I had published a novel, and Hunter had this horse’s-ass idea that it was supposed to be important to be a fiction writer. I would try to point out to him, “Hunter, you are writing fiction. All writing is fiction. Experiences you experience, and words are words, so everything is fiction. This is just its own kind of fiction.” We’d argue about that.
PAUL SEMONIN
A couple of years after we were in Puerto Rico together, when Hunter was down in Latin America and South America writing stuff for the National Observer, I was becoming much more politicized. I went to Africa and ended up at the University of Ghana getting a master’s degree in African studies. There was a colony of African American exiles in Ghana, including people like Maya Angelou and Julian Mayfield; Malcolm X came to visit, and I met him and became very interested in the political direction he was taking just before he was assassinated, and of course I was writing to Hunter about some of this stuff. But as I was writing and identifying in some ways with the black struggle, the civil rights struggle—but even more with black radicals—Hunter addressed one of his letters to me as “Niggerboy.”
I mean, that’s it in a nutshell. He pulled a deep race card out of his pack and used it as an insult. Although if you look at many of the letters he wrote, he would often use these ridiculous “Dear so and so” addresses. Part of it was insulting and part of it was humor and part of it was just provoking you. But there was always this race element buried in his character which popped out every now and then, and it was nasty.
Hunter was always pushing you, always testing you, seeing how far you’ll go before your loyalty breaks, or before you’ve had enough. And it created a kind of inner circle of people who stood the test. It’s like hazing, but there could be that feeling, if you’re on the other end of it, that he was mocking you in some way. It was a part of his character from a very early stage. And it was partly what later led to us parting ways. It grew kind of tiresome and unproductive.
DR. BOB GEIGER
I know that different people have accused Hunter over the years of having kind of a Neanderthal attitude towards blacks or minorities. Sometimes he would use the word “nigger” when he was writing, and he was very quick with racial jokes and things like that. But in terms of where his real sentiment was, it was the opposite. When we were getting together, we would get all fired up about this shit. At one time, Hunter and I were planning to—thank God we didn’t do it—we were going to get a truck and run guns down to Mississippi to help out with all this crap that was going on in Mississippi in ’64 and ’65. We figured that maybe we ought to level the playing field, and a truckload of guns would do that.
Hunter and I each tended to have our own ideas. Hunter was a great guy to argue with because he would listen to what you said. Very few people do that. He would change his mind on the basis of what you said. And if someone’s going to actually pay attention to what you’re saying, you argue a little differently than if you’re just saying things to hear yourself say it, though when when you got Hunter and Clancy and McGarr and I together, you couldn’t hear anything.
JERRY HAWKE
Hunter and John Clancy were kind of kindred souls. Clancy had a really wild streak to him, and that appealed to Hunter.
I used to get telephone calls from Clancy and Hunter in the middle of the night. They would generally be drunk. It started when they were together in San Francisco; later, they would put in conference calls. I remember listening to operators come on at two o’clock in the morning: “Will you accept a collect conference call from John Clancy and Hunter Thompson?” “No!” So a few minutes later, they’d ring back with a paid call and Hunter would say something like, “I’ve got a very important question. Do you still feel the same way about The Great Gatsby?”
JACK THIBEAU is a poet and actor who met Hunter in 1964.
Clancy was a vicious attack lawyer. You wound him up and it never stopped. He would come after you with guns, knives. Because he was crazy, and he had no mercy. And he was brilliant; he was at the top of his class at Columbia.
ROGER HAWKE
Clancy was insane.
DR. BOB GEIGER
McGarr was not eminently sane, either. He was a very handsome big guy who would come on to all the chicks. Hunter and I and Clancy would usually just insult them. Even if Hunter tried to not be insulting, he would insult the girls. So you always had this dynamic: If McGarr would come on too strong, Hunter would get upset at that. It didn’t bother me that much. If McGarr was coming on to my wife, I’d just say, “Well, that’s McGarr.” Hunter, though, would get very defensive, and say that McGarr was abusing me. He was very loyal and protective that way, surprisingly.
