I’d like to say that this insight changed my life, but that is not true, nor did it result in a sudden breakthrough with Hunter. However, it never left me, even when I returned to Colorado and resumed my normal life. It was a background awareness, the conscious realization that I wanted and needed to be closer to my father, and that it was up to me to move toward him. Consistent with our communication style up until then, I didn’t tell him about my sudden insight, nor did I ever say much about Kripalu to him, and he didn’t ask.
When I completed my four months at Kripalu I was ambivalent about leaving because it had been such a powerful and intense experience that I wanted to prolong. I agonized over my decision, whether to stay on or return, and finally chose to return to Boulder. Several years later I felt better about my decision when I learned that Gurudev confessed to sleeping with several of his senior female disciples over many years, causing a major crisis, which eventually led to his resignation in disgrace and the disbanding of the ashram. Kripalu became a purely secular health and wellness center, which it remains today. I never told Hunter about this, but I’m sure this would not have surprised him one bit, but rather than condemning Gurudev, he probably would have wondered why the ashram community was so shocked and disillusioned.
Once I graduated from college, I no longer received any money from Hunter, and this was good. It meant that I no longer had to endure the madness of trying to get something from him, particularly money. No more nervous phone calls, no more fear and panic. It is no way to live, being dependent on someone else for money, especially being at the mercy of an admittedly irresponsible and unreliable man. Meanwhile, I was still slogging through the Twelve-Step process and establishing a beachhead of sanity. The more I looked at my life with my parents, the more I realized how strange, confusing, and peculiar it was. Now I had a normal life in Boulder, I worked at a regular job, I paid my bills, I did not have to deal with the excitement and self-inflicted crises that Hunter lived in constantly.
—
IT WAS A YEAR OR SO after my return from Kripalu that I started dating Jennifer. She, her partner, and my live-in girlfriend at the time, Cyndi, and I had been friends for a couple of years, double-dating frequently. Jennifer and I would sit across from each other at the restaurant and talk about family dynamics, dysfunction, and personal and spiritual growth, while our dates talked about who knows what. After this had happened several times, Cyndi suggested that Jen and I sit diagonally from each other to discourage us from talking so intently to the exclusion of our dates. Maybe she knew something that we didn’t, because it came as a surprise to us when, a few months after we had each broken up with our partners for reasons completely unrelated to our friendship, Jennifer and I found ourselves becoming aware of an urge to be more than simply friends.
Jennifer came from a similarly unusual background. Her father, Bill, had abandoned a job as a successful salesman for Texaco in order to be his own boss as the owner of a gas station in Brighton, Colorado, just outside Denver. Unfortunately that coincided with the OPEC oil crisis in the ’70s, and the family suffered financial catastrophe including the loss of their house, business, and most of their possessions. The stress caused her father to be hospitalized for a serious ulcer that nearly killed him. Kay, her mother, left her father and took Jennifer’s two sisters to Iowa. Jennifer stayed with her father for a while, and then joined her mother and sisters, later attending the University of Iowa. Eventually Bill followed, getting a job repairing the giant injection-molding machines at a toothbrush factory and starting his own hand-built furniture business on the side.
Like Susannah, Jennifer was smart, funny, artsy, and beautiful, but unlike Susannah, I wasn’t her student. We first connected while talking about our crazy childhoods and unconventional fathers. She too knew what it was like to while away the time in a bar while her parents drank, and she knew what it was like to grow up with a father with keen insight, disregard for convention, and a painfully sharp tongue. We both loved books and poetry, which she wrote, and we both had been lonely outsiders. And she was just odd and up for adventures, which I loved. One weekend we took turns blindfolding each other and leading the other around Boulder. Another weekend we spent all day gathering small branches and twigs to create a mobile made with the branches, black thread, superglue, and old TV tubes. We both liked old electronics, not because they were useful, but because they were beautiful. At a junk store we found a portable EKG machine from the ’50s in a sturdy blond wooden case, and celebrated such a lucky find.
We also had drugs in common. Not that we did drugs together, but we both had done plenty of experimentation when younger, and had each chosen to stop at a certain point (though I had just about given up my experimentation phase by the time she got started in college). It was wonderful to be able to talk about the benefits and downsides of drugs and drinking without feeling freakish, and also to be with someone who didn’t feel the need to keep doing them.
The spiritual connection was very important also. We both were seeking peace and clarity through spirituality and personal growth. We could easily talk about what we had learned working with therapists, about yoga and gurus and meditation. After we had been together about a year, I learned about a ten-day Buddhist meditation retreat, which required not only silence but forbade eye contact with the other participants for the entire ten days, including mealtimes. I asked her if she wanted to go. She said of course.
I wanted to introduce her to Hunter. I spent that Christmas at Owl Farm, and Jennifer came up for New Year’s. She had been a fan of his writing for years before we had met, ever since she had been active in political campaigning first as a canvass director and later as a campaign manager for a national grassroots political organization that advocated a freeze in nuclear armament. She had read many of his books and was especially fond of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, also my favorite.
