So, after about 40 hours of constant thought, here’s the plan I’ve come up with. I’ve located a car, a damned good one, for $550. I can’t afford to get a junk heap because I can’t take a chance on constant breakdowns if I use the car for work. I want to borrow $350 from Memo—$300 in addition to that $50 I hope you’ve already sent. I want to borrow it just as I would from a bank—at 6% interest and repayable over a period of 12 months at $30 a month, (correction, $31 a month).
I need only $350 now because I’ve already sold my apartment for $200 which I’ll have next week. Needless to say, the money won’t do me any good unless I can get $350 more. (Actually, I may have to borrow a little more than $350 so I can make the first payment on an insurance policy from Jack [Thompson], I can’t get insurance here because it costs something like $270 and I damn certainly can’t afford that. This means that I’ll have to register the car there but that will be no problem. Once I get it registered I’ll wait a while and then have the registration switched to New York. I’ll just send you the papers when I get the car and you can send me a license.)
Now I’m deadly serious about this and I intend to run through hell and high water to keep from losing this job. If I’m forced to try to get it from a bank then I’ll do that, but it’s going to be like playing russian roulette as far as keeping the job is concerned. If I lose this job I also queer my chances for a shot at the World-Telegram and if that happens I might just as well go on unemployment insurance. At $70 a week I’ll have no trouble paying Memo back in a year’s time and I give you my word of honor that I’ll repay every cent. I’ve seen enough of this job to know that I like it and that I’m not going to lose it once I get a car and get settled. It’s simply too good an opportunity to throw away for want of money.
Please let me know about this immediately—by telegram or by phone at the Record (3 to 11 p.m.). I can’t afford to waste time and I only have about one week to get a car. A million thanks in advance if you can swing this.
Love, H
TO ANN FRICK:
Thompson often dreamt of escaping to the Caribbean to get away from the cold New York winters he loathed. While at Eglin, his favorite pastime with Ann had been swimming at night in the Gulf of Mexico, then lying on the beach and staring at the stars.
February 21, 1959
Middletown, New York
Dear Ann,
I’ve been intending to write you for several days. As a matter of fact, I sent you an airmail postcard yesterday—to assure you I was still alive—but I think I forgot to put an address on it, leaving the front completely blank. I somehow doubt whether it will get to you.
This letter was prompted by a book I just found in the apartment I moved into this afternoon. (I’ll be here for three weeks. One of the reporters who lives here is on an assignment in Puerto Rico and the other one is in Switzerland for a while.) At any rate the book is called Escape to the West Indies,2 and for some reason I thought immediately of you when I read the title. Hence, this letter.
After thinking about it for a moment, I find myself wondering exactly why you came to mind so quickly when I began to think about the Caribbean. I think a little further and I find that you come to mind in connection with a lot of things—not just the Caribbean. I think of Europe, Africa, South America, California, Mexico, Australia—all places I intend to see someday—and you come to mind there too. You’ll admit this is puzzling and a little frightening to someone like me. I seem to want everything—even things that seem almost totally incompatible in the life of any one human.
Several hours later, after a session of beer and conversation with one of the disc jockeys from the local station.
It’s dark now, and beginning to snow. I would like very much for you to be here. Not because you’d enjoy this place, because you probably wouldn’t, but because of the very selfish reason that I’d simply like you to be here. We have three months more until June, and almost three have gone by since the first of December. I should have a house in the near future and you figure very definitely in that, too. I want to get one you’ll like, although I don’t think I’ll really believe you’re serious about coming until I actually see you.
We’ll both be three months older by June and a year from then we’ll be a year and three months older. Time seems to be going much faster and I’m beginning to get the idea that life is very short. It makes me feel that whatever I do in the next few years will be very important. A thousand years from now our lives will be, at best, a few sentences in someone’s history book. But the next day, and the next month, and the next year are more important to me than all the history books ever written. It would be compounded lunacy to waste any of this time, and it would be just as foolish to think it was important to anyone but us.
So you see why I think very seriously about you and the way I feel about you. It could be such a good thing if it were right, and such a horrible waste of time if it weren’t. And you can’t compromise when it comes to love, because it becomes something else if you do. For either of us to alter ourselves for the other would be wrong and foolish. If you change yourself in order to be loved, then you are in love with love and not a person. America is overrun with people whose lives are dictated by abstracts and I don’t want to be one of them. I am not in love with love, or happiness, or security, or virtue, or anything else in that line. Sometimes I wonder if I could really be in love with a person, but to admit that I couldn’t would take too much of the pleasure out of life.
So I would like to be in love with you and I hope I can be. It will take a while to find out—not a few days and certainly not a series of letters. I will wait, then, until summer, and we shall see what happens then.
