He absolutely despised any friends I had that weren’t his friends, any work I had that wasn’t related to him. You staked a really tiny piece of turf and said, “This is mine,” and that was not acceptable. He wanted all of it, all the time.
The problem with living with Hunter was when your primary job is padding the walls, you don’t get to bounce off of them yourself. From the time I moved back to Owl Farm in June to January of the following year, we had a sort of deteriorating dance of love and hate and anger and all sorts of other stuff. In August, we had a big fight, and Hunter lapsed into one of his long unconsciousnesses that he did from time to time. I had been trying and trying to wake him up because I was livid about something, and I couldn’t. I went into the kitchen and loaded a pistol and stood at the foot of the bed and shot the window out. When he woke, he said, “If you’re shooting for me, I’m down here.” And I said, “If I was shooting for you, I’d shoot you in the balls, and you’d live. I don’t want to be the woman who killed Hunter Thompson.”
I had been offered a job in Moscow, and in January I left him and moved there. I was in this country that was collapsing, trying to learn Russian and work and survive, and Hunter decided that it was in my best interest to make me come home. He started sending me really raunchy, obscene faxes with naked bodies and swastikas, warning me that I’d fallen in with the wrong crowd and that violent overthrow of the Soviet government was a bad idea. He sent them to the central telegraph, which was like the post office. Central telegraph would read them first, and then they’d deliver them. Then Hunter got the number of my office, which was at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and sent a fax there. I got pulled in for questioning by the KGB.
CATHERINE SABONIS-BRADLEY
One night after I had finally left Owl Farm, Hunter called me and told me he needed my help for a speaking engagement in West Palm Beach. I laid down a few conditions before I agreed, but as soon as we got down to the Breakers, where we were staying, he was sparring with me, saying, “Oh, okay . . . you say you’re not going to do any drugs, you’re not going to put up with any of my shit. . . . How exactly are you going to pull that off?” And then he dosed me—a large dose of acid in something I was drinking. I went very far over the edge, and he started the “Ho ho—isn’t this great acid?” I was pretty pissed off—and then he passed out in the bedroom of the suite. I spent over twelve hours tripping out of my mind by myself in the hotel room, including about seven hours of crying hysterically, having wallpaper talk to me and all that, and finally calmed myself by watching palm fronds, because they sway. Someone from the hotel came around because the phones were off the hook and someone had been trying to call the room, and Hunter woke up. It was just after six p.m., and the speaking engagement was at ten, and he told me that he wouldn’t go anywhere unless he had a “Haspel cord sport coat”—he insisted it was the only thing to wear in Palm Beach—and then went right back to sleep. I was still tripping, but I called a local Brooks Brothers, which was closed, and somehow begged an elderly sales guy into essentially stealing one of these and bringing it to the hotel by cab. I tipped him $200, and Hunter got his goddamned Haspel cord sport coat.
TERRY SABONIS-CHAFEE
Two weeks after my KGB interrogation in August of 1991, the coup happened in Moscow—the Committee on Emergency Situations overthrew Gorbachev and took control of the government—and I ended up in the middle of that in a barricaded building. The coup failed, and I went back to the Rocky Mountain Institute to write an account of it, and when I finished it, I went to see Hunter.
He loved the article, and we had this absolutely gorgeous long couple of days where we stayed up straight through and he told me about the riots of Chicago in ’68 and why he never wrote about them. What bothered him was that this was such a huge turning point in history, so central to his mythology about what bothered him about America and what was wrong with America. He had all these stories, but they were fragmented and very personal, and he felt that he had to write something that was big, that really told why it was important, and he couldn’t do it. He talked about some times in life when things around you are profoundly personal but too big to be about what you saw. It was one of the most amazing conversations I ever had with him. It was extraordinary to listen to a story that Hunter told where he didn’t even really try to make it about him.
And then I left Colorado. I went out maybe three times over the next couple of years, but it was already too late for poetry, as they say. The last letter I have from him is from 1994.
