Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Where indeed? They had me dead to rights. I tried to save face by arguing that political science has never conclusively proven that music and politics can’t mix—but when they asked for my evidence I said, “Shucks, you’re probably right. Why shit in your own bed, eh?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I didn’t really want the goddamn things, anyway.”

  Which was true. Getting barred from the White House is like being blackballed at the Playboy Club. There are definite advantages to having your name on the Ugly List in places like that.

  The Campaign Trail: The Banshee Screams in Florida

  April 13, 1972

  The whistle-stops were uneventful until his noon arrival in Miami, where Yippie activist Jerry Rubin and another man heckled and interrupted him repeatedly. The Senator at one point tried to answer Rubin’s charges that he had once been a hawk on (Vietnam) war measures. He acknowledged that he had made a mistake, as did many other senators in those times, but Rubin did not let him finish.

  Muskie ultimately wound up scolding Rubin and fellow heckler Peter Sheridan, who had boarded the train in West Palm Beach with press credentials apparently obtained from Rolling Stone’s Washington correspondent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

  —Miami Herald, 2/20/72

  Chitty and the Boohoo

  This incident has haunted me ever since it smacked me in the eyes one peaceful Sunday morning a few weeks ago as I sat on the balmy screened porch of the National Affairs Suite here in the Royal Biscayne Hotel. I was slicing up grapefruit and sipping a pot of coffee while perusing the political page of the Herald when I suddenly saw my name in the middle of a story on Ed Muskie’s “Sunshine Special” campaign train from Jacksonville to Miami.

  Several quick phone calls confirmed that something very ugly had happened on that train, and that I was being blamed for it. A New York reporter assigned to the Muskie camp warned me to “stay clear of this place . . . they’re really hot about it. They’ve pulled your pass for good.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “That’s one more summer that I have an excuse to avoid. But what happened? Why do they blame me?”

  “Jesus Christ!” he said. “That crazy sonofabitch got on the train wearing your press badge and went completely crazy. He drank about ten martinis before the train even got moving, then he started abusing people. He cornered some poor bastard from one of the Washington papers and called him a Greasy Faggot and a Community Buttfucker . . . then he started pushing him around and saying he was going to throw him off the train at the next bridge . . . we couldn’t believe it was happening. He scared one of the network TV guys so badly that he locked himself in one of the lavatories for the rest of the trip.”

  “Jesus, I hate to hear this,” I said. “But nobody really thought it was me, did they?”

  “Hell, yes, they did,” he replied. “The only people on the train who even know what you look like were me and—and—.” (He mentioned several reporters whose names needn’t be listed here.) “But everybody else just looked at that ID badge he was wearing, and pretty soon the word was all the way back to Muskie’s car that some thug named Thompson from a thing called Rolling Stone was tearing the train apart. They were going to send Rosey Grier up to deal with you, but Dick Stewart [Muskie’s press secretary] said it wouldn’t look good to have a three-hundred-pound bodyguard beating up journalists on the campaign train.”

  “That’s typical Muskie-staff thinking,” I said. “They’ve done everything else wrong; why balk at stomping a reporter?”

  He laughed. “Actually,” he said, “the rumor was that you’d eaten a lot of LSD and gone wild—that you couldn’t help yourself.”

  “What do you mean, me?” I said. “I wasn’t even on that goddamn train. The Muskie people deliberately didn’t wake me up in West Palm Beach. They didn’t like my attitude from the day before. My friend from the University of Florida newspaper said he heard them talking about it down in the lobby when they were checking off the press list and waking up all the others.”

  “Yeah, I heard some of that talk,” he said. “Somebody said you seemed very negative.”

  “I was,” I said. “That was one of the most degrading political experiences I’ve ever been subjected to.”

  “That’s what the Muskie people said about your friend,” he replied. “Abusing reporters is one thing: hell, we’re all used to that—but about halfway to Miami I saw him reach over the bar and grab a whole bottle of gin off the rack. Then he began wandering from car to car, drinking out of the bottle and getting after those poor goddamn girls. That’s when it really got bad.”

