Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  JANN WENNER

  He was an alcoholic. That was his real problem. It worked together with the drugs, of course, but with either one, you can’t sustain the attention to structure, flow, and coherence that you need. The problem with the proposed Rolling Stone column was that it was going to have to be 1,500 good words. He was going to be putting his name on it for his audience—not in the local San Francisco paper and not on a Web site, but in front of the people who knew and cherished his work. And he couldn’t sustain even that because of the damage of the alcohol and drugs.

  Hunter didn’t want to do bad work for us, and I didn’t want to publish his bad work, so we fell out of regular contact with each other during those last five years. We had once had something extraordinary by any measure. Why deprecate it with a bunch of whining between the two of us like some old couple that doesn’t get along anymore? We were still devoted to each other, but “Why don’t we just not do that” became our general unspoken agreement.

  PAUL OAKENFOLD is an internationally known club DJ and producer.

  Hunter wasn’t aware of it until I told him, but for some reason—probably because of the Vegas movie—his name had become very trendy among those in the club movement. I was recording an album in 2000 and had been working with different artists on collaborations. I told him I wanted to spend a couple days and nights with him working on something that was relative to the generation of today—something to pass on his work. Not long afterward he was in L.A. and rang me up and said, basically, “Show up at my hotel at midnight.”

  I brought him a bottle of absinthe, and he unscrewed the top—glug-glug-glug—passed it around the room, and we began. The surrealness had started almost as soon as we began: Fifteen minutes in, there’s a bang-bang-bang on the door and in walks Sean Penn, and Sean and I started talking a bit, and then Hunter just said, “Shut up. We’re gonna get on with what we’re doing.” Sean left, and this other actor, this really old chap shows up—Harry Dean Stanton.

  We rolled on from midnight till sunrise, and we did it again the next night, ending up with this idea of the American dream. He touched on Kurt Cobain. He touched on Richard Nixon and how he ruined the American dream. He talked with me about a lot of things he had done in his life where he was just chasing a dream, and that’s what we were trying to get. I came up with this idea for a track called “Nixon’s Spirit.”

  Some time afterward, my lawyer quite rightly did what any lawyer would do—she took the responsibility on herself for offering a contract for the deal to use Hunter’s voice, for the deal that she felt was right—but she did this without speaking to me and knowing that I’d already worked out a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” with Hunter.

  Pretty soon he’s on the phone screaming at her, and he’s writing a letter saying that you’re this and you’re that.

  Dear Sonia,

  I’m in receipt of your second (or third) letter in 5 (five) days, in re: the mess you have made of my very private and personal relationship with Paul Oakenfold, perhaps the finest and most nakedly original musical talent of our generation.

  What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you one of these socio-legal Perverts who get their jollies by fucking with other people’s lives because you don’t have one of your own? Is that how you like to introduce yourself, Sonia—like a teenage slut with an anal compulsion? Is Money all that matters to you, or do you crave the thrill of cheating, too? In any case, get out of my fucking life or I will do what you suggested in your earlier message—slice off your nipples and suck out the blood while you dance and scream in my lap. The image horrified me, of course. Paul never mentioned anything like this.

  How old are you? Who gave you a goddamned Job? And why?

  Not me, Sonia. Never in hell. I would hire a mutated giant Pack-rat before I would ever hire you. . . . But who am I to jeer at Paul’s corruptive decisions? I am not that sane, myself, in this regard. We all make mistakes.

  So here is where we’re at, Sonia: If you (and my friend Paul) don’t want to pay me even a cheap fee of 10,000 Pounds and fifty per-cent, (50%) of all royalties, earnings and all other monies for the right to publish/record/sell/share and otherwise earn in re: my Song/lyrics for Nixon’s Spirit, (currently on Paul’s new CD BUNKKA)—you can jam that song up your ass and I will record it with some other contemporary Musician with his tongue on the pulse of Youth Music.

