We all dismissed that, but it stayed with Hunter for a long time.
DOUG BRINKLEY
Hunter wrote his mother these very philosophical letters from behind bars. They exude the desperation of a young man in jail looking for his freedom as well as contemplating how the rich get away with dastardly things and the poor don’t—that the buddies that he was with in the Cherokee Park event were waltzing because they knew the judge, and that he was the poor kid on the other side of the railroad tracks with no dad. The game was fixed.
She was an extraordinarily loving, giving mom. They were very, very close. Hunter was running amok, and she didn’t know what to do. She kept two of her sons fairly grounded. Hunter was the loose cannon. There was always a maternal disappointment that she perhaps had failed.
PORTER BIBB
He was such an outgoing, self-initiating guy that as one of his close friends, I never even thought to help. I didn’t even go see him. He was there for a couple of days in a sort of temporary holding cell. It wasn’t even a real jail. He’s made up a lot of stuff about how terrifying it was and that he was worried about being attacked and everything. I think they called it Louisville Children’s Detention Center. Then he had a choice given to him—go to juvenile prison or go into the military—and off he went.
He hadn’t even applied to college, and it was unique that he didn’t. Everybody went to college in the circle he was in, most of them to Ivy League schools. Hunter would probably have been in the top 25 students out of about 250. He didn’t come to class a lot, but we all skipped around.
I remember asking him even before all this happened, “What the fuck are you going to do?” I mean, he could have gone to the University of Louisville or the University of Kentucky almost for free. And he said, “I don’t know. Something. I’ll figure something out.”
LOU ANN ILER
Hunter was sent to jail for ninety days right before graduation, and at that point I really lost touch with him. As I was getting ready to go down to the jail to see him, my mother actually forbade me to do so. Then his probation officer got him released early with the understanding that he would go into the service. So Hunter got out of jail and literally went to the bus station, got on the bus, and went into the air force.
CHAPTER TWO
An Itinerant Professional
Hunter used to tell us that he was going to be a great writer but that he figured he’d have to do some sort of journalism to make a living in the meantime. He wasn’t too happy about this, but he figured that if Hemingway did it, he could too.
DOUG BRINKLEY
The air force was his college. He learned a lot from various military types, and used this knowledge in his writing a lot—how the hillbilly grunt has to deal in a world of hard-nosed authority. Imagine such a rebellious spirit being forced into boot camp and mess hall drills and having to keep his boots polished perfectly and observe lights-out. Hunter would brag about his deviation from the rules, but that was one percent of the time. Ninety-nine percent of the time it was “Yes, sir!” But he was constantly studying the military culture. He really respected most of the officers; he became friends with a lot of them.
PORTER BIBB
We sent a lot of letters back and forth when I got to college. He’d gone off with the air force, so I started writing him as if he were my gay lover—thinking that the air force would read his mail—and he never responded. He didn’t take the bait. But right after college I went into the Marine Corps, and he started writing letters to me as my gay lover (I was in Parris Island), and they definitely opened our mail and read it. They read it to the whole platoon.
JERRY HAWKE served in the air force from June 1955 to May 1957, assigned to the Public Information Office at Eglin Field in Florida.
Part of the function of my department was putting out the Command Courier, the base newspaper. Not long after I got there, Hunter came aboard as sports editor. He had been assigned to a radar unit, which was clearly not his bag. He managed to get transferred to the base newspaper. He loved sports, so it was a natural for him. He also had a moonlighting job with the local civilian newspaper, the Fort Walton Playground News. Hunter was a very good-looking kid, a boyish-looking guy, and even then he was something of a cutup. He had a very provocative sense of humor.
We had a common friend, a lieutenant colonel named Frank Campbell, who was the deputy head of the information services office. Frank was a delightful fellow, a former newspaper man, I think, a very literary guy. I had been an English major at Yale and had pretensions of being a writer. I had spent a summer at Oxford and was planning to go back there to read English. The four of us—Frank and his wife and Hunter and I—became very good friends. I would play duplicate bridge with Pauline and Frank, and Hunter would sit around and drink beer.
I remember very clearly talking about the great writers from the twenties and thirties—Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Frank was a big influence on Hunter—he really provided kind of a home away from home, and he encouraged Hunter’s literary interests. Hunter was trying to do creative writing at the time. I remember his remorse for not having gone to college and his hope that when he got out he would go to Vanderbilt.
LOU ANN ILER
He came to see me in December of ’56, just showed up at my door. He was still in the service, but he really wanted to start a relationship again, and I did not. He was not too happy, but . . . there’s alcoholism in my family, and the pain that it caused me was something that I saw could happen with Hunter, and I wasn’t going there. It was really a survival decision. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for him. We parted as friends.
Hunter probably got in more trouble than other people, but he wasn’t that different in terms of his actual drinking. There was just always that energy, that tension. I don’t know that he had the ability to stop himself once that energy took over. Hunter was exciting and had that edge that a lot of men didn’t have. You’d be drawn to him like a moth to the flame. And when he wanted to, he could fit right in. It just seemed like every so often he had some energy that could not stand that type of constraint.
