Stories I Tell Myself

by Juan F. Thompson

  Which he was. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and a hell-raiser, but he was also a brilliant writer and craftsman of the language, facts that are still overshadowed by his Wild Man persona. This is the persona most people think of when they hear the name Hunter S. Thompson, if they know the name at all. And that is a shame. He was first and always a writer in the best and highest sense of the word, in which writing is a vocation, not an occupation. Everything else was secondary. Drugs, family, lovers, friends, sex, adventure, they all came after writing. And into his world I came in 1964, when he was twenty-seven, poor, and living in an unheated shack with his new bride.

  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

  HST TIMELINE

  1966 Hell’s Angels published. Hunter, Sandy, and Juan move back to Aspen.

  1968 HST on Nixon press bus during 1968 presidential campaign. Hunter buys house and 140 acres of land in Woody Creek from George Stranahan.

  HST at Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the riots.

  1969 Involved in Joe Edwards’s run for mayor of Aspen, fall 1969—Hunter becomes interested in the potential of the disaffected Youth Vote (Freak Power) to change local and national politics.

  Hunter meets Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, in San Francisco.

  1970 Writes “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s magazine, which was the first example of Gonzo journalism. Hunter and Ralph Steadman work together for the first time.

  Writes “Freak Power in the Rockies” for Rolling Stone.

  Hunter runs for sheriff in Aspen and loses by a very slim margin. End of Freak Power.

  1971 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas published.

  Moves to Washington, D.C., for a year to work on the ’72 campaign book.

  1973 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 published.

  MY EARLY MEMORIES are like photographs, freeze-frame images disconnected from any sense of time or continuity, as if the photos in an album were thrown up in the air and fell randomly, some facedown, invisible, some faceup, and all of them completely out of sequence and context. There are also those memories that are based on stories I’ve been told. I wasn’t there, I just imagined the scene, and it became a memory, another snapshot in the pile, indistinguishable from a real memory. For instance, I remember my mother in a long sheepskin coat embroidered with multicolored thread standing outside a cabin in Woody Creek in the winter, surrounded by a couple of feet of snow. Is this a real memory? Or one of many snapshots in one of the many family photo albums? I don’t know. Whatever their source, however, my early memories, scattered and unreliable as they are, are tinged with a warm hazy glow, and I treasure them.

  When we first came to Colorado as a family in 1966, before Hunter bought Owl Farm, we lived in a rented old farmhouse in Woody Creek, a narrow mountain valley about ten miles outside of Aspen. It was then primarily a ranching community with lots of Hereford cattle, hay and clover fields, and a house every half mile or so. Though Aspen was beginning to transform into a cosmopolitan ski resort, Woody Creek stayed far behind, still maintaining the rural ranching lifestyle that had taken root in the late 1800s when Aspen was a mining boomtown.

  Not everyone in Woody Creek was a rancher, however. George Stranahan, scion of a wealthy family and a physics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, bought up a good chunk of the middle Woody Creek Valley in the 1950s. He and his family would live there for the next fifty years. He was Hunter’s first landlord in Woody Creek, eventually sold him Owl Farm, and was one of his political allies for decades to come.

  Hunter and me astride his motorcycle in the apartment on Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco, 1965

  Our farmhouse was right off the Lenado Road on Stranahan’s ranch. The three of us lived there for a year or so. There was an old barn and a horse pen right across the driveway, and a shack next to the house that may have been a bunkhouse at one time, and which Hunter used as his writing office. I remember my room was upstairs, up a short staircase from Hunter and Sandy’s bedroom to what had once been an attic. It was cozy and bright. I remember our red-and-white ’57 Chevy with the big bench seat out in the driveway, and the deep snow everywhere, especially deep to a two-year-old. If the number of photos from that time is any indication, Hunter was very pleased to be a father. I have several photos of Hunter holding my infant self, balancing me on his knee, Hunter and Sandy sitting over me as I baked in the spring sunshine, and Hunter holding me in a swimming pool. My favorite is a photo of Hunter standing beside a large tree with a target nailed to it, a .44 Magnum pistol in one hand and a tiny me in his other arm, pointing with the barrel of the gun at the tight grouping of shots in the center of the target.

