CHAPTER FOUR
Freak Power in the Rockies
Every afternoon our whole staff would end up in the Jerome Bar with Tom Benton and Hunter and a whole bunch of people. We all did mescaline, LSD, cocaine, opium if you could find it, but—this sounds funny—in moderation.
LOREN JENKINS
I don’t remember thinking anything bizarre about Owl Farm at all in those early days. I mean, hey, it was the sixties . . . what was strange? Everything was there, you sort of accepted it, and . . . we were all strange, right?
JOHN CLANCY
After Hunter moved to Woody Creek, I’d get a legal case in Denver, go skiing in Aspen, and then swing by Hunter’s place on my way home. One evening when I pulled up, Hunter had the stereo cranking good and loud. He came out of the house and put this big bag of pot up on the roof. One thing led to another, and Hunter dragged the couch out of the living room into the snow in the yard, poured gasoline onto it, and set it on fire. Then he walked back to the house with this huge ball of fire going up in the air. He looked me right in the eye and said, “I am a master of tools.” A friend of his was ducking up from behind the burning couch firing tracer bullets out of a machine gun over the couch, and then Hunter said, “Holy shit!” In the glare of the flames, it looked like there was a thousand pounds of pot up on the roof. We expected the police would be on us any minute. “Jesus,” Hunter said. “We’ll go to prison for life.”
GEORGE STRANAHAN was Hunter’s Woody Creek neighbor.
Before Hunter moved out to Owl Farm in ’68, he was in a little apartment in Aspen. My friend Bob Craig, who was the executive director of the Aspen Institute, and I were buying real estate in Woody Creek for protective purposes. Craig was making friends with Hunter and called me one day and said, “I think I have a good tenant for this place that we just bought together, namely Hunter Thompson. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Nice folk, a writer.” I now was Hunter’s landlord. He was renting the place, with about 140 acres behind it, for $375 a month.
If I did get a check from Hunter, which was irregularly, I usually got a little letter along with it. I think it was his way of apologizing, though he’d never actually apologize or write “I’m sorry.” Never.
I was still in my academic career—I was a theoretical physicist at Michigan State—so I didn’t meet Hunter until I came out the next summer. Sandy called my wife and said, “Hi, neighbor, we live down the road. We rent this house from you. Why don’t you come on down for dinner?” I drove up in an old jeep, and Hunter came out the door and said, “Oh, good, you’ve got your jeep. We have to go down and pull my motorcycle out of the creek”—those were his first words—which we then did. I admired his motorcycle, particularly the fact that it was a Bultaco Matador. Soon thereafter I ordered my own Bultaco, and I would get riding lessons from Hunter, which basically meant getting your wire cutters and maybe a pistol and going trespassing. We’d go across hayfields, and if there was a fence we cut it.
But then we went in for dinner, and Hunter said, “Eat these.” It was my first experience with pure, very high grade mescaline. Sandy had put the turkey in at about one in the afternoon—she told us that—and at about eleven she opened the oven to take it out. The mescaline was . . . I was hungry. The turkey, of course, just collapsed.
TOM BENTON was an Aspen-based graphic artist.
In 1965, I had a little gallery in Aspen, and I rented out part of the gallery to a girl that ran a frame shop. One day she came to me and said, “Tom, you gotta see these damn pictures from this crazy guy who came in and wants me to frame them.” And so I looked at them. They were pictures of Hells Angels, and some of them were kissing and touching tongues. When the guy came in to pick up the stuff, she introduced me to him. Right then, Hunter and I became friends. He seemed crazy enough.
JUAN THOMPSON is Hunter and Sandy’s son.
We moved into Owl Farm when I was around four. Before that, we rented a house on George Stranahan’s property. In some ways the experience was like that of any of the kids around Woody Creek whose parents were ranchers or farmers or whatever. Things like guns were a part of life. They were just lying around. Much later on, I moved them all to the gun safe, but for a long time they were propped up in corners by the doors. Very early on, there was a very clear understanding that you don’t mess with the guns. It never occurred to me to actually pick one up until much later. I got a BB gun first, and then a .22 rifle when I was eleven.