Hunter went after McGarr with a tire iron one time for coming on to my wife. McGarr and I were out in the front yard boxing at my place in Sonoma. Bare-knuckled boxing, which was a mistake. McGarr was a good boxer, but we weren’t hitting each other hard. We were playing, really, but McGarr had been coming on to my wife, and Hunter walked out and thought we were serious. He went to his car and got this tire iron and started chasing McGarr around, and then suddenly he got in his car and disappeared for two days. He was embarrassed that he overreacted. Sandy was looking frantically for him. I said, “I think he drove off like a dog that’s bit somebody and doesn’t want to get caught.” But you have to realize that this was booze too. This wasn’t high-powered drugs or anything. Maybe there was a little grass around.
Hunter decided he wanted to be closer to the action, so they moved down to a place right across from the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. He and I rented a trailer and I moved them down, which was another adventure because the mattress flew out of the trailer, as it usually does.
It was there where he mostly wrote Hell’s Angels.
CHAPTER THREE
San Francisco, Hells Angels,
and Merry Pranksters
I saw him two days after they beat him up. Both of his eyes were filled with blood. His ribs were taped. He could hardly stand up.
SANDY THOMPSON
We moved to San Francisco and got a place at the top of Golden Gate Park, right at the edge of the Haight. The Haight-Ashbury scene was just beginning—this was in ’65.
We had very little money. Every once in a while there would be an article and a little more money, and one of these was the piece for The Nation on the Hells Angels. So that’s where it all began. Ian Ballantine, who would become Hunter’s book editor, came out from New York and offered Hunter a contract.
DR. BOB GEIGER
I’d drive down to San Francisco to see Hunter when he was writing Hell’s Angels. The bedroom had been converted to a studio for him, and Sandy and Juan were sleeping in the living room. It was kind of a typical old San Francisco apartment, long and narrow. He had drilled holes through the ceiling and tapped into the phone line of the empty apartment upstairs, so for a little while he was able to use the phone as much as he wanted.
SANDY THOMPSON
I was working for a Realtor and I made ninety dollars a week, so there was two dollars or something that he could spend on beer. He heard the Jefferson Airplane and got friendly with them, and he took acid for the first time. They all came back to the apartment and then the band left and Hunter was there with me and Juan, who was in a crib. I didn’t know anything about acid, except that it seemed awfully dangerous. Hunter said, “Get me my gun.” I had hidden the gun. I said, “Absolutely not.” He started to get really angry. And he said, “If you don’t get me the gun . . .”
There was no way I was going to get him the gun while he’s on acid. I had no idea if he was going to kill me, if he was going to kill my son . . .
He said, “If you don’t get me that gun, I’m going to throw this boot through the window.” These were plate-glass windows, big windows. And he did. He threw this boot—wham!—through the window, and I was shaking. I reached up—this was a mom protecting her son—and scratched his face. There was blood. And it was weird, but he stop
ped. I guess that jolted him.
Hunter had a motorcycle, and he went out and got on it and rode up to Bob and Terri Geiger’s in Sonoma. I called up there an hour or so later and said, “Is Hunter there?” I had no idea if he could possibly make it on acid or not, not knowing anything about acid. And Terri said, “Oh yeah, he’s here. And you know, I’ve never seen him like this. He’s out there coloring with the two little girls.” They were maybe two and three years old.
DR. BOB GEIGER
We got into it a little bit when he showed up because I started bawling him out about it, telling him that it was inappropriate behavior to attack Sandy or to be negative to Sandy.
SANDY THOMPSON
When Juan was an infant, Hunter was very sweet with him—in the first year or so. By the time he was two, he just wasn’t there for him. Hunter told me, “Juan’s your novel.” He could come out and be there when he needed to be there, for someone or something. He could rise to the occasion, and then when he didn’t have to, he could sink back into the uncharming self.
