He gunned it down the Long Island Expressway at a little over a hundred miles an hour with complete nonchalance: He held the steering wheel with only his thumb and his two smallest fingers; between the two other fingers on that hand was his cigarette, in his other hand was his tumbler of Chivas—rotated on some sort of unconscious axis to counterbalance the g-forces when the car cornered sharply—and, at Hunter’s request, I’d light up his skull-shaped hash pipe and hold it to his lips as he turned sideways to toke.
Then he turned off the lights. At this point, I went from thinking I might die to knowing that I was gonna die. We were floating back and forth from lane to lane, I had a shaving kit full of enough drugs to put one or both of us in prison for the rest of our lives, and Hunter was driving drunk and enraged. And the dome light was on. I was half into the backseat, rooting around double-dong dildos and beer bottles and wineglasses and oddball porno magazines trying to find the goddamned Fuzzbuster, when Hunter found it on his own—in the glove compartment. Again, my fault.
TOBIAS PERSE
The thing about those unpleasant nights is that they didn’t really end. The unpleasantness wasn’t a quick outburst.
At some point a couple of days later, he turned the wheel over to me. He just said, “You drive.” Hunter was a great driver, and more than that was a confident driver, so this was saying a lot. And then I hit a bump, and he spilled a drink on himself. Then it happened again, and he said, “If I spill one more drop of whiskey on myself, I’m going home tonight.” Well, I wanted him to go home more than anything in the world, so I sped up suddenly and then braked suddenly to go over a speed bump—on purpose. Hunter spilled his drink everywhere and just started beating the dashboard—“That’s it. I’m going home.”
I went upstairs and booked the first flight I could. I arranged for a limo with the concierge—who hated us—and then at seven a.m., a van arrived. Hunter had no baggage except for his leather satchel with the Chivas and the bucket of ice and the Heinekens in his pockets, and he got on with a beer in his hand. What we didn’t know, but what we learned quite quickly, was that we were in a van that was making multiple stops to pick up business types in these upper-middle-class suburbs of Long Island.
By this point there was no way Hunter had slept in two or three days, and he kept lighting cigarettes, and each time the driver got angrier and angrier. Hunter just kept putting his cigarettes out on the floor of the van. He was talking to himself and making these weird sounds, and everyone else in the van was completely silent.
We finally got to the airport, and Hunter stepped out right in front of two cops, drinking his beer and carrying the bucket of ice. As he lit a cigarette, the cops told him that he couldn’t drink beer, and I stepped in and said, “That’s Hunter S. Thompson—believe me, it’s not a problem. He’s in and out of this airport all the time—they all know him.” Hunter kept walking a straight line. The cops were kind of bewildered because Hunter didn’t even look at them. I checked him in. Walking toward the metal detector, he set the ice bucket down on the floor and kept going—smoking, of course. Security was getting into it, but he didn’t interact with anyone. I got to the metal detector with him and explained that I was his assistant and I’d be checking him onto the flight, and he walked through. At this point we were not talking at all. I got on the fucking plane with him, and Hunter sat and leaned his head to one side and looked like he was going to go to sleep, but just before I left him, he raised his fist and just said, “Take no shit.”
And he went home and “went down,” as Deborah always called it when Hunter slept. That in itself was a great thing: If you worked for Hunter and he went down, that was thirty-six hours that school was out. You may be back to answering the phone at work, but you’ve had this amazing experience.
I think I spent a year working on that piece. It was always an interesting give and take with Jann. He kind of disapproved and approved of it at the same time. He disapproved that Hunter required that, but approved of doing it if that’s what it took, and if I was willing to do it.