The hours my dad and I kept were quite different. He didn’t get up at a certain time every day. It would be three, or six, or seven p.m. Sandy would make dinner for me and then breakfast for Hunter. He’d be eating bacon and eggs and reading the paper, and I’d be finishing my dinner or doing my homework before bed. My friends at school thought that was funny, and at the time I thought it was funny too: My dad wakes up at five p.m., just in time for the evening news.
My mom provided a basic framework of functional childhood—meals and toys and reading and all that. Reading was very important. I read a lot.
SANDY THOMPSON
It was one of my jobs to get Hunter up. When he came to bed, I’d be asleep, and he’d wake me up and say, “Wake me up at one.” So I would, though he usually didn’t get up for a couple hours after that. I’d be busy making the right breakfast, because he had some very specific ideas about what breakfast should be, and there were maybe four different ones that he liked. One was a Spanish omelet with bacon. One was mayonnaise and peanut butter on top of toast with bacon on the top. There was some sort of a spinach thing. There was huevos rancheros. And then maybe six cups of coffee. With the last cup of coffee, he’d start in on the beer, and maybe four beers, five beers later he started on the whiskey. It was pretty orderly, pretty structured.
As I was busy making the coffee and the breakfast, he’d come out into the kitchen yelling about something or another. Sometimes it was directed toward me, and sometimes it wasn’t. Maybe even most times it wasn’t. But it was scary. Somebody comes in yelling, who’s big, and angry. It’s scary. It makes for that angst in your heart. You shake a little bit. And then later on in the day, when you’ve had a drink, it’s a lot easier.
Hunter didn’t drink fast. It was more like a drink an hour. Problem was, when you stay up for twenty-four or thirty-six hours, it accumulates. But Hunter could really hold his alcohol for a long time. And he could hold the drugs. I mean, I saw him with some powerful political figures when he was on acid, and no one knew the difference. The one thing that really brought him down was opium. I only saw him do that twice. Otherwise, he could function. I mean, was it completely changing the way he was, and what he was saying, what he was doing? Of course. But he could function, just like a functional alcoholic, or a functional coke addict.
JACK THIBEAU
I think Hunter preferred drugs to women, actually. And he liked women who understood that.
SANDY THOMPSON
At Owl Farm, you did a lot of cocaine, and at times you did too much. That’s not a problem. You just take something else. If you’re really bad, you take quaaludes. If you were not so bad, then you just smoked a good strong joint. But you could always go up. And you could always come down. There were so many options.
GENE MCGARR
Sandy and Hunter had some rough times because he just never stopped. I mean, he would fuck a fire hydrant. There were instances later, in front of the Jerome hotel in Aspen, when she would be howling up at him, “I know you’re there, you son of a bitch. I know you’re in there fucking somebody.” But it got to the point where you couldn’t get in touch with Hunter.
SANDY THOMPSON
One night Hunter and I went to a party in Aspen at the house of a woman who was a good friend of Jack Nicholson’s and had been close to Timothy Leary. Hunter was the big deal because he had written Hell’s Angels, and it was my first excursion into the world of him being adored. There were drugs around, and some very pretty women, and all of a sudden I was just this little wife in Woody Creek, and
all these women were hanging all over Hunter. I went into one room and everybody’s drinking and high, and this woman was sitting on Hunter’s lap with her arms around him kind of cooing, and I went ballistic and ran outside, sobbing hysterically. Hunter came after me. It was a new stage of a never-ending drama, the beginning of all the attention. That was the beginning of “Oh, Hunter . . .”
