His eyes were telling me, “This is a test. This is a test.” Because we weren’t all that far from the propane tank, and we had a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with double-ought buck, which is a pretty powerful little combination. I pumped the gun and leveled off on it and KABOOM!!—this enormous fireball went shooting in the air, and Hunter started whooping and screaming, “Hot damn! Good shooting, man!” And that was it—from that moment on we were pals, and stayed in almost constant touch.
DEBORAH FULLER
Sometimes he would say, “Get the Colonel on the phone!”—he called Johnny “the Colonel”—so he could bounce around a few ideas and try to get some questions answered.
JOHNNY DEPP
I’d get these weird calls—in retrospect they were super-weird, but from Hunter they were normal, an everyday thing. I got a phone call one time where he said, “Where are you?” I said, “I’m in the car; I just got off work and I’m heading home.” With Hunter, very rarely would I say, “I’ll call you right back” or “I can’t talk now,” and it was never a five-minute call. It was at least an hour, more like three. But this time he said, “What do you know about hairy black tongue?” And I said, “Uhhh . . . hairy . . . what is hairy black tongue?” He said, “Oh fuck! You don’t know anything about it?” I said, “No, I don’t. What is it?” He started going into this huge and very knowledgeable speech about this disease known as hairy black tongue. What it all boiled down to was Hunter had been to the dentist, and he’d read some pamphlet on hairy black tongue, and it concerned him gravely. This turned into a three-hour conversation about hairy black tongue and how we could avoid getting it. There were certain guidelines and rules that were set up: Peroxide was out. You could never brush your teeth with baking soda or peroxide or any such thing; it got into that weirdly specific realm. As weird as it was, that sort of thing became normal.
GEORGE TOBIA is a lawyer and trustee of Hunter’s estate.
One of the great joys in Hunter’s life was a place in Boston, where I live, called Jack’s Joke Shop. It’s the oldest continually operating joke shop in America. It sold everything that Hunter loved, so it became a running thing over the years where he’d call and say, “I need a care package.” I’d get some stuff from the store together and write him a letter listing everything in this big box—maybe two and a half pages of an “exhibit listing”: “hideous squirming rubber rat caught in trap,” “fake dog doo,” “fake vomit,” “blue-mouth gum,” “black-mouth gum,” “gelatinous tablets”—you’re having a drink with someone, and you slip this little tablet into their drink, and it slowly turns to gelatin—“Richard Nixon mask,” “infected thumb.” Hunter would be talking to someone for a half hour with it on, and they wouldn’t notice it, and then he’d pass them something, to make it more obvious.
I bought him a life-size guardian raven with infrared eyes and fake feathers. Hunter put it on a perch in the kitchen; the infrared eyes acted as a motion detector. If you were creeping through the kitchen in the middle of the night, as soon as you crossed the motion sensor, the wings would go up and the raven would go nuts. Absolute heart attack material.
Another one of his favorites was fake scratch lottery tickets. You run into a gas station—say there’s four people in the car—and you buy three real scratch tickets and slip this one in. Everyone’s got one, everyone’s scratching one, and one guy scratches off an “Instant $50,000 Winner.” It’s a heart-wrenching experience to watch the victim try to redeem it.
But the exotic stuff was what he really liked, and the most note-worthy was the “shocking beer can.” It became a trademark of Hunter’s. In the United States of America, where ladders have a warning not to fall off them and hair dryers have warnings not to put them in the bathtub, this beer can would be the least likely thing that you could ever imagine getting approved for sale. It’s a severe shock. Not a jolt but a continual current. As long as you’re holding the can, it delivers. You’d look like one of those lit-up cartoon figures—and you can’t let go of it because you’re caught in the current. Once I showed Hunter that thing, I think it was his favorite toy of anything he ever had in his life, and he’s had many.
BOB BRAUDIS
He was a kid in an adult’s body. He handed me a ballpoint pen once and said, “Here, give this a test drive. It’s one of the best pens I’ve ever used.” And when I pressed the button, I got this huge shock. He would spend hours poring over catalogs of practical-joke products and then get on the phone and order thousands of dollars’ worth of them.
