Tall and lanky, wearing a woolen Native American–looking knit hat that trailed down past his shoulders, the ubiquitous aviators tight to the face, he shot a massive hand toward me. I placed my hand in his firm hold and gave back what I got—the beginning, I sensed, of a long and deep-rooted friendship.
He plopped himself into a chair, laid his armaments—a giant cattle prod and a hefty Taser—on the table. In that very second, the proverbial good times began to roll. We had a few rounds, talked about this and that, and connected on more than a few levels, not the least being the discovery that we both hailed from the dark and bloody ground of the great state of Kentucky. That fact alone sent Hunter into eloquent tirades ranging from southern chivalry to hillbilly moonshine-running to our fellow Kentuckian Cassius Clay. Within no time, the group was invited back to Owl Farm, Hunter’s fortified compound just up the road from the tavern, where we babbled ourselves silly and, at about two-thirty a.m., blew up propane bombs with a nickel-plated shotgun. This, I was to learn later, was my first test before being initiated into the “Too Much Fun Club.”
Sometime later, I was working on Donnie Brasco in New York City when my phone rang one morning at about five-thirty a.m. “Johnny . . . Hunter . . . Listen, if they were going to do a film of the Vegas book . . . would you be interested? Would you want to play me?” I was stunned and tried to gather myself. “Well . . . What about it? Are you in?” Of course I was. Who wouldn’t have been? I was beyond interested. It had actually been a dream of mine that I’d always thought an impossibility. We spoke a bit more about the hows, the whos, the whens, et cetera. It was then that I learned that there really weren’t any. There was nothing—no script, no director, no production at all. It simply didn’t exist. Not yet, anyway. He’d inquired for his own edification. He did that sort of thing a lot. Rhyme, reason, and rationale might have been totally invisible to the majority, but Hunter was always way ahead of the curve. Even amid what appeared to be absolute chaos, he was all too aware of exactly where the chips would fall.
We both acknowledged that there would be a great need for me to spend ungodly and potentially unhealthy amounts of time with him. We’d already established a pretty strong friendship from various other adventures together, such as a three-hour stint onstage at the Viper Room in L.A. I’d come to see Hunter and was then wrangled into doing the entire gig with him. He had insisted over dinner, minutes before he was due to be introduced at the club: Either I went onstage with him or he would cancel the whole thing right then and there. John Cusack had come ’round and was also shanghaied into participating. The three of us drove to the entrance of the club in some rented (I think) convertible. We inched our way down Sunset Boulevard with a life-size blow-up doll in tow and the ever-bespectacled Dr. Thompson spilling whiskey everywhere out of his large highball glass. Oh yeah, were we ever subtle. As we began to park, Dr. Thompson decided that the right thing to do was to heave the poor, defenseless sex maiden into the Sunset Strip traffic. One nasty screeching of tires and one horrified, ultra-high-pitched scream from Hunter, and all hell broke loose—more screeching, more screams, all eyes in our direction. A trail of madness in—literally—seconds.
Reunited with the sex toy, we calmly made our way inside and took the stage. The night got weirder and weirder, but my God, was it fun. Too much fun.
Meanwhile, the Vegas film finally got set up properly, and the time came for some serious soul stealing. I flew into Aspen and was greeted at the airport by Hunter in his ’71 Chevy convertible, aka the Red Shark. We serpentined our way through the mountains and arrived at Owl Farm, where I was swiftly invited to put my things in the basement, where I lived for much longer than was planned and grew to be kind of comfortable with the brown recluse spiders that shared the room.