  He was often on the other side of the camera. When he was a young freelance writer, he was by necessity a photographer as well as a writer, and apparently he frequently turned his camera on me. There are pictures of me as a baby in Glen Ellen, and then in San Francisco—in a playground, at a party, on the sidewalk, in a streetcar. There is a self-portrait of Hunter holding me while sitting on his Norton motorcycle in our apartment on Parnassus Avenue. In Colorado, there are pictures of me playing in the snow at our first house, me with our Dobermans, Darwin and Benjy. There are photos of me on a tractor, swinging on a tire swing, and a bit later, me posing with Hunter in a Groucho Marx mask.

  —

  THERE ARE MANY PHOTOS from over the years that I discovered while going through the hundreds of boxes that make up my father’s archive, which contains everything from manuscripts and reporter’s notebooks to junk mail, to-do lists from twenty-five years ago, and canceled checks from 1964.

  I don’t remember him taking these photographs. I don’t remember these events. By the time my memories really kick in around six or seven, Hunter was a background presence, but not a part of my daily life. He seemed to live roughly in parallel with my mother and me without being a part of the family. He slept, he wrote, he traveled frequently, he spent a lot of time with friends in Aspen, and he ran for sheriff, among many other things. I don’t remember him spending time with me, between his vampire schedule, his friends, and his ambition as a writer.

  My consistent memories begin at Owl Farm, a split-log ranch-style house that he bought from Stranahan in 1968, and where he lived continuously until his death. During the school year I remember Sandy waking me up in the dark, and me stumbling to the bathroom where I would curl up on the red shag carpet in front of the heater vent and go into a half sleep until Sandy came to tell me to get dressed and to come eat breakfast. I always ate at the kitchen counter—Hunter had not yet established that spot as his writing place. Then I would go into the living room and watch through the huge picture windows that overlooked the upper Woody Creek Valley and the Lenado Road that ran in front of our house. I was watching for the school bus to come around the corner by the Craig ranch about a mile up the road. As soon as it appeared I would hurry into my coat and boots and run down the driveway to the road and get on the short yellow bus. Hunter would be sound asleep most of the day. By the time I returned at around three p.m. he would usually still be sleeping. While Hunter was sleeping there was to be quiet. Around four or four-thirty in the afternoon Sandy would wake him, and he would shamble into the kitchen in his bathrobe and take his place at the kitchen counter in time for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on our black-and-white television, which received only one channel. I remember every night there were solemn reports from the Vietnam War. Sandy would make breakfast for him, always bacon and eggs, often with corned beef hash, and some toast with orange marmalade. Hunter would read the newspaper and watch the news while he ate. Sometimes this was dinner for me also, or sometimes my dinner would come later. We never ate as a family. After breakfast, Hunter would take a shower, get dressed, and begin his day
. This usually meant heading out to see a friend or driving into Aspen. I would not see him until the next afternoon, for he would make the rounds of his friends at night, and then if he was going to write, he would start long after I was in bed and asleep. Weekends were tricky because of the prime directive to stay quiet and not wake up Hunter. I would get up for Saturday cartoons nice and early, curl up in a blanket on the couch in the kitchen, eat a box of chocolate or peanut butter Space Food Sticks, and watch TV until about nine or ten, when the boring big-kid shows came on, then find something to do, either read or play by myself. Sandy would rise usually late morning, and Hunter would be on his usual schedule, waking up in the late afternoon.

  Hunter’s photo of Agar, his Doberman at the time, facing off against the head of a deer Hunter had shot. Sandy is in the background, pregnant with me, circa 1963.

  Hunter took this photo of me playing with Tinkertoys on the floor in 1966 in the Stranahans’ cabin, before we moved to Owl Farm.