I think there are really only three ways, if you loved Hunter, that you could leave him, three states you could be in: homicidal, suicidal, or determined to get into rehab. He demanded such an extraordinary amount of loyalty, commitment, and energy, and although he paid back a lot of that, he just sucked people dry. And I think I left him because I was homicidal.
Bobby Braudis thanked me once for being the first woman to leave Hunter who didn’t require police action to get her extricated.
GERRY GOLDSTEIN
One night he took me out driving from Owl Farm in the convertible. The first thing we did was try to drive up the levee to the racetrack by the rock quarry, but we missed it twice. Finally we got to the top, and Hunter started gathering these smooth stones. We then drove to the house of a nice lawyer here in town, John Van Ness, who did some work for Hunter. I’ve forgotten whether Hunter was angry or happy with John, or what exactly had happened that week. First Hunter placed these defrosted elk hearts on John’s front doorstep, and then he started throwing these stones he’d collected onto the tin roof of John’s house and just listened as they rolled down. Then he shot off a couple of rounds from a 9 mm and started playing a continuous looped tape of pigs or rabbits being slaughtered—a godforsaken screeching, curdling sound. This poor little girl came to the window screaming. Apparently Van Ness was out of town and this teenage girl was house-sitting for them.
From there, he proceeded to Nicholson’s house, where he engaged in the same folly.
ANJELICA HUSTON
He had a loudspeaker on top of his truck and drove to the top of Maroon Creek and started to play these tapes of terrible dying-animal cries. Jack was in his house with two small children and the nanny. Hunter proceeds to fire off a few rounds for good measure, and the animals are screaming, and Jack is horrified and locks all the doors and takes the children down to the basement in a state of panic and calls 911 and asks to talk to the FBI and has the sheriff on the phone, and this thing is a nightmare. Animal death cries are going out all over the valley.
At which point Hunter drives down to the house, takes the frozen elk heart, and places it directly in front of Jack’s front door, where the blood seeps into the living room, and then drives back home to Owl Farm before the arrival of the police and the FBI and everybody else on the scene.
GERRY GOLDSTEIN
Apparently some of Jack’s neighbors were in the process of digging fence poles and had somehow severed the telephone lines of Jack’s place so that when all this shit happened and the security people tried to use the phone, the lines were all dead. They were convinced there was about to be another Mansonesque slaughter, so an all-points bulletin went out.
Hunter and I were back at his house when the sheriff’s deputies called him to ask where he’d been for the past two hours. I advised Hunter—as his counsel, of course—that he couldn’t answer that question.
JACK NICHOLSON
I didn’t put two and two together because I didn’t see the elk heart until the following day. But the animal noises and the screaming and the beating—I had people in the house who were petrified, and so was I.
ANJELICA HUSTON
Hunter got away with this completely scot-free.
CHAPTER TEN
A Writer Resurgent
“Polo Is My Life” is where Hunter tried most consciously to evoke the spirit and style of his hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it was set on Gatsby’s turf. But “Fear and Loathing in Elko” was so
dark, it made Vegas look like a tale of innocence—and it was as funny as anything he had ever written.
COREY SEYMOUR was an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone in 1992.
Nobody told me what to expect, or what was required of me, when Hunter came to town. Jann told me, “Just meet him at the airport and see what happens.” I had no idea what he looked like—I actually seemed to believe that some sort of Ralph Steadman caricature was going to walk off the plane. Hunter walked right past me, and I had to scramble to meet him down at baggage claim. He looked pretty tired and pissed off—he was sitting on the floor surrounded by a half-dozen pieces of his Halliburton metal luggage—and he stuck his hand out, and as I went to shake it, he almost yanked me to the ground and barked, “No, goddamn it!! Help me up!!”
When we walked into the Carlyle, I guess I was a little paranoid. I thought that the people behind the front desk might run screaming from the concept of Hunter checking into their beautiful, elegant hotel, but he was greeted like a returning hero. When we got upstairs to his suite, Hunter started railing about “this fucking dump” and calling the concierge to get the temperature adjusted—he was demanding a bigger suite and basically telling this guy he was lied to—but somehow he calmed down and we hit it off well and had a few drinks, and the phone in his suite started ringing almost immediately. Jann was on his way over. Terry McDonell was on his way over. Ed Bradley was on his way over with Kathleen Battle, the opera singer.
