Stories I Tell Myself

by Juan F. Thompson

  When I think back on it now, I wonder what Hunter was up to. He knew, of course, that it would be awkward for me, especially with Susannah there, and I think he wanted to see how she would react. I can imagine that it was always interesting to bring a self-proclaimed feminist to the O’Farrell and watch her reaction. Sometimes it was genuine curiosity that motivated his probing, and sometimes it was just the prankster at work.

  I realize now that for all his courage and public madness and the power of his words, Hunter was very circumspect when it came to matters of the heart. In the national media he called Nixon “a predatory shyster…full of claws and bleeding string-warts,” but when it came to those he loved, he would not speak directly. Instead, he would observe and sense. After the final separation of my parents, the divorce proceedings began, and the lawyers got involved. It is remarkable now, reading notes between him and Sandy in 1977 and 1978, before that final separation, to see how hard they both were trying to overcome their differences, to be patient, to reassure each other that the love and willingness to succeed as a family was there. But it was not sufficient to overcome the history and the anger and the habits that had led them to separation in the first place, and once they decided to give it up for good, it got ugly. Hunter realized that the disintegration of our family was going to be hard for me.

  But we never talked about it. He never told me that this was going to be hard, or that if I started to feel like my life was coming apart, that was normal. He could have said a lot of things that many fathers these days, trained in the modern methods of clear communication by their therapists, might say. We could have talked it through, as I would with my son now. But that was not his way, as it is not my son’s way. My son doesn’t want to necessarily talk about his hurts. I want to have an open discussion, make sure we are communicating unambiguously and explicitly, but that is not his way. He has a low tolerance for discussing highly personal matters in such a blunt and objective way, as if the intensity of the topic is too much for him to endure for more than a couple of minutes at most, as if he can see more clearly by looking indirectly at the topic, the way you can see something in the dim light more clearly if you don’t look directly at it. I think he prefers to grasp the situation as a whole, with his eyes, his intuition, and his heart, rather than try to reduce it to simple, clumsy, crude words. I think he is like Hunter in that way, who for all his mastery of language, who could speak so clearly, elegantly, and with power through the Word, ultimately found them inadequate. It was as if to speak too plainly about a delicate topic was like looking at the sun with no eye protection. It is too bright, harsh, and unendurable. Better to filter it to see the subtle details, the fine points. Instead of asking me how I was handling the divorce, he would invite me out to Owl Farm for the weekend and just observe me, perhaps ask how Sandy was doing, not in a sneaky or deceptive way, but in a searching and exploratory way, so that I didn’t even know I was being examined. I have an image of a doctor exploring an injury with long, delicate fingers, carefully searching out the contours of the wound under the skin, hardly pressing at all, more sensing, then pressing a bit here, just enough to cause a gentle reaction. All that time I thought Hunter was not paying attention, he was paying close attention.

  On the other hand, what did he know about fathering? His own father had died when he was a teenager. Maybe he was just winging it, trusting his instincts, hoping for the best. Just as I am. I believe now that he was paying attention, and that he always loved me, but that’s not the same thing as fathering.

  That spring I had decided to go to England on a junior year abroad program through the University of Colorado the following fall. A friend of mine from boarding school had spent a semester in France and had written me many letters about her adventures there, which compelled me to create my own adventure. Susannah and I talked about it and agreed that though we loved each other and got along wonderfully, we were both very unhappy. Our comfortable life together, our comfortable and cute apartment in downtown Boulder, our comfortable routines, were not enough, not nearly enough. We each had to find something for ourselves. I thought it was in England, and Susannah thought she might find it at home in Virginia where she was born and raised.

  That summer Stevens and I went on a trip to Russia, which was still a part of the Soviet Union at that time. My grandmother Leah made arrangements for us to join a tour, which was the only practical way to see the USSR. Individual travelers were discouraged. It was an odd arrangement—two twenty-year-olds from Colorado and about sixteen retired folks from central Florida. We met up with the group in New York and flew to Oslo for a night, then on to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). It was midsummer and Leningrad is very far north, so that the sun didn’t set until eleven p.m. or so, and it didn’t get dark until well after midnight, only to start getting light a few hours later. I remember that we could see a monument commemorating the Siege of Leningrad in World War II from our hotel window.

