Stories I Tell Myself

by Juan F. Thompson

  I was very afraid of losing my new life, and I was also not surprised. By the time I was ten or so I had understood that Hunter was irresponsible when it came to money. When I was still at Owl Farm there was always the background threat of creditors and not enough money. It seemed that he always owed the IRS back taxes. Every so often it would come to a head, there would be a scramble to come up with the money before something terrible happened, and then the threat would go away for a few years. Credit cards were always coming and going—charged up, ignored, canceled, paid off, and then reissued. I don’t know how many times American Express canceled and then later reissued a card to Hunter, but it seems like dozens.

  I was furious that his irresponsibility was threatening the stability of my life, not just his. I called him immediately and conveyed the threat from my headmaster. He promised to pay.

  And he did. I did not hear from the headmaster again. In fact, what strikes me now is that this happened so infrequently. I’m sure he was late with tuition payments often, but that was the only time it escalated to the point that I became aware of it. I realize now that those sizable tuition payments were a high priority to him, right up there with the mortgage, the IRS, his cocaine bill, and the Grog Shop liquor tab. As I read his letters from that time, I realize that he was in a serious money crunch, between his debts, a pending divorce settlement, and little income. His correspondence with others around this time consists mostly of schemes to make money quickly, either by selling book ideas or selling part of Owl Farm. I now appreciate how serious he was about my education.

  My perception of my father was characterized by duality. It was as if I saw my father through glasses whose lenses were two different colors. There was the rose lens, the hero lens, and there was the dark gray lens. Through the rose lens I saw Hunter as the young, brilliant, brave, romantic, adventurous hero, and for all my talk of wanting to be different, I wished I could be like him, my hero father. I read Hell’s Angels in high school and I thought his description, at the end of the book, of driving the motorcycle down Highway 101 in the middle of the night was not only brilliantly written, but romantic, secret, and wonderful. I wanted that kind of life, and not only was Hunter writing about it, he was my father. Surely I had that potential in me, didn’t I?

  However, through the other lens I saw the raging monster, the man I could not count on, the man who burst into unpredictable fits of rage or who would yell suddenly for no good reason at all. This was the father who never paid his bills, who was never home, who cheated on my mother, and lied to the police.

  I knew that he was both men, but I could only focus on one at a time. When people would ask me about him, I saw in my mind my hero father, a handsome young man who went seeking adventure on his motorcycle in the cool San Francisco nights, romancing beautiful women, having thoughtful and profound conversations with his friends while smoking a cigarette and looking out over the ocean, and then returning to his apartment to write, pipe clenched in his teeth, until the morning sun shone in through the window.

  In private, though, when he let me down, I was ashamed of him, and I was filled with bitterness.

  This duality persisted. Combining the two fantasies into one person was too complicated, too ambiguous, too paradoxical. I wanted a father I could love and adore, or a father I could put away from me for good.

  But that’s not how it works. There was one time in my freshman year at Tufts University in Boston when I was on the phone with Hunter at three a.m. or so. He was suggesting that he might not be able to pay for Tufts next year. However, the way he put it was something like, “You understand that if I have to choose between cigarettes and whiskey or your tuition, I’m going to buy cigarettes and whiskey.” I held that comment against him for a long time. Why would he say such a thing? Perhaps it was a confession, that if it came down to a choice between his primary addictions and my tuition, he would have to choose the booze, not because he wanted to, but because he had to.

  The fact is, though, that he did pay my tuition. When I later read letters from his archive, I saw that I was ignoring the circumstantial evidence, the important evidence. In a letter to Sandy in 1982 (when I was at Tufts) discussing the divorce settlement negotiations, he wrote, “…I intend to ignore [my divorce lawyer] for as long as possible (i.e. until I’m forced to seek legal counsel again). He’s still bitching and Raving about the outrage of sending Juan to a school that costs a lot per year.”

