Hunter would set up the TV in the living room on a rolling cart, select a classic movie, often a Bogart film, turn the lights off, and we would enjoy some quality family time. Before one of these nights Hunter brought out a couple of guns and said that they needed to be cleaned. He gathered up the cleaning supplies—solvent, cleaning pads, brushes, rods, and gun oil—and proceeded to teach me. We started with a pistol that Hunter disassembled and then passed the pieces to me to clean. He would clean one gun while I worked on another. He patiently explained the proper way to clean the parts, and how to disassemble and reassemble the guns. I was anxious to learn, anxious to please, and honored to be taking part in the ritual of gun cleaning, which was unmistakably a kind of rite of passage. Looking back on it, there was a lot in common between learning to clean the guns and learning to turn a winch, reef a sail, or scrub the icebox on the boat with Jimmy Buffett. Except in this case, it was my real father teaching me, not a stand-in. I was determined to do it just right and cleaned each piece as thoroughly as I possibly could. After I finished with each piece, Hunter would examine it and pronounce it good, or point out an area I had missed. I was happy for any kind of patient attention from Hunter, even if it involved pointing out my mistakes. By the end of the movie that night we would have had a couple of guns clean and oiled, and Hunter would put them away.
Many years later when Jennifer, Will, and I would go to visit him at Owl Farm, he would tell me within minutes that there were guns to clean since my last visit. I did not ask if I could clean them, he did not ask me to clean them. At some point in the evening I might say something like, “Time to clean some guns,” and Hunter would say, “Good! Clean that nickel-plated twelve-gauge, it’s filthy.” I would ask if there were any others to be added to the list. As he got older I think he stopped cleaning the guns, yet he still felt a gun owner’s guilt for not taking care of them properly. I know he was delighted when I would clean them, both because I clearly appreciated them, and because he could let himself off the hook for at least that one small thing.
Sometimes we would shoot. I remember shooting clay pigeons together. I remember cartons of yellow or orange clay pigeons on the porch, and Hunter and his friends shooting while someone flung them with a handheld launcher. Later the yard and the field beyond it were littered with fragments of clay pigeons.
Shooting was something that bound us. I don’t know what kind of boy Hunter had expected, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t what he had in mind. He was fascinated by sports and had been since he was a boy. I had no interest in sports. He was very social, drank too much, raised hell, and got laid. I was quiet and shy, got drunk a few times a year with some friends, and was most definitely a virgin.
The guns connected us. I love the power of guns and the elegance and precision of the engineering, especially in the revolvers and side-by-side shotguns. The machining is so fine, the fit of the parts so precise, the movement of the parts so smooth. The gun itself can be a work of art, whatever you might think about its purpose, usefulness, or danger. For an admirer of the mechanical craft, a well-made gun is a thing of beauty. Hunter shared this appreciation for the machine itself. As I got older I came to appreciate the power, particularly of large handguns such as the Ruger .44 Magnum and the Freedom Arms .454 Casull.
What do fathers want most from their sons? Do we only want them to be happy? Do we want them to be like us? Do we want forgiveness? Do we want them to be better than us in love, work, money, fatherhood? Do we want to be loved by our sons? Is it enough that they want to still talk to us when they grow up? I don’t know what my father wanted from me. He was happy when I graduated with honors from college; he was happy when I got married to a woman he respected; he was thrilled when my son came along. I know he was glad I was able to support myself and that I wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict. I know he needed my forgiveness.
I don’t know what he wanted. And yet, it’s so terribly important to me to believe that I didn’t let him down. He’s dead, I’m in middle age, and it’s still very important. Will there be a time when I can say it doesn’t matter what my father thought of me? I don’t think so, not today. I see it in my own son. He doesn’t want to disappoint me, wants me to be proud of him, so much so that he won’t tell me things that he thinks might upset me. I tell him that he can tell me anything and I’m not going to get angry at him, but he doesn’t always believe me. I ask myself if I have done anything to make him fear me or think I would disapprove. Maybe it’s just the nature of fathers and sons.
