I loved going to the Bentons’ house because it felt safe. It turns out that after the kids went to bed Tom and Betty got down to some serious weirdness with my parents involving various drugs, but their evening wildness did not threaten the reassuring structure that their children lived within, in contrast to the formlessness of my life at Owl Farm. Their kids had chores and they all ate dinner together at the same time every night at the dinner table. We never sat down as a family, and never at the same time. They had rules: they had to be home by dinnertime, they had to clean their rooms regularly, and they had to do their homework before friends came over. I had just a few rules: don’t wake Hunter up, don’t touch the guns, and put the tools away when I used them. My chores were random and on-demand. In a kitchen drawer the Bentons had Pinwheels, those chocolate-covered marshmallows, and we could each have one—but only one, and not right before dinner. I didn’t have much junk food at home, but there were no rules governing it. At the Bentons’ the guidelines were clear and reasonable, and when they were violated the consequences were consistent. At my house the guidelines were unclear, the enforcement patchy, and the consequences vague and frightening. I envied Brian and Michelle’s structured life and felt calm and safe there.
The Bentons also had cable TV, and when I went to their house we would watch I Dream of Jeannie or other programs that were not available at home on the one channel out of Grand Junction that we received out at Owl Farm. Some weekend nights I would stay the night and Brian, Michelle, and I would watch terrible horror movies, like The Blob, or movies about giant ants, or crickets, or spiders attacking New York City. It was wonderful.
At some point I stopped spending solitary nights at the Hotel Jerome and would instead be dropped off at the Bentons’ while Sandy and Hunter went on to the bar. We would play games like hide-and-seek in the gallery after it closed. At one point Brian and I became obsessed with trucker culture. We memorized the “10” codes (such as “10-4”) used by police and truckers, persuaded our parents to buy us CB radios, ordered stacks of brochures from truck manufacturing companies, and spent hours and hours in the Bentons’ VW bus pretending to be truckers. The more the situation at home deteriorated, the more the Bentons became a refuge of stability for me. It was easy for me to imagine them as the perfect ’70s family: somewhat weird, essentially normal, and happy together.
That ideal burst with the Bentons’ divorce about a year before my mother and I left Hunter. Overnight, it seemed, they sold the house in town, and Betty and the kids were suddenly in California while Tom stayed in Aspen with his girlfriend, the soon-to-be-ex-wife of a good friend of Hunter’s and fellow resident of Woody Creek. My mother and I hadn’t seen Betty and the kids since they left, thus our visit to California.
This trip was the beginning of an entirely new life and a new adventure for my mother and me. We were returning to the state where I was born and where my parents were happiest together, and where Hunter wrote his first book, which transformed him from a reporter to a writer.
I didn’t think about this at the time. I was glad to be on an adventure and mostly I was glad that we were safe and away from my father. I didn’t miss him at all.
We took several days to make the drive to California, staying at little motels. One day we stopped in Reno at Harrah’s Automobile Collection to see the beautiful old classic cars, and bought a large black-and-white photo of a long, sleek black convertible that ended up on the wall at Owl Farm for years. I wonder now if my mother bought it as a gift for Hunter even while fleeing him. I remember driving through the heat and brown of the Nevada desert, and the next day through the Central Valley of California and being amazed at how green everything was. Mostly I remember the feeling of freedom and the sudden absence of fear and anxiety. My mother and I were away from that beast in Aspen. He couldn’t touch us; he didn’t even know where we were. We were safe and we were having an adventure. If my mother was concerned about money or jobs or a place to live, she didn’t tell me.
We got to Betty’s house, which was on the side of a steep hill overlooking San Anselmo. I remember how lush it was there. The house was white and surrounded by flowers, bushes, and trees of all kinds. Colorado had nothing like this. We spent two weeks in suburban peace. There was no screaming, no threats, no police, no hiding. Betty worked during the day and came home in the evening. The kids attended public school nearby and had neat rooms of their own with big windows that overlooked the valley below. Everything was clean, orderly, quiet, and beautiful in that early summer in Marin County.
At the end of two weeks I got on a plane in San Francisco and joined my grandmother in New York, and from there we went to Ireland for a couple of weeks. Ever since I was ten my grandmother Leah, who was a travel agent in DeLand, Florida, had taken me every summer on a trip to foreign lands. It was back when travel agents didn’t have computers and the airlines gave them great discounts on flights. One year it was England, another year Paris, a third year Greece and Italy. That year it was Ireland and Scotland. We went to Dublin, Edinburgh, and Inverness, I kissed the Blarney Stone and took a boat ride on Loch Ness, and for two weeks I didn’t think about my family.
I had a surprise awaiting me back in the United States. Sandy met me at the airport in New York and told me that we were going home to Owl Farm. Hunter had come for her, she said, and now things were going to be different. There would be no more fighting, no more police in the middle of the night. Hunter was going to change because he didn’t want to lose us. I went along with it, full of apprehension. I was relieved that we would be back at home but fearful that nothing would change.