  In another letter to his accountant, he notes that he has not received any parental mail from Tufts, and worries that the university administrators might look on me as a bad credit risk. He emphasizes how important it is that I not be worried by late tuition payments:

  That’s what I want to avoid right now. Juan is going to get enough extra visibility just because he’s my son—and it would be cruel (and maybe even too much pressure for him to handle) if he has to constantly live in fear about whether or not his tuition is paid up.

  So let’s try to spare him these worries—for as long as we possibly can.

  Let’s discuss this on the phone—but, ASAP, because I think it’s very important for Juan’s sake, to reassure the Tufts administration people that Juan is not a potential bad credit problem and that we have taken all the normal and necessary steps to pay his bill on schedule….This initial $5K should get us over the hump—(I think—although I’m not really sure what it’s for)—and I think we should use the occasion of paying it to establish a stable financial image for Juan. Which should probably include a permanent Colorado address for him, so they don’t start wondering.

  OK—let’s put our heads together and do this Tufts thing right, for openers—just to take a nasty load off Juan….Maybe I should get in touch with them personally—or maybe I should fly to Boston and check Juan in, as it were. Hang around for a day or so while he registers, etc….That sounds right to me, but let’s talk about it. (Letter to Mark Lipsky, 8/18/82)

  As I read other letters to his accountant from that period, it became clear that he was under serious financial stress at the time. But he didn’t want me to worry.

  In a letter to Sandy in 1980, he wrote,

  …and what the fuck makes you or anybody else think I want to argue with lawyers about money for the rest of my life? Why wouldn’t I maybe just say “yes”—if you asked? For anything fair….

  Why don’t you just tell me what you want, or yes, what you need to live decently without fouling both our lives with endless haggling. (Juan has always been a separate issue to me. He is my son and I love him and I suspect we sooner or later will get to be good friends….with no help from lawyers.)

  I didn’t see that letter until I started going through Hunter’s papers in 2006.

  In another letter to a friend of his a couple of years later, he asks for a loan of $3,200 to pay my tuition, offering some original Steadman prints as collateral. In this letter he writes that he hopes I will remain ignorant of this loan.

  Relationships are influenced so heavily by what we choose to remember and how we choose to interpret events. I think now that he cared very much, and that it did require a sacrifice, but it never occurred to me to look at the situation through any other lens than the one I was so used to using, the one that filtered out implicit acts of love and highlighted his selfishness and cruelty. Had it occurred to me, I would have begun to see that he loved me in a concrete and meaningful way.

  Unfortunately, it took a long time for me to figure that out.

  In the spring of 1982 it was time to graduate from boarding school. My grandmother Leah came from Florida, along with Sandy. My best friend Stevens Brosnihan and I had bought secondhand zoot suits for the ceremony, which was in a horse pasture along the irrigation ditch. My diploma was a rectangular piece of cowhide with the calligraphic text hand-lettered. I had invited Hunter and Laila, of course, and he assured me that he would come. But on the morning of the ceremony he wasn’t there.

  This was a recurring theme with Hunter and me. I knew not
to expect anything from him, I knew he was extremely unreliable, yet I still felt disappointed when he let me down. I imagined that he had been asleep, or maybe he and Laila had had a fight, or maybe he just couldn’t get himself together in time for the morning ceremony. I was sure that he hadn’t forgotten, though, and I was sure he felt deeply guilty about it. But his guilt was no consolation. He had let me down at a crucial time, and the only conclusion I could draw was that it hadn’t been sufficiently important to him to overcome his resistance, his inertia, his dislike of crowds of people, his exhaustion, or whatever. If the fights between him and my mother demonstrated his capacity for cruelty, this incident demonstrated the extent of his self-centeredness. We never talked about it, he never explained or apologized, I never asked why he hadn’t come. Yet whenever I think of that day I am still angry at him, after forgiving him for so much else.

  And yet that afternoon, after graduation, I went with a few of my friends from CRMS to Owl Farm. They were thrilled to meet Hunter. We shot guns, perhaps even set off a gasoline bomb. I had forgotten that until recently. We remember what we choose to remember.