The writing part of it was torturous. I went out to Owl Farm twice specifically for that reason. I took a week off work, and Hunter put my flights on Michael Stepanian’s credit card, but by the end of the trip, things had turned sour between us or I’d just really want to go home. Hunter would always rally for a strong good-bye, though. Sometimes it would involve an act of contrition—I’d admired the white dinner jacket and white pants that he was wearing earlier, and now he was saying that he wanted me to have something, which in a certain sense seemed to mean, “I’m sorry for everything that went bad,” and all of a sudden I now had this white alcohol-soaked tuxedo. I tried it on for him, and he was straightening it out and manhandling me as if he was a professional tailor, turning me around and telling me where to take it in a bit and checking to see if there was enough fabric in the sleeve. He said, “You look really handsome in that.”
He had been writing me into the “Polo” story as a character, and that character went from being kind of fierce—beating people with golf clubs and that sort of thing—to being introduced like this: “The magazine sent me an assistant, a tall, jittery young man. He said, ‘My name is Tobias, but my friends call me Queerbait.’” Over four months, I cut “Queerbait” every time I sent it back to him, and every time he’d change it back. I finally had it cut in the copy department just before we closed the issue.
From “Polo Is My Life: Fear and Loathing in Horse Country” Rolling Stone 697; December 15, 1994
Polo meant nothing to me when I was young. It was just another sport for the idle rich—golf on horseback—and on most days I had better things to do than hang around in a flimsy blue-striped tent on a soggy field far out on the River Road and drink gin with teen-age girls. But that was still the old days, and I have learned a lot since then. I still like to drink gin with teen-age girls on a Sunday afternoon in horse country, and I have developed a natural, friendly feeling for the game.
Which is odd because I don’t play polo, and I hate horses. They are dangerously stupid beasts with brains the size of cue balls and hoofs that can crush your whole foot into bone splinters just by accidentally stepping on your toe. Some will do it on purpose. I have been on extremely mean and stupid horses that clearly wanted to hurt me. I have been run against trees by the bastards, I have been scraped against barbed-wire fences and bitten on the back of the head for no reason. . . .
At the age of 5, I got trapped in a stall for 45 minutes with a huge horse named Buddy, who went suddenly crazy and kicked himself to death with terrible shrieking noises while I huddled in the urine-soaked straw right under his hoofs.
My uncle Lawless, a kindly dairy farmer, was flogging the brute across the eyes with a 2-by-4 and trying to get a strangle rope around his neck, but the horse was too crazy to deal with. Finally, in desperation, he ran back to the house and got a double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun—which he jammed repeatedly against the horse’s lips and teeth until the beast angrily bit down on the weapon and caused both barrels to fire at once.
“So much for that one,” he said as he dragged me out from under the dead animal’s body. I was covered with blood and hot, steaming excrement. The brute had evacuated its bowels at the moment of death. . . .
No one seemed to know why it happened. “It was a suicide,” the vet said later, but nobody believed him. Uncle Lawless loved animals, and he was never able to reconcile murdering that horse with his basic Christian beliefs. He sold his farm and went into the real-estate business in southern Indiana, and finally he went insane.
The main problem with horses is that they are too big to argue with when they’re angry—or even bitchy, for that matter, and highbred horses are notorious for their bitchiness. Which might be cute or fey in a smaller animal, but when a beast that weighs 1,200 pounds goes crazy with some kind of stupid pique or jealousy in a room not much bigger than the handicapped stall in the Denver airport men’s room, bad things will happen to anybody who tr
ies to argue with it: fractured skulls, broken legs, split kidneys, spine damage and permanent paralysis. The kick of a horse at close range, a hoof flicked out in anger, is like being whacked in the shins with a baseball bat. It rips flesh and shatters human bones. You will go straight to some rural Emergency Room, and you will be in a cast by nightfall . . . if you’re lucky. The unlucky will limp for the rest of their lives.
TOBIAS PERSE
Once all that was finally finished, it was time for him to start reporting the second installment of the story down in Palm Beach. By the time I got to the Breakers, where he was staying, it looked like he’d been up for a long time. He was wearing pajama bottoms—or maybe wrestling pants. Hunter normally put so much time and preparation into how he looked, but this was the opposite. Maybe he’d put that time in three days ago, but this was day three, and people were staring.
