That’s about it for now. Let me know quick if there’s an article sale in this trial. And don’t forget the Jack London–Rustic piece.14 If you can dig up even rumor of good news, send it along. I feel myself going down the tube.
Sincerely,
Hunter
TO ALLEN GINSBERG:
Ginsberg granted Thompson permission to use his poem “To the Angels” in his motorcycle book.
June 28, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Dear Allen—
It looks like my Hell’s Angels book will finally be published this fall and I’ve tentatively included your poem, “To the Angels,” which I got from that copy of the Berkeley Barb you gave me one night last winter when I boomed into your Fell St. apartment in a jabbering pill frenzy.
Jim Silberman, my editor at Random House, was out here last week and I told him that, although I’ve laced your poem into the manuscript, I still felt we needed more formal permission from you than a 5 a.m. gift of the Berkeley Barb. I very much want the poem in the book: it gives another dimension to that whole Kesey-VDC[Vietnam Day Committee]-Angels scene that we were both a part of. I can’t possibly pay you for the poem unless you want an IOU that will only be good if the book sells. Right now I’m trying to sell my bike for money to move into a new apt. The Chinese evicted me from this one last week, mainly because the neighbors reported it as a Hell’s Angels hideout.
Anyway, I’m stone broke and desperate, which means I can’t pay you anything for use of the poem. I think, however, that Random House can and will. Silberman seems like a decent sort, and he speaks well of you. But when I told him we should ask you before using the poem he copped out and said I should write the letter.
So this is the letter. And the message is to contact Silberman and tell him what you want for using the poem. I think you should get something and if I had any money I’d give it to you, but I honestly don’t. If you want an IOU, let me know and I’ll sign a document promising you any reasonable amount, to come out of my royalties on the book, if any. But if I were you I’d nail Silberman for something definite. He seems malleable and I think he’d be a bit awed if you called up and said, “This is The Man and I want cash.”
Try to let me know something—or contact Silberman—as soon as possible. Until I hear something I’ll keep the entire poem (the Barb version) in the manuscript, pending some word from you. The final revisions are done and a lot of the original zap is gone from the book, but there are parts of it I think you might like. I’ll have them send you a copy. It’s dawn here and in a few hours I’ll ride up to Santa Rosa for the rape trial. Terry, Tiny, Marvin and Little Magoo are going through what amounts to a witchcraft trial. If you have any rich friends who might hire a lawyer for them, let me know quick.
Thanks—
Hunter S. Thompson
TO MAX SCHERR, EDITOR, BERKELEY BARB:
Thompson had read an article in Scherr’s magazine that said the best thing to do if pulled over while driving was to hand the police officer your driver’s license through a slit in your car window. Thompson tried it on a California Highway Patrolman with near-disastrous results.
July 20, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Max Scherr
Editor, Berkeley Barb
Dear Mr. Scherr:
The recent Barb article on Western Union prompts me to write a letter I’ve been meaning to send for many weeks—or ever since I got arrested while trying to follow some rules of behavior laid down by a contributor (several months ago), who spoke knowingly of what police could and could not do when dealing with a suspected traffic violator.
First, the Western Union thing, which reminded me of my own very similar experience: One dawn several months ago—after a long night at the typewriter—I received the Chronicle from the delivery boy and went into a rage upon reading some front-page statement by [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara. (I forget which one it was, but that hardly matters.) In my strung-out condition I grabbed up the phone and told the Western Union operator I wanted to send a “public service message” to the president, a service they advertise at 85 cents per fifteen-word message. I gave the operator the following message:
FIRE MCNAMARA AT ONCE HE IS A LYING BLOODTHIRSTY BEAST.
This did not pass, and my call was quickly transferred to a supervisor, who also refused to have the message sent. I persisted, and was passed up the line to the Mojo Jefe, who tried to be reasonable and said he would pass everything except the words “lying,” “bloodthirsty” and “beast.” He seemed to feel I could find adequate synonyms, but I insisted on the original wording and the message was killed.
I managed to send it later that day, however, by calling it in to an operator I’d come to know pretty well in the course of sending frequent and lengthy press messages. At the time I was patronizing Western Union two or three times a week, frequently to the tune of 1500 and 200 words a crack. So my operator sent the message without comment—but when I got the bill it was slightly more than $3.00, and not the 85 cents as advertised. I have, of course, refused to pay for it.
The moral of that story, I guess, is “Always exploit your contacts instead of making a frontal assault.” Which is not much of a moral, in any league.
The second incident, having to do with the California Highway Patrol, is less instructive. I had read the piece by your contributor—who cited some press credentials and experience, as I recall—and one of the points that stuck in my mind had to do with the (victim’s) legal right to remain in his car and roll down his window only far enough to pass his driver’s license out to the “investigating officer.” This struck me as a hell of an improvement over my usual technique of leaping out of the car and getting as far away from it as possible, hoping to keep the cops away from anything that might be incriminating. I had my first chance to try your contributor’s method last spring, on the northern outskirts of Gilroy about 2:00 a.m. on a weekday night.