For days and nights on end we would sit in that Command Center and talk about anything and everything, from politics to weapons, our home state, lipstick, music, Hitler’s paintings, literature, sports, always sports. We were talking one night about which sports he preferred and didn’t. We were watching plenty of basketball and loads of football, so I asked him he if he had ever been a baseball fan, to which he replied flatly, “No . . . Baseball is like watching a bunch of angry Jews arguing on the porch.” Once, a year later, we made a bet on the World Cup soccer tournament, France versus Brazil. He was absolutely, vehemently positive that Brazil was just going to cream France. I took that bet, one thousand dollars. We teased and prodded each other for weeks leading up to the match. The outcome bent in my favor; he promptly wrote me a check and sent it with this letter:
WELL, COLONEL, I TOLD YOU THE FUCKING GAME WAS FIXED. I just didn’t think those prissy quadroon boys would go totally into the tank. They acted like stupid animals. They shit all over themselves and disgraced a whole nation of gutless whores in the eyes of the world. And it taught me another good lesson in WHY amateurs shouldn’t fuck around with gambling on games they know nothing about.
Anyway, here’s a check for $1,000.
Thank you very much for yr. business. I’ll be back.
Okay,
Doc
His generosity was astounding. Never once did he try to wriggle away from my unending barrage of questions. He was always exceptionally patient and very giving. He was totally open regarding the details of his exploits, personal experiences, and memories, even the more private and intimate particulars from his past. He did not have to be. The more time together, the more intense the bond. For the most part, we were inseparable. And it felt good. The connection was profound and becoming more so.
I used to tease him that we were becoming a perversely dark and twisted version of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, which really made him uncomfortable. I had by this point purloined an impressive amount of his clothing from the Vegas period and adopted his mode of dress: the aviator shades, a bush hat, short pants, athletic socks, Converse sneakers, cigarette holder clenched tightly between the teeth. If I took my hat off and aired out the chrome dome, he’d always beg me to cover up again. We’d saunter out of the house like freakish twins. For good or ill, there we were—a pair of deviant bookends on the prowl. Truly, the man should be sainted for putting up with my continual scratching away at the layers of his life. He stuck it out like a champion and couldn’t have been a better friend.
There are countless other moments and experiences that I was fortunate enough to have gone through with Hunter, far too many to write about here. I was well aware that it was all going to happen only once in a lifetime. These were fantastic experiences. Some of the best moments of my life were happening to me, and luckily, I knew it.
Speaking as a fan: You owe it to yourselves to not be cheated, or shortchanged, by believing merely the myth. Understand that his road and his methods were his and only his, and that he lived and breathed his writing twenty-four hours a day. There are those of you who, based on Hunter’s journeys and the mad stories that surround his life and memory, the excess and wild rantings of his lifestyle, might think that he was simply some hedonistic lunatic or, as he always put it, “an elderly dope fiend.” I promise you, he was not. He was a southern gentleman, all chivalry and charm. He was a hilarious and rascally little boy. A truth seeker. He was a hypersensitive medium who miraculously channeled the underlying current of truth buried in lies that we have become accustomed to believing.
Hunter was a genius who revolutionized writing in the same way that Marlon Brando did with acting, as significant, essential, and valuable as Dylan, Kerouac, and the Stones. He was without question the most loyal and present friend I have ever had the honor of knowing. I am privileged to have belonged to the small fraternity of people in his life who were allowed to see more than most. He was elegance personified. I miss him. I missed him when he was alive. But, dear Doctor, I will see you again.
Colonel Depp
Los Angeles
CHAPTER ONE
Coming of Age in Louisville
We had guns in our cars. We shot houses, mailboxes, ga
rbage cans. We shoplifted. We broke into liquor stores. We’d jimmy a lock or break a window. I never paid a hotel bill when I was with Hunter. We’d just go out the window or the fire escape.
SANDY THOMPSON (now Sondi Wright) met Hunter in 1958 and was married to him for seventeen years.
Hunter was born different—very different. His mother, Virginia, and I talked a lot many, many years ago about Hunter as a little boy. He was angry. He was charming. He was a lot of trouble. And what I always used to say—which is interesting, in light of the end of his life—was that he shot out of the womb angry. And then he left that same way.
NEVILLE BLAKEMORE grew up with Hunter in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky.
My grandmother owned a house a block away from Hunter’s. I couldn’t tell you the first time I met him; I just knew about him.
