I was supposed to go out to my father’s house on Long Island that night to celebrate Christmas Eve and decorate the tree. It was my father’s new house, his new bride, my brother was coming home from college—everyone was going to be there. I called Daddy and I said, “I can’t quite make it at the time we talked about, but I’ll get there.” I walked over to the bar. No Hunter. Time passed. Still no Hunter. The bartender got a phone call from Hunter, and—this is a first and a last—Hunter actually called and said, “I’m going to be late. Buy her a drink, okay, and I’ll be there.” Maybe an hour later he walked in and immediately there was that chemistry, that seduction. We both sat there and talked, and about every hour I would go to the pay phone and call out to Long Island and tell them I was just going to be a little bit later. We were together for maybe three hours. The last train out to Port Washington was something like one o’clock in the morning. We were totally sensually connected, just wild chemistry. Hunter asked me whether I would come up to his cabin, and I told him I couldn’t, which was a good idea, actually. And so I left and caught the last train out.
This was probably the highest I had ever been in my life. I was just so charged with this magic, this charisma—all these feelings. I was on top of the world. The next morning, I remember telling my father, “I’ve met a wonderful, wonderful man.”
At the bar, Hunter had asked me if I’d like to go out when he was back in town the next week, and when I got back to the city, I actually called people I had been dating and made a date for every single night that week. I was certain that Hunter wasn’t going to call, and I just didn’t want to be sitting and waiting for the telephone to ring.
On Tuesday or Wednesday the phone rang—of course, at three o’clock in the morning. I really should have known right then. “Hi. Well, I’ll be in town later today. How about we get together tonight?” I called whoever I had to call, and I didn’t say that my grandmother was ill, and I didn’t say that I was ill. I said, “I have just met the most extraordinary man, and I’m really sorry, but I can’t go out with you tonight.” Hunter came over. I had a friend from college visiting me, and then she left, and Hunter and I spent the next seven days in my little railroad apartment. I had a tiny, tiny bedroom—just big enough for a single bed and a chest of drawers. The bathtub was in the kitchen. It was a sweet little place, and it was fifty-nine dollars a month. I think we actually went out once or twice to get more to drink. I had a little food in the refrigerator. But it was more about making love, talking, talking, drinking Christian Brothers brandy—really awful stuff, but when you’re that young, you can drink anything.
After our seven days, Hunter went down to Puerto Rico.
BOB BONE
After my work in Middletown, I got this job in Puerto Rico, and then Hunter followed me and we began having some adventures down there too. The Record had sent me to Puerto Rico on assignment earlier for a story on migrant workers because we used to have a lot of them in Orange County. While I was down there, I met this fellow who had just started the San Juan Star, Puerto Rico’s first English-language daily paper, and he hired me. That’s where Bill Kennedy also worked.
WILLIAM KENNEDY was the managing editor of the San Juan Star in 1959.
In 1956, I heard about a new newspaper starting up in Puerto Rico and I applied for the job and got it. I was sick of Albany’s journalism and politics and social life, a dreary dead end. I heard good things about Puerto Rico, and it was an expatriate life—Hemingway and Fitzgerald go to Paris, go to Spain, go someplace. Puerto Rico was as far away as I could get at the time. I figured I’d rise in the world and become some kind of foreign correspondent. But the paper, a broadsheet called the Puerto Rico World Journal, lasted only nine months.
I met Dana in December and married her in January, the week after the paper folded. We went to Miami and I got a job at the Herald. But we loved San Juan and I quit journalism for the first time and went back to live there and write a novel. I became the Time-Life stringer and freelanced for magazines to stay alive while I wrote the novel. In 1959 the World Journal’s editor started the San Juan Star and hired me as managing editor. I put the novel aside and took the job. Before publication we advertised for a sports editor, and Hunter answered the ad.
Hunter was twenty-two. He said he was twenty-four in his letter. In his application to be sports editor he said that the job interested him because it was in Puerto Rico, outside of the “great Rotarian democracy.” Our publisher was a Rotarian, so that was the first misstep. He said he had kicked in the candy machine at the Middletown Record because it ate his nickel, and had gotten fired for it. He wrote, “I have given up on American journalism. The decline of the American press has long been obvious, and my time is too valuable to waste in an effort to supply the ‘man in the street’ with his daily quota of clichés. . . . There is another concept of journalism. . . . It’s engraved on a bronze plaque on the southeast corner of the Times Tower in New York City.” Then he added that he had to get back to his novel, which was with the Viking Press in New York.”
In my introduction to Hunter’s first volume of letters, I wrote about this time:
As managing editor of the fledgling Star, I wrote him explaining that our editor was a member of Rotary, that we had a staff of offbeat reporters (and editors) who, like him, were writing fiction, and suggested he return to his novel, or perhaps start another, building his plot around the bronze plaque on the Times Tower. “You should always write about something you know intimately,” I wrote, and added that if we ever got a candy machine and needed someone to kick it in, we’d be in touch.