  I don’t like your attitude, Sonia. And it was worth a few stupid little pence or shillings or shiny new dimes in order to shit on the chest of your Ethics. You represent all that is venal and cheap and mendacious in the Human Race.

  NIXON’S SPIRIT is already a copy-righted monument to the bed-rock ability of the American Dream to recognize itself, even in the breach, and heal itself smartly without unseemly delay. It is people like you who depress and degrade our collective future.

  As always,

  Hunter S. Thompson

  He CC’d George Tobia, Walter Isaacson, Graden [sic] Carter, Sean Penn, Greg Shapiro / Nick Nolte, Ralph Steadman, [Indianapolis Colts owner and longtime HST friend] James Irsay, Johnny Depp, [Depp friend and former Viper Room manager] Sal Jenco, Don Johnson, Jann Wenner, David Letterman, Charlie Rose, Ed Bradley, Jeanette Etheridge, and [ABC News correspondent] Jake Tapper.

  He made her cry. I had to send her flowers.

  JEFF KASS is a journalist who covered the story of Lisl Auman, a twenty-one-year-old Colorado girl who in 1997 was riding in a car driven by a skinhead with a rap sheet who later killed a policeman and then himself after a brief chase. Though already in police custody before the cop was shot, Auman was later found guilty of felony murder due to her association with the skinhead—whom she had just met that night—and was sentenced to life without parole.

  I wrote a profile of Hunter that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News on December 31, 2000. And I didn’t know it at the time, but Lisl Auman read that article when she was in prison in Canyon City, Colorado. Hunter Thompson seemed like an interesting character, and she decided to write him a letter just to say hi. She explained her situation and thought Hunter may have remembered her case, but she wasn’t asking him to do anything for her.

  Hunter did remember the case. He had been horrified by it. He wrote her back saying, “I’ve got this column on ESPN.com. Let’s see if I can stir up any trouble.” One of Hunter’s driving quotes at this time was Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” This was his battle cry for the Lisl Auman case. And Curtis Robinson said, “You know Hunter’s on a tear when he starts quoting Burke.” Hunter started to get his friends on board.

  Hunter was facing long odds. He was often saying things like “This could always blow sideways.” But this was already sideways. This was upside down. Now, the facts of her case alone convinced a lot of people she got a raw deal, but trying to take on the cause of a woman who’s technically a convicted cop killer is not an easy thing to do. It’s felony murder. But Hunter’s level of interest was always high and always genuine. He was very savvy with politicking and campaigning and PR.

  HAL HADDON

  He dove into the case. He correctly figured out that this was a monstrous injustice and rallied support and brought attention to it. He got lawyers involved in helping with her appeal. In the last couple of years of his life, that was his big cause—and it was a great example of Hunter’s organizational skills.

  MICHAEL STEPANIAN is an attorney who had become close to Hunter in San Francisco in the sixties.

  Hunter and Gerry Goldstein and Hal Haddon and I talked for twenty-five and thirty hours, easily. Hunter was a great, great cross-examiner. I’ve been a criminal lawyer for thirty-five years, and whenever I related a set of facts to him, he would get into the nuances of the facts, the weaknesses in the arguments, and the concepts of what the facts were driving toward as very, very few men could do. He was incisive, and he was deep in the sense that he could analyze facts. He played with facts, he slept with facts, and he bathed with
facts. They warmed him like a blanket. Facts were key, and they weren’t arbitrary or ambiguous. They were precise. And he was very, very precise.

  Hunter got Hal Haddon’s office to write the brief that took Lisl’s case to the appellate court for nothing, and Hunter organized some demonstrations on her behalf. He got his friend Warren Zevon to come out for a rally on the steps of the capital in Denver and sing “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

  JEFF KASS

  There were appeals and more appeals, and it took years, but Lisl was transferred from prison to a halfway house in October 2006. In March of 2007, she was released from the halfway house to serve out the rest of her probation.

  Some people might say that he just took on this cause because of his distrust of authority—and I do think that psychologically it helped him to have a cause; it almost seemed like a muse to him at times. But his relationship with and interest in Lisl simply as a person was always genuine. They never met, but Hunter would send her books and talk with her on the phone.

