SANDY THOMPSON
We went to Jim’s when he was dying, and I think Hunter spent two days with him. Jim was very grateful. Hunter gave him a thousand dollars or something. Hunter did leave at one point, and he came back drunk and coked up. But Jim was just really, really glad that Hunter came to see him. They didn’t speak much. I’m sure that Hunter was embarrassed by Jim’s gayness earlier in his life. I don’t know if that was true later on. He might not have been. But they were real different people.
Hunter didn’t talk to his other brother, Davison, very much either. And he didn’t talk to Paul Semonin or a lot of other old friends. A lot of them just went by the wayside as his whole world changed.
PETE PETERS
I never actually met Hunter until Jim’s wake. It was a bizarre day. As I understand it, their mother hadn’t had a drink for eighteen years until the day Jim was buried. At the burial at Cave Hill Cemetery, when the car showed up with Davison, Mrs. Thompson, and Hunter, Davison got out, and then Hunter got out and was trying to help his mom. And I’ll never forget this: I didn’t know if I felt worse for Mrs. Thompson because she was burying her youngest son, or if I felt worse for her because of the shape Hunter was in. It was just god-awful. He was like a six-year-old kid. It was pitiful. It wasn’t because he was drunk or drugged. I was just looking at a guy who was adult in body only. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to take care of her, how to help her. He looked like he was looking to her for guidance. He looked lost.
DOUG BRINKLEY
Hunter came down to New Orleans in April of ’94 for an event for one of his books, and I put him in touch with Stephen Ambrose, the late historian who wrote the three-volume biography of Nixon. They got along famously, but while Hunter was here, Nixon died. Hunter was staying at the Pontchartrain Hotel and wrote his obituary for Rolling Stone from New Orleans. He would go into the St. Charles Tavern, a twenty-four-hour bar-and-grill, and would sit and eat gumbo and watch CNN and write notes. He liked watching the trolley car go by. He said, “If I don’t write the obituary on Nixon and make it tougher on him than Mencken was on William Jennings Bryan, I will have utterly failed in my career.” He was obsessed with Nixon’s death. He felt he had spent all of his life going after him, and now he had to summarize it all. He felt that pressure to publish just the right statement intensely.
GEORGE MCGOVERN
It’s not any secret that Hunter had total contempt for Nixon. He just couldn’t handle him. When Nixon died, I went to his funeral. I figured that as he was a former president of the United States, and was my opponent, that that was the proper thing to do. I said a couple of words to his family and friends. That was the one exception Hunter drew to my honesty. He said, “Yeah, you went in the tank; you went in the tank.” He never forgave me for that.
COREY SEYMOUR
Most of my time with Hunter was spent in hotel rooms, just the two of us, or with a few of his friends over. But in 1994, I was with him at the Beat Generation Conference that Doug Brinkley had organized at NYU.
The conference was my first real experience of seeing what kind of an insane following he had. We were late, of course—I had my usual ordeal trying to get Hunter up. That day’s random time-stop was Hunter’s obsessive attention to a fax he was making to send Jack Nicholson, who had been in the news for bashing somebody’s car in with a golf club on a highway in California. Out came about seven of his thirty or so different-colored markers and pens that he always traveled with, and he started hand-detailing this note to Jack that said something like “Ho ho, bubba—you do know that if you would have come to New York with me like I’d told you to that none of this would have happened, right? Oh well—never mind. Selah, HST.”
When we finally got to the conference, Hunter was sitting up on the stage as part of a panel, and as soon as he sat down, he called up some student in the first row and gave him some cash and had him run out to buy him some beer. Hunter and I had a plan to watch a basketball play-off game afterward—we wouldn’t have time to get up to his hotel room, because we were all the way downtown—and we ran into some poor young NYU student who eagerly offered up the only set of keys to her apartment, which was a block away, for us to watch the game. We were all set to head over after Hunter’s talk, and then he got mobbed—really mobbed—by a couple hundred people. It didn’t get really ugly, but it was on the way to that. We had to rush him into a car, and people were jumping on top of the car and sticking their hands in through the windows to try to get him to sign things. He had to speed off with this poor girl’s only set of keys in his pocket. We never saw her again.
