Of course, to the neighbors, it’s an outrage, a fucking outrage. Somebody calls the police, and two beefy cops come bounding up five flights of stairs—they probably had apoplexy by the time they got to my apartment—and pound on the door.
The cops come in and bark, “What the hell is going on?” They check everybody for marks, but nobody has any marks on them—they’re sitting quietly drinking beer at the kitchen table. So there was nothing to be done about it, no law being broken, nothing violated. They just split.
I came home that night at about three o’clock in the morning. And I don’t know what’s happened. There’s a note, “We waited for you but you weren’t home” from Hunter.
The next day, as I’m coming up the stairs with a bag of groceries, I meet this Chinese guy from just below me. We’d always gotten along fairly well—“good morning,” “good evening,” smiles, pleasantries. I think I borrowed some salt from him once. But he’s coming down as I’m going up, and as I approach him, he flattens against the wall, shoots me this horrible look, and starts mumbling in Chinese. And I’m wondering, “What the fuck is wrong with him?” I climb up another flight of stairs and finally get to my floor, and there’s a little girl who lives down the other end of the hallway playing in the stairwell. Her mother is working in the kitchen, and their apartment door opens, the mother sees me—and runs out, grabs the little girl, runs back in the apartment, and slams the door. Then she peeks out through the door to see if I’m still there. I’m thinking, “What’s wrong with these people?” Then I hear the story from Hunter about what happened the night before. From then on, I was treated like King Beast.
PAUL SEMONIN
I had a small room over on Charles Street right off West Fourth, which was only a block away from Hunter. We were practically roommates from April of ’59 right on through the summer and into the early fall, until the winter of ’60, when Hunter took off for Puerto Rico. We were getting more and more into the beatnik culture, reading Kerouac and Ginsberg. And of course Norman Mailer’s early stuff was really important. That was teething for us until we were starting to live those kinds of personas in a way. That whole period forms this kind of continuum when you might say there was a kind of brotherhood of dare, a brotherhood of rebellion. Hunter was starting to work on Prince Jellyfish, which is the first novel or manuscript that I remember him actually sitting down to try and write.
As I recall, the essential character, the protagonist, is someone called Welburn Kemp. And those two names were a conjoined name of two different people from Louisville, one of whom had been killed in a car wreck—Welburn Brown—and another one, Penny Kemp, who was severely brain damaged in an auto wreck. They were heroes for young Louisvillians, in a certain way. And they both had tragic ends.
But Hunter hadn’t found a voice. He didn’t like what he was writing, but he never confessed to being inadequate. He just felt limited in a way that he didn’t like.
GENE MCGARR
Hunter’s place on Perry Street was two blocks up from the Riviera Bar and a fairly nice apartment house for Greenwich Village. It was a step above a tenement. But he was in the boiler room in the basement. Just an outrageous cave. I mean, the first time you brought a girl down there it was, “Holy shit.” Because you went down the back rickety stairs and into the backyard, and you had to be very careful, particularly at night, to not strangle yourself on the clotheslines, which were all at about throat level if you were tall. You ducked under those and you got to this door and when you opened the door the first thing you’d see were the flames coming out of the boiler—the furnace—because the door was slightly broken and it wouldn’t shut completely. The flames were dancing on the walls all around you, and the first door, right next to the furnace, was Hunter’s apartment.
Hunter painted the entire interior black. Ceiling, walls—everything totally black, just to add to the atmosphere, presumably. The only way you could tell whether it was night or day, when you woke up, was one whole wall was barred windows that opened up on an air shaft, and you had to get on your back and press your head against the bars to look up. And there was a little triangle of the sky that you could see at the top of the air shaft. If it was blue, it was day.
