Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson
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Lyndon LaRouche was atomized and the Deviate Reverend Jim Bakker was sent to prison for forty-five years for just dabbling in the kind of brazen, low-rent crimes that were apparently taken for granted and pursued with relentless zeal—day and night, 366 days of the year, in full view of the servants and the Secret Service—by the folks who lived in the White House.
Just folks. No different from you or me or the Mitchell brothers. And they never claimed to be anything else, really. Just Good Ol’ Dutch and What’s Her Name, the maniac little sex doll who squawked openly (allegedly) with Frank Sinatra on dim-lit couches in TV studios, where she went constantly to tape public-service announcements about Just Say No.
It was a very wild act in a very fast lane, and I have to admire it for the Heaviness. It is no small thing in some circles to make headlines lewd and shocking enough to bump a new Kennedy/Palm Beach rape case off the front page of the tabloids ... That is Strong ... That is Charles Manson country.
Remember, they laughed at Thomas Edison. And don’t forget that Deep Throat was a box-office hit in the same years that Nancy spent grooming her mongrel stud for the Real Derby, the biggest race of them all . . . and They Won!!! Twice!!!
So, never mind that review we were talking about. The book is a shitrain of old gossip and sleazy little stories that we read a long time ago and never quite believed ... for good or ill.
So what if the former First Lady was a relentless fellatrix with the soul of a Pod and the style of a chicken in heat? She was, in her time, perhaps the highest and finest expression of the American Dream in action ... and that is worth noting. Some people are Born to Win and others are spewed out like tadpoles. This is all ye know and all ye need to know—except that weasels speak English and God is a King Snake, and if Kitty Kelley and Nancy Reagan are what America is all about these days, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
But not here. I am glad to be rid of this book. It is like a bracing dose of ether on Monday Night in a Crack House. The very sight of it fills me with queasiness and shame. To read it and believe that it might be True is to wallow in the depths of personal and professional degradation.
Okay. That’s about it, for now. Never send me a book like this again.
Thanx,
Hunter
Res ipsa loquitur.
__ __ __ __
Laughter in the Dark
In 1991 Hunter, seemingly spontaneously and after a lengthy hiatus from long-form writing, began faxing large chunks of copy—or “pages,” as he referred to them, always “pages”—to the office. I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of these pages, and ritually read them aloud to my boss, Bob Love, and whoever else might gather around. The story that began to emerge was both simple and complex, hilarious and disturbing; essentially, it involved Hunter witnessing a car crash in the Nevada desert and finding that the man driving the car was Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—who at the time was still sitting for his controversial Senate confirmation hearings amidst allegations of sexual harassment. Hunter and “the Judge”—who was traveling with two hookers—essentially fled, and spent the rest of the story locked in a twisted cat-and-mouse game with both each other and the long arm of the law. But to describe what became “Elko” as a story about Clarence Thomas is like calling the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby” a song about a drag race: technically correct, but short on inspiration.
—Corey Seymour
Letter from JSW to HST
October 29, 1991
VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656
Dear Hunter:
Time is running short and I’m getting worried. You have one big insert to write and a couple of transitions and it all has to be done this week.
Please call me asap.
All the best,
Jann
JSW/mm
Letter from HST assistant Deborah Fuller to JSW
2:32 pm
Tuesday 10.29.91
To: Jann
From: HST
OK—HERE ARE THE FIRST 5 PAGES/RAW COPY (OF THE 8 OR 9 PAGES) HUNTER HAS COLLAPSED FROM FATIGUE.
THE OTHER PAGES WILL BE FAXED OVER WITHIN THE HALF HOUR.
Best.
Deborah
Letter from JSW to HST
October 30, 1991
VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656
Dear Hunter:
Get out of the car. Get off the road. I know how you drive. Do the hotel scene. Without this, we don’t have a piece. There are two nights left.
Call me when you get up.
No more driving. Orgy, please.
Best,
Jann
JSW/mm
Letter from JSW to HST
November 1, 1991
VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656
Dear Hunter:
Keep going. It continues to be terrific stuff. You still have to get us to Leach at the trailer court and then, escape from Elko, i.e., the airport farewell, which needs to be pretty brief.
We’re almost home.
Love,
Jann
JSW/mm
Letter from HST to JSW
Friday 11/1/91
Dear Jann,
There is no hope for the satisfied mind. We all know that—but it don’t worry us, eh? Or not me, anyway. No. My problem is a Diseased mind, and a body so wracked with death-germs & festering, backed-up poisons that I can barely speak or talk or even think in a straight line for more than 40 or 50 seconds at a time ... Yes. I am deeply Sick & Wrong in many basic functions. Cazart!
For this reason I must know immediately if the Real Deadline for this Elko piece is NOW or next week or maybe sometime in March, when I expect to be recovered ... I can get it finished & roughly wrapped by Sunday, but that will be a nasty drain on my health & it will also require some Skilled edit/assistance from yr. end. Ho, Ho. As in SUBHEADS, Bridges, Continuity, etc. If you know what I’m saying. Yes. So pls. let me know instantly on this, so I won’t have to destroy what remains of my fragile health for nothing. Please.