It was a neighborhood in which people would sit on the porch and talk to the people walking by. Washing was hung in the backyard to dry, and ironing was done with flatirons heated on stoves. Everybody knew everybody—the generations knew everybody, everybody knew the help, and so on. In the afternoon we’d listen to radio programs like Superman and Sky King. Television did not exist.
Hunter’s dad, Jack, was born in Horse Cave, Kentucky, in 1893 and came to Louisville with his three brothers when his widowed mother moved here. His first wife, who was from eastern Kentucky, died in 1923—two years after their first and only child, Jack Jr., was born. Jack Jr. was raised by his maternal grandmother in Greenup, Kentucky, so he wasn’t around much. And he was a lot older; he served in World War II and Korea.
Mr. Thompson was a tallish man with glasses and gray hair combed straight back. He had served in World War I, and he was stern. Hunter’s mother was Virginia Ray, who Jack married in 1935, and her mother was named—well, we called her Memo. Hunter was Jack and Virginia’s first child—born on July 18, 1937. Mr. Thompson was an insurance agent, and Memo helped with raising the children and was always around the house. She’d read to us.
DEBORAH FULLER was Hunter’s personal assistant from 1982 to 2003.
Hunter’s mother told me that he was born a night owl. She cursed him for that—“Oh God, he never slept at the same time as his brothers.” But Virginia loved him and was very proud of him. She told me he was very charismatic as a young man, even as a boy. Kids—boys and girls—would come around to the house and sit on the front steps to wait to walk to school with Hunter. But she also said that he was a feisty one—that he got in trouble quite a bit.
NEVILLE BLAKEMORE
My parents didn’t like my hanging around with him—even when we were pretty young. They thought he was a bully. I think they may have been right. But we always wanted to go over to his house. Hunter was a magnet. There was always something going on. We had toy soldiers and we’d play these huge war games. World War II was a big influence. We’d play Germans and Japanese, and have battles all over the neighborhood. People would have cardboard guns and cap pistols and backpacks and helmet liners. Some guys had BB guns.
Hunter got his interest in guns from another neighbor, Joe Bell. Joe understood firearms when he came out of the womb. He loved them, and he always had the latest thing.
Hunter would go over to another friend’s house, and behind the street where this friend lived was Bear Grass Creek and a culvert. A lot of African Americans lived on the other side of the creek. Hunter and his group would shoot these guys with BB guns and hurl racial insults, and the black guys would finally have enough and swarm down into the culvert and up the wall, and Hunter and the others would retreat into their friend’s house and hide. They’d start these little mini–race wars.
Everybody had bicycles. Hunter used to ride his bike around the neighborhood, shooting matches with a clothespin shooter. You could make a shooter out of just a clothespin and a rubber band and a “strike anywhere” match, and all you have to do is squeeze the thing and out shoots a lit match. People used to burn their leaves in the fall, and they’d rake them into the gutters first. But Hunter would ride around the neighborhood and shoot these things into the leaves and start fires all over the Highlands.
Another time, when I was twelve or thirteen, I had all the neighbor kids over for lunch, and we played soldiers in the backyard. Hunter stole a bunch of my soldiers. I figured it out that night, and it really hurt me. My father said, “Well, I’m very sorry, but it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, because that’s the kind of guy he is.” That for me meant, “Okay, he’s fun to be around, but be careful.”
GERALD TYRRELL also grew up a block away from Hunter.
Our group would go to Cherokee Park to play football, or go to the basketball courts, or grab a dime and go downtown to the movies—we would go all over the place—but going to the library and reading books was always given equal billing. Hunter would say, “Let’s go to the library,” and seven or eight of us would grab our bikes and ride down. It’d be all grab-ass and being rowdy and loud marching up the steps of the library, and then we’d be quiet as church mice inside and each pick out a book and sit down and read for a couple of hours, and then put the books back and leave and be rowdy and grab-ass and ride our bikes home. And it wasn’t just on rainy days. It was year-round.