I had been smoking marijuana since I was twelve or so, but marijuana was the first thing that Hunter and I did together. He didn’t do it that much, and we weren’t out looking for it, but if somebody turned up with some marijuana, we’d smoke it. The first time Hunter ever smoked, he got as sick as a dog. Later on, we did a lot of cocaine, a lot of acid. We kind of discovered a lot of it together. Something would come along, and we would try it. I think I was the one to introduce him to mescaline. He tried to get me into Adrenalin—shots of Adrenalin. I don’t know where he got the stuff from. He once stuck a hypodermic full of Adrenalin into his ankle, and by accident he hit an artery and a needlelike thickness of blood just hit the wall of the room. He was a gorilla for a while once it kicked in, but at the same time scared shitless because this stream of blood was an awesome thing to see. He had to go to the hospital because it wouldn’t stop.
One night, hot as shit, July, one hundred degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity, and it’s midnight. We’re with our girlfriends, and we can’t stand Hunter’s apartment anymore so we decide to go down to the Leroy Street pool a few blocks away. We climb over the fence, boosting the girls. And we strip down to our Skivvies and jump into the water and swim around. And, God, it’s cool. But all of a sudden, over the fence come these five guys—local guineas—who decide that this is their turf. They start throwing our clothes in the water, and I start to get out of the water, but my future wife, Eleanor, gets there first and starts yelling like shit about throwing the clothes in the water, and these guys immediately turn to me, get around me, and start pegging me. So I start moving fast and pegging back at them, and then along comes Hunter. He jumps on one of the guy’s backs and beats the shit out of him, and then he grabs another one. Between the two of us, we drive them back over the fence. We gather all our clothes up and figure we’d better get the hell of there, but before we’re finished, over the fence come ten guys right at us. Well, it’s another melee, but now there are too many of them. I’m getting hit, Hunter’s getting hit. But somehow or another, we drive them off.
We finally put our clothes together and turn around to leave, and behind the fence we just came over must be fifty of them. I told my wife, “You and Connie”—I think it was Connie—“you get over the fence, and don’t look back. I don’t think they’re going to bother you. They want us. Run for Seventh Avenue and do whatever you can to find a cop. Run like hell.” So they go over the fence, and then Hunter and I gathered ourselves. Hunter was as brave as a lion. He waded right in. There was no fucking around. They started wailing and we started wailing. They started hitting me with bottles, and in the meantime, I can’t see what’s going on with Hunter. Thank God it only lasted about a minute. Somebody had called the cops, and the cops were right there. If the fight had lasted two minutes, both Hunter and I would have been dead.
PAUL SEMONIN
I arrived on a motor scooter just afterward. Both Hunter and Gene had a flair for the dramatic, and they could make it into almost an operatic event, but it was nasty—really nasty.
GENE MCGARR
The cops get an ambulance to take us to St. Vincent’s Hospital. There’s so much broken glass on both of us, they have to put us in this big room and hose little pieces of glass off of us. They have to sew up a cut over my eye and a cut above my right elbow. We get dressed and, as instructed, we go down to the precinct station house. They ask us what are we were doing at the pool. And I say, “Oh, shit—it was a hot night. We climbed over the fence to go swimming.” They say, “Look, if you press charges against them”—and they’ve rounded up about ten of the guys by now, and they’re in the station house—“they’re going to press charges against you, and then we’re going to have to keep you all in jail.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. Just give us a h
ead start, and we’ll leave.” And sure enough, they did.
Hunter was a wreck the next day. Fortunately, he had this lovely girl to take care of him. But he started carrying a knife after that, a big bowie knife or something like that. I suggested brass knuckles, but he liked the idea of showing a big blade.
PAUL SEMONIN
Hunter talked about it being a bunch of vandals or delinquents who had stolen clothes from them or something, but I’m sure there was a provocation as well from Hunter and McGarr’s side. They were always bristling and ready for fisticuffs if the chance arose, but this time it was a gang, and they were outnumbered.
