Stories I Tell Myself

by Juan F. Thompson

  I ended up getting accepted to both Andover and Concord Academy. I picked Concord. I told Sandy, but I never told Hunter directly. I never asked for his advice. But then I had never asked for his advice in the past. We were not friends, and he had neither the familiarity with my life nor the authority to give me advice. Looking at it now, it is a shame that we knew each other so little at that point. I wish it had been otherwise. I wish I had asked his advice. I think now he would have said going East was a terrible idea, that I didn’t belong there, and that where I went to school didn’t say a damn thing about me. But I had to find out for myself.

  I went to Concord Academy, and it was hell. I was short, about five feet, with a bowl haircut, and wearing things like plaid shirts with turtlenecks, corduroys, and canvas sneakers. I showed up the first day at Concord wearing jeans and a down vest. My roommates wore oxford button-downs and penny loafers. I had no training in manners or socializing. I was truly a stranger in a strange land. I had just come from a tiny private school where my graduating ninth-grade class consisted of eight other students with whom I shared all classes and activities. That school was essentially a giant log cabin in the middle of hay fields on the mesa next to Owl Farm. We went on several backpacking trips each year, some for up to ten days through the mountains of Colorado. The last year Brad and I had studied bomb-making with George Stranahan, the physicist and benefactor of the school, and had successfully set off a large pipe bomb packed with gunpowder in a gopher hole outside the school. On our last camping trip before graduation, all the eighth and ninth graders sat in a circle and each person told every other person in the circle what they appreciated about them, something that took several hours and was very emotional. Though I was shy by nature, I knew these people so well, and the school was so small, that there was no room for shyness. Since we had the same two teachers for every class and almost every activity, the students were very close to the teachers. We were like a family. My ninth-grade diploma was mimeographed, and the school director gave us each a small sapling as a graduation gift.

  From here I went to Concord, Massachusetts, a small and wealthy New England town just outside of Boston. Concord and nearby Lexington were the sites of the first battles in the Revolutionary War, the site of Walden Pond, and the residence of Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others. The town is still over 90 percent white with a median family income of $115,000. In addition to Concord Academy, there was one other prep school as well as two private schools for the lower grades, one of which was all-boys and the other all-girls after third grade. The countryside itself was foreign. It was flat, and lush with trees, bushes, and flowers. I had never seen so many huge leafy trees. There was no mountain horizon, just trees. The houses were old and delicate colonial homes of clapboard or brick, not the ranch or farmhouses I was used to. Concord was a perfect example of the traditional New England elitism that I was seeking—and that I had absolutely nothing in common with.

  Hunter apparently understood that this transition was going to be difficult for me. He contacted his good friends, Richard and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who lived in Concord a few miles from the school. Hunter arranged for me to be able to visit them on weekends if I needed friends or a place to go. I am sure now that he also wanted someone to keep an eye on me and let him know how I was doing. He did the same thing three years later when I returned to Boston to attend Tufts University.

  Sandy flew to Concord with me and helped me get established. In the dorm I shared a large room with two roommates. Sandy bought furnishings so that my corner of the room was marked off by a carpet and a bookshelf. I had brought my computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80, and set it up on the bookshelf. I had no idea how to deal with these two foreigners in my room. I tried to ignore them, and they left me alone, though at least once one of them invited me to join him and some of his friends for ice cream. I declined. One day I came into the room and saw a few people standing around my computer and using it. I angrily chased them off. I spent my days in isolation. One day there was a trip to the beach for all the new students. I went, because I had to, and I found a large rock some distance from the rest of the kids and read my book (I was working through Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy) for the entire afternoon. I’m sure I read on the bus ride both ways so I could avoid talking to anyone. At meals I read my book in solitude. After classes I read my book before and after doing my homework. I had no social skills and no confidence. I was utterly, pathetically lonely and homesick. I would call my mother daily and plead with her to let me come home. She finally told me that I would have to talk to Hunter.

  I remember calling him one afternoon from a phone booth in downtown Concord, down the street from the school. I told him how miserable I was and how I wanted to come back to Aspen. He tried to convince me to stick it out. He said this was the predictable homesickness that most kids feel when they go away for the first time, and he said it would pass. I begged him, I sobbed, I pleaded, I told him I couldn’t do it. We talked for a long time. Finally he agreed to let me come home.

  This is one of those questions I wish I could ask him now. Why did you agree to let me come home? Did you understand how completely unprepared I was to be away from home? What do you think would have happened if you had insisted that I stay for the entire year? Who did you think I was then?

  I was fifteen, it was 1979, and Hunter was with Laila. As part of my research for this book, I asked Laila what she remembered. She said that Hunter wanted me to have a good education, and that he was upset at the prospect of losing at least $5,000 in tuition, but that he understood how difficult it must have been for me, an only and very sensitive child, to be so far away from home only a year or so after the collapse of our family, and in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. It may be that he understood me better than I did, that he knew or suspected that it was too much for me to handle two such major ordeals in such a short time.

