Sometimes when it was time for us to go, he would be asleep. There was something wonderfully childlike about Hunter in sleep. He would be asleep on his side, with a hand under his head, his knees up slightly, in a faint suggestion of the fetal position. His face was peaceful, all the pride, anger, and humor gone. The bedroom had a faint bitter smell of his sweat, and though it was a large room it felt close and cozy, a room for sleeping, not working, thinking, or even talking. The windows were always covered by curtains or blankets, and there were bookshelves holding his favorite books on three walls. To let the unfiltered sunlight strike that room would have been wrong, it would have disrupted its insulated quality. That’s what it felt like—as if the room were wrapped in an insulation that dampened everything—light, sound, thought, and even anxiety. It was his inner sanctum, and I entered it with the appropriate reverence.
I would sit down on the bed beside him and shake his arm gently and call his name, then again a bit harder and a bit louder. Eventually he would moan. I would tell him I was leaving, and he would mumble something. I realized that often he wasn’t actually awake, and that he would have no recollection of my waking him. But sometimes he would be awake, and we would have a short conversation. I talked in a low voice not because there was a need but because the room required quiet. Those brief times, maybe a dozen, when I sat beside him on the bed, were some of our most intimate moments, not because of what we said, but because at those times we both were less guarded. It was as if there in the bedroom, and at the Stranahans’ pool, we were protected and could set aside the armor. I think for Hunter it was the vulnerability of sleep combined with the safety of his sanctum. For me it was the privilege of being with him in his unarmored state. Eventually, I would tell him I had to go, that I loved him, and walk quietly out of the room, almost on tiptoe though it was carpeted. Once across the threshold of the bedroom door I was in the outside world again. But for those minutes in the bedroom I felt blessed.
—
IN THOSE LAST ten or so years we had built up enough mutual trust that I could take part in the writing process from time to time. Hunter started work on his book about the 1992 presidential campaign, Better Than Sex, in 1993, just after Clinton was elected to his first term, and continued for the next year or so until it was published in 1994. It is a disjointed book filled with flashes of brilliance, power, humor, and insight. Once Clinton got the Democratic nomination and it was clear he had a shot at winning, Hunter was in frequent contact with the campaign staffers, often in the form of faxes. There were hundreds of faxes between Hunter and Clinton’s top campaign staff, George Stephanopoulos and James Carville. It was more like a scrapbook that consisted mostly of correspondence in the form of actual photos of the faxes. This made Hunter’s job much easier: he just had to write transitions or fillers.
It was a wild, chaotic effort, and at critical moments he recruited Jennifer and me to help. It seemed like it was all happening at once—selecting the faxes, deciding on the organization of the book, writing chapter subheads, and researching facts. But the real problem was that Hunter couldn’t focus on writing. He would find a million ways to put it off. There were football games to watch, and if not football, then basketball. There was the news. Or maybe he had stayed up two nights in a row and was so exhausted that there was no question of useful work that night. There were people coming over most every afternoon and evening to say hello, watch a game, talk politics. There were long phone calls. There were always drugs.
Pot was always sure to mellow him, make him smile, and laugh, and cause him to lose his train of thought. It was when he had had a few hits of pot or hash that he loved to tell stories. He would sit on his stool, rocking back and forth slightly, grinning often as he remembered something, or laughing at his own story. The stories would usually start in one place and wander, branch, and diverge until an hour later you had long forgotten the initial episode, but it didn’t matter because he was such a captivating storyteller. Other drugs, like acid, brought out a sharper side, sometimes playful, but sometimes cruel. An hour or so after he took LSD, his mood would turn, and it was time for us to say good night and go to the cabin. Cocaine and booze didn’t even qualify as drugs, they were a staple of his daily diet, like pink grapefruit, orange juice, and vitamins.
