Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  Those kinds of literary evenings were always pretty much just him and me up at my house, and we’d have a ball. I kept what he liked to drink in the shed, and we’d sit there and tune up for the night. I’d ask him things I wouldn’t know about—what’s happening here or there politically—and he was always very informed about that. His contacts were very impressive.

  DEBORAH FULLER

  One reason he lived as long as he did was that he held the least amount of anger inside himself that he could. He vented at anyone around him. He could be quite cruel, and you had to learn how to stand up to him and know how much of it you would take, and let him know. One thing that was very important was that you held no grudges. There wasn’t time for that; we had way too much to do. We might be yelling at one moment, and then I’d say, “All right, do you need another drink? Let’s get back to the page you’re writing.” But he would get into his dark moods. You didn’t always know where they came from; any number of things could cause them.

  The world definitely revolved around him—that’s just the way it was. He had to make those choices, and so did I, and I was able to do it longer than a lot of people. But yes, it took its toll. There’s not much that he didn’t say to you if he felt like it.

  It was my life. You either did it full-bore or you didn’t, and I accepted that. Any assistant knew that you didn’t have time for another life. I helped train the new ones the best I could and helped them get through some of the rough times. Hunter would have them call me and talk to me about the reality of what the job entailed. Just honest stuff, really: Yes, it really does mean working nights, and some days. It’s a lot of intense work. Are you nervous driving fast in a car? Do you like birds? Can you type? All of the assistants were extremely bright, and they were all women, basically. He wanted a woman to flirt with while working, and he liked younger women to be there because they had the energy to keep up with him. It was a very difficult job to walk into cold. They either had the spirit and the fortitude, or they left.

  TIM FERRIS

  Hunter would travel sometimes with assistants, and often it never came up whether they were girlfriends or not. It was this endless parade. They all tended to be good conversationalists.

  JACK NICHOLSON

  Those migrations from assistant to girlfriend—it was pretty consistent behavior, but I never quite really knew when the transition had occurred. It would just eventually become apparent.

  DEBORAH FULLER

  He would find them in different ways. He would meet people at the tavern or at a lecture. He had Rolling Stone put something in the magazine saying that he was looking for an assistant, or he would have people connected to the literary world looking for him; people would write offering to work for him.

  DOUG BRINKLEY

  The ones that were successful knew when to back away from Hunter—when the going gets weird, get the hell out of there—but a wayward personality could get psychologically trapped in the spiderweb of Owl Farm. In your twenties, you’re vulnerable to things. In that way, Hunter had a very unfair advantage in those relationships. On the other hand, you have to be responsible for your own life—to know whether to get away from Hunter or not. Hunter was going to be Hunter. If you’re the moth coming into the flame, and you get burned by the flame, and then you complain, “Oh my God, I got burned”—well, what did you expect? He’s an inferno. Did you think you were special?

  A dynamic got created, and it usually crashed because it wasn’t a dynamic based on deep love—it was based on a kind of convenience and expediency, on loneliness and friendship. He had some bad crackups in those regards.

  DEBORAH FULLER

  All assistants were taught to shoot. Most seemed to enjoy it. I certainly did, and became a good shot. Hunter was a good teacher. He had a shooting range, and there would be things like old water heaters he’d have placed around for targets. He’d teach you to shoot in different ways—up close and at a distance, as well as with different kinds of guns—handguns, rifles, shotguns. We used to put out beer kegs he had found behind the tavern. Hunter felt there was a reward in hearing each shot hit the target, so the metal targets were perfect. He liked using exploding targets attached to small propane canisters, like the ones used for camping stoves. Now, those were fun for everyone—a big bang.

  MARY HARRIS was a neighbor of Hunter’s in Woody Creek.

  I used to live just up from Owl Farm in a little cabin, and I woke up a couple of times at three in the morning with a machine gun going off so loud that it sounded like it was under my window. I’d fly out of bed screaming, but then I’d remember that I lived next door to Hunter.

  PATTI STRANAHAN is George Stranahan’s wife.

  Every now and then some windows would get blasted out when George and Hunter were making bombs. That was always a big occasion: “Oh boy, let’s get together and blow something up.”