  MICHAEL STEPANIAN

  Hunter Thompson saved her life. The felony murder law as it was applied to her was wrong. The public defender who did the case tried their best. But if it wasn’t for Hunter Thompson, she would not have gotten the kind of appellate work that she did.

  JUAN THOMPSON

  He called me up in 2003 and told me he was thinking about getting married and wanted to know what I thought. I said, “Well, if that’s gonna make you happy, go ahead.” They were married April 23, 2003.

  There were times over the years when he proposed marriage to different women. He and Maria came really close to getting married, but again it would have been a deal down in front of the judge in Glenwood Springs. For him, getting married was not a public act. It was something between two people, and he would not have had any patience for all the bullshit that goes into a wedding. So he and Anita just went down to the courthouse and signed the papers.

  Hunter was a romantic at heart, and I think he liked the idea of getting married, but if he had been ten years younger he wouldn’t have done it. There had been many women he was in love with that he didn’t marry, because he didn’t want to restrict himself. It’s no secret that Hunter was not the soul of monogamy. He valued his personal freedom very highly, and I don’t think he was interested in compromising that until he had to.

  WILLIAM KENNEDY

  When Kingdom of Fear was published a thousand people came out to see him do a book signing, and he loved that. But he was an unbelievable mess. Anita was there—this was right before they were married—and my wife, Dana, and I went up to their suite at the Carlyle. He was being interviewed by a reporter, and Hunter was dying for him to leave—he kept calling him a geek—so he could bring out his coke grinder. He was in an ultimate condition—a constant movement of hands to smoke with the cigarette holder, or tip the glass of Chivas, or pack the pipe with dope, or pop the pills, grind the coke, sniff it, smoke it, drink it, eat it, inhale it, hand-to-mouth, hand-to-hand; he had turned himself into a perpetual-motion machine, a perpetual intoxicating device. I said, “Jesus, you keep busy.”

  He said to us, “I’m an addict.” Hardly big news, but I’d never heard him say it. We were there a couple of hours, and at least twice he went in and out of focus, almost to sleep after the dope, then he’d do the coke and straighten up and we could talk again. He was in severe pain, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He was truly far gone, but in the lucid streaks very funny and sharp. I never saw him fall-down drunk, and he wasn’t that on this night. But I never saw him this bad, ever.

  JUAN THOMPSON

  He didn’t want to go into surgery for his back. He really wanted to stay out of the hospital, for a lot of reasons. I could tell that Hunter was nervous about the surgery, but then he’d say things like, “This is just like taking the car in for some service. Just gotta do some work on the mechanics.” I think it was the easiest way to make himself more comfortable with the idea. But he knew what was at stake. I think he finalized his will before the surgery. He was aware that there was a possibility that he might not survive.

  Alcohol dependence was a factor in both the hip-replacement and the back operations. At first the doctors said, “You’ll have to stop drinking so many hours before the surgery.” And then they’d say something like, “This would be a perfect opportunity for you to stop drinking; you might take that opportunity.” Hunter would answer, “I have no interest in that. I intend to start drinking the moment I wake up. Don’t ever mention that again.” And in both cases they accepted that. Hunter was such a longtime and consistent drinker, he couldn’t go very long without it before his body would start to react, and it’s a very dangerous condition. For someone like Hunter, to suddenly stop drinking cold turkey can kill you.

  Dr. Corenman at the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic in Vail basically scooped out and fused Hunter’s L4 and L5 vertebrae. One of them had flipped forward, pinching the spinal cord, so he pulled that back and fixed it. The spinal cord had become compressed by material that built up in there, and that was what caused a lot of pain.