He received my letter at his home in Louisville in the same mail that brought Viking’s rejection of his novel, and he sat down and wrote me: “Your letter was cute, my friend, and your interpretation of my letter was beautifully typical of the cretin-intellect responsible for the dry-rot of the american press. But don’t think that lack of an invitation from you will keep me from getting down that way, and when I do remind me to first kick your teeth in and then jam a bronze plaque far into your small intestine.”
I wrote back, saying that since he was the bushy-tailed expert on journalism’s dry rot, we would pay him space rates to summarize its failings in three double-spaced pages that we would run in our first edition, along with our exchange of correspondence. I said I didn’t know another publication that would give him the time of day, and signed it “Intestinally yours.”
There was a fellow named Bob Bone who had worked with Hunter in Middletown, and we hired him as a reporter-photographer for the Star. Hunter had corresponded with him and then applied for a job at a new bowling magazine in San Juan and got it. Hunter showed up in the Star’s city room one day—presumably to kick in my teeth, but he proved to be very friendly. We went back to my house for dinner, and that was the beginning of our friendship.
Hunter stayed on in San Juan for a couple of months, but the owner of the bowling magazine proved to be insolvent, and Hunter never got paid for the stuff that he wrote, or paid very little. So he was just floating free. If I could have hired him at that point I would have, but there was never an opening.
I remember talking about an essay by James Baldwin about the writer’s quest for wisdom. Baldwin viewed the generation of American literary giants—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Faulkner—as looking at the world as “a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost.” Baldwin thought this was a simplistic vision, that the world was a much deadlier place now. This was 1962. The key phrase for Hunter was Baldwin’s view that “innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward the greater innocence called wisdom.” Baldwin was certain that “the curtain has come down forever on Gatsby’s career: there will be no more Gatsbys.” Hunter didn’t buy this. He thought of himself as Gatsby, and he reveled in that kind of fate—that green light always receding, boats against the current, borne back into the past, and so on. This was a romantic notion that prevailed in him until he di
ed. It first surfaced in our conversation and letters as a result of that Baldwin essay.
Salinger was one of his heroes at that time. He identified with Holden Caulfield, the rebel in the society, and he was talking about confrontation all the time. I think that the rebelliousness in Holden—swinging a chain mace at society verbally—was something Hunter was very good at very early on. But we’d talk about everybody. I remember he liked Styron a lot—Lie Down in Darkness. He didn’t like Bellow very much. He tried Augie March and said it didn’t get to him. He liked Algren, and so did I. The Man with the Golden Arm was one of my major books when I was a kid writer. We both liked Baldwin’s essays, and I remember telling him to read Ellison.
He was reading voluminously—Ulysses, James Agee’s A Death in the Family, The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy, Dylan Thomas, Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, Dos Passos’s U.S.A., The Plague by Camus, Don Quixote, Proust, Huck Finn, D. H. Lawrence, The Sound and the Fury, The Decameron, The Inferno. It was the Western canon. He didn’t think there were any serious women writers. He didn’t know much about Flannery O’Connor, or if he did he didn’t value it. He did like Isak Dinesen’s Gothic Tales.
We often looked back on those days and those all-night conversations. Finally the sun would come up and we’d have some breakfast and call it a night. I remember how freewheeling it was. Also, we were drinking a lot of rum, one of the great liberating forces. “Drink is oil for unauthorized movement” is a line that came out of those conversations somewhere.
SANDY THOMPSON
I went down to Puerto Rico in March and spent a week with Hunter in Vieques, and again, it was total romance. Both of us were really smitten. I think Hunter really loved the fact that I had a college degree and that I had majored in international relations and then economics, and that I had traveled, and that I was a free spirit. And I had a great body. I really did. And Hunter—he was just gorgeous.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
Sandy was a beautiful girl, really gorgeous. They seemed to have a good relationship. We’d hang out and drink beer on the beach, or have dinner and the talk would be political or literary or about what was in the newspapers. I remember Hunter told her to bring money because he wasn’t solvent. “If you’re going to hang out,” he said, “you’ve got to be able to support yourself.”
SANDY THOMPSON
After a week with Hunter, I went back to New York. We decided that I would come back down in June, so I saved money and then went back. Hunter had this little concrete cabin right on the ocean about sixteen miles outside of San Juan. It was all jungle, and it was just the two of us at first. We had a single bed, with a net over it because they had mimis there, which are teeny, teeny mosquitoes that come out about four in the afternoon and cover everything. There were screens everywhere. This is where Hunter began The Rum Diary.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
He thought of The Rum Diary as The Sun Also Rises in Puerto Rico.
BOB BONE
After they lived in the cinder-block house, Hunter and Sandy lived for quite a while out at a place that had what he called a “voodoo center,” a place called Loiza Aldea. You could only get there by a ferryboat across the river. It was all very spooky.
SANDY THOMPSON
Paul Semonin came down toward the end of our time there. McGarr was the wild guy, but Paul was a wild thinker, very creative, very soulful. He was an artist—he wrote, he painted. He and Hunter would talk late into the night about all kinds of things.