I’d lie to Jann. He’d ask me how the writing was going, or how many matches Hunter had been to. The answer was usually none, but I’d brazenly say, “I think he went to a few chukkers,” because I felt it reflected on me—as if I had any bearing on what he would do.
Jann would ask, “Has he been doing a lot of cocaine?” What was I going to tell him? “Uh, yeah, he’s doing more cocaine than any person that I’ll ever see in my entire lifetime—in fact, he’s gone through almost all the stuff he FedExed to me at the office on your personal account?” I would be kind of low-key: “Uh, I don’t think a lot . . .”
He never finished part 2. Unfortunately, it took about a year and a half to figure out he wasn’t going to do it.
While I was down there, somebody had found Hunter’s Lincoln Town Car on an abandoned polo field that had been absolutely ripped to shreds. The car had been sitting there for two or three days; Hunter had apparently just abandoned it and seemed to have no memory of it. I remember the detail that he loved: The keys were still in the ignition, and the door was ajar and still pinging.
I didn’t say anything to Jann about it; I just rented another Lincoln Town Car. When the expenses came in, they were sent to me—on top of all my other jobs, I was the accounting liaison for the trip. I’d try to trickle the bills through the finance department instead of submitting them all at once, and Hunter would say things like, “Good boy.” There were things on the Breakers receipt like a $7,500 charge for “incinerated sofa.” The expenses on that were enormous—maybe $25,000 or so—and he wasn’t there for more than a week.
Hunter could be incredibly vicious. His voice could be so fraught with what seemed like an unreasonable anger, an illogical anger at some perceived incompetency or fuckup. And the allegation that you could be ineffectual would be the gravest offense—that Hunter seemed to imply that you weren’t an expert in what you did, that you weren’t professional, or that you, in Hunter-speak, “went sideways” on him. The pressure was extreme but intelligent in a particular way. He used to say things to me like, “By the time I was your age I’d written Hell’s Angels; what have you done today?”
Jann was the only person in Hunter’s life who would tell him no. I was always really impressed at Jann’s confidence, and at the way Hunter would accord him respect. Hunter could be excoriating toward Jann—he was always talking of this hidden stash of first editions; he had calculated the cost on a piece of paper with amounts written down, like $1.2 million, $900,000. But Hunter would get people riled up about Jann and then as soon as somebody else said something bad about him, he’d turn on them. Ultimately, Jann was sacrosanct.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Vegas Goes to Hollywood
Johnny would jump into his Hunter character at any given second. He is a brilliant actor, and the way he held a cigarette or picked up Hunter’s walk would give us the creeps. Hunter was always screaming, “Stop that!” Johnny would turn it on and off just to fuck with him.
DOUG BRINKLEY
Hunter was about making money, and there was money to be made in Hollywood. You only get paid so much for book advances and writing for Rolling Stone.
LYNN NESBIT
He said to me, “If you don’t get me more than $300,000 for Rum Diary, I’m not going to give you the commission.” And I didn’t, so he took the contract but didn’t pay my agent’s commission. It wasn’t a pleasant result, even for Hunter’s sake, but he was getting more and more desperate. I don’t think it was just that the bills were piling up. I think that somewhere in there, he knew he couldn’t keep doing it that much longer. He wasn’t happy with the way his work was going, and there’s always somebody who’s going to get kicked—either the wife or the agent or somebody. So I took it philosophically. Hunter knew I cared for him; it wasn’t just about the money.