  DR. STEVE AYERS

  There’s acute withdrawal, which lasts up to seventy-two hours, and that’s seizures and tremors and elevated blood pressure and sweating and vomiting and all sorts of things. Delirium tremens starts at about the third day, at about seventy-two hours. That’s where you can develop a true delirium or confusion and your brain gets out of whack, and the part of the brain regulating the other body functions like temperature, heart, and breathing gets all out of whack. And it carries about a 30 percent mortality rate. You go into true DT’s and about 30 percent of those people die. It’s very dangerous. You don’t want to let that happen.

  JUAN THOMPSON

  They spent another week or two nursing him through the detox process. Once it starts, you have to ride it out. They couldn’t get him awake and drinking alcohol quickly enough after his surgery, so then his body started to detox, and they put him into a drug-induced coma using IV drugs and very gradually, with a combination of drugs, helped the body transition.

  The idea for both surgeries was to get him drinking as soon as possible so that we didn’t have to go through that, but both times we had to go through it. No one expected it to actually happen, so when it started to happen it was scary—scary and risky.

  He was delusional; he remembered nothing about either one of his stays, even though he was there for two weeks, awake and carrying on for much of the time. In both cases he had to be restrained; he would wake up and not know where he was; he’d get angry. It was scary for him, and scary for us to see him restrained and getting very angry about things. Just the fact that he was there—he didn’t like hospitals and wanted to go home as quickly as possible, and we had to tell him that he couldn’t go home. Someone would watch him all the time, and there were all sorts of approvals needed and rules about what you could and couldn’t do. There was no privacy.

  Deborah was there for both surgeries, as were Jennifer and I; Hunter’s assistant Heidi was at the hip surgery; Anita was at the back surgery, along with a college student that helped out with Hunter a bit on and off. But for the bulk of it, it was Deborah, Anita, and me doing a rotation. Braudis came down a couple days before Hunter got out.

  BOB BRAUDIS

  They wound up putting him in the ICU unit, which was insulated from the general patients by two or three doors, because he was screaming and acting out. They were worried because he wasn’t eating or drinking anything. They had him on an IV for hydration and alcohol.

  At one point when I was there, he asked Juan, Anita, and Deborah to leave, and he whispered in my ear, “Get me out of here.” I said, “You want me to spring you?” And he goes, “No, take me to the bar.” I said to the nurse, “He wants to go to a bar,” and she said, “Well, it’s against doctor’s orders, but I think it would be a great idea.” So I wheeled him through the fucking streets of Vail over potholes and gravel, and I get him to this bar. Just before I took him out out of
the hospital, the nurse gave him a shot in the thigh. I said, “What’s that?” And she said, “Haldol. It’s an antipsychotic.” We use it in the jail as a chemical restraint for crazy motherfuckers, and it works. But I said, “You’re giving him Haldol and asking me to take him for a wheelchair ride?” She said, “It’s a very low dosage.” Well, we got to the bar and Hunter was nodding off. He said, “Okay—you better take me back.”

  DR. STEVE AYERS

  I think Hunter had a superhuman liver. I don’t know how you could have that much alcohol for that long and not have liver failure. Hunter apparently tolerated it well. I have no idea how. Just different physiology, I guess. If you want to figure that one out, you’ll have to ask God someday.

  TIM FERRIS

  After both the hip replacement and the back surgery were the only times since I’ve known him that I can think of that he went days without a drink. He came back home and was recovering in his bedroom, where no drugs or alcohol were ever permitted. He always observed this interesting scrupulosity.

  He was in there for a couple of days and was still kind of dried out, and we would talk, and he was the most tender, sweetest guy, just charming. When people drink all their lives, part of them stays emotionally at whatever age they were when they started. And suddenly it was as if I was talking to Hunter as a teenager—he had these wonderful dreams that he would tell me about. It was this little window, but pretty soon, once he was up and about, he was out of the drug-and booze-free zone and was back on everything.

  The key to Hunter’s personality is the question of why he had to be so deeply involved with intoxicants from such an early age and never found his way out. That’s sort of the Rosebud of this story. It’s not that he didn’t think about it. He certainly thought about it. There’s never been any shortage of answers, but the question is, are any of them actually illuminating?