Hunter had told me some stories about Allen Ginsberg intervening with the Hells Angels during protests in San Francisco in the sixties. Hunter had actually been trying to reach Ginsberg since he arrived in New York—they hadn’t spoken in quite some time—and by coincidence, while I was walking home from the conference I stopped in a bookstore and sat down to read something. When I looked up, Ginsberg was standing almost directly in front of me, packing up his stuff after giving some kind of reading there. I introduced myself and mentioned that Hunter was trying to get hold of him. “I’ve been trying to call him at the Four Seasons,” Ginsberg said, “but they said there’s no Hunter Thompson staying there.” I told him to try again—“Hunter’s there, but he checked in under the name Ben Franklin.”
Ginsberg thanked me, asked me to help him finish the rest of his soy milk, and left. When I told Hunter about this, he mumbled something about Ginsberg being too embarrassed to see him ever since some weird time in the late sixties when the two of them spent a lost weekend together—something about running around in the woods together in California. “It’s a little-known fact, Corey, that Ginsberg was a horrible drunkard.” They ended up having dinner that night.
DEBORAH FULLER
Hunter hated Christmas. One year it was just the two of us at Owl Farm, and we were in heaven—not having to go out to any of these big events. Hunter canceled everything and we drank, caught up, played loud music, watched TV—just “whooped it up,” as Hunter would say—and then he decided to call up everybody he knew, and in a very weird voice left his “Christmas greeting”: “This is Santa Claus—ho, ho, ho—I shit down your chimney.” He called Jann; he called everybody he could find in his Rolodex at all hours of the morning—waking some people up, of course. “Ho, ho, ho—I shit down your chimney.” We taped them all and would laugh hysterically in between each call. We had such fun—and remember: Hunter was a fun hog.
JANE WENNER
One Christmas when the kids were small, Jann and I went to Aspen and rented a house on Red Mountain. Hunter and Deborah came over with Juan and brought presents for all the kids—he bought one a black plastic rat and one a wig. But the big thing was the Bedazzler, which was a small machine that you could order on late-night TV, and you could fasten bits of colored plastic, like jewels, to your T-shirts or jeans or whatever. Hunter had this Bedazzler, and he let the kids play with it, but he wouldn’t give it to them. And I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t give it to them. They Bedazzled all day, and then he took it away. But they were happy with the plastic rat and the other things, and we had a lot of fun. Juan used to stay with us on summer visits, so for all of us, it was a mellow family Christmas.
Years later, right after Jann and I were separated, out of the blue Hunter sent them the Bedazzler. Around this time I was tussling around with my son Theo, and I sort of absentmindedly said to him, “How did I get such a crazy kid?” and he said, “Well, you know, I’m not as crazy as Uncle Hunter.” I said, “Really, Theo? What do you think it is that we do with Uncle Hunter?” He said, “I think you stay up late, you eat fire, and you Bedazzle all night.” And I looked at Theo and I said, “Yeah, that’s about right.” Hunter loved that.
JANN WENNER
After Hunter stopped writing big pieces for us, he struggled with his craft, essentially doing a lot of ephemeral writing in tiny bursts, nothing inspired or meaningful. Then su
ddenly came what were his two last major pieces, which I thought were two of his best—“Fear and Loathing in Elko” and “Polo Is My Life.” They were really different: not reportorially based but just great, flat-out pieces of expansive, elaborate, swinging writing.
“Elko” was one of my favorites, and it came out of nowhere. It was hysterical, but it was also dark and evil. He made me reread Vegas and compare it to that, which at the time we thought was dark. Well, “Elko” makes Vegas look like a tale of innocence—which in fact it was. “Elko” was a nightmarish piece about sex and torture. It’s also as funny as anything he’s ever written.
From “Fear and Loathing in Elko”
Rolling Stone 622; January 23, 1992
On my way to the kitchen I was jolted by the sight of a naked woman slumped awkwardly in the corner with a desperate look on her face, as if she’d been shot. Her eyes bulged and her mouth was wide open and she appeared to be reaching out for me.