DOUG BRINKLEY
All in all, Hunter had a great billet. He was in Fort Walton Beach when it was still pristine, before it got developed. The most beautiful emerald waters in America are on that Florida Panhandle, and Hunter and his friends would go out swimming and surfing, and they drank. He would overdrink, but you didn’t often find a twenty-year-old in the military who wasn’t drinking a lot; they didn’t hold that against him. It was just another part of being in the military—that wild male culture of strip clubs, boozy nights, a really raucous kind of comedy, and a kind of verbal hazing of each other. Hunter was a ringleader in all of those macho coming-of-age rituals.
He was pushing envelopes a lot with his sports coverage for the Command Courier, the base newspaper, and he wrote some extra stuff for the Playground News under the pseudonym Thorne Stockton. The officers eventually had to censor him and shut him down, but it wasn’t out of disdain for Hunter. That’s why he got the honorable discharge—he charmed those officers a lot too.
I think there is a misimpression that Hunter’s air force years were one of him just flipping off authorities. In truth, he was an integral part of what was going on on the base and was respected by superior officers and the enlisted men. He just got into a tangle with some of the rules as a journalist. Quarterback Bart Starr was apparently finagling special treatment from the air force top brass so he could sign with Green Bay. Hunter found this appalling—or at the very least worth noting—so he snuck into base headquarters and found Starr’s sui generis discharge and snuck it onto the front page of the Command Courier at the last minute. He had also made fun of radio and TV personality Arthur Godfrey when he had come to the base. Hunter was just pushing it too far; they had to call him on it.
GENE MCGARR lived and worked with Hunter in New York City after Hunter was discharged from the air force.
The last thing he did, in November of 1957, wa
s to write up a press release describing a riot that took place at Eglin when the enlisted men attacked the women’s quarters and the officer’s mess—stole all the booze, got drunk as shit, attacked the women, beat up the officers. It was a very funny and colorful story—completely fictional, of course—and he sent a copy of it to the AP and to UPI, left a copy on his captain’s desk, then drove like a son of a bitch for the gate.
He headed north; he’d read in Editor & Publisher about a small town newspaper that wanted a sports editor. He wrote them a letter, and they said to come up. This was a place called Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania.
Now, it turns out that Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, was just a bleak, hideous place with coal dust in the air. Dreadful, and no women in town that were worth looking at. Hunter got a room over a bar and started working for the paper, describing horse pulls and wrestling matches with “Popo the Killer Jap” and all kinds of things with this peculiar Dadaist approach. He wrote everything deadly serious. These things—like pro wrestling matches—were supposed to be laughed at to a certain extent. Everybody knows how it’s phony as baloney, but he played it straight. Well, not exactly straight; he was writing things like “People were carried out of the ring with broken backs,” “his neck was broken in three places”—stuff like that. Apparently nobody really cared whether it was true or not.
He’s working there for a couple of months when the editor’s daughter comes home for Christmas. She’s a nice-looking girl, so Hunter immediately hits on her. They get together. One night, he takes her on a drive into the countryside in the editor’s car. They pull into this side lane and start making out. They’re having a fine time, but when Hunter tries to back out to take her home, he’s mired up to the hubcaps in mud.
It’s two o’clock in the morning. There’s a farmhouse with a tractor sitting outside. Hunter goes up to the house, and he’s loathe to wake up a farmer at that hour. The tractor’s got the key in it, so he climbs up on the tractor, starts the goddamn thing, figures out how to put it in gear, turns it around, and runs it back down to the car. There’s a chain at the end of the tractor to pull all kinds of farm equipment, so Hunter attaches the chain around the car’s back bumper, puts the tractor in gear and eases out the clutch—and immediately rips the bumper half-off.
By this time, the farmer’s running down the hill with a shotgun. Hunter explains everything to him, and the farmer calms down and actually decides to help him. He shows him, basically, how you don’t put the chain on the bumper, you asshole, you put it on the axle. So he puts it on the axle and tows them out. Hunter’s in the driver’s seat and he’s got the door open and he’s looking backward to see where to steer, but he doesn’t notice this tree. The tree catches the door and bends it completely forward. So now he’s got a door and a bumper both hanging half-off.
They drive home. Hunter leaves the car in front of the editor’s house, goes back to his apartment, and packs all his bags. He goes to the office and is waiting for the editor when he hears this horrible scraping noise coming down the street. It’s the editor driving to work with the door and the bumper scraping the ground. Hunter gets up, walks out the door, gets into his car, and drives immediately to New York. That was the end of his Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, experience.
JERRY HAWKE
I got out of the air force in May of ’57. The Oxford plans had been scrapped, and I went up to Columbia Law School and was living in a shared apartment in New York City with my brother, who was a year ahead of me at school, and a fellow named John Clancy, who was a classmate of my brother. Clancy was a great character, a very bright, florid-faced Irishman. We all lived together in this old railroad flat at 110 Morningside Drive near Columbia.
Hunter called me and said he was leaving Jersey Shore and needed a place to stay. He wanted to come to New York. The way he put it, they sort of ran him out of town. He had to leave town so quickly that he left his watch in a pawnshop.