There was always anxiety or depression to distract him—maybe the money situation was getting critical, or a legal problem was making him edgy. Or maybe he just felt so depressed he didn’t feel like writing anything. As a last resort he could always pick a fight with someone—his girlfriend, the writing assistant of the day, or Deb were the most likely targets. Eventually a combination of shame and fear finally drove him to the typewriter late at night. The next morning there might be a page, but sometimes there were only a few sentences.
It was hard to watch. I felt terrible for him. Hunter was a perfectionist, and he was a damn fine writer, and I know it killed him to realize he wasn’t going to write anything, hit the power switch on the IBM Selectric typewriter, and retreat to the bedroom, leaving an empty page.
Other times, though, when there was movement and energy, it was a wonderful thing to be a part of. I remember sitting at the end of the counter reading parts of the book and then discussing it. This was tricky. On one hand, Hunter wanted honest feedback, including the negative. But he wasn’t always gracious about receiving it, and as for giving advice on what he should write, that was pointless. I kept my comments to a minimum, focusing on what I liked and not commenting on what didn’t work.
I didn’t realize until much later, after his death, that what he needed from those around him wasn’t advice on how to fix what was broken, but encouragement. He needed us to tell him that he could write, that he was a brilliant writer, that he just had to keep going, that this line was funny, or that line was really well written. He needed cheerleaders. With that encouragement, he would get excited, would turn the TV down, roll a new piece of paper in, and start to type. He would start to throw ideas out and if they were well received he would throw more ideas out. He would go quiet for several minutes while he typed, and then the back-and-forth of ideas and encouragement would resume. His eyes would brighten and he would sit up straight at the typewriter.
Those were the best times, when Hunter remembered for a little while what a fine writer he was by actually doing it. He loved the praise and literary recognition that had come to him in the last ten or fifteen years of his life, but ultimately he needed to feel the words flowing through him onto the page and see their effect on an audience. Those long stretches without sleep were really hard on me, but it was well worth it to be a part of Hunter’s writing life, especially seeing my father having fun writing, doing what he was born to do, and doing it well.
But the fact was that he no longer had the ability to complete a book-length project. Better Than Sex was the last book that contained new writing. After this point, every book was a collection of previously written or published material. Three years later the first letters book, The Proud Highway, was published. The year after that, in 1998, The Rum Diary, his only novel, was published, some thirty-eight years after it was written and rejected by numerous publishers. In 2000, the second letters book, Fear and Loathing in America, was published, followed by Kingdom of Fear in 2003 and the last book, Hey Rube, in 2004. These books consisted entirely of writing he had already done—as a young man in Puerto Rico or his correspondence over the years, his ESPN columns, or various previously unpublished work. Even completing the weekly ESPN column became an epic adventure, or maybe a nightmare. A thousand words were all he could manage, and that under extreme duress. His powers of observation had not decreased, and in those short bursts you could often see his native brilliance and hear the powerful music of his voice in the words, but he couldn’t sustain it.
A couple years after Better Than Sex was published, Jen and I helped Hunter with the first book of letters, The Proud Highway. Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian and author who by this time ha
d become a close friend of Hunter’s, suggested it as a way to publish a book without actually having to write one. It was a painful but realistic assessment: Hunter needed money, the only way to bring in money was to write another book, but that was a very, very long shot. A book of letters was a great solution: the letters were very good, something Hunter could be proud of, and it was a book that could be put together with very little work on Hunter’s part.
When Jen and I came to visit Owl Farm, we were put to work in the War Room looking for material. Though Hunter had not used it for writing in around twenty years, it was still the place where the most important or sensitive papers, tapes, and videos were kept. Over the years, I had gone in at Hunter’s request to find something in particular, but never casually. The War Room and Hunter’s bedroom were both off-limits to everyone besides Deb, even to me, unless I had his permission. For Hunter to permit Jennifer and me to work in the War Room and go through his papers while he remained upstairs was a gigantic show of trust in us. Also, Hunter had a pretty good idea of what we would find as we went through the papers.
