MICHAEL SOLHEIM
Hunter and I got into a beef with two guys at the J-Bar one evening. It was New Year’s Day—I think 1985—and we’d been in there all day watching football; we were into our fourth game, and Hunter said, “There’s two guys back there by that table, and they’ve been watching us—I think they’re up to something.” He could see them in the mirror. He said, “I’ll let you know if they come over.” I said “Good idea. Then what do we do?” He said, “We’ll drop the fuckers.” I said, “That’s a great idea.” Sure enough, the two guys get out of their seats and walk over, and just when they get close, Hunter says, “Now!” and spins around in his seat and punches one of the guys. I spun around and got the other guy, and then all four of us are rolling around.
KALLEN VON RENKL
Michael and Hunter beat the absolute crap out of them and threw them out the front door. That was the first time I saw the other side of Hunter. The Jerome was crowded, and it was pretty bloody.
MICHAEL SOLHEIM
All four of us wound up having to go to the hospital for stitches, because we’d gotten little nicks in our hands—and at the hospital, one of the other guys walks over to us and says, “All we wanted was your autograph.” We felt like the biggest assholes in the world. We felt terrible, so we brought them back to the bar and bought them a bunch of drinks. It was the least we could do.
SHELBY SADLER began working as an editor and researcher for Hunter in 1986.
Hunter would come to Washington quite frequently, and we’d hole up for two or three weeks at the Embassy Row or the Ritz-Carlton and do a lot of writing. That’s when we began working on a new novel called Polo Is My Life. It’s unclear exactly how it started.
Very early in our relationship, Hunter had been flirting with a polo player from California named Paula Baxt, who rode at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. Her husband had some connection to Aspen, and she was spending time out there when Hunter met and became desperately enamored of her for a week or so. He kept asking her to run away with him and all this, and Paula is the one who said, “I can’t go with you, Hunter. Polo is my life.” When Paula said that phrase, it all came together for him. He was crazy about it. It struck him like thunder that all the elusive women in the world, in the end, would tell him essentially the same thing in different words: “Sorry, but polo is my life.” It all led into class and money and all of that. Paula Baxt was Hunter’s Daisy Buchanan.
I’ve talked to her about it since, and she finds the whole story to be hilarious, because it was just a throwaway line for her. She had no interest in Hunter. He was just a strange, crazy guy who was fun to hang out with. But Hunter took this all very seriously—he was infatuated with her, and her husband became Tom Buchanan in his mind, and it just went on from there. I don’t think he ever saw her again.
DEBORAH FULLER
The visual progress of each book was very important to him. There were two storyboards, each made of cork. Each was marked off in sections by colored tape to denote the beginning, middle, and end of the book, and beyond that by chapter. As he wrote pages, they would be tacked up, along with headlines and subheds and any pictures. If there was a character named Jilly, Jilly’s picture went up. The Polo Is My Life board had a road map, polo mallets, two belts of machine gun bullets, and a five-foot-long rusty two-handed saw with “Confessions of the Best Piece of Ass in the World” written on it.
Hunter made up a lot of his own letterheads for writing faxes on. These were mostly handwritten, often accompanied by some strange picture, and they’d often be headlined with things like “The Horrible Cokie Monster,” “Rich, Drunk Teen Seized in Shootout at Bogus Animal Shelter,” “Woman Seized by Game Wardens: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, doctor—I keep waking up naked in the woods. Do you think I’m sick?’”
SHELBY SADLER
He always intended Polo to be his story of lost love, the green light at the end of the dock—not so much in the way Fitzgerald presented it, but more from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s original use of the term “green light” in “Dejection: An Ode:”
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
It’s the only time Hunter has ever truly written about a female character—usually they’re just throwaways, as are most of his characters other than the Hunter alter ego, which is also fractured in two in Polo: There’s Hunter and there’s Raoul Duke, and they’re two very distinctly different people in the book.
When Hunter found out that I lived a fifteen-minute walk from Fitzgerald’s grave in Rockville, Maryland, he was astonished. One time when he visited, we walked to the grave. We stopped and bought a white rose to leave on the grave, where the last line of Gatsby is inscribed on the headstone: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” I will never forget Hunter gently laying the white rose down across the words and peering up and being absolutely silent the whole walk back.
The thing is, Polo Is My Life had nothing to do with polo—absolutely nothing. Polo is in The Great Gatsby as well, and Hunter saw it as being in Polo Is My Life to the same extent. Hunter went to the polo matches because Jann paid for it, and because he wanted to be able to watch the polo society, but with some distance. He wanted a reason to be there and meet these people so that he could get a sense of the ethos and write characters from that.
DEBORAH FULLER
Hunter worked on Polo—the novel—for twelve to fifteen years, I’d guess. His work habits stayed the same as long as I knew him. People tried to get him to use a computer, and he would get them and hate them and never use them. He often wrote notes by hand and then typed a page and then hand-corrected. He could cut and paste.