About a week earlier I had finished a book (on the Hell’s Angels, scheduled this fall by Random House) and I felt that I needed about a week of total degeneration to cool out my system. To this end I went clown to Big Sur and Monterey and filled my body with every variety of booze and drug available to modern man. For six or seven days I ran happily amok—spending money, sitting in baths, and futilely hunting wild boar with a .44 Magnum revolver. At one point I gave my car away to a man who paid $25 for the privilege of pushing it off a 400-foot cliff.
So it was, at the end of my visit among old friends and haunts, that I had to buy another car to return to San Francisco. One Friday afternoon I bought a Saab and started back to the city just before midnight. The debris of my cooling out was heaped on both seats of the new car.
At Gilroy, on 101, I noticed a CHP car behind me and very carefully stashed a tall metal cup of bourbon and ice I was drinking, easing it between the seats and onto the floor in back. The CHP car followed me for about a minute, then dropped back to trail me again. I knew something ugly was happening and drove with extreme caution and five miles under the speed limit. Despite this, the CHP car finally pulled me over with the traditional flashing light.
But I knew my rights and I was relatively straight. Instead of getting out of the car I sat tight and reached into my pocket for my license, which I intended to pass out through the small opening next to my head. I watched the officer approach and reached up to hand him my license.
At that instant the right hand door flew open and I was faced with a cop, a flashlight and the black hole of a .38 Special. At almost the same time the left door came open and I was pulled out of the car. Both officers got into it: one sat in the driver’s seat and the other made a methodical search of everything from the glove compartment to my shaving kit. I watched from outside and finally said, “You can’t do this—it’s illegal search and seizure.”
The cop in the driver’s seat looked up and gave me a nice, two-years-of-college CHP
smile and replied: “Yeah, but we’re doing it, aren’t we?” And they kept on rooting through the car while I stood on the highway and cursed the bastard who wrote that bullshit about staying in your car and passing your license out through a slit.
They found two bottles of bourbon, one which I’d brought down from San Francisco a week earlier and had completely forgotten about. The other was a quart I’d bought earlier that night for $6.80 and which was only an inch away from being entirely full. They found the booze almost by accident, in the course of pushing clothes and baggage around to get at small crannies.
After ten minutes of searching they gave up on the Dope angle and came out to talk to me. The press cards in my driver’s license holder changed their attitude considerably. It was the friendly old CHP again, reluctantly doing their duty and tagging me for having “unsealed containers” in my car. One of the two, who had earlier referred to the Saab as a “pile of shit,” showed new interest in its handling characteristics. When I asked why they’d searched it so viciously they explained that more and more people, these days, are coming out of innocent-looking cars with guns blazing. They were worried that I might be armed and drunk.
Which I was, but they never noticed. The .44 Magnum was fully loaded in a leather bag on the back seat and my tall tin cup of straight booze and ice was sitting on the floor behind my seat. But they missed them both. They were so intent on going through my shaving kit that they overlooked a huge, loaded revolver with an eight-and-three-quarter-inch barrel, sitting in plain view in a holster on the back seat. And this dangerous possibility, they said, was precisely what made the search necessary. If I’d had the inclination I could have easily shot them both as they walked back to their car, seized their citation book, and gone quietly on my way. We were stopped on a pretty empty stretch of highway and anything that happened out there would have been a very private thing.
This is certainly one of the keys to their action. They had a victim with no witnesses in a strange-looking beatnik car that was probably full of Dope. When I asked why they pulled me over in the first place they said it was because I had “amber tail-lights,” instead of the mandatory red. The incident cost me a $29 fine, a nearly full quart of bourbon, and the cancellation of my liability insurance. I ignored the ticket for “amber tail-lights” and never heard anything about it.
The moral of that story is hazy. Since then, however, I have kept my car doors locked when traveling on any highway and the next time I get stopped I’ll get out of the car as fast as I can. Regardless of what the law says, to sit there and defy two meat-hungry cops is a form of masochism. It’s like the man said: “Yeah, but we’re doing it, aren’t we?”
They were, and they did, and unless I’d had the instincts of a cop-killer there was damn little I could do about it. When I told my attorney I wanted to go to court and protest the $29 fine he advised me to pay it and keep quiet. “Don’t go near that goddamn court,” he said. “Those cow-town judges can put you away for six months for having an open (unsealed) container (of booze) in your car—you’ll go to jail for sure if you start raising hell in a courtroom.”
And that’s about the way it is. The only lesson to be learned from it is one that people who’ve dealt with cops should have learned a long time ago: your legal rights are contingent on a whole bag of factors that vary from one situation to another. But that’s too broad a thing to face right now; the point of this screed is the difference between legal rights and actual rights. A cop with a gun on a midnight highway is his own law, and he knows it. If he violates any “individual rights” he can be turned around, but only with the help of a very expensive or very dedicated attorney. There are also time and nuisance factors to consider, along with the baleful necessity of avoiding the offended cop’s turf for the rest of your natural born life.
