We left Owl Farm in the care of two friends. Hunter drove his Volvo 164 with a trailer full of stuff while Sandy and I flew to D.C. to meet him. In November of 1971 we moved into a rented and furnished three-story redbrick house on a cul-de-sac on Juniper Street in quiet, Northwest D.C., right on the edge of Rock Creek Park. Rolling Stone magazine was paying for it; I can’t imagine Hunter selecting such a house otherwise. It was the sort of place for a doctor or a stockbroker. Redbrick with white trim around the windows, and a black, colonial-style lamppost at the end of the walk. There was a huge, dark living room with a huge, dark, oak dining table, a giant backyard with big trees, and an attached garage. Over the garage, accessible through a door off the main stairway, was a large office where Hunter worked. He called it the Fear Room.
It’s hard to convey the shock of moving from a funky ranch house in the country outside Aspen to a colonial on the East Coast. There was a garage-door opener; Owl Farm didn’t even have a garage. This house had three stories, not including the basement; Owl Farm had one. The newspaper was thrown on our lawn each morning; in Woody Creek we had to drive about two miles to the Lenado Road turnoff to pick it up from our newspaper box. Finally, it had Rock Creek Park right across the street.
In the Fear Room with Hunter at our house in Washington, D.C., while he was working on Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. His tools of the trade are all visible: beer, tape recorder, IBM Selectric, The New York Times, telephone, television, and cigarettes.
The park was a wilderness in a very East Coast way—a uniform covering of bushy deciduous trees over a thick carpet of brush, and through the middle of the park ran the Rock Creek. I spent a lot of time roaming around the park either alone or with a friend, just exploring. It was the first time I had spent any time in the East, and the experience of wilderness was so completely different, just like everything that year. However, what stands out most for me was my school.
It’s important to understand the division of labor between my mother and father, keeping in mind that they were, for all their disregard of some social conventions, children raised in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s in very conventional households. Hunter was the breadwinner, and Sandy was the housewife. As such, she was responsible for pretty much all aspects of raising me, including education. She was also responsible for tracking the finances, taking care of Hunter, and handling all the administrative aspects of a writer’s life. She was interested in alternative education, “progressive education,” as it was called then. There were no public charter schools in those days. Instead, some parents in Aspen, with the backing of George Stranahan, who was very interested in education, started something called the Aspen Community School. They brought in a teacher and educational philosopher from New Zealand named Sylvia Ashton-Warner, who had some strong opinions for the time that children should be engaged by teachers, rather than simply force-fed facts, and should be taught something more than blind obedience. I was a test subject. Over the years I bounced back and forth between the Aspen public schools and the Aspen Community School several times. I spent kindergarten and first grade at the public elementary school, and then moved to this experimental school for second grade. It was initially housed in the brand-new buildings of the Aspen Center for Physics, sponsored by the Aspen Institute, a now-famous think tank that was largely responsible for Aspen’s cosmopolitan influence and perhaps its rapid commercialization and growth, and is also home to the Aspen Music Festival, the Design Conference, and countless other cultural/academic events. The whole complex was on the edge of town on a plateau that overlooked the Roaring Fork River. Behind the school was a giant field covered with tall native grasses. In front, there was a thick green lawn with a tiny stream running through it where, during lunchtime, we would have boat races with little pieces of wood in the fall and spring. At this school it was completely acceptable to wear a white T-shirt with a red circle on the front, and in the circle, in white script, the word “Cocaine” (instead of “Coca-Cola”).
Pat Caddell, George McGovern, and Hunter on the 1972 campaign trail
When we moved to Washington, Sandy enrolled me in a nearby public elementary school. It was no such thing. It was a prison. The classes were large and the discipline strict. The building was huge and old. I remember long hallways with very high ceilings, the walls either beige or light green, and many doors down each side, off into the distance. The playground was fenced in, all asphalt. The rooms were cavernous, with many rows of desks. All it needed was a bunch of nuns to make it the polar opposite of what I had just come from. I hated it on sight and on principle and within a couple of days Sandy pulled me out.
But where to put me? She chose an experimental school called the Free School. It was operated out of a run-down, walk-up, second-story apartment in a grimy neighborhood of Washington. There were maybe ten other kids and between two and four teachers who were mostly young hippies with long hair, round John Lennon glasses, and big ideas about progressive education. The back window overlooked an alley full of trash. It was simply day care with a fancy name. I don’t remember doing anything like traditional schoolwork the entire year, not that I objected. I had a great time. We either ran wild in the apartment or went on field trips, stuffed into the far back of a couple of VW Beetles. We went to the Smithsonian many times, and to the Washington Monument. Once we drove to New York City for a few days and slept on the floor of a school gym, visiting various landmarks by day. I remember climbing the stairs of the Statue of Liberty, reaching the top, and looking out the little windows in her crown at the skyline of New York. Some days we made candles by melting wax in pots on the kitchen stove and pouring them into molds. One day we broke a three-foot hole in the drywall between a room and the hallway. I don’t remember being reprimanded or scolded.