SEMMES LUCKETT
We started the Woody Creek Rod & Gun Club because Hunter and some of us thought that Colorado might pass a restrictive gun-ownership law. I was the first president, Paul Pascarella did the logo, and Joe Edwards was a counselor. That was so important to Hunter. He wrote about the club in a wonderful piece, “Turbo Must Die,” from Songs of the Doomed. In the story, Stranahan has a prize bull, Turbo, and we’re going to blow him up after selling 1,000 vials of the bull’s semen at $10,000 apiece. We got this charter from the NRA without having to deal with a lot of the normal requirements. Hunter also used me as the “spokesman” for the club, and we had everything set so that if they did pass a gun law, we’d all be able to keep our weapons.
PATTI STRANAHAN
Hunter would come over to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, and we used to let him swim in our pool every night. He was quiet, and he could do whatever he needed to. He would drive up and make sure that all the lights were out, or that everyone was asleep. He never came in when he thought he would be disruptive. He’d sneak in with a flashlight through a side door.
GEORGE STRANAHAN
He felt safe here. He trusted me and I trusted him. Absolutely. And if he had a loaded gun and was messing with it, I trusted him not to hit me.
PATTI STRANAHAN
Our kids always felt safe with him. They would go down and talk to him late at night, and he would often drop little presents off, whether it was on Christmas Eve or on any random night.
GEORGE STRANAHAN
He left a lot of presents, usually high-powered flashlights or some sort of gadgets. He’d come up for his swim, and we’d get up in the morning and say, “Wow.”
PATTI STRANAHAN
Sometimes there would be roses for me, or I’d be getting up to get the kids ready for school and he’d still be here swimming, and we’d sit and have grapefruit. That was his favorite thing. One Christmas morning we came out, and there was this taxidermied raccoon holding Hunter’s expired American Express card in his paw. There was a sign on it that said, “To Ben.”
GEORGE STRANAHAN
When our son Ben
was about seven, we had a tarantula in a glass cage. One night at maybe nine o’clock, Hunter dropped in with a great big athletic bag full of toys—he had a new gun to show me, and he had his whiskey, and a bunch of other things. He dropped the bag, and we started having a political talk, when Ben woke up and came out and sat down with the guys. Talk then turned to the tarantula, and the fact that we had read that it was perfectly safe to let a tarantula walk right across your hand. We had never actually done it, but I had been drinking with Hunter, and so somehow we decided that this was the night when we would do what needed to be done, and bravely. So Wilky was brought out in his cage, and he was sitting in front of us. Hunter poured another glass of whiskey and then reached down into his big sports bag and said, “Wait a minute. We’re not ready for this yet.” And he pulled out some lipstick from his bag and said, “Lipstick is important.”
Hunter put the lipstick on himself, on me, and on Ben, and we got the tarantula out of the cage with considerable care and were letting it crawl on the palms of our hands. That was the moment when Ben’s mother came out to see what was going on, and that’s what she saw: two drunks and her son wearing lipstick and playing with a tarantula.
TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE was working at an energy policy think tank outside of Aspen in July 1989.
One night I was going out to dinner with an old friend of Hunter’s who wanted to introduce me to him. Shortly after we sat down at the Woody Creek Tavern, Hunter pulled up on a motorcycle. The three of us went up to Owl Farm and spent the evening bullshitting and drinking, and then I went off to my conference. When I got back, the secretary at work said I had five phone messages from Hunter Thompson. His writing assistant was off that week, and he asked me to come out to help him with a column. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it would have been just a hell of a lot of fun, except that I fell madly in love with him.
We were only about a month into the whole mad romance when I had to go to grad school. I was twenty-seven—old by Hunter’s standards—and I had finally gotten into Princeton and wasn’t about to blow off graduate school for this lunatic I had just met, a fact that just filled him with rage.
He took me to the Aspen airport to fly to Denver and then Princeton, and when I was in the Denver airport, I got paged. It was Hunter. In his marvelous, growly voice he said, “Goddamn it, I love you and I want to marry you—will you marry me?” and went on about how much he missed me, even though I’d only been gone two hours. I said, “I will marry you, but I’ve got to do this thing first”—which was very much not the answer that he was expecting. I didn’t realize the extent to which this was an effort to get me on the next plane back to Woody Creek, and from the time I left to the time I finally came back to stay in June, Hunter flew me back to Colorado every other weekend.
Hunter had a box of loose gemstones that he enigmatically said were from Africa and had been given to him by somebody to settle a debt. We sat down with the box, and Hunter told me to pick out whatever stone was my favorite. I picked an implausibly huge rectangular aquamarine, and he picked out a beautiful uncut green emerald, and he gave the two gemstones to a local artist friend to make jewelry for the two of us. The aquamarine was placed in a beautiful white gold setting on a ring, and the emerald was made into a necklace—that’s the one that Hunter wore for the rest of forever.
Hunter really needed someone to be an assistant, and I told him to interview my younger sister.
CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY was about to start her last semester at the University of Florida in the winter of 1990.
