Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  It was about me being alone in the kitchen with her husband. What had I been doing in the kitchen with her husband? That should have been a wake-up call for me, but the only wake-up part of it was “Be careful. Be careful. Don’t make this man angry. Because maybe he’ll leave you—and you don’t want him to leave you, because this is exciting.” We were newly in love, newly whatever—seduced by one another—and all I wanted to do was just make it right. And somehow I did.

  It never, ever occurred to me to get my coat, slam the door, and walk out in the middle of the night. It never, ever crossed my mind.

  GENE MCGARR

  Hunter wrote me this really awful letter from Bermuda about how he and Sandy were stealing cabbages out of gardens and living in a cave. They had no money at all. Hunter was always very, very good at getting what he needed from people—all his life—but when he pled for any help that he could possibly get from me, I took him at his word that he needed help.

  I sent him what was half our passage money home (and this was four months before we were going to leave), and I told him, very explicitly, in the letter, that I had to have this money back by this date at the very latest because this is our passage money. We’ve got tickets; we have arrangements on a Yugoslavian freighter out of Tangiers for New York City. Something like a week before the deadline, I still hadn’t heard from him, so I wrote him a letter, saying, “Where the hell is the money?” The day after I send that letter off from Málaga, I get a letter from him saying he’s off for San Francisco, and since I’m flush he’s going to delay a little bit as far as the money he owes me. So I write a letter back to him saying, “You stupid son of a fucking bitch. You promised.” Now he knows fucking well I’m depending on that money. For several days I was going nuts. Then I get a telegram from Sandy saying, basically, “He’s gone.”

  Sandy had to go to my mother to get the money for my wife and I to get home.

  JOHN CLANCY

  I moved to San Francisco in ’59, and Hunter came out west shortly after that, and then Sandy joined him a little later. Dennis Murphy had written a book called The Sergeant that was later made into a movie with Rod Steiger. It said on the book jacket that Dennis Murphy lived in Big Sur, and there was a picture of the Big Sur compound where he lived. Hunter and I both liked the book, and Hunter wanted to meet Murphy, which is why he went to Big Sur in the first place: to look him up. The two of them met, and we’d play touch football with Murphy and his Hollywood friends, which was great fun as long as you weren’t running hard toward the western part of the field because you might fall three hundred feet toward the ocean and die.

  Hunter ended up living in the servants’ cottage near the Big House, which had originally belonged to Murphy’s grandmother. It was on the edge of a cliff. Dennis Murphy’s brother Mike was one of the two guys who would soon start the Esalen Institute on the property. We would sit for hours in these amazing hot baths, screaming at each other about political issues. We lay around and drank beer. It was paradise, really. I never wanted to leave, but you couldn’t make a living in the place.

  One night Hunter and I were driving and a deer came off the side of the hill and crashed into the car, and it had a little baby with it. The deer itself was killed, and we threw it in the back and took it back with us and hung it up and gutted it and chopped it up into meat, but the little baby deer had a broken leg, so we put a splint on it. We got it hobbling around a little bit and drinking milk from a bottle, and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. A couple days later Alan Watts, the great Zen Buddhist guru who was very popular and had a lot of followers at the time, came by and looked at the deer. He said, “Oh, I think I can help the deer. This deer needs some of nature’s herbs.” He started collecting these pieces of plants and cut them up and fed them to the deer while he pronounced these weird mumbo-jumbo phrases and touched the deer. The deer lay down and went to sleep, and Watts said, “The deer’s going to be fine now.” Well, about an hour later the little deer stood up, cried out, went into these quick spasms, and died. Hunter was outraged. “That fucker, that quack, that fraud, that charlatan! I don’t believe in anything that he speaks. He killed a deer. He murdered it, that rotten prick!”

  GENE MCGARR

  The Murphys made him the caretaker for the place when they weren’t around or old lady Murphy was on her own. How he talked his way into that I don’t know. He was writing and living with Sandy in a nice little house that was very close to these fantastic hot spring baths. Two enormous square cement tubs with little ledges all the way around and the hottest fucking water in the world being fed right into it. Right in front of you was the Pacific Ocean, the rocks down below, sea lions barking—right there. And the sunsets were incredible.