He enrolled in the School of General Studies at Columbia and took some courses. We had a deal where he wouldn’t have to pay any rent but he had to do dishes and stuff like that.
One of the things Hunter did was sign up for book clubs. They’d offer you four free books up front if you agreed to buy so many books over the course of the year. Hunter would sign up, get the free books up front, and never order any other books—or if he did, he wouldn’t pay for them. So he would get notices from these book clubs and would stiff them, or he’d send back some minuscule payment, which would only force them to trigger their whole process all over again.
ROGER HAWKE is Jerry Hawke’s brother.
They’d send him letters, one after another. Finally when it got to a certain point, Hunter wrote them back, starting off very rationally but gradually getting crazier and crazier, to the point where he’d end up claiming that they owed him money—but that he didn’t want their money and they could keep it. After that he’d never hear from them again. He used to read them to us. They were real gems.
JOHN CLANCY was one of the roommates.
Hunter used to tell us that he was going to be a great writer—he’d mention Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the same sentence—but that he figured he’d have to do some sort of journalism to make a living in the meantime. He wasn’t too happy about this, but he figured that if Hemingway did it, he could too.
GERALD TYRRELL
I went down from Yale to Hunter’s place in New York on spring vacation of my sophomore year to see him. He was living in this barren flat up by Columbia. I had to sleep in my overcoat on the floor. The only thing he had to eat in the refrigerator was a jar of peanut butter. I’m not even sure he had bread. There was a Chinese girl who lived next door, and Hunter said she fed him a lot.
GENE MCGARR
Around this time, Hunter and I started working together at Time magazine as copyboys. We worked the same daytime shift, starting at about seven-thirty or eight a.m. It was a miserably paid job, but a simple one. You deliver newspapers in the morning and then run copy from the editor back to the writer and from the writer to the editor and so on. Flunky work.
You couldn’t get the job if you wanted to be a writer. They didn’t want aspiring writers working as copyboys because all of a sudden, they would be rewriting the articles themselves and bugging editors with their own stuff. They wanted premed students or poor goofy anybodies, but no writers.
JERRY HAWKE
Hunter would get absolutely smashed and go around mouthing off and insulting all of his superiors at Time. He could drink a lot, and that got him into trouble. He eventually got fired because of that. He probably didn’t last more than three or four weeks.
JOHN CLANCY
We lived uptown until the summer, and then Hunter and I shared a place in the Village. There was one bed, and a cot in an alcove that was very hard to sleep on. There was no mattress or anything, so we kind of shared the one bed. I worked as a teamster down on the docks. I’d go to work at seven at night and come home at eight in the morning. He’d be off to work at dawn, so we never saw each other during the week. But I’d come home around noon on Saturday after drinking with my coworkers—our “Friday night” started at eight a.m. Saturday morning—and Hunter and I would crank up what he called “the Fun Machine,” with me on no sleep. We’d drive somewhere, or we’d just run all over the Village and drink and smoke and talk and argue and chase girls. And then on the weekends, if one of us didn’t sleep in some girl’s bed, we had to fight over who the fuck was going to actually use the bed instead of the horrible cot.
GENE MCGARR
Hunter almost never talked about his sex life, or about sex in general. You could never pin him down. He would never admit to having had sexual relations with anybody, or give you any details, except a couple of times. He told me once that if a girl wouldn’t blow him, he wouldn’t see her again. As far as he was concerned, a girl who wouldn’t suck cock wasn’t worth hanging out with, no matter how good-looking she was.
And I recall another time, we had m
et a stripper, a very pretty, nicely built girl, at Dirty Julius’s or the Riviera, and he had a little affair with her. And there was something about the “standing tree” position—the girl was light and strong and athletic enough to perform in the standing tree position. Exactly what the hell the “standing tree” position was, I never found out, but it blew his mind.
JOHN CLANCY
I was going out with a girl that lived in an apartment down the street, and she had a roommate from Smith College who had a separate room. This girl and I were hot and heavy, and one night, about six months later, she told me that Hunter had been sleeping with her roommate. He’d been coming over the roof and down the fire escape and going in through the roommate’s window. But the thing that impressed me was that Hunter had never said one word about any of this to me. I said to myself, “There’s a man of principle.”
GENE MCGARR
I was living on the Lower East Side, between the Bowery and Second Avenue, on the fifth floor. It was so bad that you could have cardiac arrest by the time you got up the stairs. I never locked my apartment door because I had nothing to steal—and if anybody actually wanted to climb those five flights, he deserved whatever he would steal. Hunter comes up one night, with a few other people, to visit me, and I’m not there, I’m out driving a cab. And I don’t get any sense of what happened until the next day.
He’s in there sitting with his friends and waiting for me, and drinking beer. And at one point, he gets up and takes his belt off. It’s a hot summer night and all the windows are open all over the block, including mine. And Hunter starts whipping the wall, and he’d whip and then scream, “AAIIIIIGH!!!” Whip, “AIIIIIGH!!! Whip, “AAAAAHH!!!” It was loud. Everybody on the block could hear this. And every now and then he’d stop and he’d go, “Do it again, do it again!” Whip, “AAAAAHH!!!” “You can’t do that, you son of a bitch!!”
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