PAUL SEMONIN
I followed Hunter down to Puerto Rico. We ended up living there for about nine months, and Hunter wrote a little piece about me for the Louisville Courier-Journal. The headline was something like “Louisvillian in Voodoo Country.” We were living out in a little place outside San Juan, which was a black community. It was pretty primitive—there were goats wandering around—and we had a little beachfront house there. But the myth surrounding it was that this was some sort of voodoo village.
Hunter did some interviews with me, but then when he showed me the draft of the article, every single quote from me was totally fabricated. I said, “Hunter, that’s not what I said.” But he sent it off and it was published. “Voodoo Country” is something that will grab the eye of any reader and pull him into the story, and Hunter was a master at that. That’s what purpose his exaggerations and his buffoonery served—fantastic, eye-grabbing stuff for the reader.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
He had no income, he was drinking rainwater and getting eaten by sand fleas and he lived in a concrete, corrugated-tin-roofed blockhouse on the beach. After a while he upgraded to a better block-house.
SANDY THOMPSON
I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to be doing, except taking care of Hunter. I hadn’t really thought much about a career. I had wanted to do something in international relations, maybe work at the UN. I also thought about being a photographer—I thought that would go well with Hunter’s writing—but my father wouldn’t put me through photography school after he put me through college. So I sunbathed a lot. I swam. I washed clothes. I fed him. I gave him feedback on The Rum Diary. I took care of him and made love.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
Hunter stayed in San Juan for a couple of months and then he got in a fight and was arrested. He wrote about this in The Rum Diary. Hunter and some friends walked out on a bar bill in this beachfront place near Vacia Talega, where he lived. I never knew what exactly happened, but some sort of fight erupted and the owner called the cops and Hunter and others went to jail. Somehow I helped him get out—I must have found someone who helped him post bail, but I’m very hazy on this. I told him he was nuts to get himself into that kind of a pickle, and then all of a sudden he was gone.
Hunter had written about tourism for a government PR agency and had gotten to know someone with a sailboat. I think they signed on as crew and went as far as Bermuda, where they were dropped off. I don’t know the circumstances, but it was a dead end and the wrong place to be stranded and broke.
SANDY THOMPSON
The three of us left Puerto Rico for St. Thomas and then crewed on a boat to get to Bermuda. The whole crew, I think, was eight guys. The captain was a slightly older Australian guy, and something like the chairman of IBM’s son was on the boat. We had these huge five-gallon containers of rum, and we drank a lot. Hunter would bark orders to me, and I was so used to it at that point—Sandy get me this, Sandy do this, Sandy do that—that I had no perspective. It was normal. I was young, and I was being told to do this or asked to do this, but by this extraordinary human being. I remember the IBM guy asking me, “What are you doing with this man?” I said, “Well, can’t you see how extraordinary—” And he said, “Extraordinary? He’s not being good to you.” And I said, “Oh, that’s just how it is.”
We arrived in Bermuda in a storm, and we didn’t go through customs. We didn’t know anything about immigration and customs or anything, and we had no money.
GENE MCGARR
Hunter just wanted to get out of the United States. My wife and I were living in Spain in a little town outside of Málaga at the time, and what we were doing intrigued him. We wrote a lot of letters back and forth, and my letters were jolly as far as living in Europe was concerned. Our money went outrageously far.
SANDY THOMPSON
My mother, who was a travel agent in Florida, had a friend in Bermuda who owned a motel, so we ended up there. He was this Dutch guy, a raging alcoholic, and he let Hunter and me sleep in a . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. It wasn’t a regular room. Kind of, sort of a room. And it had a kind of, sort of a bed in it. Paul slept in the park, and then he would go to the yacht club and get showered and dressed because Paul could pull that off.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
I got cards from Hunter and also Paul, who said that Bermuda was one of the ten bottom places of the Earth.
GENE MCGARR
They seemed to think that since Bermuda is out in the Atlantic Ocean, from there they
could catch a trap steamer or something and just hop over to Europe. Well, there’s no traffic between Bermuda and Europe. There’s traffic between Bermuda and New York, which is where they had started. But they didn’t want to go back there.
SANDY THOMPSON
Hunter wrote an article for the Bermuda Gazette, and it was published with a picture of the three of us. Then we got a call from Immigration saying, “Wait a minute—who are you?” I was in the process of getting a job at a bookstore, and it was just about to happen, but you couldn’t get a job until you had gotten your papers in.
We went to the consul, all three of us. Hunter did his absolute best. He had this story: “We were on this boat, and we’re artists, and we’re this, and we’re that, and we’re planning to work, and then we’re leaving for Málaga . . .” And at the end of the story, the consul said, “Right. So what you can do is call your parents and have them send you a ticket.”
We got hold of friends and got tickets back to New York. Hunter and I went up to see the editor of the Middletown Record and her husband, who lived in the Catskills.
The four of us were downstairs in the living room, and later in the evening the husband and I ended up in the kitchen getting drinks. The conversation was all about Hunter and how madly in love with him I was, and when we came back out Hunter and the woman were gone. I went upstairs to our room, and Hunter was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. The room was dark. As soon as I walked into the room and knelt down on the mattress, Hunter lashed out at me—literally. It was something that would happen a handful of times later throughout our relationship, and there was a great deal of emotional abuse as well, but this was the first time it was physical.
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