DEBORAH FULLER
Hunter’s friend Dan Dibble built a potato gun for him. You shoved potatoes in it, and then it was just another gun that the two of them would shoot off the porch. I was buying boxes of potatoes for a while. . . .
There were always Chinese firecrackers, usually a whole line of them, each one going off like a gunshot. Hunter would throw those around and scare the living shit out of people in the living room or the kitchen or a hotel room. And he always had these toy hammers that sounded like a screaming woman or like breaking glass when you smacked them against somebody’s head. He would call somebody up on the phone and leave a “hammer message,” and he enjoyed giving people this pen that would shock them when they took the top off. That was always fun—“Ho ho.” I hated that one.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
When my wife and I went to see him at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York once, he had a rubber rat on the floor. He could squeeze a ball on a tube, and the rat would run around. It was a four-second joke, but he kept doing it. At his Lotos Club party for the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Modern Library edition, he had a hammer, and he hit people on the head with it. It made a sound like glass breaking, and it was funny one time, but he hit Tom Wolfe with it at least twice, and I remember Tom not thinking it was terribly funny.
TOM WOLFE
The Lotos Club has a rule that men have to wear a jacket and tie, and so somehow Hunter was forced to do this—but he got even. When each person came through the door, he hit them over the head with a mallet made of rubber. It wasn’t a heavy thing like a truncheon, but it did something odd, and he loved that. And when somebody is having as much fun as Hunter could, even if it’s not funny, it just sweeps everybody else up in his mood. He was just bopping people on the head left and right.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
In the later years, when his substance intake got more intense, it was hard to get serious with him. When he was sober in the early part of his waking day—the afternoon or early evening—you could get something reasonably lucid out of him. One night we had a conversation for about an hour, and I said, “Hunter, this is unbelievable. You’re really cogent.” He was so clear I thought he’d stopped drinking. I was wrong.
RALPH STEADMAN
I think that by the end of the nineties he had gotten a bit bored with the whole thing. He didn’t want to do it. We tried to do a few things together, but . . .
WILLIAM KENNEDY
Life ganged up on him in the late years, and he ganged up on himself. By this time he was repeating himself, and some of the work became a self-parody. That is not uncommon with writers. But Hunter continued to think of his fictional icons from the past, talking about them, quoting them—Faulkner and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, none of whom he resembled in the work. But he still looked to them as shaping influences on his writing life.
MICHAEL CLEVERLY
To change his lifestyle was such a flat-out, unthinkable impossibility that wasting more than a minute of fretting about it was an utter waste of time.
KALLEN VON RENKL
He could recognize that some other people needed to change their lifestyle. When a group of us in Aspen thought a friend of ours might need an intervention, Hunter was part of that conversation.
MICHAEL CLEVERLY
I was there too—Don Johnson, the sheriff, Hunter, me, and a couple of others. A friend of ours was in the business, and for decades he maintained it, but at some point he crossed the l
ine into cocaine psychosis the likes of which I have never seen. He thought everything was covered in slime. The sheriff had actually thrown him out of town at one point. He basically said, “Listen, pal—you get out of town or get out of the business, or you’re going to end up getting caught.” A lot of our friends over the years did a stretch.
Hunter would always be behind you if you had a drug problem. If you wanted to clean up, he would be behind that. If you got busted, he would find you the best lawyer to try to cut you deals. He would do all the weird backroom stuff, moving the pieces. He would always rise to the occasion. He was all for people improving themselves—as long as they didn’t try to improve him.
Let’s face it—Hunter was an alcoholic. He was a drug addict. People had tried to do an intervention on Hunter too, but you can write your own script to that one. Ask Bob about it.
BOB BRAUDIS
Some of his friends did an intervention in the mid-nineties, and he said to me and some other friends, “If you ever try that again, I’ll never speak to you.”