  That summer I traveled to Turkey with Stevens to see Sandy, who was living in the small town of Kas on the southern coast, and I met my mother’s new boyfriend, William, who was twenty-six, while my mother was around forty-four.

  If Don filled the role of an older brother and confidant, William was sibling and rival. He was a wonderful guy, friendly, kind, funny—but he was only a little older than I was. You don’t have to be a psychologist to see the potential for disaster: I had a mother-son relationship with my mother based on biology, and she and William had a mother-son dynamic based on their age discrepancy. Sandy and I had a very close relationship bordering on the unhealthy. William had a new girlfriend and a rival for her affections. It was complicated. We would alternately have a lot of fun together and snip at each other over inconsequential things, just like siblings. On top of this, my mother was drinking regularly and heavily. I remember one night at a dinner party at a rooftop restaurant in Kas. There were maybe ten people there, and Sandy sat at the head of the table. She got drunk on wine and began telling stories and delivering her opinions in a way that may have been entertaining to the others there, but which I found embarrassing and distasteful. Stevens and I left early, disgusted. We left a few days later to do some touring of Turkey on our own while Sandy and William remained in Kas.

  Hunter and Laila Nabulsi in the kitchen at Owl Farm, circa late 1990s

  At the end of that summer, before I started college, I went to Owl Farm to spend a week or so with Hunter. He was in the middle of writing The Curse of Lono and was having a rough time with it. He asked me to read the first chapter and wanted my opinion. That was a tricky thing, to give him my opinion on his writing. I knew well his capacity for anger and how he could effortlessly reduce an opponent to tears with a few expertly chosen words. Yet I wanted to be honest. I didn’t want to be another sycophant, and there were many by that time, feeding him cheap praise. So I gave him my thoughts, carefully, erring on the side of praise, but not exclusively. He seemed to take it well, no explosions of rage or scorching wrath. He didn’t take my advice at the time, but neither did he take offense. That was a big deal, when I think of it now. His writing was the most important thing in the world to him, and he asked me my opinion.

  We also did some shooting, cleaned guns, watched some Bogart movies, and one day went motorcycling. He still had a dirt bike then, he borrowed another one for me from his best friend, Oliver Treibick, and the two of us went for a long ride into the hills.

  We wound up into the mountains and finally emerged on a hilltop overlooking the Woody Creek Valley. I remember sitting there on our motorcycles, side by side, commenting on the extraordinary view. At last, my father and I were spending time together, just the two of us, riding motorcycles in the hills, doing what guys do. We didn’t have many of these moments, so when they happened, they carried a lot of weight. Sure, it was partly a fantasy, both of us acting as if all the horrible things had never happened, but there we were, together.

  Two days later I left for college, for Tufts University in Boston.

  SIX

  INDEPENDENCE: AGES 18 TO 24

  Tufts—The cub reporter—Priorities—Rolling Stone—Al-Anon in earnest—The letters—A year abroad—The correspondent’s coat—Graduation with honors

  HST TIMELINE

  1983 The Curse of Lono published. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas published in Finland.

  Hunter spends a few months each year up until 1987 in the Florida Keys working on The Silk Road, a novel about the Mariel Boatlift.

  1984 Meets the Mitchell brothers, works as night manager of O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco.

  1985 Still in San Francisco.

  1987 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas published in Spain and Germany.

  1988 Generation of Swine published, a compilation of columns for the San Francisco Examiner. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas published in France and Denmark.

  AS I WAS GETTING on the plane in Aspen to fly to Boston, Hunter gave me a letter. He told me to read it once I was in-flight.

  Sept 1 ’82

  Dear Juan

  Okay. You’re off. And things seem generally under control—on your end, anyway. I am still juggling madness on this end, + I’ve never even heard a rumor that the end might be in sight.

  It’s a queer life for sure—but at least it keeps me in shape, more or less.