  GEORGE STRANAHAN

  We did some pretty good bombs. I was always the supplier. Hunter would go buy the gunpowder, but I always got the gel, the dynamite. It was easy. And I’m no expert on this stuff, but that’s the way it was, from the seventies on up until 9/11. Out of politeness we would call the sheriff if we were going to do something, and tell him that if somebody calls in with a report of an explosion in Woody Creek, you don’t need to send a deputy. The sheriff understood.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  Most of Hunter’s dynamite came from George Stranahan, who actually was raising cattle and had ditches and stumps. George and Hunter liked to blow up shit as a recreation. They blew up an old Jeep Wagoneer. The hood was blasted three hundred feet up in the air. Hunter told me they used a half a case of Dupont 80 percent, twenty-five pounds of black powder, and five gallons of gasoline. Often they would blow stuff up before George would go in for surgery. He had an awful lot of spinal surgery, and he was warned that he might come out of one of them in a wheelchair forever. So it boosted his spirits to blow something up beforehand.

  GEORGE STRANAHAN

  Hunter felt that there was ceremony around the bomb, and that it was important. I guess he knew that I was a rancher and enjoyed dynamite—I mean, I’d like a “boom” right now!—and because I had the shit, I could.

  PAUL PASCARELLA

  He appreciated sheer firepower—explosions, huge weapons.

  GEORGE STRANAHAN

  Soldier of Fortune, of course, was fascinated with Hunter and with guns and explosives in general, so some of their staffers came out to Owl Farm with a .50-caliber single-shot assassination rifle. Now with .50 caliber, you could be three miles away and with a good sight still kill a guy. The cops aren’t going to get you; you’ll make your escape. So the magazine called Hunter and said, “We want to get a picture of you shooting this thing at dusk, and we need to have an explosion where the bullet hits so that we can get a picture of you and the muzzle blast, and then whatever you’re hitting exploding.” And these assholes came out, and I was called in as the munitions expert, and we got everything all set up with this big rifle and the explosion waiting to happen.

  We put a car up the hill, and I put a whole bunch of dynamite in the cylinder block, figuring that if they hit it, it would be enough impact, as well as enough flames. But I also thought that we might have trouble actually hitting the dynamite precisely—it was Hunter shooting, after all. Hunter was in the kitchen drinking while we were doing all of this stuff, and so I put a can of gasoline in the front seat and a fuse leading from the dynamite to the can of gasoline, with the idea that in the worst case, we miss the dynamite and we’ll hit the gas can with a tracer, the gas will burst into flames, it will light the fuse, the fuse will go, and we’ll get an explosion and we’ll get good pictures. Finally they got Hunter to come out, and he was pretty drunk. Soldier of Fortune snapped him as he pulled the trigger, and we saw the tracer go fifty feet above the goddamn car. Not even close.

  JEANETTE ETHERIDGE is the owner of Tosca, a bar in San Francisco.

  I met Hunter in San Francisco in the late sixtie
s, but we got to be good friends when he was working as the night manager of the O’Farrell Theater—which was run by the Mitchell brothers, who had made the classic porno film Behind the Green Door. Hunter was also writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner, and became a regular at my bar in North Beach.

  JEFF ARMSTRONG is a manager of the O’Farrell Theatre.

  In 1984, he accepted an assignment from Playboy for a story he called “The Night Manager.” Which led to The Night Manager by Ralph Steadman, which we have on our wall. It shows all these naked, writhing women at the bottom, and in the middle of it all, Hunter sitting on what looks like a lifeguard chair. He’s looking down at all these women writhing about underneath him, nude and screaming. Hugh Hefner paid for it and he gave it to us.

  We had yellow business cards made: “The O’Farrell Theatre—Night Manager, Hunter S. Thompson,” which I thought was kind of cute. He would pass those out and tell people, “Come down and see us. I’ll be down there. I’m workin’.” He actually did some sort of work; he talked to the DJ and he made recommendations. He didn’t sweep up or anything, or count money.

  At any rate, the piece never came out.

  DAVID MCCUMBER was Hunter’s editor at the San Francisco Examiner.