TOM BENTON
This was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but some of us were convinced that Hunter was running amok and his health was going to crack and he was getting a little out of control and his mind was going. Well, that was just crap, but we convinced ourselves. So we got some of Hunter’s friends lined up and talked to a lawyer and a doctor about an intervention—it has to be done a certain way—and we called Hunter to this confab. Hunter came in and listened to us for a little bit and then just muttered something or other and left.
The next time I talked to him, he said, “Listen, we won’t talk about it again . . . the inquisition . . . we won’t talk about it. We’ll never mention this again.” And he meant it. I said, “I apologize. It was stupid for me to think that I could assess you in any way, and my God, as you’ve always said, everybody should be allowed to go to hell in their own manner. Even if we were right, we were wrong.” That was about as serious as he ever got with me.
He never brought it up again—though once in a while he’d utter the phrase “the inquisition” and look around the room.
COREY SEYMOUR
One day in 1995, we were at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York getting ready to go to the Rolling Stone office. We were already hours late, and we were just about ready to walk out the door, when Hunter decided he wanted to change his blazer. For anybody else that might be a thirty-second operation, but Hunter had to take out his grinder, the hollowed-out Bic pen, the skull-shaped hash pipe, cigarettes, lighters, pens, notepads—and a lot more stuff—and transfer it all from one jacket to another. It was taking him forever, and at one point he let out one of his shrieks—“Aiiiggghhh!” and looked over at me and said, “You know, Corey—it’s a lot of goddamn work being a drug addict.” He didn’t seem like he was looking for a laugh, and I was young and naive enough to actually think, “This is my chance.” I said, “Do you ever wonder if it’s worth it?”
He sat down and was silent for what seemed like five minutes straight. Finally he looked up at me calmly and said, “You know, I’ve seen a lot of friends over the years go straight and clean up their act. But you know what? They’re just not having as much fucking fun as I’m having.” And that was that. He put on the new jacket, grabbed his tumbler of Chivas, and off we went.
We had people waiting for us on the street outside of the office, and there were staffers gawking at us through the windows as we pulled up in the car. Hunter did the long walk down the hallway, and he had his skull-shaped pipe filled with hash. Jann was with him and introduced him to every editor down the hallway, and Hunter made a point of offering his pipe to each of them. They’d all laugh nervously and say, “No, thank you.” But there was this woman, the editor of Australian Rolling Stone, who said, “Sure,” and went for it. She told me later that she literally thought this happened every day at Rolling Stone. She took this huge hit off this thing and seemed to think, “Wow—these guys are still keeping it real.”
JANN WENNER
He’d come to town as the conquering hero and set up shop at the Pierre or the Carlyle or the Four Seasons. He’d pay a royal visit to the office, always two hours late. Everybody wanted to see the legendary Hunter S. Thompson. The ice machines were working overtime, and we’d have plenty of Wild Turkey in stock, and he’d make the ambling entrance trailed by a couple of people. He’d have his satchel and he’d be smoking with that cigarette holder. It would take him forty-five minutes to get down the hall to my office.
It was great. I was always so happy to see him.
TOM BENTON
Around this same time, Hunter and I left his house one day to head down to the Woody Creek Tavern. I noticed that he grabbed a twelve-gauge shotgun as we left the house and put it in his backseat. We parked at the tavern, and just then, George Stranahan was walking in front of the car, and Hunter gets out and reaches in the back and pulls out the shotgun and says, “George, I’ve had as much as I can fucking take of this!” and puts the shotgun to his shoulder and points it right at him and pulls the trigger from less than ten feet away. He had these twelve-gauge shells that were loaded with confetti, but the sound and the smoke and everything else were like a twelve-gauge going off in your face. I mean, fuck—poor George thought he’d been killed.
GAYLORD GUENIN
George Stranahan probably did more for Hunter Thompson—in terms of renting him and then selling him the property he lived on, and then buying the property back during the divorce so he could protect the property, and buying part of it back again to help Hunter with the IRS—but then again, that’s Hunter.