GENE MCGARR
And of course there was the night of the cement in the Riviera. That was the day before he packed up and moved to Middletown, New York. He’d gotten some job as the sports editor of the Middletown Record. Eleanor and I went down to see Hunter, and he had a girlfriend with him in his apartment. He was excited. It was the last night in the dungeon, and he decided to celebrate by jumping up and grabbing a sack of flour and doing a dance all around his black-painted apartment until it looked like fallen snow everywhere. Then we walk out the door. He says, “Come on, I’ve got to go get stamps.” And where he buys stamps is down at the Riviera. So we step out onto the catwalk into the furnace room. And there’s this bag of cement, torn at the top, just sitting there outside his door, which really just looks like a bigger bag of flour. It was as though God wanted him to dance some more. Hunter grabs it, throws it onto his shoulder, and heads down the street to the bar. I say, “Hunter, what do you plan on doing with that cement?” He just says, “Stamps. I’ve got to have stamps.”
We get to the Riviera, and I say, “Hunter, you going to go into that place with that bag of cement?” Again: “I’ve got to have stamps.” I turn to my future wife and I give her my watch and my rings.
We open the door at the small end of the Riviera and march in. It’s a Saturday night, so it’s crowded. And as we walk through to the bar—silence. The whole goddamn place is quiet. Hunter gets to the middle of the bar, takes the bag off his shoulder, slams it on the bar, and this kind of mushroom cloud of cement rises from the top of the bag.
There are three bartenders on duty. There’s a kind of middle-aged guy in the center, and the other two appear to be twenty-five-year-old middleweights, one at either end. The guy in the center looks at Hunter in silence and finally says, “You can’t do this.” Hunter says, “I want some stamps. What do you mean?” And the guy just says, “You can’t do this.” He’s like a zombie, staring at the bag. Hunter says, “Come on, now.” I see one of the middleweights coming around one end of the bar and the other middleweight climbing over the other end. I say, “Hunter, they’re coming for us. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He grabs the bag, it tilts backward, and some guy yells, “My suit! My fucking suit, you son of a bitch!” Then some lady screams, and a general melee begins. Everybody heads for the door, only the door is at the narrow end of the bar, and it’s like a mob trying to get out of a fire. Hunter and I get swept along with them, and the bag keeps getting jostled more and more until finally it rips in half. And now everything’s white. You can’t see anything anymore. The stomping feet are sending the cement up into the air, the bag is in shreds, and we’re lost in the fog. Everybody is still pushing for the door. It’s a mob.
Outside, Hunter’s girlfriend and my future wife are standing in the doorway of the haberdashery across the street. They can’t see anything, and then all of a sudden—they later said it was like something coming out of a cannon—this incredible explosion of white powder comes bursting through the door, with arms and legs sticking out of it. Everybody empties out onto the sidewalk, and the stuff begins to settle on the two fucking middleweights. One of them chooses off Hunter. The other chooses off me. And the other people want to get in there and hit us, but one enormous guy takes control and decides to become the referee. And he insists on a fair fight.
About three punches are landed, and then we hear sirens in the distance. We run like hell up Tenth Street and down toward Hudson, and then sneak back over to Christopher to peer around the corner by the Riviera to see what’s going on. The cops are there. People are brushing themselves off, and everybody’s yelling and screaming. We all head to a bar about a block or two away, Hunter brushing himself off.
Later that night, we were sitting in a place called the Kettle of Fish, and this black guy came over and said, “I saw you! I saw you! That was the greatest thing I ever seen in my life!” Hunter had been wearing a trench coat that night, and this guy hands Hunter one of the shoulder epaulets that had gotten ripped off in the melee. The guy had saved it for him.
Hunter and I had to stay out of the Riviera for quite a while.
BOB BONE had just come back from Europe and resumed his job in Middletown, New York, at the Daily Record in the summer of 1958.
Hunter showed up at the paper soon after I returned. They hired him as a general assignment reporter. I think he may have covered some sports (because he was always interested in sports), but that wasn’t his job there. I’m not sure how he happened to leave Time. I had the feeling that he quit in a huff or they fired him, but everything was always an emergency of some sort with Hunter.
Hunter and I began running around with the same girls. He had this place over in Cuddebackville where he tried to do some serious writing, and for a long time, a lot of us used to hang out at a house in Otisville, which is also in Orange County. There was an older couple there who liked to have young people around, and we’d go out there and drink Ballantine Ale until we all fell asleep.