Thanks,
Hunter
Letter from JSW to HST
December 13, 1991
VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656
Dear Hunter:
After the last minute, I have decided to go for an Elko cover. Ralph is sending in a portrait of you he has already done for this purpose. We should have it Sunday. If it suits, then it’s a go.
Here are the cover heads. If you can improve them, please do ... but not at any great length.
FEAR AND LOATHING IN ELKO
By Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
A Wild and Ugly Night with Judge Thomas ... Sexual Harassment Then and Now ... A Nasty Christmas Flashback ... A Nation of Jailers . . .
All best,
Jann
JSW/mm
Hope you’re pleased! I am!
Xxx J
Fear and Loathing in Elko
January 23, 1992
Dear Jann,
Goddamn, I wish you were here to enjoy this beautiful weather with me. It is autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown, and the warmth going out of the sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and all the flowers die from freezing.
Oh, God! You should have been with me yesterday when I finished my ham and eggs and knocked back some whiskey and picked up my Weatherby Mark V .300 Magnum and a ball of black opium for dessert and went outside with a fierce kind of joy in my heart because I was Proud to be an A
merican on a day like this. It felt like a goddamn Football Game, Jann—it was like Paradise ... You remember that bliss you felt when we powered down to the Farm and whipped Stanford? Well, it felt like That.
I digress. My fits of Joy are soiled by relentless flashbacks and ghosts too foul to name ... Oh, no, don’t ask Why. You could have been president, Jann, but your road was full of forks, and I think of this when I see the forked horns of these wild animals who dash back and forth on the hillsides while rifles crack in the distance and fine swarthy young men with blood on their hands drive back and forth in the dusk and mournfully call our names . . .
O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again.
Right, and so much for autumn, the trees are diseased and the Animals get in your way and the President is usually guilty and most days are too long anyway ... So never mind my poem. It was wrong from the start. I plagiarized it from an early work of Coleridge and then tried to put my own crude stamp on it, but I failed.
So what? I didn’t want to talk about fucking autumn, anyway. I was just sitting here at dawn on a crisp Sunday morning, waiting for the football games to start and taking a goddamn very brief break from this blizzard of Character Actors and Personal Biographers and sickly Paparazzi that hovers around me these days (they are sleeping now, thank Christ—some even in my own bed). I was sitting here all alone, thinking, for good or ill, about the Good Old Days.
We were Poor, Jann. But we were Happy. Because we knew Tricks. We were Smart. Not Crazy, like they said. (No. They never called us late for dinner, eh?)
Ho, ho. Laughs don’t come cheap these days, do they? The only guy who seems to have any fun in public is Prince Cromwell, my shrewd and humorless neighbor—the one who steals sheep and beats up women, like Mike Tyson.
Who knows why, Jann. Some people are too weird to figure.
You have come a long way from the Bloodthirsty, Beady-eyed news Hawk that you were in days of yore. Maybe you should try reading something besides those goddamn motorcycle magazines—or one of these days you’ll find hair growing in your palms.
Take my word for it. You can only spend so much time “on the throttle,” as it were ... Then the Forces of Evil will take over. Beware . . .
Ah, but that is a different question, for now. Who gives a fuck? We are, after all, Professionals ... But our Problem is not. No. It is the Problem of Everyman. It is Everywhere. The Question is our Wa; the Answer is our Fate ... and the story I am about to tell you is horrible, Jann.
I came suddenly awake, weeping and jabbering and laughing like a loon at the ghost on my TV set ... Judge Clarence Thomas ... Yes, I knew him. But that was a long time ago. Many years, in fact, but I still remember it vividly ... indeed, it has haunted me like a golem, day and night, for many years.
It seemed normal enough, at the time, just another weird rainy night out there on the high desert ... What the hell? We were younger then. Me and the Judge. And all the others, for that matter ... It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days—without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money, or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko when you were lost in a midnight rainstorm—and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California.
There were Laws, but they were not feared. There were Rules, but they were not worshipped ... like Laws and Rules and Cops and Informants are feared and worshipped today.
Like I said: it was a different time. And I know the Judge would tell you the same thing, tonight, if he wanted to tell you the Truth, like I do.
The first time I actually met the Judge was a long time ago, for strange reasons, on a dark and rainy night in Elko, Nevada, when we both ended up in the same sleazy roadside Motel, for no good reason at all ... Good God! What a night!
I almost forgot about it, until I saw him last week on TV ... and then I saw it all over again. The horror! The horror! That night when the road washed out and we all got stuck out there—somewhere near Elko in a place just off the highway, called Endicott’s Motel—and we almost went really Crazy.