It was the night before Rolling Stone’s twenty-fifth-anniversary party at the Four Seasons restaurant, and Hunter wanted to surprise Jann with this shotgun-art portrait he’d made of Jann with a bullet hole through his heart and blood-red paint exploding all around it. Hunter was in a great mood, and all the men except Jann got summoned into Hunter’s bedroom for the unveiling of the portrait. He had a shroud over it, and he whisked it off in this grand manner—he was so proud of it—and everyone sort of universally agreed, “It’s beautiful, Hunter, but you can’t give that to him tomorrow night. He’s going to be sitting at the front table next to Yoko Ono. You can’t unveil a picture of Jann with a bullet through his heart.” Hunter looked abjectly demoralized, but he kept a brave face while everyone was still there.
At the end of the night, though, when it was just him and me left in his suite—well, let’s just say his mood fell. Everything turned black. Almost as soon as the door shut when Jann left, Hunter started cursing and going on about how the art was stupid, he shouldn’t have brought it, the trip was a failure, he wasn’t going to the party, he wanted to leave. And then he hit on the solution, or at least a partial solution: He said, “Well, fuck. Help me throw this fucking thing out the window,” and started dragging this large framed portrait over toward the window. He started screaming at me, “C’mon, goddamn it! Help me!” but somehow I was able to convince him that that wouldn’t be a good idea.
TERRY MCDONELL
Every time he was in New York was like showtime.
COREY SEYMOUR
The next day I brought over an Armani tux that the Rolling Stone fashion department had arranged for Hunter to wear, and he had to try it on so I could see how it fit and check the hem on the pants. But Hunter’s interest at this point was in two things—or three, if you count cocaine—CNN and room service. As I would soon learn, he went large on breakfast. The first time he told me his order, I cracked up laughing, which seemed to make him angry. He gave me this stern look and said, “Do you think I’m fucking joking?!” I remember him sitting on the sofa in his robe, grinding up coke and mumbling, “Uhhh . . . ahhh . . . two pots of coffee . . . uhhh . . . six-pack of Heineken, uhh . . . two pitchers of Bloody Marys, corned beef hash . . . white toast . . . better make that four orders of white toast . . . uhhh . . . large basket of fresh grapefruit . . . lemons, yeah . . . better get some limes too . . . couple jars of peanuts . . . uhhh . . . and get something for yourself too.” But beyond that, I never saw him eat much.
DEBORAH FULLER
When he woke up, he liked eating a really big breakfast—always with fresh fruit and usually eggs and sausage or bacon. He’d usually start out with orange juice, coffee, and whiskey—Chivas, snow cone–style with a lot of ice—and a Molson or a Grolsch beer. He liked the big bottles of Grolsch because he could recap them.
COREY SEYMOUR
After Hunter ate and drank his breakfast, he muttered something about taking a bath. He ambled into the bathroom, shut the door, and I heard the sound of gigantic amounts of rushing water. Almost an hour later, I started to worry and knocked on the bathroom door and called his name and finally cracked the door open—and saw Hunter, naked and completely submerged beneath a full-throttle Jacuzzi. He was doing some weird Axl Rose–like underwater horizontal serpentine dance with his arms going crazy like he was trying to fly. I shut the door.
Eventually he got himself dressed, and we were now late for meeting Lynn Nesbit downstairs for drinks before the party. Hunter was smoking dope out of his skull pipe, and refused to leave his suite until he’d thrown a piece of crumpled paper into the wastebasket from across the room. And it needed to be a clean bucket too—no off-the-rims and no off-the-wall rebounds. But he kept missing, and he was getting angrier and angrier. Then he made one clean, stood up, pumped his fist, and let out a roaring “WHOOOP!” Between that exact moment and the moment he kissed Lynn’s hand downstairs, he’d somehow transformed himself from unhinged childlike maniac to Hunter S. Thompson, southern gentleman and man of letters.