  “What girls?” I said.

  “The ones in those little red, white, and blue hotpants outfits,” he replied. “All those so-called ‘Muskie volunteers’ from Jacksonville Junior College, or whatever . . .”

  “You mean the barmaids? The ones with the straw boaters?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The cheerleaders. Well, they went all to goddamn pieces when your friend started manhandling them. Every time he’d come into a car the girls would run out the door at the other end. But every once in a while he’d catch one by an arm or a leg and start yelling stuff like ‘Now I gotcha, you little beauty! Come on over here and sit on poppa’s face!’ ”

  “Jesus!” I said. “Why didn’t they just put him off the train?”

  “How? You don’t stop a chartered Amtrak train on a main line just because of a drunken passenger. What if Muskie had ordered an emergency stop and we’d been rammed by a freight train? No presidential candidate would risk a thing like that.”

  I could see the headlines in every paper from Key West to Seattle:

  Muskie Campaign Train Collision Kills 34;

  Demo Candidate Blames “Crazy Journalist”

  “Anyway,” he said, “we were running late for that big rally at the station in Miami—so the Muskie guys figured it was better to just endure the crazy sonofabitch, rather than cause a violent scene on a train full of bored reporters. Christ, the train was loaded with network TV crews, all of them bitching about how Muskie wasn’t doing anything worth putting on the air . . .” He laughed. “Hell, yes, we all would have loved a big brawl on the train. Personally, I was bored stupid. I didn’t get a quote worth filing out of the whole goddamn trip.” He laughed again. “Actually, Muskie deserved that guy. He was a goddamn nightmare to be trapped on a train with, but at least he wasn’t dull. Nobody was dozing off like they did on Friday. Hell, there was no way to get away from that brute! All you could do was keep moving and hope he wouldn’t get hold of you.”

  Both the Washington Star and Women’s Wear Daily reported essentially the same tale: a genuinely savage person had boarded the train in West Palm Beach, using a fraudulent press pass, then ran amok in the lounge car—getting in “several fistfights” and finally “heckling the Senator unmercifully” when the train pulled into Miami and Muskie went out on the caboose platform to deliver what was supposed to have been the climactic speech of his triumphant whistle-stop tour.

  It was at this point—according to press reports both published & otherwise—that my alleged friend, calling himself “Peter Sheridan,” cranked up his act to a level that caused Senator Muskie to “cut short his remarks.”

  When the “Sunshine Special” pulled into the station at Miami, “Sheridan” reeled off the train and took a position on the tracks just below Muskie’s caboose platform, where he spent the next half hour causing the senator a hellish amount of grief—along with Jerry Rubin, who also showed up at the station to ask Muskie what had caused him to change his mind about supporting the War in Vietnam.

  Rubin had been in Miami for several weeks, making frequent appearances on local TV to warn that “Ten Thousand naked hippies” would be among those attending the Democratic National Convention at Miami Beach in July. “We will march to the convention center,” he announced, “but there will be no violence—at least not by us.”

  To questions regarding his p
resence in Florida, Rubin said he “decided to move down here, because of the climate,” and that he was also registered to vote in Florida—as a Republican. Contrary to the rancid suspicions of the Muskie staff people, Sheridan didn’t even recognize Rubin, and I hadn’t seen him since the Counter-Inaugural Ball, which ran opposite Nixon’s inauguration in 1969.

  When Rubin showed up at the train station that Saturday afternoon to hassle Muskie, the senator from Maine was apparently the only person in the crowd who didn’t know who he was. His first response to Rubin’s heckling was, “Shut up, young man—I’m talking.”

  “You’re not a damn bit different from Nixon,” Rubin shouted back . . .

