ED BASTIAN
But then everybody was wondering, “What happens if we win?” Hunter never really saw himself as a working sheriff. He saw himself as carrying the vision, carrying the mission, making a big statement, and changing the culture of this town.
TOM BENTON
Hunter said, “I’ve got it all figured out. If I win, I’ll take my salary and the undersheriff’s salary and combine them and give them to one guy who knows how to run a nuts-and-bolts sheriff’s department. I will be the figurehead who will sit up and listen to the people and make decisions.”
The guy who was really going to run the office if Hunter had been elected was Dick Kienast, who was going to be his undersheriff. Dick had been a city police officer, but he quit because he disagreed with the heavy-handed attitude of the police. Dick had been a divinity student earlier, and he was soft-spoken and very smart, and a very good administrator.
JOE EDWARDS
On election night, Hunter wound up losing by, I think, 274 votes out of 2,000 or 3,000. It was pretty damn close. The night of the election was wild. The Jerome was packed body to body in all the halls and all the way up the stairs; you could hardly get in. Hunter was walking around with his cigarette holder and his shaved head and an American flag wrapped around his neck, and people were cheering.
JANN WENNER
Had he taken it a little more seriously at the start, or had it been his second try, he would’ve been elected sheriff.
TOM BENTON
If we’d had another two weeks, he’d have been sheriff.
PAUL PASCARELLA
I think what lost him the few hundred votes he needed was his idea of changing the name of Aspen to “Fat City.” These old people got all upset. But it was a very exciting time. It showed me that voting worked. We changed this little valley by registering to vote and coming out with some posters and doing the work and getting all the freaks involved.
ED BASTIAN
It was a big downer that night, but in the next few days we got over it. Hunter was a realist. I don’t think he was depressed about it. It was an experience, and he began moving on.
JOE EDWARDS
In between that election and the next one, the district court ordered the undersheriff removed from office, so Whitmire had further embarrassment. And the next time there was an election for sheriff, Dick Kienast ran and won and became sheriff for eight years. And of course the city police changed too, so now instead of wearing these militaristic uniforms, the police and sheriff’s departments started wearing blue jeans and blue-jean jackets. For a while, Dick Kienast had them not even carrying sidearms.
The attitude of the police became laissez-faire. They refused to cooperate with any of the federal undercover agents regarding marijuana, primarily because in those days everybody—at least everybody under thirty or thirty-five—was smoking dope. None of our officers would participate in their raids or their busts, and they didn’t have enough manpower to do it on their own.
The whole tension of harassing the younger people disappeared, and the whole attitude of policing in the community shifted from beating up people to helping them and seeing what their problem is and getting them to social services or rehabilitation. If they found you drunk, they’d help you home. And to a great extent it’s remained that way for thirty years.
Bob Braudis was Dick’s undersheriff, and Dick hired everybody who had the same attitude—let’s just keep things low-key, let’s be a service to the community and not a harassment. When Kienast decided he didn’t want to do the job anymore, Braudis stepped into his shoes and has been sheriff ever since. He’s continued that same program that Hunter originally had in mind, and it’s been just wonderful. Hunter changed the culture of this whole area. He was the catalyst that got the whole thing going.
GEORGE STRANAHAN
Our social club at that time was the Jerome Bar. It was Hunter’s court salon. Michael Solheim was manager of the bar and Hunter’s buddy.
MICHAEL SOLHEIM
The bar was being run totally wrong. The people who were running it thought it’d make a great African-themed bar, and the interior was filled with swords and spears and shit. The clientele was mainly winos and a low-end crowd. I told the owner when I started, “The group of people you saw here for the sheriff’s campaign will be back.” He loved that, because his hotel rooms were packed then, and there were people in the bar all the time. I changed the place back to a Victorian theme and made a whole different thing out of it, and it became popular fairly quickly; we were the only bar in town that was busy all the time, day and night, all year round. There’s no doubt that Hunter hanging out there was a draw, and there were a lot of girls coming through as well. Most of the colorful people in town seemed to hang out there.