As Hunter and I began the long, long road to reconciliation, the separation and move into Aspen brought new father figures into my life. Sandy dated a nice man, Bill, who owned an art gallery in Aspen. He would come for dinner and stay the night. We spent a Christmas together. He paid attention to me. He was calm and thoughtful. When they stopped dating I was sorry to see him go.
After Bill there was Don, with whom we ended up living for the next few years. Don was more like an older brother than a father. He was probably around thirty and Sandy was forty. He was funny, lighthearted, earnest, and he knew how to have fun. We took to each other right away. When I talked to him for this book, he said that he came over for dinner one night while Bill was out of town, and never left. The next morning Sandy went to work and Don and I sat at the dining room table playing a game with a little folded-up triangle of paper in which we would try to flick the triangle through the goalposts of the other person’s fingers. We didn’t talk much, just played this game for an hour or so. It must have been a very uncomfortable situation. As far as I knew, Bill was the boyfriend, and suddenly here’s this new guy who spent the night and he and I are alone while Sandy goes off to work. Sandy did not explain why he was there, or what was going to happen when Bill returned, or how Don fit into our lives.
Fortunately we got along well. Sandy broke up with Bill and Don essentially moved in, though he kept his apartment for a while. We went camping in his old Toyota Land Cruiser, went sledding in the winter, had picnics in the summer. On weekend mornings we went out to breakfast and read the papers. One day after a particularly large snowstorm we jumped out the second-story window into the deep snow in the backyard, over and over again, laughing and laughing.
Hunter didn’t talk to me about Sandy or Don when I went to visit him, but apparently he knew about him. Don told me a story about the first time that he met Hunter, when he discovered that she was still married, and to, of all people, the infamous Hunter Thompson. Early in their relationship, he and Sandy were awakened late one night by an insistent pounding on the door. Sandy went to the door and found Hunter there, very angry, with a shotgun in his hand. She and Hunter argued for a while until Don couldn’t stand it any longer and went to try to help her. He saw Hunter with the shotgun, walked up to him, put two fingers in the barrel, and slowly took it away from him. The crisis was defused, and after a bit more talk, Hunter left and Sandy and Don returned to bed. I think there were very few people who had the courage to take a gun away from an angry Hunter S. Thompson. I also am sure that the gun was not loaded.
Though I didn’t see Hunter much during those years, Don did tell me about a time when I met him and Sandy in Honduras after staying with Hunter for a week or so in the Florida Keys. He said that I arrived traumatized and withdrawn from that visit, and that it took several days for me to unwind. Taking LSD with Don and floating in the bay at night off the shore of a Honduran island may have helped that process.
With Sandy and Don Stuber in 1978. Don was like my fun, kind, gentle older brother.
It was with Don that I first took LSD, aka acid, when I was around fourteen. Like many people in the ’70s, he was interested in Eastern spirituality, and this shaped his approach to taking acid. Like Hunter, Don approached acid as a ceremonial drug, not a party drug. My first time was with Sandy, Don, my best friend Brad Laboe, and me. We had a ceremony before taking the acid. I remember putting the acid blotters on a pillow and sitting on the floor. There may have been candles. Ther
e was certainly a sense of respect and solemnity as we embarked on this new journey. Don, Brad, and I took the acid and Sandy remained straight. She was to be the trip master, the one adult who was straight, who could take care of things when needed, not to mention drive. We went to the Glenwood Springs hot springs pool that night. It may have been wintertime, so the steam would have been thick over the pool and there were few people there. As trip master, Sandy took care of mundane things like paying admission, keeping track of the car, handling the ordering of food when we went to a restaurant after swimming. It was a wonderful, magical experience. We laughed and laughed, had insights, discovered new things or saw them in new ways. Another time Sandy, Don, Brad, and I went to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. We all took acid and while Sandy and Don lay on the ground and listened to the music, Brad and I went wandering around the festival grounds and the town with a notebook, the “Acid Notebook.” I remember at the time we were overflowing with insights. I also remember that when we looked at the notebook the next day, it made no sense whatsoever.