  With Hunter on the front porch at Owl Farm in 1969. He was using the TarGard for his cigarettes even then.

  The summers in the early ’70s, before my parents’ marriage began to visibly crumble, were long and sweet. I especially remember summer picnics up in Little Woody Creek, a small valley that shoots off the main Woody Creek Valley, where some good friends of my parents’ lived, and who had children about my age. Nobody seemed to have traditional nine-to-five jobs. Sometimes Hunter would crank up his Bultaco Matador trail motorcycle, I would climb on the back and hang on to him as tightly as I could, and we would race down the street, turn onto the dirt Little Woody Creek Road, and roar up the little valley trailing a big cloud of dust. I remember Hunter’s broad back, my little hands clutching his coat because I couldn’t reach all the way around his body, and how even though it seemed like we were on the verge of a horrible accident, I trusted him. When we arrived at our destination I was buzzing from both the adrenaline and the vibration of the motorcycle. We never talked about it, it was just a quick motorcycle ride, but it was also a private adventure just between us. We didn’t have that many of them, so those memories are precious.

  Hunter and the posse in the Jerome Bar in 1970

  The summer before Hunter died, I took my son, Will, who was six, for a ride on Hunter’s BMW R75/5 motorcycle. I started out slowly, concerned that he would react as I had done, that he would be afraid of speed. As we idled down the road at fifteen miles per hour, I asked him how he was doing. He said, “Good!” I went a bit faster, and checked again. “Good!” he said. I had planned on just going a couple of hundred feet up the road and then coming back, but his evident enthusiasm led me to keep going up the road, all the way to where the pavement ends. On the way back to Owl Farm, he leaned forward and said, “Faster, Daddy!” I think we hit sixty before I had to slow down to make the turn into the driveway.

  There were two families up in Little Woody that we were especially close with, the LeFavours and the Smiths. John Smith was the head of the tiny local community television station called Grassroots. He had a wife, Katy, and two children, Nicholas and Emily, who were around my age. They had come from out west, where John had been a professor of journalism at UCLA. He had opted out of academia to start and run Grassroots based on the idea that television should not be controlled solely by corporations. The Smiths’ house was down by the Little Woody Creek, and the banks were thick with willows and grass. Hunter and I would arrive on the motorcycle on a hot day in the summer. There were already a few other families there; Hunter was never the first to arrive. I would find the other kids, and Hunter would join the adults, who would re-form around him. When Hunter arrived at a gathering, he never joined a group, he became the focus of the group. Without effort, he simply commanded everyone’s attention. His mother, Virginia, once told me that even when he was a little boy, eating breakfast before school, there were other little boys waiting outside on the sidewalk, waiting to walk with him to school, not because he bribed them, or flattered them, or threatened them, only because they wanted to be near him.

  I remember watermelon, hot dogs, soda pop, and a little bridge across the creek. There was an open outhouse hidden by the bushes, which consisted of a wide board with a hole cut in it over a hole in the ground. I don’t know if the adults used it, but that’s what the kids used. The hot sunny days eased into warm summer evenings, the adults talking and laughing in groups as the sun went down over the mesa, the children playing in the creek or in the little aspen grove that grew alongside it. I think we all were happy then, so that we didn’t even think about being happy. It was all right, the children, the twilight, the friends, the blue sky darkening to indigo, the laughter—it was all right in that way you don’t notice until you look back much later and realize you were happy then.

  Me on the front porch of Owl Farm around 1970

  The LeFavours, Bruce and Pat and their two daughters, Nicole and Cree, lived at the very end of Little Woody Road, past the Smiths. Bruce and Pat were both gourmet chefs who owned a fine French restaurant in Aspen, the Paragon. Their house and land were a little Garden of Eden. Bruce had designed and built the house. They owned dozens of acres at the end of the valley, at the end of a narrow dirt road. There was a little pond on one side of the road and a small tack shed for the two Shetland ponies. On the left was what may have been a scraggly and neglected orchard, or perhaps just a grove of scrub oak from which the underbrush had been cleared so that long grass grew in the shade beneath. The road wound along the side of the hill for a bit, then crossed over the creek and up to the house. A forest of aspen trees filled the space to the top of the valley, and steeply up each side rose the red walls of the mountains, looming, blocking the sun for all but the middle of the day, but also allowing plants and trees to grow that could not thrive in the sharp bright heat of the high-altitude sun.