GEORGE STRANAHAN
I don’t care who it is or how well you know them. When you see a stainless-steel sawed-off shotgun pointed at you and then see the blast, there’s that instant of absolute terror. Then there’s the next instant when you realize you’re not dead, that it’s just Hunter, and it’s a joke. I just said, “Fuck, Hunter, why’d you do that? I nearly shit my pants.”
ANN OWLSLEY was Hunter’s neighbor and worked at the Woody Creek General Store.
Hunter was very dear friends with the Stranahans, and the Woody Creek General Store, next door to the tavern, was the Stranahans’ store. We’ve always carried the Gonzo stuff here—the T-shirts and books and everything—and Hunter would get a percentage of all the sales. He’d come in now and again and count how many T-shirts were left and how many we must have sold and wonder if he was really getting his fair share of the profits. Of course he ran up an enormous tab here as well, so I don’t think anybody felt they had to cut him a check.
GEORGE STRANAHAN
Hunter and Ralph always had this not-so-funny competition. Ralph would always say, “I’m as good a writer as Hunter—maybe even better.” And of course Hunter would give it right back to him: “I’m as good an artist as Ralph—maybe better.” Well, Hunter could shoot, but you know the motherfucker couldn’t draw. So Hunter would put ink bottles in front of posters of some kind and then blast it all up with pistols and shotguns to create his art.
DEBORAH FULLER
Mary Grasso, who had an art gallery in Aspen, offered to help. She got posters and supplies and came out regularly to assist. We would be out there at the house setting up the firing range, and then we’d set up the table. It was always a big thing to set up the table so that everything was there. All the ammunition and food and liquor—he loved to create a party and dictate how he wanted it to look. Of course, a lot of the people who came out for interviews wanted him to shoot.
We would fill little hotel room jelly jars with different colors of paint and hang them down in front of the poster or the picture as Hunter directed. He chose different guns depending on what effect he wanted. Sometimes he would lay the poster on the ground and stand on the picnic table and shoot down to get a certain splatter effect, or he’d shoot the poster upright for a splatter-drip effect. It was usually at night; that was the only way to do it for maximum effect. We had firing-range lights, and
we’d crank up the stereo in the living room so you could hear it outside.
JACK NICHOLSON
He was printing images of people and then putting targets on them and shooting them. A splatter job. He thought this was going to be a marketing coup for him, but it seemed to me to be just a reason to go out back and fire away, more or less. He always needed something like that. Some people might have tried collecting them. I just remember that Hunter kept saying, “It’s not art until it’s sold.”
GEORGE STRANAHAN
He sold one in a local gallery for $10,000, and that really wound him up. I don’t think he produced more than a handful of pieces. He tried to price his Mickey Mouse portrait at thirty-five grand. That’s in the archives now—where it will stay.
BARNEY WYCOFF is an Aspen art dealer.
I really respected Hunter as a fine artist, not just as a journalist and a writer. I thought he created a new way of producing a kind of art-work that was legitimate. Hunter shooting up posters of J. Edgar Hoover or Mickey Mouse with his guns was a real statement of who he was. It brought his guns, his writing, and his philosophy all together in a piece of art. I found it very original and bold and brilliant, and I wish he had more time and energy to take that another couple of steps further.
DOUG BRINKLEY
Hunter was hugely interested in the academic world—he wanted to be taken seriously by English professors, PhD students, people doing master’s theses—and I became his broker for that. There was never once, if somebody was working on a PhD and wanted to talk to Hunter, that he would not talk to them. He wanted to be part of the canon of American literature; he didn’t want to be fringed off as some hillbilly buffoon or as the Doonesbury cartoon or the guy that frat guys liked because he drank so much booze. He wanted to be taken as a serious American writer whose named was uttered in the same breath as Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce or H. L. Mencken—an equal to Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs or Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe. I’d say, “Well, I don’t think you’re as great as Twain, but certainly you’re in the Ambrose Bierce category.” He wanted to be in the Twain category. He loved the sport of literary salon talk—whose poem was influential or what book was the hot book of the moment. It was as deep a passion for him as watching the NFL or the NBA.
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