  My wife and I spent a few days with them. That first night I got so fucking drunk on red wine. One of the things that I recall, when I fell down into the weeds trying to get back to the house, was hearing my wife, Eleanor, say, “Leave him there. Don’t bother, leave him there.”

  The next day, I really lit into Hunter about the money thing and his nonchalant “since you’re flush” comment. Jesus. And he just sat there with his head down while I ranted. He had fucked me, and he knew it. I was confronting him with his basic selfishness, and there was nothing he could say. He never apologized for anything. I’ve never heard Hunter say “I’m sorry”—ever. Hunter was shameless—borrowing money, asking people for help, making these weird deals—and he got away with it.

  JOHN CLANCY

  When my girlfriend Judith Spector and I got married, we had our reception at the Big House, and Judith had asked Hunter if he would please wear a tie for the occasion. As we drove in from the wedding to the reception, we saw a goat tied to a post out on the lawn. The goat was wearing a tie. Hunter never showed up.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  I was in heaven in Big Sur. Hunter was working hard. Jo Hudson, who became a friend of ours, was a sculptor who could do anything with carpentry and stone. He knocked out a whole side of our little two-story, one-room place and on the second floor he put in a giant plate-glass window facing the ocean. I found a job as a maid in a motel, and Hunter would write and get fifty dollars for something, or twenty-five dollars, or maybe even a hundred dollars. Our rent was only fifteen dollars a month, and once a week the postman would deliver food with his old station wagon because there were no stores anywhere nearby, and he gave everyone credit. We bought very little, but we’d get a gallon of cheap red wine, and Hunter always wanted these crescent pastry things—bear claws—and milk, eggs, maybe one box of groceries.

  Joan Baez lived on the Esalen property too, on the other side of the canyon. She was living with a guy named Michael, and Michael’s sister Jenny was living with Jo Hudson, so Joanie and Jenny and I became friends. Joanie had just cut her first album. She and Hunter had a not very great relationship because Hunter would hunt, and Joanie was against anything like that. They didn’t connect.

  I had two abortions when we lived in Big Sur. There was absolutely no way that we were ready, and we didn’t discuss it. I just told him that I was pregnant and that I would take care of it. I knew that if I had a baby, Hunter would leave me. There was no question. We weren’t married. We had no money. He would have had to have left me, for himself. I mean, as a child he was a narcissist, and later he became a very well developed narcissist—a polished narcissist, actually.

  I asked an ex-boyfriend for the money for one and my mother for the other one. They were very dramatic, especially the second. Hunter came with me to Tijuana both times, and the second time was all messy and ugly.

  We were really poor for a long time. Every once in a while I would ask my mother for a hundred dollars, and she would always send it. Every once in a while she would send a little food. Being poor was actually kind of great, because once there was money, which was a lot of years later, then there was money to go out and drink.

  We had to leave Big Sur after a year because Hunter had written an article for a men’s m
agazine called Rogue about Big Sur and the baths. There was sometimes a gay scene at the baths, and Hunter mentioned this in the article. Well, when someone showed the article to Vinnie Murphy—the matriarch, the grandmother of the whole property—she flipped out. Her husband had this dream of the property becoming this incredible health spa and healing place, and she didn’t know about the gay scene, and she didn’t want anybody else to know about it. She came striding out with her assistant and said very majestically, “You’re out of here!” Our fifteen-dollars-a-month place.

  So we wound up back in New York. I got a job at a travel agency, and I would get dressed and put my hair up and put on high heels and go and make money, and when I came back, Hunter was writing. I had a steady income, and Hunter knew he could write; he just didn’t think he could make a living at it yet.