I leapt back and heard laughter behind me. My first thought was that Leach, unhinged by his gambling disaster, had finally gone over the line with his wife-beating habit and shot her in the mouth just before we knocked. She appeared to be crying out for help, but there was no voice.
I ran into the kitchen to look for a knife, thinking that if Leach had gone crazy enough to kill his wife, now he would have to kill me, too, since I was the only witness. Except for the Judge, who had locked himself in the bathroom.
Leach appeared in the doorway holding the naked woman by the neck and hurled her across the room at me. . . .
Time stood still for an instant. The woman seemed to hover in the air, coming at me in the darkness like a body in slow motion. I went into a stance with the bread knife and braced for a fight to the death.
Then the thing hit me and bounced softly down to the floor. It was a rubber blowup doll: one of those things with five orifices that young stockbrokers buy in adult bookstores after the singles bars close.
“Meet Jennifer,” he said. “She’s my punching bag.” He picked it up by the hair and slammed it across the room.
“Ho, ho,” he chuckled, “no more wife beating. I’m cured, thanks to Jennifer.” He smiled sheepishly. “It’s almost like a miracle. These dolls saved my marriage. They’re a lot smarter than you think.” He nodded gravely. “Sometimes I have to beat two at once. But it always calms me down, you know what I mean?”
Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train. “Oh, hell yes,” I said quickly. “How do the neighbors handle it?”
“No problem,” he said. “They love me.”
Sure, I thought. I tried to imagine the horror of living in a muddy industrial slum full of tin-walled trailers and trying to protect your family against brain damage from knowing that every night when you look out your kitchen window there will be a man in a leather bathrobe flogging two naked women around the room with a quart bottle of Wild Turkey. Sometimes for two or three hours . . . It was horrible.
He reached into a nearby broom closet and pulled out another one—a half-inflated Chinese-looking woman with rings in her nipples and two electric cords attached to her head. “This is Ling-Ling,” he said. “She screams when I hit her.” He whacked the doll’s head and it squawked stupidly.
TOBIAS PERSE was an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone in 1993.
Somehow it was decided that the U.S. Open of polo, which was being held at Bethpage on Long Island, would be the beginning of this whole gear-up for “Polo Is My Life.” At the time—or, I should say, in Hunter Time—it was like the whole world revolved around this tournament. There were four or five people in the galaxy of this story, and Hunter was at the center, with everyone else moving around him to plan and coordinate and pay for everything. It was a general attitude that pervaded everything: Hunter Is Coming, and Corey would be introducing me to him. I remember this look of relish in Jann’s eyes when he knew that I didn’t know what I’d be getting into. He said, “Don’t forget that you have a job.” But I never was sure what the expectations were.
When Hunter had asked for help with the research, I jumped on it because it all somehow felt like journalism to me in some way. It felt like the job. But it wasn’t journalism to research luxury hotels in Garden City, Long Island. It wasn’t journalism to find out what color Lincoln he’d be getting.
Jann understood that Hunter’s expenses had to be contained and what that meant, but I fucked everything up constantly. It was decided that Rolling Stone would pay for Hunter’s hotel room, but under no circumstances would they pay for any incidentals—or damages. That was part of the deal. Deborah told me all about these special requirements about Hunter’s airplane reservations, and there were concerns about Hunter’s expenses that I had no idea about. I got Hunter’s first-class tickets for him, but then I had to get another set of first-class tickets just in case he didn’t make the first flight. Later on, this became a matter of course, but Deborah was very insistent on all this from the beginning.
He FedExed cocaine to me before his trip, and on the phone there was that strange code or etiquette of drug users. It took me years of later experience to really recognize how much cocaine he was sending, but one day I got a package containing a thick pile of National Geographics with a hole cut out inside—like the way you’d cut out the inside of a Bible to put a gun in it. It was sealed with tape on every side and sprayed with Right Guard, and it arrived via FedEx. I got a call from Owl Farm: “Did you get the FedEx? Um, I think you’ll find one of those National Geographics has something in it. Keep that for when Hunter arrives.” This was three hundred grams, four hundred grams in two Ziploc bags. It was a huge amount of cocaine, and it was sent using Jann’s FedEx account, which we were never supposed to use, of course. We had an Airborne account for normal use, one FedEx account that we could use if we got permission, and then Jann’s FedEx account. Hunter just sent the coke on Jann’s FedEx to “Tobias Perse” with no return address.