He had a generous heart, which gave him so much conflict, and that led to, I think, so many kinds of abuse—self-abuse and abuse of others. He couldn’t deal with that part of himself consistently. What a great, great writer he would’ve been—to have been able to bring that into his prose. I had really interesting conversations with him about life and love, and he never touched on that in his writing. They weren’t really about his personal life, just sort of philosophical talks about “What is love?” It was more abstract but more interesting. He needed that in Polo Is My Life, and he really needed it in The Rum Diary. That experience was painful because he was so smart about his own work. The Rum Diary came out when it did because he needed money, absolutely. He never would’ve published that twenty years before.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
It’s very hard to become a novelist unless you give it your full time. You are not necessarily going to create a valid work of fiction by desiring it. You have to go through all the failures of the work to know what fiction is all about. But if Hunter left the traditional fictional form, he created a new one, a fictional hybrid with his persona dominant; and he produced these incomparable pieces of work, some of which stand, for me, as works of art. Most people still think of him as a journalist, but I think the form, as it exists in some of his work, has serious validity as a variant of fiction. And I think that was willful on his part. He had put in the time as an apprentice in fiction, but then he stopped and did other things.
DOUG BRINKLEY
There was money to be made selling movie rights, and he sold successfully. He liked showbiz folks. He gravitated to Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Johnny Depp, and Sean Penn—i.e., the Hollywood rebel continuum. He saw himself as an extended member of that group.
He was the same way with rock & roll. He was not interested in rock bands per se. Before he died, Korn was trying to pay him a ton of money to just quote something from him, and he rejected it completely. The same with Garbage. He didn’t like their music, and he would be specific about it.
He would do anything for the music he liked—people like Warren Zevon, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker; old Kentucky bluegrass masters like the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt; and some blues people like Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon. Those were gods to him, and a lot of them were friends. He would do anything to promote their CDs, to go to their concerts, to talk them up. But his interest in rock music was not as deep as people think. Because he wrote for Rolling Stone, people sometimes think he was a big music guy. Hunter was not up on current music and didn’t really care to be. He knew what he liked: some Bruce Springsteen; Van Morrison could really get him writing. He knew Leonard Cohen songs by heart. But it was Dylan first and foremost. Any of the Dylan live bootlegs he thought was the greatest thing of all time.
JOHNNY DEPP was on vacation in Aspen in December 1995 when he met Hunter.
I had read the old standards—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail—and then moved on to the books of essays like Better Than Sex. His writing was a presence in my life and an important one long before I ever met him.
I happened to be in Aspen around Christmastime and really couldn’t stand the whole celebrity jet-set ski thing. I thought I’
d ended up in the wrong place—I felt like I was in someone else’s Christmas. But I saw this guy Alan Finkelstein, who I’d known on and off in Hollywood, and he told me that Hunter was in town and would I like to go out to Woody Creek and meet him?
We arrived at the Woody Creek Tavern and were having a drink, and suddenly there’s this big commotion at the front of the bar, where it kind of twisted back. The doors open, and I see this kind of force, this brute force, making his way through the place with a giant electric cattle prod in one hand and a Taser gun in the other and cursing, “Out of the way, you swine!” It was like time stood still; I was thinking, “Holy God . . . it’s all real.”
He made his way to the table, and we were introduced and shook hands. I’ll never forget that: It was the handshake of my grandfather or my father; it was a man’s handshake. In the first thirty seconds we discovered that we’re both from Kentucky, which was something that was important to him. We had a couple of drinks, and he invited us up to his house. I was admiring some of the weapons that were around—handguns, shotguns, rifles, and things of that nature—and I made a comment about this beautiful nickel-plated twelve gauge. He said, “Oooh yeah, Christ!” and got it down off the wall and said, “Yeah, let’s take this out back and fire it off. We need a target. We’ll make a target.” He had these propane tanks, and he handed me some duct tape and these things that were a little bit bigger than a matchbook and started showing me how to tape these things to a propane canister. I had a cigarette dangling out of my mouth. We were in his kitchen, the command center. I said, “What are these things?” He said, “Oh that . . . yeah, that’s nitroglycerin.” I immediately heaved my cigarette into his kitchen sink, finished the job, and then we went outside, set one up, and he loaded a shell into the shotgun and handed it over.
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