  I had never considered that possibility until Laila told me. How ironic that he, who hardly spoke to me, whom I saw so rarely, who had played virtually no part in the major decisions affecting my life, should comprehend my predicament better than I did, and that only now, decades later, after his death, I should come to have compassion for that boy who was going through very difficult times.

  There is no knowing what would have happened had I stayed, but odds are I would have remained utterly miserable until the end of that school year and then refused to return the following year. Furthermore, I was melded with my mother. I could not imagine daily life without her. In contrast, I have watched my son gradually distance himself, one tiny step at a time, from his mother. When he was six he was able to tolerate separations that at four would not have been possible. As he has become a teenager, he is more likely to disagree with her, to risk her anger. He is not gregarious, but he reaches out into the world with more and more confidence and can stand alone. I did not have that confidence. I was my mother’s confidant, her trusted, devoted, attentive, and sympathetic friend who needed her desperately. In turn, she was my biggest fan and cheerleader, the one person who loved me completely. How could I live without her?

  After getting Hunter’s assent, I started marking off the days. In order to get a tuition refund, I had to stay until a certain date. On that day, Hunter came to pick me up. I remember that it was mid-morning and there was nobody in the dorm. I quickly packed up my things and loaded them into the rental car, hoping that no one would see me. I didn’t tell my roommates; one morning I just disappeared. I never regretted leaving, though I tried the eastern experiment again for college three years later with marginally better success.

  After Concord, I ended up as a day student at a private prep school in Carbondale, Colorado, called Colorado Rocky Mountain School, or CRMS, about thirty miles down-valley from Aspen. Sandy, Don, and I moved into a brand-new subdivision about a mile from school. It was a small ranch house in the classic suburban mold. Each day I would walk across pastures and climb the fences between th
e subdivision and school while Sandy and Don commuted to Aspen.

  My experience at Concord was the result of a brutal collision between my fantasies of East Coast elitism and the reality of who I was and where I came from. CRMS was a much more suitable fit for many reasons. It was thirty miles from Aspen, which made my transition easier. I was a day student, so I had the pleasure of living with Sandy and Don another year. Finally, it was a different kind of school. It had been founded in the ’60s as “an antidote to modern easy living.” A ranch had been converted into a school, which the students had had a large part in building. Twice a week for two hours after classes all students were assigned to small groups that took care of some aspect of school maintenance, from cooking to washing dishes to fixing machinery to caulking the cracks in the old wooden buildings. The other three days we had a sport of some kind, from horseback riding to cross-country skiing to kayaking and soccer. In addition, every student was responsible for an assigned job. My best friend at CRMS, Stevens, was once on hog-feeding duty at six every morning in the winter. I once had bathroom-cleaning duty for a semester. These weren’t punishments, they were jobs that needed to be done and the founders of the school felt that it was important for character development that the students do them. Finally, like my previous school, we did lots of backpacking in Colorado and Utah. Though I was still shy, I was able to make a friend in the first couple of weeks, and by the end of the year I was a part of the school community.

  That year with Don and Sandy was, in a word, comfort. We went to breakfast every Saturday at the Village Smithy, a popular local restaurant in Carbondale. There were no arguments, no fights, no yelling. We went camping in Utah and took acid together several more times. The living room of our subdivision house was carpeted, with large bright windows. I loved to sit on the new carpet in the sun and read.

  By the end of that year, though, the lease was up and my mother and Don were tired of living in a subdivision and commuting thirty miles each way to Aspen. We moved back to Aspen that summer and in the fall of 1980 I returned to CRMS, this time as a boarding student. I was apprehensive about boarding, but now it didn’t seem quite so scary. I heard much later from Sandy that Hunter said at the time that I became a boarding student, “Best thing that could have happened to him.” I didn’t understand at the time how true that was. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I saw that it was my first major step of independence from my mother and a step toward my father.

  Hunter was paying far more attention to me than I thought. But if he was paying attention, why didn’t he intervene occasionally? Maybe he did. Maybe he talked to my mother and told her to do this, to stop doing that. Maybe she listened, and maybe she did not. And maybe he did not intervene because he didn’t trust himself, or because he was preoccupied with his own life. He was a self-centered man.

  It was around this time that Deborah Fuller, who was to play such an important role in Hunter’s life and in mine, entered the scene. Sandy and I had stayed with Deb and her teenage daughter, Kristine, for a summer in Aspen, in a large house she took care of. Through Sandy she met Hunter and began running errands for him for some extra cash. She was a very organized, very competent woman, a few years younger than Hunter, and within a year she was working for Hunter full-time, paying bills, buying groceries, organizing travel, and generally managing the day-to-day aspects of Hunter’s life. She began doing the work for money, but over time she became a part of Hunter’s life, and she took care of Hunter not because he paid her, but because she loved him, and he loved her. It was as if they were married, except it was not a romantic or a sexual relationship, it was a deep friendship that endured through many, many women and many hard times. I remember thinking often that it was as if Hunter was a polygamist, and Deb was the First Wife who had relinquished the conjugal duties to the younger women, yet had the longest history and the deepest bond with Hunter. The young women came and went, and Deb was always there, keeping Hunter’s life on track, friendly with the women but loyal finally to Hunter. They were not lovers, they were not husband and wife, they were partners for twenty-four years. No one knew Hunter better in the daily manifestations of his complexity, and loved him more in spite of himself, than Deb. Hunter would not have made it to sixty-seven without her, and he and I would not have had the time we needed to find each other. Deb made that possible.