Hunter and James Salter and I were watching the NBA play-offs there one day, and then another couple guys walked in and came over to us. One of them knew us, and I looked at the other guy that he’d come in with and said, “You know, you’ve got a familiar look about you. Aren’t you a friend of [ski racer] Billy Kidd’s?” As it turns out, he was a friend of Billy Kidd’s, but he was also Robert Redford. We all sat around and talked for a while. Redford wanted to talk to Hunter about Hell’s Angels. He really liked that book.
Another time Hunter and I were sitting there watching some football and who shows up but Allen Ginsberg. I said, “Hunter, here comes Allen.” And he said to me, “Don’t say a word.” Hunter owed him some time together. Well, here the fucker was, but Hunter didn’t want to pay him back that time. So we just stayed quiet and Ginsberg walked right by us.
PAUL PASCARELLA
One time, when we were watching football at Owl Farm, Hunter was threatening Juan with a cattle prod, but he was always great to Juan. He always really loved Juan. It’s kind of like that thing with dogs—if you rough them up a little, they like to play like that. In a sense it was never really anything harmful. He never pinned him down and drilled him with electric jolts or anything; it was just a threat and a lot of running around.
But Juan was always different; he was always so quiet. I don’t remember him being around all that much. I think he was off in some other part of the house or off with Sandy.
SANDY THOMPSON
I helped start the Aspen Community School, which is right next to Owl Farm. I think that really, really helped Juan. I had no idea how bad things were for Juan until we left. I really didn’t know.
JUAN THOMPSON
I’ve often wondered how much so-called childhood trauma is the result of an adult’s comparison and questioning of what they experienced with what they thought they should have experienced. At the time I didn’t question any of this. It’s only later, when you learn more and grow up a bit, that you can say, “Hey, this guy was always high.”
Given the time period, looking back now, the values look extreme, but at the time they weren’t. My mom and dad and their friends came out of the sixties and shared a system of beliefs and some similar assumptions about life’s problems. For the most part, drug use was taken for granted. In the environment in Aspen in the late seventies there was a lot of drugs, so it was pretty natural for kids to try them. There were two or three years where I tried them out on weekends—nothing that serious to where it became a problem.
Politics were very liberal. Some families were a lot more open, some were more structured. I do remember going over to a friend’s house when I was young and sitting down with his family for dinner and them saying grace. That was odd. But I just took it all in.
GAYLORD GUENIN
Every afternoon our whole staff at the [Aspen] Illustrated News 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. I mean, there was a period in Aspen, in the late sixties and the early seventies, where everyone was doing copious amounts of drugs. In the Jerome, not only would they sell drugs, but they had the mescaline fla
vor of the week. One week it’d be raspberry, the next week strawberry, the next week grape. Hunter’s real intake is one of those things that you cannot be certain of, because Hunter made such a show of his drinking. I’d wonder—was he really doing that much cocaine all the time? Or was it a lot for show? But if we’re talking an over/under situation, I’d take “over.”
PAUL PASCARELLA
The Jerome Bar was our base. Hunter always took up the far end of the bar where it turned, by the back door. Because there was a television, we used to watch sports there. There were some pretty big people floating around in those days—Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson, and Don Henley—but I remember at one point thinking that out of all my famous friends, Hunter was the only genius.
Back in those days, Aspen was really cool. It was adventurers, mountain climbers, exceedingly wealthy people that chose their own path. You’d be sitting in the bar and you could be sitting next to Hunter, or some bikers from Massachusetts, or some heir to some huge money thing—but you all looked the same. If you were just some rich person from out of town, that didn’t cut it. And if you didn’t know these people, you were out.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Golden Age of Gonzo
What were we doing out here? Did I actually have a big red convertible out there on the street? Was I just roaming around these Mint hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come to Las Vegas to work on a story?