  Western visitors were carefully monitored and controlled. We stayed at approved tourist hotels and had a Soviet guide with our group at all times, though Stevens and I did some exploring on our own, apparently without supervision, though we were paranoid that we were being watched or followed. In Moscow, we walked from our hotel to a market several blocks away. The market was rather small, dim, and dingy, and had a limited selection of goods, and not very many of them. The produce section was sparse. It was a remarkable contrast to American supermarkets, which are huge, brightly lit, colorful, and bursting with food.

  We flew from Leningrad to Moscow, and from Moscow to the Republic of Georgia. At that time the USSR was monolithic, and I had no understanding or appreciation for the myriad cultures and nations that were collected under that vast umbrella, far broader and varied than the states within the United States. The USSR stretched from Western Europe to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic Circle to the Middle East—it bordered Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and bordered the entire northern Chinese border, very nearly touching Japan. In Tbilisi, Georgia, we were offered good money for our Levi’s as we walked cautiously through the ancient, narrow, curving streets of the old city, which looked like it had sprung up out of the earth, being the same color and texture. We took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Irkutsk to Khabarovsk and stopped in villages that probably looked much the same as they did five hundred years ago, with muddy dirt lanes, crooked wooden fences, and thatched houses. Merchants gathered on the train platform to sell fruit, cigarettes, and goods to the travelers for the few minutes we were in the station, and then we would pull away and disappear, and the village would fall back a few hundred years until the next train arrived a few days later. The Siberia I saw from the train consisted of vast forests, plains, and rolling hills. We traveled through it for three days and saw only a handful of villages along the railroad.

  When Stevens and I returned three weeks later to the United States, it was time to pack up the apartment in preparation for England, and for Susannah to head back home to Virginia. A friend of ours offered to drive a truck full of my boxes to Woody Creek for storage at Owl Farm, and so the three of us, Steve Evans, Susannah, and myself, went to see Hunter and Maria. It was an ancient panel truck from the ’40s or ’50s and though it was durable and roomy, it had no heat. As we drove over 12,000-foot Independence Pass outside of Aspen, on a cool late summer day, we shivered under blankets and had to stop at a café in Leadville for an hour or two to chase the incipient frostbite from our fingers and toes.

  Hunter tried to prepare me for my adventure. He lent me a red Woolrich hunting jacket and his correspondent’s raincoat. I say lent, because it was rare for Hunter to give something outright. He might lend it indefinitely, but he wanted to know that he could get it back, if he really wanted it. There was a handwritten list on the back of one of the kitchen cabinet doors that listed all the items he had lent to me over the years.

  Hunter was a deeply sentimental man, and like most sentimentalists, he was a pack rat, because su
ch people, and I am one, confer on objects the essence of a person, place, or event. They are tangible reminders of the good and significant, and they are more than simply reminders, they are talismans, objects consecrated by memory. They have magical properties and they are not to be lightly disposed of or given away, because in losing them we lose a part of our memory, and memories are the bricks of the houses of our selves, our lives. That entity that we think of as our self is built on memories, of what we have done, where we have been, whom we have known and loved and fought. That house is our refuge, and also it can be our prison in which we are chained to our sins and regrets. We use our memories to define ourselves, for better or for worse. If, as the Buddhists say, fear and desire are the forces that propel us through our lives, then memories are the road behind, and the road ahead is a projection of the road behind. We expect to be who we have been.