  That winter Hunter proposed an assignment to Running magazine to cover the Honolulu Marathon. He and Ralph Steadman, along with Laila and Ralph’s wife, Anna, rented a couple of houses in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, and Hunter invited me to join them for Christmas.

  I flew to L.A., stayed the night in the Hollywood Hills with Hunter’s director friend Bob Rafelson, and flew to Hawaii the next day. The houses were right on the beach, or more accurately, the lava rock. Hawaii has two active volcanoes that periodically erupt and create huge tongues of slow-moving lava that creep down the sides of the mountains to the ocean, and then harden. This had apparently happened at one time where the houses were, because where the ocean met the land there was nothing but spiny black rock that only a fool would venture onto without thick shoes. A fall would result in serious lacerations. God help anyone who fell in the water and was caught between the surf and the lava. As Hunter documented in his book based on his time in Hawaii, The Curse of Lono, the weather was lousy. Large waves pounded the rock day and night.

  I stayed for about two weeks. Ralph and Anna had already gone home, so it was just the three of us: Hunter, Laila, and me. It was uncharacteristically peaceful. I don’t remember any crises, but a few memories stand out.

  Fireworks were plentiful in Kona and Hunter had several “bombs,” which consisted of five thousand firecrackers woven together into a belt that was rolled up into a disk more than a foot across and wrapped in bright red paper. During my stay I detached many from the end of one belt and set them off one by one, as I used to do when I was a boy at Owl Farm, blowing up plastic model cars, trucks, dirt hills, cans, anything that could be effectively ruptured. One night Hunter, Laila, myself, and several other people were having dinner at a seaside restaurant in Kona. I had a firecracker in my pocket, and I was feeling clever. While the rest of the people were talking, I took it from my pocket and pulled the fuse out of the body of the firecracker and attached it to the outside. I lit the fuse, and said, “Hey, Hunter! Here!” and threw the firecracker to him so that it landed in his lap, the little fuse sparkling. He cursed and frantically tried to brush it away before it exploded. But because the fuse was taped to the outside, it didn’t explode, the fuse just burned to the end and stopped.

  He had fallen for it, in front of other people, and he wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t yell or curse, but he didn’t laugh either. He may have said, “You little bastard!” or flashed me that sudden artificial smile that was playful and yet slightly menacing. I remember thinking at the time that he was much better at being the originator of practical jokes than the recipient of them. It may have been a matter of pride. It was rare for him to be taken in; he was almost always the smartest guy in the room. I think he was also a little proud, though, that his son had been the one to do it.

  My best memory from that trip is of golfing. One morning Hunter said, “Let’s go golfing.” I knew nothing about golf, Hunter knew that, but it was a chance for my father and me to spend some time together.

  That morning we drove up the coast to a golf course. I don’t remember seeing anyone else the entire time we were there. Hunter was pretty good, it seemed to me. He had played a fair amount as a kid in Louisville. I was hopeless, but that didn’t matter. We were walking along lush green fairways that bordered cliffs that dropped down several hundred feet into the ocean. The morning was warm but not hot, the sky was clear and the air was hazy with humidity, soothing, and dreamlike. Hunter would give me pointers now and then on how to play. Though I’m sure he would have been happy had I been able to swing a club, he didn’t seem to care. He was playing against himself, I was goofing. We
played nine holes in three or four hours and then returned to the shack in Kona.

  We hadn’t had any profound talks in Hawaii, just quiet and unhurried time together, probably for the first time in many years, going back to before the bad years leading up to my parents’ divorce. I’m sure there were questions he wanted to ask, and I could have asked him questions too, but I was just happy to be with my father when he was calm and patient, and I am sure that he didn’t want to risk breaking the delicate filaments of connection that we were creating together on that trip, only somewhat consciously, with questions that could easily lead to anger, tears, and further distance. It was sacred time.

  —

  I WAS NOW at boarding school full-time and Sandy had embarked on a round-the-world tour that ended up lasting several years, with only occasional returns to the States. Hunter was paying my tuition on time for the most part. However, one day, several months into the school year, I was called to the headmaster’s office and told that my father had not yet paid my tuition, and that if he did not do so immediately I would be kicked out. I felt a chill as I took it in. This had become my home. The notion of living with Hunter never even occurred to me—that would have been utter madness. In the past few years I had come to know and love the calm, the predictability, the stability of life without the grand drama of verbal death matches, imminent financial ruin, wild mood swings, and the ever-present fear of sudden outbursts of rage at any time.