PORTER BIBB grew up with Hunter in Louisville.
I first met him when we were eleven or twelve. Louisville then was a very elitist town, and very small. Geographically it’s midwestern, but we all thought of it as very southern.
He lived in a slightly decaying middle-class neighborhood. It had been a prominent upper-middle-class part of the city, but it was within walking distance of downtown, and the city had gone out to the country by the time we were growing up. His mother, Virginia, was a wonderful, very intelligent, very hospitable lady who worked as a librarian. She looked like Betty Crocker. Hunter also had two younger brothers, Davison and Jim.
SANDY THOMPSON
He was very good-looking, tall, slender. He had this wonderful gait—and just a tremendous power of seduction. And he knew this very early on: how he could seduce not just women but men, children—anybody he really wanted to.
LOU ANN ILER was Hunter’s high school sweetheart.
I was a new student at Highland Junior High when I met Hunter in ninth grade, in 1951. He was at my locker between classes, and before I knew it he rode home on the bus with me, and then he carried my books; he put his arm around me. It was a very innocent time. We’d go to the movies, which was only twenty-five cents a person—even with popcorn and a Coke you could have a very nice date for a dollar—and we would go to high school football games or walk from my house to the ice-cream shops. Sometimes we got around on the bus, or he had older friends who drove and we double-dated with them. Afterward he would drop me off at my house and say good-night, but once I arrived at my door, my mother knew I was home and she set a time limit: five minutes, and that was it. So after we said good-bye, Hunter would throw pebbles at my bedroom window, and he would stand outside my window and we would talk for another forty-five minutes or an hour.
He was very charming and handsome, and had wonderful manners, and treated me very well. I wouldn’t take any guff from him, and I think he liked that. And I could out-stare him, which used to annoy him greatly. He had a lot of energy—I wouldn’t call it sexual energy at that point, because it was ninth grade, in the fifties—but he was different from the other young men I dated. There was just a presence about him. And, yes, he would draw attention to himself.
In our sophomore year we were double-dating at a neighborhood theater called the Bard. Afterward he told me that he was going to go with the other couple, and he’d be back. In a few minutes, up drove a car with this little old lady in the back, all dressed up, screaming, “Help me! Help me! I’m being kidnapped!” Well, it was Hunter. He had dressed in his mother’s clothes—he had a hat and a veil, and he had on her stockings rolled down to his knee, and he was screeching in this high voice. Well, I got so mad, because it called so much attentio
n to himself. I started walking home, with Hunter following me in the car, hanging out the back window, shouting, “Please get in the car. . . . I promise I’ll never do this to you again.” I walked all the way home.
We dated through that summer, and then we both went to Atherton [High School] in our sophomore year. Hunter was there for about six weeks, and then something happened—I don’t know what—and he immediately went to another school. One day he was there and the next day he was at Male High School. I didn’t see him for a while, and I started dating other people, but he kept coming in and out of my life. He would show up unexpectedly at my house.
PORTER BIBB
There were basically four schools. There was Male for the white males who were going to college. There was Manual for the guys who were not going to college and were going to be manual laborers or blue-collar workers. There was St. Xavier for the Catholics and Central High for the blacks. Male, though, was really an extraordinary place, even though it was a public high school. We had people teaching there who had turned down tenure at Yale and Princeton.
GERALD TYRRELL
Hunter went to Highland Junior High School and then Atherton High School for a semester, and then down to Male. It wasn’t long before he joined the Castlewood Athletic Club and later the Athenaeum Literary Association. Those were the two organizations that shaped all our young lives—particularly Hunter’s.
To get into both Castlewood and, later, the Athenaeum, you had to rush. Hunter loved to pledge people. One of the things he liked best was to have pledges throw “fits.” We’d go into a restaurant, and all of a sudden on his command you’d throw an epileptic fit and scream and roll on the floor and carry on. Sooner or later they’d have to call either the police or the ambulance, and you’d have to run off. Hunter would be outside just doubled over laughing.
Gonzo Page 2