In addition, Deborah had given Corey strict instructions to buy blow-up sex dolls for the hotel room.
DEBORAH FULLER
Hunter thought blow-up sex dolls were fun, mostly just for the reactions he could get. He would always think of something new to do with them—throw them off balconies, down into the lobbies of hotels. He threw one out on the street into traffic once, and this guy thought he was running over a real woman. Mona was always his favorite name for them. When a reporter was on camera interviewing Hunter at home, or just when he was expecting people, Hunter would sometimes take the lid off the hot tub in the Water Room and throw a bunch of sex dolls in there, and he would take these unsuspecting people around the house and he’d remove the top of the hot tub, and there’d be all these dolls floating inside.
TOBIAS PERSE
All in all, he was on Long Island for two weeks, and we didn’t go to more than four matches. I remember them distinctly, though, because everyone there was looking at us. Hunter had . . . not exactly a diaper, but this weird thing on his head. He looked bizarre. He was enjoying himself thoroughly, but part of the enjoyment was in shocking the people there. When Jann and his wife got there, they didn’t seem embarrassed by it, but I was.
Hunter was really interested in the polo equipment, and after the matches, we’d go around to the vendors’ tents and look at things like high-end Argentinean leather saddles. Hunter was really serious about it and was asking people questions. A lot of this detail showed up in the story, which at the time I didn’t understand at all. He wasn’t taking notes.
The low point was probably when Hunter interviewed a dentist by mistake. We were out at the polo fields, and Hunter was supposed to have interviewed one of the Gracida brothers, Carlos and Memo—or Hector and Homo, in Hunter’s coinage—the premier polo players in the world, or their team owner. But Hunter either mistook the meeting place or mistook a random man for being the owner of their team and was interviewing this completely normal-looking guy for about fifteen minutes. At some point it became apparent that this guy wasn�
��t a player or an owner, but just a local dentist who liked to watch polo now and then. But it had taken Hunter a long time to uncover that—long enough that he was really angry. That turned out to be the beginning of the end of the trip. It started to get ugly.
COREY SEYMOUR
Later that night, Hunter was late to meet Ginger Baker and some of the other polo crowd at the Huntington Hilton. I’m not sure if we knew if Hunter really wanted to go out or not, but at the same time he seemed furious that he was late. When we got downstairs, the car was taking a few minutes longer than expected to arrive from the valet—he was barking that it had taken “forty-five fucking minutes!” when it really had only been maybe ten minutes, and then yelled to anyone within earshot, “I’M BEN FRANKLIN, AND I WANT MY FUCKING CAR NOW, GODDAMN IT!!! THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!”
When the car finally showed, I made a move to drive it myself. “Fuck that!” was Hunter’s response. Inside the car were broken wineglasses and empty wine bottles; in the backseat, empty Chivas bottles and liquor stains on the white leather seats; on the dashboard, smudged streaks of a white powdery substance. I really think the whole thing was just too much to comprehend for the valets to really do or say anything about anything. We were supposed to wait for Tobias to lead us to the next hotel, as he had directions or a map, but when I mentioned this to Hunter, I got another, “Fuck that!!” He gunned the car over a couple of speed bumps in front of the hotel and then hit both the front and rear bumpers of the car squealing out onto the road. We were going sixty-five or so in a twenty-five zone, but we had no idea which direction we should be going. Hunter was seething with rage, and I wasn’t sure where it was directed. He seemed really angry at me for not knowing how to get where we were going, and he seemed furious at not being able to find his radar detector, which he blamed on “that fucking cunt Shelby!! Bitch!!” whom he had been driving around with the previous night. I asked him to pull over to a gas station so I could ask for directions, which he did, but when I got back in the car after talking with an attendant for maybe eight seconds, he gave me a cold stare and seemed to accuse me of being some kind of traitor: “What the fuck took you so long? What the fuck were you talking to him about?”
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