  Hunter’s house was filled with memorabilia, the kitchen walls a couple of layers thick with letters, pins, photographs, newspaper clippings, notes, posters, postcards, invitations, contact sheets, awards, proclamations, memos, flags, scarves, bar coasters, buttons, and anything else that could be held up by tape or pushpin. The lower layers were usually ragged around the edges and tinted the deep yellowish brown of cigarette smoke, for they had been on the walls for twenty years or more. Every horizontal surface had things on it—statues, figures, stuffed animals, bones, knives, balls, boxes of filigreed silver or inlaid bronze, trays of ebony, an abalone shell, all things he had been given or had collected during his life at Owl Farm and in the years before that when he had traveled like a nomad around the country, becoming a writer. Owl Farm and everything in it anchored him.

  Hunter was deeply rooted in Owl Farm. He had grown up in one house, on Ransdell Avenue in Louisville, Kentucky. That is where he and his two brothers were born, where he lived when his father died, where he read and wrote until he was seventeen and was thrown in jail for a month and then into the air force. From that point on, he never returned to Louisville to live. He traveled extensively from the time he was seventeen until he was about thirty, from Kentucky to Florida to the Eastern Seaboard, to California and Colorado, with visits to many other states on the way. He first lived in Woody Creek in 1963, but California pulled him back, and it wasn’t until 1966 that he returned to Woody Creek. Even then, he didn’t plan to stay long. He had all kinds of ideas about where he would go next. Back to California, maybe to Europe, back to South America, but it never happened. Within a few years he took root in Woody Creek; maybe it was the land, the quiet, the privacy, maybe it was the people he met, maybe it was having a family, or maybe he was just tired of moving all the time. Whatever the reasons, he took root, and for the next thirty-nine years he never left for any length of time. From that point on he had a home that he always came back to.

  He wrote all of his best books there, with the exception of Hell’s Angels, which allowed him to buy Owl Farm in the first place. He evolved from a freelance reporter to a writer to a legend while living there.

  When he bought the house, he transformed it into his own creation—the War Room downstairs, where he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the living room, which was one of three hearts of the house, along with the kitchen and the bedroom. The living room was the social heart of the house for the first thirteen years or so, with the giant fireplace, the eight giant speakers surrounding the room, the books, the couch, and the Morris chair like a throne from which Hunter would hold court. There are bullet marks in the brick over the fireplace, and the andirons were made by a friend.

  The War Room was the creative heart of the house up until my parents separated. It was Hunter’s hideout. More than an office, it was his sanctum, with its own giant fireplace, no windows, significant books along one wall, and the typewriter. It was the place where he would not be disturbed, where he could be alone and thrash out the words, battle with his writer’s block, or drift in a drug- or alcohol-induced stupor.

  After 1980 or so, the kitchen became the creative and social heart. With satellite television and no wife and child to distract him, it was natural that he would take up residence there, and that friends and visitors would find him there. With football, basketball, CNN, or the Playboy Channel in the background, he wrote, talked on the phone, entertained guests, screamed, ate, threw things, read the newspaper, did his drugs, and told stories for the next twenty-five years.

  Then there is the land itself. Land and space were very important to Hunter. Having privacy and space around him, where he could not be hassled or evicted, where he could sit on his porch naked, and where he could shoot large-caliber pistols from his front doorway. He was, after all, a Kentucky hillbilly, and he was ferocious in his defense of the rights of individuals to live and act as they chose, so long as it didn’t cause harm to others. If he wanted to build a bonfire, dance naked, and play loud music in the middle of the night, by god he could. If he wanted to blow up propane/gasoline bombs on a winter night with a 12-gauge shotgun, he could—and did. If he wanted to tape large posters of celebrities to plywood sheets and blow large holes in them in his front yard on a Monday afternoon or a Thursday evening, he could. No one would question or try to stop him, because it was his land, his domain. As he said once in an interview, the United States was probably the only country in the world where he could live as he did. Few others would have tolerated him.

  The correspondent’s raincoat he lent me was part of his history, part of him, and I think that is why he could not give it to me, but only lend it. He also gave me, for that year, the rent from the tenant in the cabin next door, $550 a month, which gave me enough to buy food, clothes, books, and to travel cheaply on weekends and breaks. It was his only steady income, but it made my life much simpler, since I did not have to wonder each month if I was going to get any money, and it removed the need for desperate transatlantic phone calls in which I would have to nag him. It was generous, and it was wise, the wisdom of a man who knows himself.