Hunter flew me out to Owl Farm while I was still on Christmas break. David McCumber was out working with Hunter on Songs of the Doomed, and the two of them got in a fight over some insanely minor point. He went ballistic in the middle of the night and destroyed a typewriter—just beat it to death with a phone. I was trying to stay awake on coffee, but I fell asleep on the couch just a few feet away from Hunter while these bits of typewriter were flying by my head.
DAVID MCCUMBER
There was metal Selectric shrapnel flying all over the kitchen. I said, “Goddamn it, Hunter, this shit gets old.” He picked up a piece of something and brought it back behind him and took a step toward me like he was going to hit me with it, and I grabbed a beer bottle in my hand—and then we both started laughing at the same time, and he just said, “I think it’s time we took a little break.” And then he was fine. Everything dissipated. Sometimes he would just have to shoot something or break something, and then he’d be okay.
CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY
Earlier I was taking reams of notes on everything he and McCumber were saying, and when the smoke cleared, Hunter told me that I understood him and what needed to be done, and that since I wasn’t freaked out by the flying pieces of typewriter, I was hired.
Deborah left not too long after I’d gotten there. McCumber had left, and Hunter had told me and Deborah that we shouldn’t be talking to him. For several days he had been saying that he wouldn’t have him out and would never talk to him again, and McCumber was calling to try to find out what was going on. Eventually I called him back from the cabin to tell him, and somehow Hunter found out. Since Deborah was in the cabin with me, we were both implicated. Hunter went after the cabin’s electrical box with a hatchet and cut the phone line and the power. That was when Deborah decided that enough was enough, and she and I were driving down the driveway, trying to figure out where we were going to stay, when Hunter came at the car with a very large rock and threw it at the windshield and shattered it.
We left and stayed the night with another assistant who now lived in town. She had worked for Hunter for a short time earlier and had left in fairly short order, not pleased, and concerned for her mental health—literally.
TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE
Everybody knew that Hunter was a very tough beat no matter how much you loved him. Hunter’s friend Tim Ferris had just done a documentary on the nature of genius, and he looked at me and said, “You know, there’s a kind of genius that consumes everyone around them to keep from consuming itself, and Hunter is like that. You’ll stay with it for as long as you can, and someday you will leave, and it’ll be okay.” It was such a bizarre thing to hear from someone I didn’t even know that well, but the image of that vortex consuming everything but Hunter himself resonates with me.
When Hunter failed at things, he made you feel like you had failed. He could make you feel like the world hung on making him smile, and when he did, he convinced you that the world did hang on this. It was a hillbilly laziness. He could be brilliant, or he could have these quirky ideas that he thought would make lots of money—and he liked the quirky ideas that he thought would make a lot of money.
CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY
A lot of time was wasted on this “gonzo bikini” he was trying to have made. The bikini top was women’s blow-up hands, and he wanted them very realistic-looking, with long nails, and he wanted drawings done. The bottoms would be gonzo bikini bottoms. He had a book that was overdue, and he was trying to get bikini sketches made and get me to research a prototype.
CHAPTER NINE
Circling the Wagons at Owl Farm
Hunter’s defense on the LSD charge, which he was quite proud of, was to say that you can’t get good acid anymore—if he’d known it was there, he would have eaten it a long time ago.
HAL HADDON is a former McGovern staffer, now a prominent criminal-defense attorney in Denver.
The Roaring Fork Valley consists of three somewhat-defined communities: There’s Aspen, which is considered ultraliberal in terms of the toleration of lifestyle issues and people have lots of money; there’s Basalt, which has changed a lot, sort of in the middle of the valley at the head of the Frying Pan River; and then there’s Glenwood Springs—all part of the same judicial district. Glenwood Springs, at least at that time, was predominantly rural, very conservative.
The city district attorney for the whole judicial district was from Glenwood Springs, and h
e was active in the war on drugs—a very conservative, hard-right guy. Hunter was a beacon of what he viewed as an intolerable kind of lifestyle—a bad example—so they set out to get him.
I had known Hunter for about fourteen years, and he hired me as his lawyer. Hunter had a great need for lawyers. He was committing felonies every day. He needed to appreciate criminal defense, and he would not infrequently get busted in small ways. His writing is replete with a lot of the problems he had earlier in San Francisco. It was all small stuff—DUIs, disorderly conduct. Gerry Goldstein and Michael Stepanian, his San Francisco lawyer, were constantly on retainer, and Hunter would always plead to something. But this one was really serious.
Gail Palmer-Slater was a producer of pornographic movies. She was living in Michigan and kept sending Hunter letters saying she wanted to meet him, and suggesting she wanted to talk to him about taking one of his books and turning it into a high-art porn movie. At some point she sent him a card, and the front of it read, “Sex is a dirty business,” and the inside read, “But somebody has to do it.” And she enclosed a note saying she was going to be in Aspen on such-and-such date.
Hunter never responded, but he kept the card—because he kept everything; he was a pack rat—along with a sample of one of her porn movies. And she showed up at his house in 1990 to talk to Hunter about letting her do one of his books. It was a typical raucous night.
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