Hunter wanted to keep his really dark self away from Juan, but he wasn’t making any changes in his behavior so that he could be a father to Juan. He stayed out of the picture. I mean he was physically there some of the time, but mostly he was asleep, or he was at the bar, or he was out of town. Juan’s time with Hunter began about ten or twelve years before Hunter died.
Hunter did not like Christmas, and he didn’t believe in Christmas trees. But when Juan was two years old we had a tree, and we continued to have a tree for Juan so that when he got older he would know Christmas. Hunter would get up for a couple hours while Juan opened presents, and then he’d go back to bed. He didn’t behave badly, and he would get me a present. But we never celebrated my birthday, ever, until the year that I left him.
JACK THIBEAU
We first met at a bar before a football game with John Clancy and then took a cab across Golden Gate Park to Kezar Stadium.
He was writing Hell’s Angels, and he told me I looked like an Oakland undercover cop covering the Angels. I just sort of shrugged that one off, and he goes, “Reach into my pocket and grab some of those brownies.” There was a whole mess of brownies that he said one of the Angels had given him. I nibbled on some. By the time we got to Kezar, we were unredeemable. He started screaming epithets during the game—“RIP HIS THROAT OUT!”—stuff like that.
He had a sheepskin jacket on and one of those slouchy golf hats. He was like a weird-looking collegiate type and passed for a sort of odd aristocrat. He spoke very well, and he was very literate. He seemed to think he was some sort of rich guy.
The quarterback for the Forty Niners was named John Brodie. At one point there was a lull in the game. There was a big play about to happen, and Brodie goes up to get behind the center, and everybody’s quiet. And Thompson screams, “JOHN BRODIE WEARS HIGH HEELS!” Everybody turned around, including some old lady, who said, “Young man, will you please stop using that nasty language?” And Hunter says, “Madam, we come here to vent our spleens and get rid of the daily drudgery of our lives. If you and your husband don’t like it, why don’t you go to the opera?” They got up and left.
After the game, Thompson paid some hippies with a pickup truck to drive us around all night. He just kept the guys stoned and drunk, and we’re driving through alleyways in San Francisco’s residential districts. All of a sudden Thompson bangs on the hood of the truck and asks the driver to stop and jumps out of the truck and runs up to this house and disappears inside. He comes out about five minutes later, jumps in the truck, bangs on the hood, and we take off again. And I said, “What did you do?” He said, “I had to make some phone calls.” I said, “Did you know those people?” He said, “No, but they shouldn’t leave their door open in the middle of the night. I mean, luckily all I wanted to do is make a few phone calls. I had to call my agent in New York.”
We ended up spending a lot of time in these nasty-ass bars around Kezar. Once I took him to a North Beach bar down on the waterfront, and some guy started bothering him—you know, some fucking drunk just harassing people—and Thompson punched him right in the fucking mouth. Boom-boom-boom and “We’d better get out of here.” He just fucking knocked the shit out of him very quickly. So we hurried out the door and we got about half a block down the street, and he said, “Let’s go back. That was fun.”
JOHN CLANCY
One day after a Forty Niners game, we were drinking with David Pierce, the mayor of Richmond, California, at Hunter’s place. Out of nowhere, Hunter leapt up and fished a shotgun out from underneath the couch, threw open the back door, screamed really loudly, and fired both barrels out the door. After all this, he ran back to us, carefully placed the shotgun under the couch, sat down, and grabbed his beer. Hunter seemed completely amazed and surprised when a few minutes later there was a knock on his door—a cop. Hunter invited him in and told him to look around, and Pierce started talking about how he’s the mayor of Richmond, and Hunter’s this famous writer on the way up. I just kept my mouth shut. Eventually the cop just sort of warned us to keep our noses clean. He scoffed at “Mr. Mayor”—I don’t think he actually believed this for a second—and said to Hunter, “Good luck with your writing. I tried to do that once, and it’s a lot harder than it looks.”