When I told my wife, Jennifer, about these experiences years later, she was appalled, both by the fact that at fourteen I was taking acid, and worse, that my mother was actively supporting it. I also remember hearing that someone once asked Hunter at a lecture how he would react if he found out his son had taken acid. He responded, “I’d beat the shit out of him.” I did not talk to Hunter about my drug use then or in fact ever. And he never asked. He didn’t want to know.
Don and I were good friends. He was the opposite of Hunter in almost every way I can think of. He was safe, he listened, I never saw him lose his temper. He laughed a lot. We did things together all the time. He did not have separate worlds that he would move back and forth between with little or no communication between them. He didn’t forget birthdays; he drank occasionally but not heavily or regularly. He was kind. He didn’t care for sports. He was up on the latest music and introduced us to a new realm, called “new wave,” whereas Hunter, though also a music lover, was rooted in the music of the ’60s and ’70s with an emphasis on rock, southern rock, jazz, and folk, people like Joan Baez, The Rolling Stones, Herbie Mann, Bob Dylan, and The Allman Brothers Band. Don liked to dance, and he and Sandy would often go to the local disco. Though he aspired to be a professional photographer, his day job was fine woodwork in Aspen. He didn’t travel for his job, he went to work in the morning and returned in the evening. He went to sleep before midnight and was up by seven a.m. A couple of years later I worked for him one summer as an apprentice and he taught me the rudiments of fine carpentry. He had a job I could see, the results were tangible, and it didn’t consume his life. I don’t know if he and Sandy discussed it, but it seems now that he had decided he would not try to take on the role of a father, but be a friend instead. And he did that extremely well. He gave me attention, love, friendship, stability, and safety at a time when I desperately needed it. Hunter was my father, physically, spiritually, and mythologically, but we were not friends. Don was not my father, but he was my friend.
During those teenage years when I was living in Aspen I started doing stupid things. My friends and I got the idea to go out on a weekend night and cause trouble. We began by drinking. If we were at a friend’s house we would sneak the booze from the liquor cabinet, but if we were at my house there was no need to be secretive. We would announce that we were going out, and then pour a drink, sometimes with Sandy and Don joining us.
Then my friends and I went out. At first, walking through the alleys on our way downtown, we were intrigued by the main electrical cutoff switches on the apartment buildings. We discussed them, then examined them and found that very few were locked. We made our getaway plans, then one of us grabbed the switch and pulled it down. There was a clunk as the switch disengaged, and then all the lights in the building went off. We ran like hell, cranked up on adrenaline and fear. Several blocks away, gasping for air, we reveled in our cleverness. We kept this up for a few months, just a few buildings at a time, and not every weekend, maybe once a month. One night, we walked through the alley behind a very popular disco, the Paragon. We had become attuned to the presence of main cutoff switches and noticed the Paragon’s. There was no lock. We planned the route. The music was loud, the simple thump of the disco beat was like a heartbeat. One of us grabbed the big handle and pulled down. The music suddenly stopped. There was a second of silence, and then the sound of a hundred voices all crying out in fear and confusion at once. We split and scattered, meeting up again several blocks away. No one followed us. We were very proud of ourselves. Over the next week we heard from others how the Paragon had gone dark Saturday night, and we were even more pleased. Several weeks later we decided it would be safe to do it again. We did not realize that we had inspired a rash of copycat shutoffs, and that the Paragon management was now prepared.
Again we laid out our plan and pulled the switch. This time, within a couple of seconds, two bouncers burst out the back door and took off after us. Our escape route was not well planned. We ran into a drugstore nearby and stood, panting, in the aisle. A bouncer followed us in, grabbed us, and marched us over to the police station. As we walked, he lectured us on the dangers of what we had done: Did we realize we were putting lives at risk? What if there had been a surgery in progress somewhere in the building? Had we thought of that? This struck me as a bad example, but it was not the time to point this out. The officer on duty threatened to call our parents. He must have seen the look of fear on our faces, because he relented, and said that because we were first offenders he would let us off, but that he better never see us again in that office. It worked. We stayed far away from the Paragon and cutoff switches in general.