  I went to England at the end of September and met with my fellow students from CU. I knew nobody. I was alone again. As I had been at Concord, at Tufts, and in New York. That first night in London I was alone in my small room in the rooming house. I was amazed to feel so alone again. It was so familiar and so dreadful. The next day we took the train to Lancaster, in northwest England, and that night there was a dance at our college. I had never been a dancer and I feared the crowds and the special kind of loneliness that they bring. I remember walking in the grass behind the school that night, hidden by the dark and the trees, and feeling so lonely and forsaken that I lay on the ground and sobbed for a long time. When I had no more tears, I went back to my room. A Chinese exchange student asked if I wanted to go to the dance. I could see he was feeling lonely and awkward too, and so we went. I ended up dancing, much to my surprise, and after the dance a handful of us who had met went back to someone’s room, drank tea, and talked for another hour or two. That night it all changed. I became myself, though I hardly knew it at the time.

  I worked hard—the classes at Lancaster were much more difficult than classes at CU—and I explored. After classes I would walk into the countryside on the little lanes, and on weekends I would catch a train, a bus, or simply hitchhike somewhere. I spent a lot of time alone, just as I had during my year at Tufts. However, I never felt lonely that year, and I had friends. There was Rosie, and Matt, and my best friend for the next few years, a fellow CU student named Elizabeth. I joined a club that offered counseling to troubled students called Nightline. Two volunteers staffed an office every night of the week from ten p.m. until seven a.m. so that a distraught student could have someone to talk to. We would sleep on the couches, and when there was a knock on the door, we’d awake from a deep sleep, open it, put on the teapot, and listen, waiting for the caffeine to take hold. I got my hair cut short so that it stood up straight. Most of the year I wore my red Woolrich coat with a keffiyeh and aviator glasses that darkened in the sunlight and turned clear indoors. I was
a vegetarian and went to Gaysoc meetings with Elizabeth, who was sounding out her sexuality. I wrote letters to Susannah in my journal and then photocopied it and sent the copies to her, most everything, anyway. There were some adventures in dating that I didn’t share, though we had not made any kind of agreement when we parted.

  I didn’t talk to Hunter much that year. He was still with Maria and trying to write The Silk Road, spending a fair amount of time in the Florida Keys. However, he did send me a letter once, along with a couple of postcards from a fan. He didn’t read much fan mail—most of it went into a box unopened—but this was a postcard, quick to read and intriguing to Hunter. The author, Lois, was from Liverpool, an hour or two south of Lancaster, and he suggested I look her up. She was a great admirer of Hunter’s and an aspiring writer herself. We exchanged letters and made plans to meet in Liverpool.

  Lois read prolifically, and wrote an endless number of long, funny, thoughtful letters to her friends. I remember that she wore black most of the time, and she loved cemeteries, Samuel Beckett, The Smiths, and of course Hunter’s writing, among many other things. She had been to university, but then rather than join the ranks of the wage slaves, she lived on the dole with other like-minded friends, using it as a subsistence-level artists’ subsidy. Three or four people lived in one small, ratty, third-floor walk-up. They ate out of cans and bought nothing new. No one had a car. She saved her money so she could travel to Wales, which she loved deeply. She would go there for a week a few times a year and walk among the hills and small towns. Lois was planning to write a novel. Her roommates were artists also. They were dirt-poor and seemed on the whole to be quite content. She invited me one weekend to join her on a trip to Wales, but for reasons I still can’t explain I missed the train to Liverpool. That is one of the lingering regrets of my life. Something important was there for me, but I have no idea what it might have been. I visited her a second time in Liverpool, and we corresponded frequently and amply over the next two years. The last I heard she had given up her vow of poverty and become a mail delivery woman, which suited her schedule and proclivities well. She was one of the sanest people I have ever met.