  Word came down that the owner of the Examiner, Will Hearst, had hired Hunter as a columnist. His very first column came in—“Buffalo Gores a Visitor”—and Hunter and his editor immediately got into a violent disagreement.

  I got a call from Will at ten in the morning. He invited me to his office and said, “I’ve got a new job for you. How would you like to be Hunter’s control?” At that moment Hunter burst out of Will’s bathroom, where he’d been listening to the conversation, poured me a drink and handed it to me, did ten push-ups, got up, shook my hand, and said, “Hi.” We hit it off immediately and somehow rocked into this weekly motion.

  We used to go to the O’Farrell together. The Mitchell brothers loved him, but he didn’t really do anything there. Hunter just liked the sort of thumb-in-your-eye approach that they took. When the mayor tried cracking down on the O’Farrell, they put his home phone number on their marquee. Things like that appealed to Hunter. He just hung out and absorbed the culture.

  JEFF ARMSTRONG

  People have said that he didn’t write much about sex or women, and that bothered him. People threw that in his face and said that even the few scenes when he did, like with the maid in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, were abrasive and offensive. We talked about that a couple times.

  When Hunter was the night manager, he interacted freely with the women. It was very cordial and open and funny; he never looked down on them. In fact, he admired the strippers. He thought that their strength and uniqueness were laudable qualities. These girls put on skits—they dressed up like gorillas and wore dildos.

  He was interested in the business of sex and fascinated by the customers. I wouldn’t say Hunter was promiscuous. He loved to flirt, and he loved the attention of women.

  MARGOT KIDDER

  In ’84, I arrived at the Sir Francis Drake, this big, wonderful hotel in San Francisco. Pat Caddell was already there, and these gay friends of mine had arranged for me to have this wonderful driver, this muscle-bound drag queen in heavy makeup, ferry me around in this gold fifties Cadillac. We got an emergency call from Hunter—he was at Ann Getty’s house and he had just slammed his fist through the wall and called Linda Ellerbee a fascist dyke or something, and we had to go and rescue him. We jumped in the gold Cadillac with the driver and raced over to the house and had to run in and grab Hunter from the kitchen with everybody yelling and screaming and haul him out and throw him in the back of the car and whisk him away.

  JEANETTE ETHERIDGE

  Everyone hung out at my bar, and it was Hunter and Ed Bradley who made that happen. Those two guys made it their headquarters. Hunter was writing a piece for Playboy about the Democratic National Convention, which was in town in July, called “While the Delegates Slept.” It was about all the shit that was going on in my bar at night. Bill Dixon and Pat Caddell were writing Gary Hart’s speeches on the pool table in the back room.

  I remember wanting to hear Mario Cuomo speak, and Robin Williams offered to take care of the bar. So I called in to Robin later that night—“Everything’s fine; don’t worry about anything.” Well, he had Ron Reagan Jr. telling him to come to the back room, and he had Hunter and all the Kennedy kids mixing it up.

  MARGOT KIDDER

  Then Hunter started his adventures with Ron Reagan Jr. Ron was ga-ga, just starstruck with Hunter. That was also the period when Hunter fell in love with a porn queen. He’d be sobbing on my bed about her, telling me how his heart was being broken and how he couldn’t quite get the girl. This was supposed to be the Democratic convention, but I suppose Hunter was the sideshow.

  DAVID MCCUMBER

  Hunter and I were sitting in Will Hearst’s office about eight o’clock one night, waiting for Will to show up, and Hunter was getting increasingly agitated. He’d been traveling, and I don’t think he had his normal supply of drugs, and he was not in a good mood. He just sat there drinking scotch and really getting pissed off because Will wasn’t there.