The three of us stayed on in New York for a few days more. I remember driving out to Long Island with Hunter and Sandy one afternoon to a house in the middle of a forest. I was introduced to a guy named John Belushi, and while he talked with my parents, I sat on the couch with another guy named Bill Murray. He seemed to prefer to talk to me rather than to the other adults, and he was interesting, odd, calm, quiet, and not condescending. I liked him. We talked about sailing.
We returned home to Owl Farm. I changed schools and started eighth grade at the Aspen Community School, now located about a quarter mile from home up on a mesa. Every morning, I would climb the steep hill to the top of the mesa and walk across the open fields to school.
That summer we attended Jimmy Buffett’s—Captain Buffett’s—wedding. He and Jane were getting married outside of Aspen at an old estate from the Colorado mining days called the Redstone Castle. While in New York Sandy had taken me to a tailor who measured me for a child-size white tuxedo with a royal blue cummerbund. I even had a walking stick. I’m sure I was the only child at that wedding reception, which I learned much later was an evening of high debauchery, ’70s style, with copious amounts of cocaine, pot, and booze along with handfuls of pills, mushrooms, and tabs of acid. Oblivious to all of this, I strolled around the grounds of the estate like a diminutive English lord and threaded my way through the crowded and increasingly unstrung crowd in the ballroom. I explored every room (except the bedrooms—who knew who might be having a licit or illicit liaison in one of them), the hallways and staircases, examined all the outbuildings, and eventually curled up with a book until my parents found me and took me home.
For a while it was as if my mother and I had never left Hunter. We all took our places and resumed the routine, without the late-night fights. We didn’t talk about what had happened, there were no family therapy sessions, we just picked up as if the police had never come and our trip to California had just been a summer vacation to visit some friends.
But of course it couldn’t last. Nothing had changed underneath, so the old dynamics reasserted themselves and the fighting began again, along with the screaming, the crashing of glass or pottery, Hunter’s verbal brutality, and Sandy’s tearful hysteria. I stood again in the kitchen, an observer and harsh judge of my father when the fights were too loud and long to bear in the darkness of my bedroom. Otherwise, I huddled down in my
bed and tried not to hear what I was hearing. It seemed as if we could do this forever.
But it became too much even for us, a family that had become accustomed to such unhappiness. One night my mother called the police again, and this time two troopers from the Colorado State Patrol came, a man and a woman. Hunter took the same approach he had before, calmly assuring them that my mother was drunk and raving, and that there was no need to get involved. I stood by in my pajamas, growing angrier and angrier. Sandy told Hunter that she and I were going to leave that night. She took a drawer of her clothes from her room and began to carry it to the front door. Hunter accused her of stealing from him and wrenched it from her. I started screaming at him, calling him a bastard, an asshole, and I lunged at him to beat on him with my undersized fists. One of the troopers grabbed me and held me until I stopped. At that moment I understood my mother’s feeling of helplessness in the face of his strength, his intelligence, his lies, and his malice, and I hated him. I hated him deeply and completely. If I could have called down a god’s wrath on him and destroyed him with a lightning bolt at that moment, I would have done it. He was more than frightening, he was deliberately and carefully cruel—he was evil—and I would have destroyed him if I could have, for my sake and for my mother’s.
The police kept Hunter at bay while my mother and I grabbed a few clothes and got in the car. Now Hunter was powerless to stop us. The two most important people in his life were leaving him, and for once, he could not stop it from happening. Hunter was losing his cool. He didn’t get violent, but he kept up a stream of insults and threats against both my mother and the police until we drove away. I don’t know where we went that night. I don’t know what we took with us, but it couldn’t have been much.
A few days later I went back out to Owl Farm with a policeman to get some of my things. Even now, that police escort is surreal. A police escort to my own home? Did my mother request this? What did the police think was going to happen? That he would try to prevent me from taking my clothes as he had tried to stop my mother?
It got even stranger as we approached the driveway. I saw police cars parked along the road, and police scattered across the hillside, some with rifles, as if this was a hostage situation with a lunatic gunman. Did they think Hunter was going to break out the kitchen window, shove a high-powered rifle barrel through the opening, and start shooting wildly? Sure, my father was weird. Sure, he loved guns, and yes, he had a ferocious temper and a capacity for real cruelty. But a SWAT team on the hillside? Even in my rage at and fear of my father, I knew he would not hurt me. I didn’t want to have to talk to him that day, I hated him, I was terrified of him, but I was never afraid he would hurt me. The much more likely problem was the presence of lots of armed policemen around his house. I can’t imagine anything more provocative than surrounding his house with police sharpshooters, except maybe kicking in the front door and dragging him to jail. Fortunately, he wasn’t at home. He must have been warned by friends of the situation and seen the wisdom of sidestepping the whole crazy scene. I quickly got my clothes, got back in the police car, and returned to my mother in town.