From the time we started dating seriously, marriage had been lurking in the background, though neither of us was anxious to ever get married, given our parents’ poor track record in that area. At one point I was working as a computer consultant for the company where she worked, and we were sitting outside on the stairs. I said, “I have this crazy fear that we’re going to get married.” Jennifer laughed and said, “That’s a crazy idea. Don’t worry about it. We’re just dating.” A year later we were living together, and the next year we were engaged.
The weekend of the engagement Jen and I stayed at a ranch in Utah for a few days. Though it was a working ranch, it was actually more of a private park owned by an old East Coast family. The ranch was on a high mesa just across the Colorado-Utah border, on the edge of Colorado National Monument, noted for its spectacular, deep canyons and sandstone mesas. The night before we left, I had been watching Jennifer sleep, and I wondered what I would do if something happened to her. I didn’t want to lose her. I didn’t want to lose this. I loved her very much and I wanted to go deeper with her.
On the way home from the ranch, just before we hit the paved road on the mesa, I asked Jennifer to marry me, and she agreed. We hadn’t planned on seeing Hunter that weekend, but Aspen was on the way from Grand Junction to Denver, so we decided to make our announcement in person. This was before cell phones, so we stopped along the way and called Owl Farm. Deborah answered and said he was in Basalt at Chefy’s, one of his restaurant hideaways. We found him sitting with Nicole and a couple of other people we didn’t know. It didn’t seem right to tell him in front of strangers, so we ended up returning to Owl Farm with him and Nicole. When we got to the house, though, a game was on and a few friends had come out to watch. Finally I said, “Hunter, I have something to tell you.” I took him aside and I told him we had decided to get married.
He was ecstatic. He whooped, he smiled, he demanded champagne for a toast, he went searching for gifts to give us, finally settling on a mounted rattlesnake’s head under glass. He put on Celtic music—the Chieftains—and demanded that Deborah and Nicole get cam
eras to capture this moment. Deb had been the unofficial photographer for Owl Farm for years, and Nicole was in charge of video.
With Hunter and Jennifer at Owl Farm, 1994. Hunter is wearing his hat of unborn wolf pup fur, or so he claimed.
He started talking about the wedding, how it had to be a good-size wedding, but not too big, how it would be the event of the year that everyone would want to be invited to, but there would only be room for a select group. Gerry Goldstein, a high-profile criminal defense lawyer, and Dan Dibble, a longtime Aspenite, got into the groove, discussing how people would compete for invitations by sending the biggest, grandest engagement presents. We talked for a long time, half-seriously planning, joking, and laughing. It was one of those magic moments with my father when everything was right. Finally, it was time for us to go. We both had to be at work the next day and we still had a three-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of us. Hunter insisted we have a ceremony before leaving. He told Deb to bring out the sugar-cured ham from the back refrigerator, probably left over from the previous Christmas. Deb protested that it was no longer edible, but Hunter had other ideas. He set the ham in a broiler pan and put it on a side table in the kitchen. He said that the burning of the ham was an old Kentucky tradition to celebrate an engagement. We had to set the ham on fire. He took a bottle of fine scotch from the top of the refrigerator, which served as the liquor cabinet, poured it liberally over the ham, and held a flame to it. Nothing. He tried a higher proof, maybe a Wild Turkey 101. Still nothing. He tried a variety of liquors, none of which worked, until he dug out a bottle of Everclear from behind all the other bottles, which gave a bright, clean-burning flame to the ham and fulfilled the requirements of that old Kentucky tradition. A few days later we received one more engagement gift in the mail: a bouquet of plastic lilies with a tiny Christmas bulb in the middle of each flower. Out from among the stems came a thin green cord with a plug on the end.
Hunter and Deb at our engagement party, 1993
A few months later there was an engagement party for us at the Basalt house of Carol and Palmer Hood, who years before had given me a place to hide, and for whom I had assassinated gophers. Hunter had taken an interest in the engagement party guest list. We had our friends we wanted to invite, and Hunter had his friends. I’m sure Hunter initially hoped to host the party at a club in Aspen, maybe the Snowmass Club, which was his preferred restaurant around that time, but he couldn’t afford it. He was going through one of his lean periods.
Hunter and money. The premise is very simple: when he had it he squandered it with such abandon and pleasure that it never lasted long, and when it ran out he borrowed until he could cobble together the next deal. The lean times lasted longer than the fat times, sometimes as long as a couple of years. The early to mid-1990s was one of those times, even though Better Than Sex was published in 1994. But when he had money he was usually very generous. One weekend we came to Owl Farm and found that a new set of knives had replaced the old, superior set. It turned out that the son of a friend of his had a job selling knife sets and was passing through Aspen. Hunter bought a set to help him out. One Christmas he bought handfuls of small gold ingots and gave them as presents. Hunter knew my interest in and fondness for computers, and for a wedding present he gave us a new Macintosh laptop. But in the lean times Deborah counted the pennies, kept the various creditors at bay with payments just large enough to keep them believing that they would get paid in full eventually. He would sometimes hide checks or payments from Deborah if he happened to go through the mail before she did, so he could have some spending money, damn the consequences.