  The house itself was two stories and covered with white stucco, with thick brown timbers. In my memory it had a turret on one side, a huge dark wooden front door, and smallish windows set deep into the walls, something like a very small castle for a minor lord. A castle nonetheless, because it was lovely in its solitude among the aspen trees, at the very end of the valley, the nearest house a good mile or two away. The space surrounding it and the lush growth along the creek were extravagant in an unconscious, unplanned way that I just took for granted, and I imagine all of us who grew up in Woody Creek did. The space, the deep blue mountain skies, the contrasts of the snow on the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks with the bright reddish orange of the iron oxide bluffs in Woody Creek, the tall grass by the streams, it was just the place where we grew up.

  I think it was a good time for Hunter as well. His years of hard work as a freelance writer had paid off, he had written two excellent books, Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and was working on his third, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. He had a growing fame as both a writer and an “outlaw journalist.” He had his home, Owl Farm, he had a devoted wife and a healthy young son, and he had friends—lots of friends, good friends, smart friends. I think he had friends for every kind of adventure or conversation, a skill or habit that is evident from his earliest letters up to his last days. National politics, local politics, literature, sex, art, the media, journalism, football, gambling, driving, motorcycles, drugs, photography, these were all topics that he loved, and he had friends for each. He roamed around Aspen and Woody Creek like it was his private club, and in those days his headquarters was without question the Hotel Jerome Bar.

  Hunter and Oscar Zeta Acosta during Hunter’s run for sheriff of Aspen in 1970

  Center of the Eye Photography Studio, Aspen, 1970

  I can’t tell you what it was like to be an adult at the Jerome, what it was like when Hunter held court from the end of the bar, but I can tell you how the bar appeared to a child. It was loud with music and laughing, hooting, yelling, a cacophony of conversations, and it smelled like beer, the distinctive smell of an old bar, the sharp, slightly sweet, s
lightly acrid smell of cigarettes and beer. It was crowded with people on the bar stools, between the stools, at the tables, and everywhere in between, though as a child I learned to snake through the narrow spaces between the adults so that they hardly noticed me.

  —

  ONE NIGHT I discovered that drunk people drop money on the floor. I began crawling under the bar stools, picking up dimes, nickels, and quarters. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed this simple source of income earlier. I realized that at one stool there were more coins each time I passed. I looked up and saw a man looking down at me, laughing and dropping them. I gathered up the money and took my booty down to Carl’s Pharmacy at the end of the block to buy Archie comic books.

  In our front yard at Owl Farm in 1971 or so, with our Dobermans, Benjy and Speed Wizard, aka Weird.

  I remember Hunter at the end of the bar facing the door, standing, never sitting, always smoking a cigarette, listening with his head bent down, brow furrowed, or speaking, his eyes, his whole body commanding attention, and his smile. He was holding court. When Hunter took up his position at the bar, he got the day’s news, delivered his opinions, praised this person, scolded that person, gave instructions, plotted and strategized with his advisors, just as the lord of the manor might have done.

  —

  IN LATE 1971 we moved to Washington, D.C. Rolling Stone sent Hunter to cover the 1972 presidential campaign. His articles were later published in book form as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Since he had to be in Washington for a solid year, he decided to move us out there with him. I saw very little of him that year. He traveled most of the time, following George McGovern’s campaign. When he was home, he was visiting friends, writing, or sleeping. I don’t even remember seeing him for a late afternoon breakfast or for the evening news.