That was it, the final separation and the end of our life as a family, such as we were. Sandy and I moved into Aspen, eventually renting a house in the West End with a roommate while Hunter stayed at Owl Farm. Life was the same in many ways, and yet totally different. I still attended the Community School on the mesa overlooking my home, but now I took the bus from Aspen. I had the same friends, but now we played in Aspen instead of out in the country. In the afternoon I took the bus into Aspen. As we turned the corner onto the main road, I could see my old driveway out the window and watch it recede. There were still men in our new home in Aspen, but they were roommates or my mother’s boyfriends, not my father. And they were nice men, calm and attentive, who didn’t yell and break things in the middle of the night.
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
HST TIMELINE
1978 HST and Sandy Thompson separate, initiate divorce proceedings.
1979 The Great Shark Hunt (compilation) published. Hunter starts spending a lot of time in Key West.
1980 Where the Buffalo Roam movie released. Hunter and Ralph Steadman go to Hawaii to cover the Honolulu Marathon. This adventure becomes the book The Curse of Lono.
1981 HST starts working on a novel, The Silk Road, based on the Mariel Boatlift. This book is never completed.
1982 The Curse of Lono published.
PAUL RUBIN was my drama coach in eighth and ninth grades at the Aspen Community School. He directed such ambitious school plays as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Blues for Mister Charlie with a cast of completely inexperienced eight-to-fourteen-year-olds. He told me that one day he and Hunter were at the Jerome Bar, and Hunter told him that my birthday was coming up and asked Paul if he had any idea what I might like. Paul told him that during breaks from rehearsals for our current play a bunch of the kids played catch, and that perhaps a baseball glove might be a good thing, since I didn’t have one. Hunter thanked him, walked down to Carl’s Pharmacy, and bought a baseball glove for me. On my birthday he gave it to me. Hunter saw Paul afterward and told him that I looked at the glove, tried it on, took it off, and said, “I’m left-handed.”
I don’t remember this at all. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was some other kid. Other people’s memories are no more reliable than mine. Hunter would no doubt remember it, because he remembered nearly everything, but I can’t ask him now. Assuming it’s true, though, it sums up where things stood. We had a long way to go.
Divorce proceedings began, which would drag on for the next five years. For the first couple of years Sandy would tell me about the rotten things Hunter and his lawyer were doing to her. I was a willing audience. None of his tactics or offenses surprised me, they only confirmed what I knew: that he was a bad, bad man. At one point there was talk of me testifying in divorce court, but thankfully that never came to pass. Thankfully also, there was never a custody battle. Hunter and Sandy had agreed from the start that I would live with my mother and see Hunter if and when I wished.
And for the next couple of years I did not wish to see him. At the same time my mother began dating and this brought new father figures into my life.
In one sense, my parents’ divorce was the best thing that could have happened to my relationship with Hunter. For one thing, there were no more of those nightmarish fights. Sandy would gripe and bitch now and then about Hunter’s lawyers and his resistance to meeting her demands, but this was mild. Yes, it helped to confirm that Hunter was a bastard, but in a distant and abstract way, as opposed to being in the room while they fought and watching my father use his whole array of psychological weapons to beat my mother down to a sobbing wreck.
His absence also revealed to me my need for a father.
I was grateful, on one hand, to get out of that house full of hatred, desperation, and misery, but it was also my home. In those last years at Owl Farm, I was happiest when I was away from it. Once I left for good, though, I was drawn back to it. It was the place where I grew up. I knew the house and the land intimately. It was always my real home, whether I was living in Aspen, Carbondale, Boston, England, or Boulder. It was home in a different sense of the word, in the sense of my roots, rather than my dwelling. I didn’t want to live there with Hunter, but I always wanted to be able to return. I still do.
What had changed was that he and I could no longer take each other’s presence for granted in the hope that somehow a real and living relationship of mutual love and respect would magically spring up between us as long as we lived in the same house. Once we were separated, I longed to be with him, though once there, neither he nor I knew what to do.
When I did see him, I remember how strange it was to be back in the house as a guest, and yet it was sti
ll my home. For a while my room remained unchanged. It was like being a ghost, returning after a sudden death to haunt the places that I had lived, seeking, in accordance with some deep natural law beyond appeal, some kind of resolution or undoing of the past. As the house changed gradually (my room was turned into a guest room, a piece of furniture changed now and then, sometimes a whole room changed), I would still seek out those places and things that tied me to the time when I had lived there. For years and years I would at some point during my visit go into the basement, into the big, dark storage room beneath the kitchen, and browse among memories. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was reminiscing, revisiting toys, books, tools, musical instruments, anything that had been part of our home up until our separation and that could link me back to that time.
When I went to visit, Hunter would make an effort to be available. And I was no longer trying to reduce my visibility as an accidental or convenient target. I was there to see my father. Therefore we had to have something to do. One activity we did together was clean guns. He had many guns and he shot most of them frequently. Cleaning them was laborious but necessary. It became a bonding ritual between us that lasted up until the day of his death.
It began one movie night, another ritual that gave us a reason to be together. It was the three of us, Hunter, myself, and Laila Nabulsi, his lovely, young live-in girlfriend and later fiancée. They never married, but she lived at Owl Farm for several years and played an important part in both stabilizing Hunter after the divorce and helping Hunter and me begin to move toward each other.
Stories I Tell Myself Page 6