The engagement party was one of the lean times, but if that bothered Hunter, it didn’t bother us. Hunter talked with Jen’s parents, Bill and Kay, introduced them to his friends, sat for a long time at a table with our friends, none of whom he knew, and flirted with some of the young women we had invited. When the party was over, he asked Jen and me to come back to Owl Farm with a few other people. I asked him if I could invite a few of my friends. He said, “How many?” I said maybe fifteen. He hesitated, always loath to have strangers in his house or even on his property, but he agreed. He said, “We’ll have to have a bomb, though.” Once at the house, people wandered freely between the living room and the kitchen, although I know it made him very uncomfortable, for he asked, “Can I trust these people?” and warned me to keep an eye on them. He kept himself from saying anything hostile or rude, though he did flip on the Playboy Channel once or twice for a few minutes, just to see how people would react, especially the women.
As it was getting dark, he called for the Bomb. Years ago he had come up with a combination of bomb ingredients that yielded a spectacular fireball. It started with a coffee can full of gasoline. Either taped to or right in front of the can he would set a small propane canister, the kind you use for a camping stove. Finally, he would stick several square exploding targets, two-inch Styrofoam squares with explosives embedded in them, to the propane canister. The device was triggered by a load of double-0 buckshot from a 12-gauge shotgun. The ball-bearing-size shot would set off the exploding target, puncture the propane canister, and punch the gasoline can so that it would spray up into the air. The exploding target would ignite the propane, which would in turn ignite the gasoline. The tricky part was hitting the target dead-on. One or two pellets wouldn’t do it. It required a bull’s-eye.
Hunter asked Deb to put together the bomb, and then he placed it on a stump in the side yard. He was a natural showman and had used the bomb preparation time to get my friends excited to see the show, many of whom had never shot a gun, much less set off a propane-gasoline bomb in their yards.
He told me that I would have to set off the bomb. I had always been a good shot, but there was a lot of pressure. Everyone had crowded behind me, and Hunter stood beside me. Hunter’s friends had seen this before, so a missed shot would not be nearly as disappointing to them as it would be to our friends, especially after all the buildup. I was most concerned about Hunter’s reaction if I missed. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I wanted to prove myself and provide a good spectacle, but more important was proving to Hunter that I could do this thing.
Perhaps I wanted to prove an element of my manhood to him. Hunter was a man’s man and had been from his childhood. He was large, strong, and dominant. He smoked cigarettes and drank, drove fast, and attracted beautiful women. He rode motorcycles and took risks. He knew how to fight and how to intimidate people verbally to avoid a fight. On the other hand, I didn’t date until I was a senior in high school, never smoked, had never been in a fight, and drank very rarely. I loved books, computers, and fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t care much for sports and preferred acting in plays. My friends were like me—awkward, smart, not cute, and frequently lonely. I was a nerd.
So that night, holding the 12-gauge shotgun to my shoulder, I wanted to show my father that I was skilled in at least one of the arts that he valued, that somehow that would establish my credentials as a man, if not a man’s man. I took aim, took my time, and pulled the trigger. There was an explosion, the gun slammed back into my shoulder, and a giant yellow fireball rose into the sky, lasting a second or so. When it was over, everyone cheered and Hunter slapped me on the shoulder and congratulated me on fine shooting. I was happy, I felt that I had staked out a small claim on the turf of manhood, and I was glad I had made my father proud.
—
JENNIFER AND I GOT MARRIED in August of 1994. Throughout the planning process, Hunter wanted to make sure that we had the right kind of wedding. He didn’t want it to be cheap—a grange hall or Knights of Columbus event room was out of the question. He was relieved to find out that we were having the wedding not in a church, but at a log cabin restaurant in an old mining town called Gold Hill in the foothills outside of Boulder. As with the engagement party, he wanted to be involved with the invitation list. We would fax our list to him and he would review it and make notes and suggestions. He was glad t
o know we were inviting his brother Davison and his family, as well as my family on my mother’s side. We told him we were inviting my preschool teacher and one of my teachers from the Aspen Community School. He was glad that we had respect for past attachments and the Aspen community that I was a part of, though I hadn’t lived there for a long time and when I did visit I hardly ever left Owl Farm.
He sent out several requests to people such as Jimmy Buffett, Jann Wenner, Ralph Steadman, Ed Bradley, and Don Johnson, as well as a number of other friends of his. When I think now of why he wanted us to invite them, I think it was a combination of “doing the right thing” and consciously reinforcing the bonds among his community by inviting them to be part of a very important ceremony. When I attended my cousins’ weddings, which were large, traditional affairs, the parents’ friends were invited. It is so ironic that as a father Hunter passed on so few traditions, yet he possessed these traditional reflexes that would show themselves so unexpectedly.
Stories I Tell Myself Page 14