Well, that’s about it. This letter has been sitting in the typewriter for several days and I want to get it out of the way. Feel free to use it any way you want—or to not use it at all—but if I get arrested for anything that appears in the Barb over my signature I may be forced to claim the whole thing was a typo. My original intent was to make available the doubtless benefits of my experience on two fronts you’ve already opened. But I’m not sure the letter is as clear as it might be. I could wrap it all up in a cogent little nut of advice, but I have to live in this state a while longer so I’ll keep that for later.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
P.S. I am writing a piece now for The Nation, tentatively titled “California, The Progressive Penal Colony,” and I’m looking around for examples and/or indications of creeping police-statism. If you have one or two you’d like to recount, maybe we can get together for a beer some afternoon and exchange atrocity stories. Give a ring if you ever get over this way. I’ll do the same.
TO BANK OF ASPEN:
August 16, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Gentlemen:
I cannot tolerate the horrifying color combination of the checks and check-holder you sent me. Nor can I countenance the flagrant disregard of my proper address, which is simply “Owl House.” No more, no less. Those people in Kansas City had the gall to add “San Francisco, California,” as you can see.
As for colors, these (this sick red and yellow) would only be displayed by a fag with mononucleosis. I think I’ll have to have a black check-holder, since there aren’t many shades of that, and I can’t easily go wrong in ordering it. As for the checks, these people obviously have decent colors: witness the bright red on the box that contains the checks, or both the red and the blue on the mailing labels. Hell, if worst comes to worst, I’d prefer those weird-looking blue checks that you give away. As a matter of fact that’s what I’ll be using until these Kansas City pastel-people send me something decent. Nor will I have any zip codes on my checks. What kind of swinish outfit are you dealing with? If all they have is this sick, pastel, zip-code garbage, to hell with them, and send me some of those regular Bank of Aspen checks.
Thanks,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO CAREY MCWILLIAMS, THE NATION:
Thompsons landlord, Moon Fay Ng, had finally forced him to vacate 318 Parnassus after a series of damaging Hell’s Angels parties. He then prepared to move back to Aspen, Colorado, despite a wave of articles characterizing the resort town as a playground for the rich.
August 20, 1966
230 Grattan
San Francisco
Dear Carey—
I am finally working on that article about California: The Progressive Penal Colony that I mentioned weeks and/or months ago. “Minor revisions” on the Hell’s Angels book turned into a nightmare of long haggling and desperate work, which kept me from working on anything else and dropped me so far into the financial pits that I was evicted from my other apartment. I have not yet begun to recover and plan to flee the state on September 15, but before I go I want to do this article.
If you no longer want it or if you have something similar on order, let me know so I can aim it elsewhere. My subscription to The Nation was canceled a few weeks ago, along with all my other subscriptions and all my local credit, so for all I know you’ve already published something similar.
From here I am going to Aspen, and then—if the book comes out on time—to New York. I took considerable issue, by the way, with your recent piece on Aspen. The New Republic ran a similar attack about two years ago and I disagreed with that, too. When I lived in Woody Creek my neighbors were too goddamn poor to build gingerbread gables on their houses or brass handles on their doors. They were worried about the collapsing beef-cattle market and the fact that speculators from “the east” (and Los Angeles) were buying up all the grazing land. They were not real concerned about dressing up their homes to suit the notions of city planners working for foundations and architecture critics traveling on expense accounts. The rotten tavern that your man mentioned is the only place in Aspen where the second-generation locals
can afford to eat … and when I lived there it was one of the two places where I could afford to drink. (The other is now gone, converted to an expensive steak house where no writer’s foot will ever tread unless he has come to town by invitation of the incredibly (almost viciously) pompous Aspen Institute or the Writer’s Workshop.) If all the houses in Aspen were “refinished” to suit the taste of visiting New Yorkers I couldn’t possibly live there. I couldn’t even afford the weekly painting, much less the rent. Hopefully you haven’t been in New York so long that you think of the rest of the country as a potential resort (well worth the expense) for people who spend most of their lives in concrete cubicles. Well, this is a rambling letter and not entirely coherent, but at least it raises a point. I’ll try to expand on it later. Sincerely—
Hunter S. Thompson
TO CAREY MCWILLIAMS, THE NATION:
Going through some old papers, Thompson came across what he had written November 22, 1963, upon hearing the news of JFK’s assassination. As the National Observer had not published any of it, he sent it now for McWilliams’s consideration.
August 21, 1966
230 Grattan
San Francisco
Dear Carey:
In re: Aspen, here’s a thing I filed for the Observer (National) on the evening of Kennedy’s death. They didn’t use it, so if you can make any use of it there will be no problem about “rights,” etc.
I was just going through my old articles and I find, to my general despair, that most of the best things I wrote were never published. This is one of them … although I’m not sure the writing is so good that it’s held up over the years, like Wendell Berry’s stuff.15 But in coming on it by accident in my heap of old articles I felt a new and more painful sense of perspective than I did on the day it happened. Then, it was only speculation … but now, after three years of Johnson, I have a better, deeper idea of that “sense of loss” that Berry mentioned in his poem. The thing that interests me about this little piece, though, is that it was written within hours after Kennedy’s death … but the few quoted comments contain the seeds of that doomed and busted sensation that has only become coherent in the wake of Johnson’s evil, truthless croaking above the rubble of our dead possibilities.
Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 Page 74