RALPH STEADMAN, the British artist, met Hunter at the Kentucky Derby.
I got a call one day from a magazine called Scanlan’s, and I thought Scanlan? What type of magazine is that? It’s the name of a little-known pig farmer from Nottingham. It was a very anti-establishment thing. They got on Nixon’s blacklist. J. C. Suarez was the art editor, and Don Goddard, who had been the foreign editor of the New York Times, was an editor. He’d found my book, Still Life with Raspberry, and he’d brought it back to America.
Hunter had asked Pat Oliphant, the famous political cartoonist, to do the illustrations first, but Oliphant was on his way to England for a cartoonist convention.
J. C. Suarez said to me, “How would you like to go to Kentucky and meet an ex–Hells Angel? He’s looking for someone specific. He wants someone who becomes part of the story. He’s a tall guy and he’s shaven-headed, you know, and he wears hunting jackets.” For two days I walked around Churchill Downs asking for “Hunter Johnson.” I looked at people, did a few drawings here and there. I actually tried to be a journalist, a visual journalist, doing what Hunter eventually called my “filthy habit”—drawing people.
I was in the press room one day and I had a beer. Suddenly I turned around and this tall man said, “Hello, I’m Hunter S. Thompson. I was told to look for a matted-haired geek with string warts. They said you were weird—but not this weird.” I said, “I’m sorry, I’m from England, I don’t . . . ,” and Hunter said, “I’m pulling your leg; don’t worry. I see you drink. Would you like to have another beer and sit for a minute and talk about things? It’s a strange assignment, because I’ve come back home and I’m feeling a bit weird being here.”
Through that whole week, we consumed enormous amounts of alcohol. I don’t think we ever stopped, actually. We liked beers, and we both had this funny thing about chasing beers with whiskeys, and we just got more and more plastered. But what I didn’t know at the time was that Hunter stayed up most of the night. I would knock on his door at eight o’clock in the morning with a bit of a hangover, and he’d shout, “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Hunter. I thought we should get to the track and try and start looking at things.”
“What the fuck is this?! I haven’t had any sleep. I’ve been up all night. Give me two hours.”
It was just bizarre, frankly. When he walked into a room, everybody noticed him. He’d have a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and his foot wouldn’t go on the floor. He’d be sort of perched and looking ’round, with a funny hat on. I thought the one-foot-off-the-floor thing was his way of making an impression, but later he told me he’d had some football injury when he was younger, which gave him this peculiar limping gait.
At one point early on, he said, “I wish you would stop doing that.” “What’s that?” I asked. “That filthy habit you have of making little scribbles of people,” he said. “They take it personally, you know. Those things could get us into trouble, because they’re rather ugly. I don’t mind them myself, you know, but they really are ugly things. You’ve got to stop it.” I said, “Oh . . . well, that’s what I do. This is my first American assignment.” And he said, “Maybe it is, but you can’t keep drawing people like that. It’s something with Kentuckians particularly. That’s not a drawing to them—it’s an insult. It’s like telling people, ‘You’re the ugliest piece of shit I ever saw’ or something. You’ll get in a fight.”
The next night we met his brother Davison in a restaurant, and I drew him, and it was a horrible picture. Hunter said, “You’ve upset my brother, you know that? And not only that, but people are looking. I really don’t think we should stay around much longer. As it happens, I have mace in my pocket, so we can get out of here. People don’t like what you’re doing. It’s a nasty, unpleasant thing.”
“But it’s what I came to do, Hunter.”
“Well, do it later. We’ve got to get out of here.” And he maced the restaurant. He maced the restaurant!
It was a terrible thing to do. I mean, we got maced too. The whole damn place got maced. People were coughing and sputtering, “Get me outside!” It was the first time I realized: “Oh God—this is not an ordinary person. This is somebody that does things with a paranoiac fever.”