  I remember a couple of nights when he didn’t come home until really, really late. That was my first inkling that he was more than a one-woman guy. I was worried and jealous. I’d call apartments at three in the morning to try to find him. Then Hunter left for Aruba. Right before he left, I came across a letter he wrote inviting another woman down there with him.

  He was writing for the National Observer and some other papers, and he would send me articles and I would type them up. At first there was no such thing as a copy machine, so I had to type maybe ten copies of each article and send them out to New Orleans, Cleveland, wherever. The articles in those days had to be published some distance apart, like a hundred or two hundred miles apart. Hunter was a stickler for perfect copy: no mistakes, perfect margins. And then he made his way down to Colombia and then Rio.

  BOB BONE

  Hunter wanted to go to South America. He figured that was where the interesting stuff was. He had begun to make contact with the National Observer, which was becoming interested in South America, and he decided he was going to go down on a smuggler’s boat. He’d heard that in Aruba people smuggled liquor and cigarettes into Nicaragua or somewhere like that, so he took a flight to Aruba and did indeed go on a smuggling boat into South America—to hear him tell it, anyway.

  I had taken a job editing this small English magazine in Rio and got to Brazil ahead of Hunter. He was still up in Peru or Bolivia or somewhere, but he knew I was in Rio, and we eventually met up. I was there for slightly under a year in ’62 and ’63.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  During the time when Hunter was in Rio, I met this guy who was a law student at Harvard—nice-looking guy, wealthy. And he and I went out walking one night in New York, and we crashed a Leonard Bernstein party, which was interesting. I ended up getting to babysit Leonard Bernstein’s children out on Fire Island. But this fellow invited me out to the end of the island on this big motorcycle, a BSA. The next day we went to the beach, and I had a bikini on while I rode on the back. He’d given me his helmet, and he made a sharp turn, flipped the bike, and I landed on my head unconscious. The next thing I know I’m in the hospital for a week—which meant that I couldn’t type any of Hunter’s things. So Bob Bone, who was living with me in New York (not romantically, though I always thought he was a little jealous that I wasn’t involved with him), wrote Hunter a letter saying, basically, “Sandy can’t do this. She can’t write for you because she was in a motorcycle accident and she’s in the hospital right now.”

  I got a letter from Hunter when I got back to the city that said, “It’s over. You’re on a motorcycle with some guy. That’s it.”

  BOB BONE

  Hunter could be absolutely, shockingly jealous. His letter to Sandy was brutal. Sandy was claiming it was all a very innocent thing, but Hunter was really upset about that and extremely intolerant. It shocked me because I had never seen him get that angry before.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  At the time, I was working in Queens as a receptionist for a company called Nuclear Research Associates. There were these young fellows there who were chemists, and they were making speed on the side. One day one of them came up to me and said, “You don’t look so happy.” I said, “Well, I’m in love with this man and he’s somewhere in South America.” The guy said, “We could make you a little happier.”

  They had four different levels of speed. I started out with the lowest amount. It definitely did make me feel better. I felt together, and sort of “up”—and then it got to be more and more, and of course I couldn’t sleep.

  When I came back and I read Hunter’s letter, it felt like the end of the world. I don’t remember how much speed I took, but it was a lot, and I took a bunch of writing paper and went to the top of the Empire State Building. Higher than a kite, but with a clear head, I wrote him this long letter about why we needed to be together. And it worked.

  Then Hunter sent me a letter. He was writing me constantly—I went to the main post office in Manhattan every day—but this letter said, “I’m in Rio now, and Rio looks like a good place. It looks like finally I should settle here for a little bit, and this is where you should come.” That’s all I needed to hear. I quit my job and got a one-way ticket and wrote Hunter a letter saying I was coming. He sent me a telegram: “Don’t come down yet—but when you do, I want you to bring my .44 Magnum.” Which was in Louisville, Kentucky.