GENE MCGARR
The only major industry in Middletown was the state mental institution. It’s an interesting place. On Saturday night, when you party with these psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers, you begin to wonder how crazy the inmates might be, because these people were bananas.
BOB BONE
He was fired after just a few months for kicking in a candy machine. He was always skating on thin ice there anyway because he was too much of a character for the likes of the bosses. He didn’t like to wear shoes in the newsroom, for one thing. The city council came through one day, and the publisher was rather upset because there was a reporter running around barefoot.
But the candy machine incident was the last straw. Hunter couldn’t get anything out of the machine, so he just beat it—“savagely,” to use his word—until it dislodged his candy bar. The interesting thing about it was that Hunter only took what he had paid for, but the whole rest of the newspaper room, including all the guys in the back shop, were eating free candy bars from the broken machine when the wrong person walked in. Hunter was deemed responsible, and that was the end of the candy man.
GENE MCGARR
My wife Eleanor’s roommate at Goucher College in Maryland was named Sandy Conklin, and Sandy came down and hung out with us and met a guy who was a bond trader and hung out with him for a bit.
SANDY THOMPSON
I was going out with a guy who was a little older than me and who was in a stock brokerage firm in New York City. One night, Eleanor and I and Gene were at this bar called Christopher’s in Greenwich Village, and I was with this guy who actually knew Hunter somehow. Hunter walked in, and I didn’t really take much notice. Then Eleanor and I went back to college, and maybe a week later Eleanor said, “Oh, Sandy, I got this letter from Hunter. Do you remember Hunter? The big, tall, lanky guy?” I said, “Sort of.” “Well, he has a cabin in upstate New York, and he said, ‘When you and Gene come up to visit me, you need to bring whiskey, you need to bring blankets, and how about that girl—Sandy, I think her name was?’”
I graduated from college and got an apartment by myself on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, and one Sunday I went to Washington Square Park, and there was some kind of a classical concert. And I was lying out there on the lawn, and there was this nice-looking young man lying on the lawn as well, and we started talking. I felt a little attraction for
him and he felt a little attraction for me, and so we started seeing each other. That was Paul Semonin.
PAUL SEMONIN
Sandy and I went out in the summer of ’59 for a little while. I took her out a couple of times, but once she connected with Hunter, that was it. It was never like someone stealing my girlfriend or anything.
SANDY THOMPSON
Paul and I were dating over that summer, and I remember times in August of ’59 when it would be the three of us—Hunter, Paul, and myself. Sometimes we’d go for long walks along the East River. And now when I saw Hunter, I thought, “Oh my, you know, this is really something.” There were two times when I was really, really taken in.
We were at Paul’s apartment, a tiny place in the Village. It was very, very hot, and there was no air-conditioning. The windows were open, and he had a standing fan. Paul was on the windowsill, and I had made dinner for them. Hunter just lay down on the floor, lifted his shirt off of his back, and he gave me this talcum powder and said, “Oh Sandy, you know it’s so hot. Do you think you could rub my back with this talcum powder?” So there I am, massaging this man’s back and shoulders, and Paul is looking at us.
Another afternoon we all went into the Village apartment of some friend from Louisville. It was Paul and myself, and Eleanor and McGarr. I remember lying on this sort of couch-bed and Paul was next to me, and everything’s fine, we’re all talking. And Hunter walks in down the stairs—this tall, lanky guy with Bermuda shorts and a big manuscript underneath his arm, which was Prince Jellyfish. And the only way to say it is that I was just gone. Absolutely gone.
The summer went on, and in September I started working for United Airlines. Paul and I stopped seeing each other. Paul was wonderful, but it just wasn’t working for both of us. Then on Christmas Eve I was outside getting coffee, and when I came back there was a message from Hunter Thompson. He was at Viking Books, and would I call him back? I kind of seized up and got really, really excited, really tense, and I called. Hunter said, “Oh, hi, well—yeah, ummm, I don’t really know why I called. Well, I guess—ummm, would you like to have a drink somewhere tonight?”
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