  And it was at this point, according to compiled press reports and a firsthand account by Monte Chitty of the University of Florida Alligator, that Muskie seemed to lose his balance and fall back from the rail.

  What happened, according to Chitty, was that “the Boohoo reached up from the track and got hold of Muskie’s pants leg—waving an empty glass through the bars around the caboose platform with his other hand and screaming: ‘Get your lying ass back inside and make me another drink, you worthless old fart!’”

  “It was really embarrassing,” Chitty told me later on the phone. “The Boohoo kept reaching up and grabbing Muskie’s legs, yelling for more gin . . . Muskie tried to ignore him, but the Boohoo kept after him and after awhile it got so bad that even Rubin backed off. He was acting just like he did the night before—only six times worse.”

  “The Boohoo,” of course, was the same vicious drunkard who had terrorized the Muskie train all the way from Palm Beach, and he was still wearing a press badge that said “Hunter S. Thompson—Rolling Stone.”

  Chitty and I had met him the night before, about two thirty, in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where the press party was quartered. We were heading out to the street to look for a sandwich shop, feeling a trifle bent & very hungry . . . and as we passed the front desk, here was this huge wild-eyed monster, bellowing at the desk clerk about “All this chicken-shit” and “All these pansies around here trying to suck up to Muskie” and “Where the fuck can a man go in this town to have a good time, anyway?”

  A scene like that wouldn’t normally interest me, but there was something very special about this one—something abnormally crazy in the way he was talking. There was something very familiar about it. I listened for a moment and then recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap—a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener.

  This is not the kind of thing you expect to hear in the lobby of a Ramada Inn, and especially not in West Palm Beach—so I knew we had no choice but to take this man along with us.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said. “At this hour of the night I’ll fuck around with just about anybody.”

  He had just got out of jail, he explained as we walked five or six blocks through the warm midnight streets to a twenty-four-hour hamburger place called the Copper Penny. Fifteen days for vagrancy, and when he’d hit the bricks today around four he just happened to pick up a newspaper and see that Ed Muskie was in town . . . and since he had this friend who “worked up-top,” he said, for Big Ed . . . well, he figured he’d just drift over to the Ramada Inn and say hello.

  But he couldn’t find his friend. “Just a bunch of pansies from CBS and the New York Times, hanging around the bar,” he said. “I took a few bites out of that crowd and they faded fast—just ran off like curs. But what the shit can you expect from people like that? Just a bunch of low-life ass-kissers who get paid for hanging around with politicians.”

  Just for the quick hell of it, I’d like to explain, or at least insist—despite massive evidence to the contrary—that this geek we met in the lobby of the Ramada Inn and who scared the shit out of everybody when he got on Muskie’s train the next day for the run from Palm Beach to Miami, was in fact an excellent person, with a rare sense of humor that unfortunately failed to mesh, for various reasons, with the prevailing humors on Muskie’s “Sunshine Special.”

  Just how he came to be wearing my press badge is a long and tangled story, but as I recall it had something to do with the fact that “Sheridan” convinced me that he was one of the original ranking Boohoos of the Neo-American Church and also that he was able to rattle off all kinds of obscure and pithy tales about his experiences in places like Millbrook, the Hog Farm, La Honda, and Mike’s Pool Hall in San Francisco . . .

  . . . which would not have meant a hell of a lot if he hadn’t also been an obvious aristocrat of the Freak Kingdom. There was no doubt about it. This bastard was a serious, king-hell crazy. He had that rare weird electricity about him—that extremely wild & heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving “normally.”

  All of which is basic to any understanding of what happened on the Muskie campaign train—and which also explains why his “up-top friend” (who WWD later identified as Rich Evans, one of Muskie’s chief tacticians) was not immediately available to take care of his old buddy, Pete Sheridan—who was fresh out of jail on a vagrancy rap, with no place to sleep and no transportation down to Miami except the prospect of hanging his thumb out in the road and hoping for a ride.