It was just after midnight when I first saw the sheep. I was running about eighty-eight or ninety miles an hour in a drenching, blinding rain on U.S. 40 between Winnemucca and Elko with one light out. I was soaking wet from the water that was pouring in through a hole in the front roof of the car, and my fingers were like rotten icicles on the steering wheel.
It was a moonless night and I knew I was hydroplaning, which is dangerous ... My front tires were no longer in touch with the asphalt or anything else. My center of gravity was too high. There was no visibility on the road, none at all. I could have tossed a flat rock a lot farther than I could see in front of me that night through the rain and the ground fog. There is a total understanding, all at once, of how the captain of the Titanic must have felt when he first saw the Iceberg.
And not much different from the hideous feeling that gripped me when the beam of my Long-Reach Super-Halogen headlights picked up what appeared to be a massive rock slide across the highway—right in front of me, blocking the road completely. Big white rocks and round boulders, looming up with no warning in a fog of rising steam or swamp gas . . .
The brakes were useless, the car was wandering. The rear end was coming around. I jammed it down into Low, but it made no difference, so I straightened it out and braced for a crash that would probably kill me. This is It, I thought. This is how it happens—slamming into a pile of rocks at one hundred miles an hour, a sudden brutal death in a fast red car on a moonless night in a rainstorm somewhere on the sleazy outskirts of Elko. I felt vaguely embarrassed, in that long pure instant before I went into the rocks. I remembered Los Lobos and that I wanted to call Maria when I got to Elko . . .
My heart was full of joy as I took the first hit, which was oddly soft and painless. Just a sickening thud, like running over a body, a corpse—or, ye fucking gods, a crippled two-hundred-pound sheep thrashing around in the road.
Yes. These huge white lumps were not boulders. They were sheep. Dead and dying sheep. More and more of them, impossible to miss at this speed, piled up on each other like bodies at the battle of Shiloh. It was like running over wet logs. Horrible, horrible . . .
And then I saw the man—a leaping Human Figure in the glare of my bouncing headlights, waving his arms and yelling, trying to flag me down. I swerved to avoid hitting him, but he seemed not to see me, rushing straight into my headlights like a blind man ... or a monster from Mars with no pulse, covered with blood and hysterical.
It looked like a small black gentleman in a London Fog raincoat, frantic to get my attention. It was so ugly that my brain refused to accept it ... Don’t worry, I thought. This is only an Acid flashback. Be calm. This is not really happening.
I was down to about thirty-five or thirty when I zoomed past the man in the raincoat and bashed the brains out of a struggling sheep, which helped to reduce my speed, as the car went airborne again, then bounced to a shuddering stop just before I hit the smoking, overturned hulk of what looked like a white Cadillac limousine, with people still inside. It was a nightmare. Some fool had crashed into a herd of sheep at high speed and rolled into the desert like an eggbeater.
We were able to laugh about it later, but it took a while to calm down. What the hell? It was only an accident. The Judge had murdered some range animals.
So what? Only a racist maniac would run sheep on the highway in a thunderstorm at this hour of the night. “Fuck those people!” he snapped, as I took off toward Elko with him and his two female companions tucked safely into my car, which had suffered major cosmetic damage but nothing serious. “The
y’ll never get away with this Negligence!” he said. “We’ll eat them alive in court. Take my word for it. We are about to become joint owners of a huge Nevada sheep ranch.”
Wonderful, I thought. But meanwhile we were leaving the scene of a very conspicuous wreck that was sure to be noticed by morning, and the whole front of my car was gummed up with wool and sheep’s blood. There was no way I could leave it parked on the street in Elko, where I’d planned to stop for the night (maybe two or three nights, for that matter) to visit with some old friends who were attending a kind of Appalachian Conference for sex-film distributors at the legendary Commercial Hotel . . .
Never mind that, I thought. Things have changed. I was suddenly a Victim of Tragedy—injured and on the run, far out in the middle of sheep country—one thousand miles from home with a car full of obviously criminal hitchhikers who were spattered with blood and cursing angrily at each other as we zoomed through the blinding monsoon.
Jesus, I thought. Who are these people?
Who indeed? They seemed not to notice me. The two women fighting in the backseat were hookers. No doubt about that. I had seen them in my headlights as they struggled in the wreckage of the Cadillac, which had killed about sixty sheep. They were desperate with Fear and Confusion, crawling wildly across the sheep ... One was a tall black girl in a white minidress ... and now she was screaming at the other one, a young blond white woman. They were both drunk. Sounds of struggle came from the backseat. “Get your hands off me, Bitch!” Then a voice cried out: “Help me, Judge! Help! She’s killing me!”
What? I thought. Judge? Then she said it again, and a horrible chill went through me . . .Judge? No. That would be over the line. Unacceptable.
He lunged over the seat and whacked their heads together. “Shut up!” he screamed. “Where are your fucking manners?”
He went over the seat again. He grabbed one of them by the hair. “God damn you,” he screamed. “Don’t embarrass this man. He saved our lives. We owe him respect—not this goddamned squalling around like whores.”