the book, still presented Hunter primarily as a drug fiend and mischief-maker.
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