When I talked to my mother about that school much later she said she had chosen it because a member of the Chicago Seven had sent his kid there. She said she did worry about the math curriculum, but that since I was already a competent and voracious reader, she figured I would be fine.
It was madness, of course. As a parent now, I wouldn’t for a second consider putting my seven-year-old son in the hands of those well-meaning amateurs, doing nothing resembling schoolwork and spending the days in a tenement house in urban Washington, D.C. But I didn’t come to any harm, and at the time it must have seemed like a good idea. If Hunter had an opinion about it, and in retrospect I’m sure he did, I never heard about it, we never talked about it, and I remained at the Free School for the remainder of that year. (I did end up repeating third grade, though, when I returned to Aspen, probably because there was no evidence I had done any schoolwork the previous year.)
The year in Washington ended with my mother’s final pregnancy. She had been pregnant much of the time we were in Washington, but I was completely oblivious to it, except for one day when we had to get rid of our new cat, Ralph. We had gotten him when we came to Washington. I had always wanted a cat but I think Hunter felt the odds were heavily against a cat at Owl Farm because of the hawks, coyotes, bobcats, and other predators of small animals. One day Sandy told me that there was a disease in cat feces that could harm her baby, so we had to get rid of him. That was the first and last that I remember of any pregnancy. I think if she had shown up one day with a newborn, I would have been flabbergasted by the sudden appearance of a new member of the family. One day she went to the hospital and was there for a few days. When she came back there was no baby. Years later I learned it was a girl, and that she survived for a day or so after being born. That was the last attempt at children for my parents. Now I wonder how our lives would have been if I had had a sibling; I would have been the older brother, protector, and, perhaps, caregiver. We would have shared both the attention and the fear.
With Hunter in the kitchen at Owl Farm circa 1971, when I was six, clowning around for the photographer
We returned to Owl Farm from Washington following that summer. I remember a huge Allied Van Lines truck
in front of our Washington house loading up boxes. I remember driving out to Dulles International Airport with Sandy and riding on the little elevated buses out to the airplane while Hunter drove the car home to Woody Creek, to Owl Farm, to our sanctuary in the high mountains of Colorado where we had friends, and space, and the quiet of the country. I know we all were glad to be home, where we could become again the happy, picturesque, offbeat, counterculture family we had been.
Unfortunately, it would be something very different. The offbeat family façade was crumbling, and I was old enough to see it happening. The next four years would be the worst of my life.
Uncle Ralph (Steadman) preparing to crush my skull with a rock in 1972 while we stand in Woody Creek, across the meadow from Owl Farm
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
HST TIMELINE
1974 Travels to Kinshasa, Zaire, to cover the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman Heavyweight Championship fight.
Hunter and Jann Wenner organize the Elko conference, intended to lay out a platform and strategy to use the Youth Vote to take control of national politics.
Starts doing university lectures.
Considers running for Colorado senate.
1975 Travels to Saigon, South Vietnam, to cover the fall of that city to the Viet Cong.
WHEN I WAS AROUND ten years old, I began to look up from the ground at my feet to see the world around me. I began to notice other people as real and separate beings. Up until then, my friends’ parents were not people, they were just parents. Once they were out of sight, they ceased to exist. The same was true of my own parents. I had no awareness that my mother had a life, or feelings, or interests, beyond me.
It was also a time of disillusionment. My parents’ marriage was gradually falling apart, and though I was not consciously aware of this, it affected me. I felt better when I was around parents who liked each other. I also began to suspect that my father’s anger was not always just and fair. Up until then there had been no questioning it: if my father was angry, I was wrong. As I raised my eyes up, I began to suspect that justice wasn’t always the governing principle of his rage.
This happened gradually, in the background, amid school, friends, chores, lots and lots of books, building fires in the fireplace, model rockets, my first gun, horseback riding, my first record player, and my first motorcycle.
I remember building fires. My father was a purist when it came to fires. We had a giant fireplace in the living room that we kept burning most nights in the winter. Cords and cords of split spruce and piñon logs were stacked up against the sides of the house in the fall. I would gather wood from these stacks in the winter. My father insisted a fire couldn’t be started by artificial means; it had to be done authentically. He patiently showed me the process: first a base of crumpled-up newspaper, then kindling, then small fast-burning logs of spruce on top of the kindling, and once they were burning well, the big, dense logs of piñon that needed a lot of heat to catch fire and then burned for hours. And then start everything with a single match. No lighter fluid, no combustible fire logs, just a match. I mastered the purist method and later, whenever I came to visit, right up until the day he died, and it was cold enough for a fire, Hunter would ask me to start one. I would gladly comply. We both understood that this was my job and I was good at it, and it made me happy that he asked.