At some point during that week, though, Hunter began to like my filthy habit of drawing and would say, “Draw that one, Ralph. Draw that, over there.” He liked the idea because he thought it was a way of saying something about a person that he couldn’t say in words. But after our first week doing this sort of thing at the Derby, Hunter hadn’t got a fucking thing down except notes in red ink in one of those spiral notebooks.
SANDY THOMPSON
When he wrote the Kentucky Derby article for Scanlan’s, the drugs and the booze and all that stuff was getting involved in his life. This was no longer the Hunter who would sit down and rewrite a piece three times. He could get out a page, maybe, or a paragraph, a really neat, wild paragraph—and then some gibberish. He couldn’t come out with a full piece.
RALPH STEADMAN
He was always going to be against the people who belong and for those who don’t, and this particular story was about the people that he really despised in Louisville—the establishment that had rejected him many years ago. He was back to settle a score. They had made him know he was not going to be anything, certainly not a writer.
Over breakfast on the last morning, he said, “I have to go see my mother; she’s having a bit of a problem.” I think she was being institutionalized for a while because she drank a lot. I met her and she said, “Hell no! I’m more worried about his drinking than I am about mine!” They were both at it, I guess. I’m not trying to malign her, because she was wonderful, a terrific lady. But that was on Hunter’s mind.
DOUG BRINKLEY
A lot of his correspondence with his mom was about filling her in on his financial situation. She was broke a lot, and he was always trying to get money for her. If Hunter got two hundred dollars for an article, fifty bucks would probably go to Virginia for what he considered a loan from some other time. They shared in each other’s financial difficulties a lot. Once her boys left, she had to make it in Louisville by herself, and Hunter had to make it in a world of freelancing where dollars were hard-earned.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” is a wonderful story, really a departure piece, and I think that that was a moment where he used all his fictional talent to describe and anatomize those characters and just make it all up. I’m sure some of it was real.
RALPH STEADMAN
The second story we did was in September. Hunter called me and said, “Ralph, I don’t know if you’re interested, but I’ve been asked by Scanlan’s to go to the America’s Cup in Rhode Island. I’d like you to be there. Maybe you could do something to help pilot a three-masted sloop or something.” I felt I had to go. In a strange way I felt chosen, whatever that means—maybe by accident. It was journalism of outrage. There was no market for journalism of outrage at that time.
We got there, and Hunter found this captain who took us out to this huge boat, and he had an idea that he’d do a story by trying to get onboard both these racing boats, the Gretel and the Intrepid. He said, “We really could kick some ass! These people are horrible, with their filthy two-million-dollar yachts with gin lounges on the front of them, and everybody sitting there drinking their mint juleps and their gin and tonics and whatever else they have—it’s filthy, Ralph. It’s an expression of decadence I’d like you to see.”
For some peculiar reason I got seasick. I was in a terrible state standing up on the deck and trying to remain, well, not sick. He didn’t demand that I take the psilocybin. He said, “Maybe it will make you feel better. Try one.” That was all. And I tried one, and that’s when the screaming red-eyed dogs started. It was a full moon, but all the reflections I saw were red. The next thing I knew I was saying, “I feel like Hitler.” It was a really awful panicked feeling.
Hunter kept barking, “We have a mission.” I didn’t quite know what the mission was. He said: “You’re the artist from England, Ralph. What do you want to say about the America’s Cup?” I couldn’t really come up with something on the spot, and he said, “Well, Ralph, I have this idea. If you find something you want to write on the side of the boats, I have these spray cans here, a black and a red. We should write something.” I said, “How about ‘Fuck the Pope?’” He said, “Are you a Catholic, Ralph?” I told him no, that this was just what I was going to write. I shook the spray cans, and that alerted the guard on one side of the jetty. By this time it was hopeless. The drugs scoured my brain. I was seriously put into such a catatonic state by psilocybin that I would write “Fuck the Pope” on the side of a boat. I was going to do it.
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