In the meantime I’ll be here for a while, anyway. This is not a place in which to stay for any length of time. By the time fall rolls around I’ll probably be thinking in terms of going somewhere else. We shall talk about that later.
Write and tell me not only about what you do, but what you think. Above all be honest and don’t kid either of us. As I said before, there is too little time for us to deal in superficialities.
Love,
Hunter
TO THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Thompson’s reply to a New York Times help-wanted advertisement explained his recent firing from the Middletown Daily Record. He never received any response.
March 1, 1959
Middletown, New York
X2787
NY Times
Dear Sir,
This letter is in reference to your “editor wanted” ad in this morning’s Times. If, after reading the rest of this letter, you think we should talk further, you may contact me at 22 Mulberry St., Middletown, New York. Or phone Diamond 2-xxxx, Middletown.
Until this recent week I was a reporter on the Middletown Daily Record. On Thursday I was summarily fired. Since the reasons for my dismissal are a little unusual I think it would be wise for me to outline them here. I find them morbidly amusing, but I think the humor will soon vanish from the situation. I’m told it’s difficult to laugh on an empty stomach.
Several weeks ago I outraged a long-time Record advertiser by sending a meal back to his kitchen for immediate consignment to the garbage can. This consequently resulted in a rather ugly session between me, the advertiser, and the Record’s editor & publisher. The judgment was definitely not in my favor and I was told that my job would henceforth rest on very thin ice.
Several days ago I was instrumental in the looting of an office candy machine. I had put two nickels in the thing without getting anything out of it. I then gave it a severe rattling which rendered the coin slot obsolete. Word got around in the back shop and a “run” on the machine followed almost immediately. The total loss—some $7.35—came out of my paycheck. My popularity soared as far as the back-shop people were concerned, of course, but there were those who viewed the situation with some alarm—notably the managing editor. I was fired the next day.
Although it seems a little ridiculous to g
o into all this, I did so because I doubt very seriously whether the same information will be made available by the Record management in the event I need a reference. Since I was comparatively new on the paper I can understand their course of action to some extent. I want to make it clear, however, that my dismissal was not based on the quality of my work. I urge you, in the event of any confusion on this score, to take any steps you see fit in order to clear this up.
I enclose a résumé and some clippings which I would like very much for you to return. You will find a self-addressed envelope for this purpose. The résumé was done originally for a sportswriting job and is thus heavily slanted in that direction. Although my experience is far more comprehensive than the résumé would seem to indicate, I saw no sense in listing it all for that particular job. Please disregard the reference to the Police Gazette.
All résumés are necessarily superficial and mine is no different. There are other things, however, which may in the long run prove to be far more important than anything included in a résumé. This is true in my case, at any rate.
Some people find it exceedingly difficult to get along with me and I have to choose my jobs very carefully. I have no patience with phonies, hacks, dolts, or obnoxious incompetents and I take some pride in the fact that these people invariably dislike me. I admire perfection or any effort toward it and I would not work for anyone who disagreed with me on this score. This is not to say that I refuse to work with people whom I consider incompetent. It merely means that I consider incompetence something to be overcome, rather than accepted.
It seems a little senseless to carry on in this vein. I think I’ve given you a pretty good picture of myself and, at the same time, I realize only one out of a thousand people would hire me after reading this letter. Right now I’m in no mood to give a damn. Maybe later I’ll become more temperate.
So, until I hear from you,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO ANN FRICK [NOT MAILED]:
Broke, unemployed, and despondent, Thompson revealed why the “Hunterfigure” would never bow to authority of any kind; like a character from The Fountainhead, he would stay true to himself no matter what the consequences.
March 3, 1959
22 Mulberry St.
Middletown, New York
Dear Ann,
You may never see this letter. Certainly you won’t see it for a while. When and if I do mail it there will be another letter with it, telling what will have happened between now and then. By the time you read this, the person who wrote it will be submerged once again beneath the surface of the person you seem to think I am. I’m writing this letter to show you that the other person exists, but I’m going to hold onto it for a while because I don’t want you to ever see that person except at a distance. He is not somebody I’d want to have you with for any length of time, but I think you should know about him just the same, if only in retrospect.
I will make it as short and pointed as possible, so as not to waste my words and your time. The “other person,” of course, is Hunter S. Thompson as he is right now. He has “gone down” again for the umpteenth time, and if he doesn’t come up this time I think this letter will serve as a fitting death rattle. And if he does come up again this letter will be a worthwhile thing to hold on to, for it will serve as a grim reminder that the dirge has sounded once before. In short, if this is the final straw I want it recorded, and if it is not then I want it recorded anyway—as a morale booster for the future, if nothing else.