  Will’s office was on the second floor, right above Fifth Street. We heard some noise out on the street—just a couple of pressmen out on the street, horsing around. Hunter threw open the window and stuck his head out and screamed, “You pigfuckers! Shut up down there! Don’t you know we have a newspaper to put out?!” What he didn’t know was that the pressmen were in the middle of an intense labor negotiation at the time—and having some freak scream and shake his fist at them from the publisher’s window didn’t do much to help this. They started flipping him off and screaming back, and then Hunter shouted back, “You bastards!! I’ll teach you some manners,” and whirled around, picked up a wastebasket, ran into Will’s bathroom and turned the shower on full hot, and started ferrying bucketfuls of hot water and throwing them out the window onto these guys. They were screaming—and then Hunter turned around just cool as a cucumber and picked up the telephone, hit 0, and said, “Operator, this is Dr. Thompson in the publisher’s office. There seems to be some sort of riffraff down on the street. Would you get security to deal with it, please?”

  It shifted his mood completely. He was feeling fine the rest of the night. Sometimes he just needed some fun, a sense of mischief, to pull himself out of the black moods.

  WAYNE EWING was living next door to Hunter and working as an independent documentary filmmaker in the early eighties.

  I had just produced a couple of pieces for a PBS series called Frontline and was looking for a new subject. Hunter was doing his night manager thing, and I had this notion that the reason why Hunter was interested in the O’Farrell Theatre was political. Perhaps he saw in pornography and sexual liberation the same elements that the anarchists in America at the turn of the century did—that it was just breaking that final bond with society.

  He was with Maria Khan at the time. They had an apartment in Sausalito, so Deborah and I flew out to San Francisco and met him for dinner in this country club setting—the oddest place you could imagine in Marin County, right across the Golden Gate Bridge—and then retired to the O’Farrell Theatre for the weekend.

  They had a big pool table, and one wall was almost completely shot away from a pellet gun that they had given Hunter, which he would use constantly. At the same time, there were naked or almost completely naked women just walking around casually, and he would supervise the proceedings from a big high chair above the New York Stage, as they called it, and would choreograph various things for the girls to do—acts.

  JEANETTE ETHERIDGE

  We were at the Mitchell brothers’ one night, and I got kind of excited that these girls were dancing and people were throwing money at them. I thought I could do that, so I got up on the pool table in the office upstairs and started dancing, and the next thing I knew, Hunter was shooting a pistol off into the wall between my l
egs. To this day I don’t know if it was live ammunition or not. There were boxes of Ivory Snow detergent all around the room because Marilyn Chambers, who the theater was associated with, was an Ivory Snow girl before she got into porn, and Hunter was using them as targets.

  WAYNE EWING

  Hunter and Jeff Armstrong, who was the real night manager for the Mitchell brothers, would talk about the best way to go up before a grand jury—the best frame of mind or, actually, the best chemical mix. Hunter had a glass in his hand and was leaning up against the pool table, and he would bend over so his nose was almost down on the green felt while he was listening to Jeff, and suddenly he would have something to say and would lurch back up, and the glass in his hand would stand straight up; it was an exclamation mark. He would say, “No, no, no. The way to go before a grand jury is you take acid the night before, so that when you go in and they ask you the very first question, you immediately start crying and slobbering on the stand, helpless in fear.”

  It took me a number of years to really get enough trust to be able to film Hunter, all the time, and then he started to ask me to shoot things more and more. He put me through an early test. Once I got a new video camera flown up from Denver for him, and I called him up and said, “It’s at the airport—I’ll bring it out.” He was very excited, and said, “Come right on out. I might be in the bathtub, so just come on in.” I would never have gone into the kitchen without announcing myself and being invited in, and when I got out to Owl Farm, I went up on the porch and made a bunch of noise, purposefully. I thought I heard a grunt inside, so I walked in, saying the whole time, “It’s Wayne, it’s Wayne, Hunter, I’ve got the camera.” I thought I heard another grunt, so I stepped into the kitchen doorway, and there was Hunter about six feet in front of me, dripping wet in a bathrobe, with a twelve gauge shotgun in his hand and this wicked smile on his face that told me, “I could kill you right now and no court in the land would ever convict me. You are an intruder.” And damn if he didn’t raise the gun and fire from the hip and blow the door frame out that I was standing in, about six inches from my side. I had never been shot at before, and my voice went up three octaves, and I screamed, “Hunter, you motherfucker!” and ran out of the house. He was laughing his ass off, and eventually I ended up laughing too. I had to just take it as a hug from Hunter—and, I think, a test that I wouldn’t call 911.