  Well, I didn’t want to wait, and I also didn’t want to go to Louisville on the bus and break that gun down and then fly in a week, two weeks. I was ready. So I wrote him and said, “I’m coming,” and I left. I had the speed with me. When I got off the plane, I called Bob Bone. Bob said, “Uh, hi, Sandy . . . well . . . Hunter, um, Hunter was not wanting you to come down right now, you know. He wanted you to wait until . . . he’s not . . . he’s not happy.” Bob told me to get a room at the such-and-such hotel, which was right on the beach, and that maybe, maybe Hunter would come by. I said, “Okay, Bob. Okay.”

  BOB BONE

  He was very upset when Sandy came down to Brazil when she wasn’t expected to. I supported a lot of people in those days, including Hunter. None of us had much money, and Hunter thought it was quite an imposition for Sandy to suddenly become a responsibility or a liability in Brazil.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  I get over to the little hotel on the beach, get myself a room, take a little more speed, and I’m waiting and I’m fine. I’m fine because I’m high. There’s a knock on the door, and Hunter comes in, and both of us just dissolve. We went out for dinner, he introduced me to friends. Everything was very, very “up,” and then the next day he said, “I have to leave. You stay here, but I’m going to take an assignment”—I don’t remember what country he went to, I think it was Uruguay—“because I’m so angry with you. At the same time, I’m madly in love with you, but I’m also so angry with you for disobeying me that I have to leave.” And so he did, for about two weeks. And I was just fine. I got a cheaper room in the hotel, down in the basement. I started taking guitar lessons and learning the bossa nova. I worked on my tan. I wandered around the streets. I started learning Portuguese. And then Hunter came back, and he was okay. We moved into an apartment on the seventeenth floor, one block from Copacabana Beach.

  BOB BONE

  I was driving an old MG convertible with a friend of mine along Copacabana Beach, and I suddenly saw Hunter loping along. We picked him up, so now it was three of us piled in this tiny MG convertible. Hunter was a little bit drunk, but he said, “That’s nothing. The thing that’s drunk is in my pocket.” He had a drunk monkey in his pocket. The way he explained it was that he got off the plane in Rio with the monkey and went to a bar, and somebody said they would buy him a drink as long as they could buy the monkey a drink at the same time. It probably was a bit of an exaggeration, but back in the MG the monkey had thrown up in his pocket for real, and he was kind of smelly.

  That monkey eventually committed suicide. We figured it had the DT’s. The maid saw it jump off the tenth-story balcony of the apartment.

  Hunter had another animal back in his room. He was staying in some crazy little hotel, and we went back, and there was an animal there c
alled a coatimundi. The Brazilians call them coatis. They’re sort of a cross between a rat and a honey bear. Hunter’s coati had no hair on his tail. Hunter claimed that he’d rescued it in Bolivia, that he’d bought it from some people who were mistreating it. Hunter had named it Ace, and Ace became famous for two reasons: One, he liked to play with soap; and two, he learned to use the toilet.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  One night just before carnival I was out on the street right in front of the building, and there was a samba group playing. And there was this guy, and he came behind me, and he was beginning to put his arms around my waist or something or other. I loved to dance, and Hunter loved to see me dancing. So I moved. The next thing I know, Hunter’s got this Brazilian by the scruff of his neck, or maybe by his shirt. He’s picked him up. And he says, “Tienes problemas!” Hunter would not let me out on the street after that. He locked me in the apartment for the rest of carnival.

  BOB BONE

  Another time Hunter and somebody else (I can’t remember who it was) were shooting rats in a dump somewhere in Rio, and somebody called the cops, who came around and pulled them in. Hunter, of course, claimed that it wasn’t them doing the shooting, that it must have been somebody else. As usual, he made friends with the cops, and they were all getting along great. And then at some point, Hunter put his feet up on the cop’s desk, and bullets rolled out of his pocket. They threw him back in jail, but things turned out all right eventually. They called the consulate, and by that time Hunter had a little bit of cachet with the National Observer. It all blew over somehow.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  I was afraid to ask Hunter about marriage. I was afraid to bring it up, because I was afraid he’d say no, but I remember asking him once there. I don’t remember his response exactly, but it was along the lines of “That’s up to me.”