As our car pulled up to the Four Seasons on Park Avenue, Hunter became very jittery and nervous about his appearance and his entrance—there were paparazzi waiting, but with Lynn and me in tow, he made his way inside to an adoring and celebrity-laden crowd, where he was besieged by people wanting their picture taken with him. The only problem was the speech he was scheduled to give—he hadn’t written it yet, of course, so midway through the cocktail hour in the Grill Room, I tried to keep his audience away from him while he jotted some things down at the bar.
A few minutes later, as Hunter was being introduced, he plopped down on the floor of the Pool Room, Indian-style, took his coke grinder out of his sock, and leaned forward with a hollowed-out Bic pen up his nose. This was right in front of the dais and right next to several tables of guests—including the head table with Jann and Yoko Ono and David Bowie, among others—who were now looking at me strangely, as if they were waiting for me to explain what was going on. I was trying to very consciously act normal—“Nothing weird happening here, folks”—and Hunter cracked me hard on my shin with his knuckle and barked quietly, “Shield me, goddamn it!!!” When he stood up, his glasses were sideways on his head, so I straightened them out and reminded him to wipe his nose.
He gave a long speech with a number of detours in it that I thought was pretty good, but Ed Bradley, who was the MC, had to gently give him the hook to keep things moving. As Hunter made his move to leave the podium, he took a wrong step and hit the ground, spilling someone else’s drink but, incredibly, not his own. After the speech a lot of people came up to me and said, basically, “What the fuck?” They couldn’t understand a word of what Hunter had said.
I passed by a hallway a little later during the party and saw him talking alone with Keith Richards, which was absolutely amazing to hear. It sounded like two dogs barking at one another, or the secret language of dolphins. It was almost nonverbal, but they both seemed to understand what the other one was saying.
Later, as we were walking out with Jann, Hunter took great glee in bursting the helium party balloons that people were carrying out by burning them with his lit cigarette. He progressed from popping nearby balloons to actually lobbing his lit cigarettes across the Pool Room of the Four Seasons to try to hit faraway balloons until Jann told him, basically, to cut it the fuck out. We went back to Jann’s house, where the first thing Hunter did when he walked in the door was grab a tangerine out of a bowl and throw it through the only open pane in Jann’s window from about fifteen feet away.
On the day Hunter was supposed to fly back to Colorado, I had a fax waiting for me when I got to the office from his girlfriend-assistant Nicole out in Woody Creek:
To: Corey
URGENT!!!
Hunter has just gone down for some desperately needed sleep. However, we need your help this morning to wake him.
Faxes and phone calls will not suffice—Hunter would like you to make sure he gets up by 10:30 a.m. (best achieved by pounding on door w/ rm service coffee/fruit/pastries in hand).
Corey, this has to be done, in person, if Hunter is to wake.
I will do what I can from this end, i.e. continual phone calls.
Please call when you get this—I will be by the phone, just SCREAM into it . . . I too, may fall asleep—please scream—
This is very important. Call ASAP.
When I finally got in the room, Hunter was completely comatose on the bed. For a while I thought he might be dead, but I got Deborah on the phone and told her what was going on, and she said, “Go into Hunter’s shaving kit in the bathroom—you’ll find some big Black Beauties down toward the bottom. Take one and put it in his mouth and massage it down his throat; make sure he gets some water with it.” I think Deborah could sense the desperation in my voice, so she told me a secret: “Don’t use this too often, because if Hunter catches on, you’re a dead man, but use the word ‘professional’ around him—just say things like, ‘Well, I guess we’ve got to be professionals about this’ or something like that. That’ll usually help.”
I did the business with the pill and the water, and Hunter eventually stumbled out in his robe and sat down and started grinding up some coke. We ordered breakfast, and a couple of hours later we were in the cab going to the airport, and by that point everything was kicking in. His whole face was twitching and sort of jumping, and I asked him some simple question, but he wasn’t really quite speaking English—he clearly knew what I was saying, but he was just making these strange squeaking sounds, and he was pouring sweat.
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