Fortunately, during the time when we were married, I only knew about one woman, and I had thought that he ended that. But it turns out there were women the whole time. I just came across a letter in a box of my stuff from a woman to Hunter—about wanting to see him again, wanting him to know how she felt, da, da, da. As it turned out, my friends—or our friends—knew that I really, really couldn’t have handled the truth. I could not have handled Hunter going out with all the Jerome cocktail waitresses and everybody else. So I didn’t know about all of this until much later, which is very good, because I would have cracked up. I almost cracked up when I found out about the one.
GENE MCGARR
Sandy always answered the phone. And Hunter was always “not available.” She was shielding him from all the calls from friends of his that she didn’t approve of. And I was high on that list.
JACK THIBEAU
Sometimes I couldn’t tell his paranoia from his reality. He seemed to enjoy both. Sandy just got worn out, I think. He would take her out to dance, take her out every month to a party, and she would dance like a fucking Frank Zappa character out of one of the songs, and then he would wrap her up, throw her in a car, and take her back home for the night.
SANDY THOMPSON
I did cocaine for maybe two years. It’s a terrible drug. Marijuana—and some other drugs too—make you feel loving, make you feel connected, make you feel good, make you feel warm. With cocaine, it was all about the ego. You felt really sharp and really, really smart, and strong, and more powerful than the person next to you. But there was no sense of connection. It’s not a drug to make love with. Not a drug to be in a community with. It is a completely self-centered, egoistic drug.
But when I took LSD with him, I was clean. I didn’t have that angst anymore. I was absolutely at the same level as he was. He was still the king, but I was a very, very important queen. It was a great escape. And it was also great fun, mostly. I’ve had friends who used LSD to really explore things spiritually, but for me, and for Hunter too, it was really more of an escape.
PAUL SEMONIN
He called me in ’68, when I was living in New York, and wanted to meet in Chicago and go to the demonstration at the Democratic convention together. I was disillusioned with the way the whole country was going and just told Hunter that I wasn’t interested in that. But I always mark that time as when his political consciousness really kicked in. He wasn’t a part of the movement in that he wasn’t any kind of radical character. I don’t think he identified with any group per se, but he could see that some of the protest movement and the antiwar stuff was important. And of course he always had this thing about the Kennedys. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, that probably drove a stake into his heart.
JAMES SILBERMAN
All his writing was about the loss of some mythic world that he may once have inhabited. It was no accident that Gatsby was his favorite book. I said to him at one point, “You’re really writing one lifelong book called The Death of the American Dream.” And that stuck.
PAUL SEMONIN
I don’t think he ever felt identity with the political ideas. He felt identity with the rebellion; he could see how it tarnished the ideals of an American identity. He was never very ideological about his thinking. He didn’t join any groups and was kind of a maverick character all along.
SANDY THOMPSON
I saw Hunter cry exactly twice in my life. One had to do with our dog, and the other was the night he got back from Chicago. He broke down telling me what had happened. The police had fired tear gas into the crowd of people demonstrating at the convention, and he was right in there. He talked about people being hit, and brutally hurt, and the violence, the horror of it all.
GAYLORD GUENIN was the editor of the Aspen Illustrated News in 1969.
Our offices were in the basement of the Jerome hotel, and one day in comes this madman with a letter to the editor, screaming and yelling. I couldn’t understand what he was saying; I didn’t have a clue who he was. His letters to the editor were all signed “Martin Bormann”—Hitler’s deputy after Rudolf Hess was captured. I asked an editor at the paper, “Who the hell is this guy?” I thought he was a wacko. He’d come into the office on almost a daily basis just to see what was going on, or he’d have some grievance about one of the politicians in town. His letters to the editor were essentially political, attacking or complaining about the local sheriff, or police, or whatever. And at that time, Aspen was really going through a transition. The old guard was still pretty much in political power, and the young people, like Hunter and a lot of others, were coming to town, and we were a hundred times more liberal than what was here.
JOE EDWARDS was living in Aspen in the spring of 1968.
I had just graduated from law school and was sitting in my office when some guys from the physics institute in town walked in and said, “Are you aware of what’s going on in municipal court?” I wasn’t, really, but they said, “Well, it’s really appalling. The city police are harassing these hippies. . . .”