I was fired last week and I’m presently stranded as high and dry as a man can get. I was given three reasons for my dismissal: 1) the fact that I spent an entire night at work in my sock feet, 2) the fact that I crippled a candy machine in the office with a violent kick after being cheated out of two consecutive nickels, and 3) the fact that one of the Record’s regular advertisers lodged a formal and very vocal protest with the publisher after I sent two meals back to his kitchen and abused him in his own restaurant for the low quality of his meals.
“Your work is good,” they said, “and you have a very deep, very keen mind. But this isn’t Greenwich Village and you seem a little anti-social, a little off-beat. You don’t seem to be very conscious of community relations and we can’t afford to have people like you working for the Record.”
So there you have it, an epitaph for Hunter Thompson. “He was a good lad, but he was a little off-beat.”
And here’s another one for you: “he was right, dead right, as he hustled along (in his own off-beat way), but he’s just as unemployed as if he’d been wrong.”
Well, at any rate, I hope you get the point. I’m sans salary, whether I was right or wrong. I’m convinced, of course, that to play a role or to adjust to fraud is wrong, and I damn well intend to keep right on living the way I think I should.
But right now things look a little bleak. I have no idea what in the hell I’m going to do and I really don’t know where to begin looking. I have enough money to last about two weeks, a huge black Jaguar that eats gas like a mechanical camel, no place to live, and no prospects of a job where the same thing won’t happen again just as soon as they find out I’m “a little off-beat.”
I feel as if life itself is crumbling away beneath my feet and I don’t know whether to jump, or run, or to just stand here and go down, screaming my defiance at the falling debris—as it slowly buries me.
I know I’m right, but I sometimes wonder how important it is to be right—instead of comfortable. I doubt whether this question arises very often in the Tallahassee world, but there may come a day when you have to think about it, too. When you do you will not be the first or the last, just as I am not. The difficulty is not in the question, I think, but in the person who answers it. There are so few people who are strong—or lucky—enough to be right in this lunatic world, and many of the best ones never live to find it out.
This could go on and on, but I think the point has been made already. The Hunterfigure has come to another fork in the road and the question once again is “where do we go from here?” We shall see very soon, of course, for even the Hunterfigure needs food. Something will have been done by the time you get this letter and I want you to keep in mind that it was written at a time of great chaos. Right now, however, I feel as lost as I ever have in my life.
I don’t get this way very often, but I think you should know my downs as well as my ups. The carefree Thompson facade gets very tiresome at times, and I need to have someone with whom I can be honestly confused and lost. I am no more than human and I know that anyone who insists on playing the great game on his own terms is bound to take an occasional beating. It may happen again and that’s why I’m going to send you this letter just as soon as I’m in a position for another fall. If the next one has any effect on you—and it may—I’ll want you to understand what brought it on, why it will be inevitable, and above all, that it has happened before.
If you are frightened by all this, then I think the letter will have served a very necessary purpose. As I said once before, I am real and not a wandering daydream. This side of my personality is just as real as the rest and I think you should know about it. I think, too, that it is equally important that I know your reaction to this letter. Send it to me when you get the time.
Love, Hunty
TO ANN FRICK:
Bearded and content to live in a Catskills cabin writing short stories for the summer, Thompson felt money to be his only pressing concern.
March 25, 1959
Cuddebackville
New York
Dear Ann,
It’s been a long time ’twixt letters, I think, but maybe you’ll understand once you hear what’s been going on up this way. Needless to say, the good ship Hunter is on wild and stormy seas once again.
I was not only fired from the Daily Record, but I’m presently in the midst of a knock-down, drag-out battle with the state employment service over my right as a discriminating human being to send an unpalatable meal back to the kit
chen in a public restaurant. I was fired for 1) being an “oddball,” 2) having a general “contempt for people,” and 3) specifically, for getting into a running battle with one of the Record’s advertisers who owns an Italian restaurant in Middletown. I was, in short, “unable to form a workable concept of community relations.” I also “worked for an entire evening in the newsroom without my shoes,” and destroyed a candy machine in a sudden burst of anger.
All this sounds pretty damned silly, I suppose, but it has some pretty serious implications. First and foremost is the sobering realization that I cannot hold a “normal” job without making drastic alterations in my personality. Stemming from this, of course, is the possibility that I may never hold a “normal” job. This is all well and good as long as I can support myself by writing. If I can’t, however, it poses something of a problem as far as my surviving is concerned. And speaking of survival, I wonder what Mr. Darwin would say to all this.
I’m in a rather odd situation at the moment: except for money, I seem to have everything I need for a perfect summer. I have a house in the woods, totally isolated from all human beings, and I have a huge, black jaguar. I also have a fine young dog named Pilar.3 Everything is fine except that I have not a cent to my name. I’ve managed to exist for about a month in this manner, but I don’t know how much longer it will last. Unless a miracle occurs, I’ll probably have to get a job, at least for a while.
Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 Page 22