  Here are three valid $50 checks, which should keep you solvent at least long enough to settle in + get a fix on things. Use them to open your own bank account in Boston.

  Also, call me tonight to confirm your safe arrival. Don’t forget to do this. Tonight.

  The sheepskin jacket is a present from Laila. Boston is cold in the winter.

  I’ll call Dick + Doris [Goodwin] + Mike Barnicle at the Globe, to say you’ll be stopping by sometime soon, to say hello, etc.

  - ooo -

  Call your advisor from the Denver airport + say you’ll be late for dinner—but you’ll try to make it + you’d like to meet him tonight. Also, ask him the best way to get from the airport to Tufts ASAP….and tell him you’re very concerned that your application for the school newspaper didn’t get there on time. Can he help you straighten out the confusion?

  He can. But you’ll have to get serious about it right away. Gall is a basic tool of journalism, which is a rude business at best.

  - ooo -

  And so much for advice + logistics. I’m not worried about you—but I am interested, and I’ll want to know what’s happening. Send me your phone number and a P.O. address. Let’s talk on the phone as often as you feel like it—especially for the first few weeks, which will almost certainly be nervous. Or maybe not. But if they are, don’t worry. The Glum Reaper will be hanging around, but to hell with him. We have dealt with the bugger before + we know the one thing he can’t handle is a bedrock sense of humor.

  So remember the 44 “Naked + Alone…” books. All you have to do is write the first two. I’ll handle it after that, + we will both get obscenely rich. Take my word for it. Why fool around with tangents, like all the others? Your future is already assured. All you need is a typewriter + a few reams of paper.

  - ooo -

  I’m glad you came home for a while, + I wish it could have been longer. I had a good time—and as always, was proud of you. Very few seekers go out in the world as well-armed as you are.

  I’ll keep after [Paul] Rubin for the $1000 he owes you for technical work. He says he has a fat job for you next summer—but so do I, and mine is a lot fatter. 44 books, rich + famous by 21. No problem.

  Even Oliver was impressed with the way you handled his motorcycle, and I will carry the scars of our ride forever. Thank god for aloe.

  And sleep. We didn’t get much of that, but your work on the LONO book was far more valuable than a simple thing like sleep. We didn’t cure the Blue Arm, but we caught it just in
time to avert a serious problem.

  But not entirely. I still have a lot of real work to do—+ I’ll get on it today; and maybe try that idea of a 12-day run, like Georges Simenon. Two more weeks are about all I can spend on LONO. After that, it’s down to Florida for the Silk Road—which will be critical to both of our futures. It will live or die on the dialogue—+ for that I will have to get re-acquainted with my own sense of humor. Mean dullards tend to write mean, dull dialogue.

  - ooo -

  Anyway, I’ll figure on seeing you for Xmas, if not before that. We had a wonderful time with Davison + his family last year, + hopefully we can do it again—either here or in Florida, depending on my Silk Road schedule….So let’s keep this in mind + plan for it.

  We still have a ways to go before we can act like good friends + yell at each other without worrying about what it all means….But we’re doing pretty well, considering the small amount of time we’ve really put into it.

  You’re a good person, and I love you for that as much as because you’re my son.

  Or because you’re about to be rich + pay my expenses forever. With my wisdom + your talent, our bets are covered from the start. By 1984 we’ll be making $44,000 a month, and even Jimmy [Buffett] will be standing in line to get your autograph.

  Let’s stop looking at this college gig as a foolish expense + start seeing it as an avenue to big money: a fine investment, with huge returns in the offing. Right? Yes. Let’s do it. Love, H.

  Sometimes apparently ordinary events or objects encapsulate vast realities. This letter is one. What is perhaps most remarkable is that I had completely forgotten about this letter until I rediscovered it during my research for this book. It is the letter I had been waiting for my whole life, a promise of an engaged father who gives advice, gives encouragement, promises adventure, affirms the good times, and talks of getting together soon. All of a sudden I had a father again. How could I have forgotten this letter?