Haight-Ashbury was breaking out, and hippies were drifting across the country. They were coming to Aspen and hanging out. There had been a petition from the businesspeople to the city council to get rid of undesirable transients, and there were six kids that had been thrown in jail for hitchhiking—and everyone got sentenced to three months. One of them was fourteen. He’d been in town ten minutes and now he was in jail with no shirt and no shoes. Guido Meyer, the police magistrate, a Swiss who came over after World War II, looked over his reading glasses and said, “You dirty hippies are messing up our town. We’ve got to clean you up. Ninety days.” That was the whole trial.
I filed the first civil rights suit in Colorado under the federal laws that were being used to help the blacks get registered to vote—against the city police, the city magistrate, and the city council. We had our preliminary hearing in Denver, and the chief judge lambasted the city and said that this was the most outrageous situation he’d ever seen. The city promised they weren’t going to do this anymore.
Suddenly I’m the hippie lawyer. Anybody that gets busted for smoking dope, they come to see me. And that’s how Hunter had heard of me. He called me one night about two or three in the morning, woke me up, and introduced himself and started saying that we needed to straighten out this town, that things were out of control. And they were, a little bit. Carrol Whitmire was the sheriff, and he and his staff were of the same mind-set as Guido Meyer. His staff would beat up handcuffed prisoners, spit on them, and kick them with their cowboy boots.
PAUL PASCARELLA is an artist who moved to Aspen in the fall of 1969.
There were a lot of us coming here who had more or less dropped out and come to Aspen in the span of a year or two. It seemed like the mountains around the town were some kind of huge two-dimensional protective barrier with a superstructure behind them holding everything back. At the time, Aspen wasn’t a hip place. When you left New York and said you were going to Aspen, people said, “Where? Colorado?” They didn’t know where Colorado was. You either went to California or Chicago or something, maybe New Orleans—but Colorado was definitely not on the map.
JOE EDWARDS
When we all came here in the sixties, or sometimes even earlier, Aspen was a fixed-up old mining town. The main street through town was paved, and nothing else. There were no stoplights. There were no condominiums, and no big hotels or lodges other than the Jerome, which had been there for a hundred years. Everybody was living in these old miner cabins or Victorian houses that had been fixed up, and suddenly in the summer of ’68, while this was all going on with the hippie trial, a devel
oper from Chicago came in and built what’s called the North of Nell condominium, and across the street they built these Aspen Square condominiums. Most of them were a block long and three stories high. Before that, you could walk around downtown and see the skiers coming right down into town a block away from you, and in the summer you’d see the wildflowers, and people would just carry their lunch bag up on the ski hill and sit down or go for a hike. When I first came to town, we’d ski off the mountain and down the streets to the bar and leave our skis outside. All of a sudden, you couldn’t even see the ski hill anymore.
Hunter started saying that we’ve got to get politically active, that we’ve got to take over and foster a recognition amongst the younger kids that they’ve been disenfranchised. He had me meet him at the Wheeler Opera House, which was showing this movie called The Battle of Algiers. After the movie, we went over to the Jerome hotel and sat in the bar for a couple hours and talked politics, and he went over his point again: that we needed to organize all the young people, all the bartenders and ski bums, the kids working the ski lifts and in the restaurants and bars; that we had the numbers; that if we could just get them registered and get them interested and get them to participate, we’d have the political power to change the town.
At this same time, the dozen or so lawyers in Aspen got together and put a petition to the city council to remove Guido Meyer from the magistrate’s office. Guido ran a restaurant in town and had no legal experience at all, and he had this almost Nazi attitude. The DA brought to the attention of the district judge the prisoner abuse that was going on, primarily by the undersheriff. So the undersheriff was removed from office by order of the district court, which was highly unusual, and Guido Meyer was replaced by the city council as a result of this embarrassment. Things were changing, and Hunter wanted to push it even further.
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