PAUL SEMONIN
Hunter spoke about the Hells Angels in a strange kind of way. There was an identification with the Angels as outcasts—downtrodden outcasts, and victims, if you will. He saw them as a kind of emblem of honor and rebellion. It wasn’t only Hunter, but people like Ken Kesey as well who somehow thought that an alliance between the Hells Angels and the peace movement was going to make or break the whole struggle. They invested a lot of their energy into that.
I think Hunter’s perspective on this goes back to his kind of survivalist character, the way that he identified with some of these extreme elements that were actually quite right-wing. If you look at his writings about the Hells Angels, there’s not a more unsavory kind of bunch of characters, and yet he somehow idolizes them. He does it in a very subtle way, but he makes their struggles something that reflects both a failure and a rebellion against certain things in American culture and society. His own descriptions of it, and the parties that Kesey threw, are just horrifying. He saw some things which I thought were worthy of some kind of a critique, or some kind of intellectual space that he needed to have and didn’t seem to have. We talked some about this, because I was there while he was writing the manuscript. But this sort of thinking just was not on Hunter’s radar then.
SONNY BARGER was the president of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels.
There was a guy named Birney Jarvis, who was an ex-Frisco member and a writer for the Chronicle. Somehow or another he and Hunter hooked up, and Hunter was introduced in a San Francisco club and then they brought him to us. We’re a very democratic club and the whole Hells Angels had to vote on letting him visit—Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Richmond—whatever charters were around in ’66. We voted on doing the book and then we worked with him to do it. Hunter was the first person that ever approached us about a book, and he got the story. He had the cooperation of the club—not my cooperation.
He was definitely different. He didn’t fit in. We hung out at his house, and wherever we went, he went. And I don’t think Hunter ever tried to act like one of us. He always knew that he was apart from us. Some people get into thinking they’re one of us, and they really run into problems. I don’t think he ever tried to put that front on. Which is a very good thing for him—and for us too.
SANDY THOMPSON
They brought their mamas over too, and they were all very sweet to Juan. One of them said once, “We’ve got to keep it down. The baby’s sleeping.” I had no idea that they had killed and raped and done horrible things because when they were at our apartment, they just talked.
Hunter would go to a bar in Oakland, the El Adobe, to see them, but he was very diligent. They would take Seconal with beer,
and when all that kicked in, they would be monsters. He’d stay until he knew they’d taken the Seconal, and then he couldn’t leave soon enough.
Sonny would come over, and Tiny. I remember going to a couple Hells Angels parties, but we didn’t stay late. And of course there was the party at Ken Kesey’s.
Hunter had met Kesey at a radio show, and Kesey said, “I’m kind of interested in the Hells Angels. Do you think they might want to come and meet my friends?” Hunter told him that he could arrange that, and then one Sunday he said to me, “Let’s go for a drive.” Which was really bizarre: Hunter, on a Sunday afternoon, like a normal human being, saying, “Let’s take the little family for a drive.” Juan was with us, and he was still an infant.
We drove up through these big evergreens, and we knew that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were under surveillance at the time. There were narcotics agents and police in the hills looking to catch anybody doing anything wrong. And then we saw this huge banner stretched across the road and across the river that read, “The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Hells Angels.” I can’t imagine what the law must have thought when they saw that sign.
Neal Cassady was there, and Ginsberg, and Cassady’s ex-wife. Kesey played this four-hour documentary of the Magic Bus and the Merry Pranksters doing their thing. After a while you couldn’t watch anymore. It was just endless people smoking and being high and being silly; smoking, being high and silly; smoking, being high and silly. Kesey’s children, who were maybe five or seven, were there too, and people were high, and drunk, and dancing; they were taking acid, though Hunter didn’t. The kids had taken acid too. At some point we jumped in a car with Ginsberg to go get some booze. We got stopped by the police, and they asked us who we were. All Ginsberg would say was “I’m a poet . . . I’m a poet,” which Hunter and I thought was funny.
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