  “To hell with that,” I said. “Take the train with us. It’s the presidential express—a straight shot into Miami and all the free booze you can drink. Why not? Any friend of Rich’s is a friend of Ed’s, I guess—but since you can’t find Rich at this hour of the night, and since the train is leaving in two hours, well, perhaps you should borrow this little orange press ticket, just until you get aboard.”

  “I think you’re right,” he said.

  “I am,” I replied. “And besides, I paid thirty dollars for the goddamn thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life.”

  He smiled, accepting the card. “Maybe I can put it to better use,” he said.

  Which was true. He did—and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps, for allowing my “credentials” to fall into foreign hands. There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster “Sheridan”—and also with Jerry Rubin—to “sabotage” Muskie’s wind-up gig in Miami, and that “Sheridan’s” beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully laid plot by me, Rubin, and the International Yippie brain trust.

  This theory was apparently concocted by Muskie staffers, who told other reporters that they had known all along that I was up to something rotten—but they tried to give me a break, and now look what I done to ’em. Planted a human bomb on the train.

  A story like this one is very hard to spike, because people involved in a presidential campaign are so conditioned to devious behavior on all fronts—including the press—that something like that fiasco in the Miami train station is just about impossible for them to understand except in terms of a conspiracy. Why else, after all, would I give my credential to some booze-maddened jailbird?

  Well . . . why indeed?

  Several reasons come quickly to mind, but the main one could only be understood by somebody who has spent twelve hours on a train with Ed Muskie and his people, doing whistle-stop speeches through central Florida.

  We left Jacksonville around nine, after Muskie addressed several busloads of black teenagers and some middle-aged ladies from one of the local union halls who came down to the station to hear Senator Muskie say, “It’s time for the good people of America to get together behind somebody they can trust—namely me.”

  After that, we went down to Delano—about a two-hour run—where Muskie addressed a crowd of about two hundred white teenagers who’d been let out of school to hear the candidate say, “It’s about time the good people of America got together behind somebody they can trust—namely me.”

  And then we eased down the tracks to Sebring, where a feverish throng of about 150 senior citizens were on hand to greet th
e Man from Maine and pick up his finely honed message. As the train rolled into the station, Roosevelt Grier emerged from the caboose and attempted to lead the crowd through a few stanzas of “Let the Sunshine In.”

  Then the candidate emerged, acknowledging Grier’s applause and smiling for the TV cameramen who had been let off a hundred yards up the track so they could get ahead of the train and set up . . . in order to film Muskie socking it to the crowd about how “It’s about time we good people, etc., etc. . . .”

  Meanwhile, the Muskie girls—looking very snappy in their tricolored pre-war bunny suits—were mingling with the folks; saying cheerful things and handing out red, white, and blue buttons that said “Trust Muskie” and “Believe Muskie.”

  Meanwhile, back on the train, a goodly chunk of the press roster were over the hump into serious boozing. A few had already filed, but most had scanned the prepared text of Big Ed’s “whistlestop speech” and said to hell with it. Now, as the train headed south again, the Muskie girls were passing out sandwiches and O. B. McClinton, “the Black Irishman of Country Music,” was trying to lure people into the lounge car for a “singalong thing.”

  It took awhile, but they finally collected a crowd. Then one of Muskie’s college-type staffers took charge. He told the Black Irishman what to play, cued the other staff people, then launched into about nineteen straight choruses of Big Ed’s newest campaign song: “He’s got the whole state of Florida . . . In his hands . . .”

  I left at that point. The scene was pure Nixon—so much like a pep rally at a Young Republican Club that I was reminded of a conversation I’d had earlier with a reporter from Atlanta. “You know,” he said, “it’s taken me half the goddamn day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people.” He nodded toward a group of clean-cut young Muskie staffers at the other end of the car. “I’ve covered a lot of Democratic campaigns,” he continued, “but I’ve never felt out of place before—never personally uncomfortable with the people.”