Instead, we moved to petty vandalism. One night we started bending car antennas. We were a bit drunk and maybe stoned, and it was funny. We either broke them off if they were the hollow extending type, or bent them into shapes if they were the solid, flexible type. It was late and there was no one on the street in these neighborhoods, so we hit a lot of cars that night. Over that summer we did this several times and once it even appeared in the police blotter of the local newspaper. We graduated to bending windshield wipers back on themselves, so that they were facing the sky rather than the window. Every now and then we would turn off the power to a house, or move a small car into the middle of a quiet street. We thought those were funny pranks too, and we were never caught.
That was our last summer of vandalism. Maybe it was the ugly pointlessness of it, maybe the promptings of our consciences became sufficiently strong, or maybe I got over my need to rebel against being a good boy. Whatever the reason, thankfully we stopped.
Hunter never did find out. For all his wildness and crazy pranks, I know that if he had found out I was up to such petty, stupid mischief he would have been furious (though the Paragon he might have appreciated—once), and worse, he would have been disappointed. He appreciated smart jokes with a purpose, but not dumb vandalism. That was for half-bright punks with no imagination and nothing worthwhile to say. As he wrote to a young fan, Dale, after the publication of Hell’s Angels, who wrote to tell him he wanted to be a Hells Angel: “They’re not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They’re just Old Punks….[who are] not bright enough to create their own scene….” His parting advice to Dale was “Be an outlaw…but do it your own way, for your own reasons…” He might have added, “and for the right reasons.” There was nothing smart, funny, brave, or original about wandering around Aspen half drunk bending antennas and wipers, though it seemed that way at the time. I’m still ashamed of it.
I was also preparing for high school. I never seriously considered staying in Aspen. I wanted to go to boarding school, an East Coast boarding school. I had grand ideas as a boy about the life I wanted to lead, or more accurately the way I wanted it to look, and I knew for sure that Aspen High School was not part of that picture. That was the jungle where kids lived by the Law of Claw and Fang, and where smart, short, shy kids with
bowl haircuts—full-fledged nerds such as myself—got teased, picked on, and occasionally beat up. I wanted to be part of a higher, finer world with large, old houses filled with fine, expensive, delicate things, with vast, perfectly trimmed green lawns sloping down to a lake or an ocean or a thick green forest. Aspen in the ’70s was a rural, small western ski town with a pinch of academia courtesy of The Aspen Institute, and a hefty dose of Haight-Ashbury’s rejection of all norms and rules. I wanted something completely different. I wanted to be elegant, rich, aristocratic, and traditional.
This is just what Hunter had grown up with and then fled from in Louisville. His friends at the Athenaeum Literary Association embodied these qualities as scions of wealthy old Louisville families, bound for Ivy League colleges and then to careers in law, business, or government, absolutely soaked in traditions, elegance, and wealth. Hunter had a paradoxical relationship with tradition. On one hand he was a breaker of icons, traditions, and beliefs. On the other hand he was a southern gentleman who grew up in a comfortable middle-class Kentucky home where he learned the essential rules of polite southern society. Hunter had disdain for a life lived according to social expectations, yet he was angry when, upon meeting some friends of his, I did not shake hands and take part in the ritual of greeting. He did not realize that I was completely ignorant of these rituals, being brought up with no training in manners whatsoever.
Though Hunter approved of a certain amount of tradition, he certainly didn’t endorse elite education. He had barely graduated from Louisville Male High School because of his lack of interest and never had much good to say about formal schooling. My mother had gone to a Quaker boarding school on Long Island but she rarely mentioned it since it referred to the privileged Long Island upbringing that she had repudiated. Her father and brother had both gone to Choate Rosemary Hall but at that time she had nothing but contempt for both of them, establishment bourgeoisie that they were. I had decided to apply to some of the best, most exclusive boarding schools: Andover, Groton, and Concord Academy. Sandy and I went east that summer of 1978 to look at schools. We looked at a bunch, Andover and Concord being my favorites. I did my interviews, sent in my applications, and waited until spring.
Stories I Tell Myself Page 7