Hunter was a pack rat. The only things that left that house were the trash bags from the kitchen or gifts. Everything else was stored in the basement or the barn. At one point I went looking for the bicycle that I received on my eighth birthday. I hadn’t seen it in thirty years. I found it in the loft in the barn, no longer shiny but still serviceable. I pumped up the tires, tightened a few bolts, and my son was riding it ten minutes later. I found my stuffed animals from when I was ten. The closets downstairs were full of Hunter’s clothes from forty years ago—one year when I was in college I asked him if I could have two sport coats that were bought in a men’s shop in Louisville, Kentucky, probably in the early ’60s. He agreed to lend them to me. He had boxes of Playboy magazines, going back to the ’70s. He had generations of luggage, a marijuana distiller he had been given as a gift, a speargun, a crossbow, boxes of ammunition, posters in mailing tubes, old wooden doors painted in the ’60s in psychedelic colors, a barred door from a bank vault—and papers, boxes and boxes and boxes of his papers, what we began to call The Archive.
Our job was to go through every single box in the War Room, extract letters, and file them by year. Some boxes were filled with thoroughly nibbled newspapers and thousands of mouse droppings, some had photos, some various drafts of books or articles, some had objects—one box contained a few hundred bars of hotel-size, yellowing, now-withered Neutrogena soap, another hundreds of matchbooks that Hunter had collected from around the country in his decades of traveling. It was a cornucopia, a potpourri, a random history of Hunter’s life from the age of seventeen to the present. There was no order to the boxes, and few were labeled, so we grabbed the nearest box and began sifting.
Part of the job included using our judgment to exclude letters deemed too personal: for example, letters between Sandy and Hunter. He was very concerned that Sandy might object to these being published, and asked her permission before including letters to her in the book. That meant we had to read them. I knew it was significant that he trusted Doug, Deb, Jennifer, and me enough to let us go through these papers, but as I reflect on it now, I understand more completely the magnitude of his decision. He knew what was in those boxes. Not all of it was flattering. Hunter, a man who was intensely private about his personal affairs, was opening his thoroughly documented life to us, knowing we would come across letters or items that revealed some of his darker aspects. I can see now that he had come to believe that I would love him regardless of what we found.
Jen was able to move at a good pace, but for me it was a sudden and deep immersion in nostalgia. I found pictures from my childhood at Owl Farm, our dogs, birthday parties, Hunter and Sandy sitting on the couch, smiling. I found report cards and assessments from my fourth-grade teachers, a declaration of independence I wrote to my parents after an unjust imprisonment in my room when I was eight, a steno notebook of Hunter’s from a trip to Idaho in 1964, a pair of dusty, scratched yellow Ray-Ban sunglasses. While Jen would identify a letter by reading the first few lines and then set it aside for filing, I would read the entire letter along with the other side of the conversation, often stapled or paper-clipped to Hunter’s letter. I was absorbing my father in tiny increments. And it had to have been very difficult for Hunter. He acknowledges in the introduction to The Proud Highway that it was a profoundly uncomfortable process to have other people, even family and as close a friend as Doug Brinkley, going through the letters of one’s youth. While we worked, Hunter sat on his stool in the kitchen, reading the paper, watching the news, hyperaware of the activity below him while trying to ignore it. He didn’t want us to discuss the letters—that would come later, after Doug had selected the best ones and needed contextual information for them, but every now and then if someone found an especially good letter, we would bring it upstairs and read it out loud.
Jen, Will, and me, in front of the bonfire while fireman Joe Fredericks stands by. Deb had piled up all kinds of scrap lumber from around the property to create a bonfire for Will, 2002.