As a child of ten or so, before building the fire, I first had to go down into the basement to gather kindling. I was afraid of the basement, especially at night. I would go down the stairs with a flashlight and into the cavernous area where the kindling was, gather as much as I could into the canvas tote, and then run back upstairs as fast as I could, imagining the claws and teeth of some demon just behind me. I would get to the top of the stairs where I could look into the bright kitchen then turn and look back down the stairs, out of breath from fear rather than exertion. There was nothing, of course, but that didn’t prevent me from imagining those claws each time I looked down into the black maw of the basement stairwell.
If the log supply was low, I had to go outside. I’d dress for winter and take my flashlight and the canvas tote through the deep snow to collect first the spruce, then the piñon logs. Unlike the basement, the darkness of the winter night was comforting, like a thick down jacket. The night sky outside of Aspen is a canopy of what seems like an infinite number of hard little points of light that shine steadily rather than twinkle, and in which the vague ribbon of the Milky Way can be easily discerned stretching from one horizon to the other.
Being small and the logs large and heavy, I usually had to make several trips, but I didn’t mind. I was at home, in my valley with my mountains, my sky, my stars, my deep winter night, and it comforted me. I think Hunter must have felt this way also, standing alone on the porch or in front of the giant picture windows of the living room late at night or perhaps at dawn when everyone else was asleep. It was our home, an anchor, not just a house, but a place and a feeling of deep-rootedness. It was always a place of comfort to return to, in spite of everything that happened inside that house, even long after I moved out, even now.
He must have felt proud. He had written three books that would become classics: Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. He had become a well-known journalist. In 1975 Rolling Stone sent him to Saigon in Vietnam, his first stint as a Gonzo war correspondent. He owned a house on 140 acres of land in the Colorado mountains, the nearest neighbors were at least a half mile away and out of sight, and he had good friends and a family. For a moment, perhaps, he may have felt that his life was what he had hoped it would be, that he was successful in spite of all the struggles, self-imposed and otherwise.
The Elko conference in 1974, with Hunter’s notes
Meanwhile, I went about my childhood. In the summer especially I spent most of my time outside, either alone or with friends. But summertime for an only child in the country could be challenging. I liked to be alone and had many diversions such as reading, inventing games, building and launching model rockets, and target shooting with my BB gun, but there was a limit to how much solitude I could bear. I would see my friends now and then, but that required coordination and transportation. One summer, in an effort to keep me occupied, Sandy took me down to a small riding stable a couple of miles from home that taught horseback riding.
The outfit consisted of a small riding ring, a stable painted yellow and peeling, four or five horses, a hay barn, a tiny office, and a tack shed. The instructor’s name was Cecily. Sandy signed me up for lessons and I got started. Cecily had defined a hierarchy of experience levels. Each level required a certain number of hours of instruction on horseback, book study, and a test. When a student completed a level successfully, they got a gold star on a grid on the wall indicating their level. Being a sucker for this kind of achievement, I started in and quickly reached the first two levels. However, each level required time and therefore money, and it became clear that my parents could not afford to pay for as much instruction time as I wanted. So we worked out a deal: I worked at the stables in return for free riding lessons and riding time. It became my first summer job.
Each morning I would ride my Kawasaki 90 motorcycle down to the stables, maybe three miles from home, and feed the horses. This consisted of opening a bale of hay and heaving a heavy slice of the bale for each horse over the paddock fence. While they were eating the hay, I would muck the stables, which means I would shovel the horseshit out of each stable into a wheelbarrow and dump it on a huge pile in the back. As I became more proficient at riding I would help teach the newcomers and later even take tourists on guided horseback rides around Woody Creek.
I spent my days there with Cecily, her boyfriend, Jan, and the other student employee, a girl named Amy Erickson, on whom I quickly develope
d a powerful crush. In addition to riding classes, Cecily organized picnics and overnights for the students. The best spot was a mile or two from the stables down by the Roaring Fork River. There was a small field of deep green grass right by the river, surrounded by cottonwoods and aspens. The river had carved a deep trench by the near bank, which made an excellent swimming hole, and a rope dangled from an overhanging tree. We picnicked several times there that summer and the next and once camped by the river, hobbling our horses and letting them graze among the rich grass while we slept. Amy and I became good friends, and though she didn’t return my affections, one morning after camping out she told me that she had awoken early in the morning to find that we were holding hands through our sleeping bags. I thought that was wonderfully romantic.
Cecily also had riding competitions and trucked us to nearby fairs and 4-H shows so Amy and I could compete in the riding events such as Western Showmanship, Western Pleasure, and the 4-H Gymkhana. Amy and I would pretty up our horses the evening before with shampoo and conditioner, comb their manes and tails, and wash and polish our tack (saddles and bridles). The next morning we dressed up in our cowboy hats, western shirts, jeans, and boots. Amy was a better rider than I was, but I won a few blue ribbons that summer also, which I displayed on my bedroom bookshelf. Cecily was proud of us both and never encouraged any kind of competition between us.
Stories I Tell Myself Page 3