I wasn’t much help those nights, since I couldn’t skim over letters between Hunter and my mother, Hunter and his brothers, Hunter and his mother. I found one letter in which Hunter explained to my mother that if she really wanted to get married, that was fine, but he wasn’t going to change his ways, and that she needed to understand that going in. And he did not change his ways. I’m pretty sure that there were plenty of women in Hunter’s life the whole time he was married to my mother. Does the fact that he warned her up front let him off the hook? Hell if I know. It didn’t stop my mother from being very hurt and angry when she found evidence of one of those relationships on his credit-card statements when I was twelve, and telling me what a bastard he was for cheating on her.
I found another letter from my mother to Hunter, berating him for yelling at me for playing with his records when I was three or four years old. I had never known that my mother had stood up to him on my behalf and risked his rage.
I also found some of the letters that made their way into the book, the letters to friends arguing about politics and philosophy, or the letters to creditors pretending to be crazy, or the provocative letters to prospective employers explaining just what he would and would not do, take him or leave him.
Hunter gradually lost the ability to sustain the necessary concentration to write, almost certainly because of the cocaine and booze. He wasn’t a binge cokehead. Hunter snorted a little bit all day, probably to balance the whiskey, but I’m sure it impaired his ability to concentrate. Then, just as he was a maintenance cocaine user, he was also a maintenance drinker, not a binger. But a fifth of whiskey a day for forty years takes its toll on the body, no matter how strong the constitution. In the last ten or so years of his life, Hunter was often sick with a variety of ailments, sometimes the usual cold or flu, but also things like fungal growths, throat infections, nasal infections, cuts and bruises, and occasional seizures. The cuts and bruises were not a result of drunken stumbling, but instead a result of his decreasing ability to walk unassisted. First the degeneration of his hip joint, then of his lower back, caused him such pain that he avoided walking as much as possible, and when he did have to walk, he would prop himself up on counters, chairs, bookcases, anything that could provide him extra support. Every now and then he missed, or slipped, and ended up cutting or bruising himself. There would be a lot of roaring and yelling, blood and excitement (he had a tremendously high pain threshold, but a very low screaming threshold) while the wound was tended to, and then he would settle down. The problem was not the bruise or the cut, but the fact that they took so long to heal. His immune system had been so beaten down that a cut that used to heal in a few days could now take weeks.
There was also the effect of long-term alcoholism on his muscles, something called alcoholic neuropathy, in which the nerves are actually poisoned by the alcohol. Gradually his muscles lost their ability to work properly, and this showed up i
n his walking, and as incontinence.
Toward the end, in the last year, I remember him standing in the kitchen one afternoon in his bathrobe, and he suddenly cursed and grabbed the bottom of his robe and pulled it up between his legs like a diaper. He didn’t say what had happened, and I pretended I hadn’t seen it and left the room so he could deal with it privately.
Hunter with Deb, the woman who knew him and loved him best, in 2003
I didn’t want to see that my father’s body was falling apart, that he was not in control of himself. He was Hunter, powerful and confident, sometimes frightening, always in control of the situation. Though he was first and always a writer, he was also an athlete, in the sense that he was firmly rooted in his body and its power. It was his trusted accomplice in every adventure and it gave him great pleasure in myriad ways throughout his life. His favorite photos were those in which he stood bare-chested, throwing a football, or piloting his boat through the Florida Keys, or wearing nothing but a pistol in a shoulder holster with a red leather jacket like some pornographic version of James Bond.
From his writing he seems to have had an affinity for certain aspects of Buddhism, but one of the central pillars of Buddhism—acceptance—was not one of them. On the contrary, he was a lifelong advocate and practitioner of changing his reality to suit his wishes. Hunter was not one to accept the gradual deterioration of his body. He endured it as long as he could, and then when it was no longer endurable, and he understood it was only going to get worse, he checked out.
NINE
THE LAST DAY
I HAD LAST VISITED my father in late November 2004, just before Jennifer and Will and I went to Europe for a month. I went up alone to see him for a few days.
Hunter was preparing for a trip to New Orleans that he was excited about, though he was still recovering from a broken leg.
Stories I Tell Myself Page 20