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

by Hunter S. Thompson

  “I can’t believe it,” said a man wearing Burberry who introduced himself as the president of the Sands Point Polo Club. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly; it’s an outrage. He owns the Garden City Hotel. He was an eight goaler in his day, you know.”

  Whoops, I thought, get out of here. My life was about to turn weird. These heinous charges against Harriman confirmed my worst fears. I knew he was guilty; there was no doubt in my mind about that, but I knew I couldn’t just flee and turn my back on him. He was good people, and he almost seemed like a friend . . . He was a violent, murdering pervert who followed children at night on the beach, and everything he said raised disturbing questions—but I am, after all, the Founding Father of the Fourth Amendment Foundation, and I had access to the finest criminal lawyers in the world. It was the least I could do for Harriman, and I decided to do it at once. I was already late for our victory celebration in Amityville, but this was a professional emergency. I flogged the Lincoln back to the hotel with no regard for the speed limit and rushed upstairs to the suite, where I found Tobias working the telephones. “Yes,” he said quickly, “it’s true. They snagged him for Murder 1. I’m trying to find out where they took him.”

  “Call Goldstein immediately and do whatever he says. I have to run out to some Mexican place in Amityville for dinner with Doug and my homeboys. This is a night for the ages, Tobias, and I refuse to let Harriman spoil it. We’ll have him out by dawn—even if he’s guilty.”

  Then I got back on that goddamn filthy Long Island Expressway and sank into serious thinking. It was another wet night on the island. I tried to relax and act normal. What the hell? I thought. It’s only rock & roll.

  VI

  Late Sunday night after our victory party in Amityville, I got lost driving back to the hotel with the Gracida brothers and two booze-maddened girls. All four of them were jammed into the backseat of the Lincoln, which made me nervous. They paid no attention to me, as if I were some kind of commercial chauffeur. There were sounds of whispering and struggling coming from the backseat, but I tried to ignore it. I turned up the radio volume and ate my last ball of hashish.

  We had been on the road for more than an hour when I realized I was hopelessly lost. I asked for help, but nobody answered. Finally I pulled into a 7-Eleven store and left the car with its lights on and the engine running. None of my backseat people seemed to notice as I got out of the car and walked across the parking lot and got into a waiting taxicab. Fuck those people, I thought. Let them fend for themselves.

  On my way back to the hotel, I spoke to the intensely silent driver about Gatsby, and I asked him if he knew where his house was.

  “I know nothing,” he snapped. “I speak no English.”

  I sagged and fell back on the seat. I had no money; in fact, I had given it all to Tobias when I sent him to look for Harriman. I reached into my dinner jacket and pulled out my .380 Walther PPK. Maybe I should just shoot this bastard in the back of the head, I thought. But I soon got a grip on myself. Yes, I thought, I could do that, but it would be wrong. I knocked sharply on the bulletproof window between us. “Go fast,” I yelled. “I am sick! Take me to the Garden City Hotel. Now!”

  He seemed to understand, and we both relaxed, but it was still a long way to the hotel. Wonderful, I thought. I need some time to think. I had feelings of terrible foreboding, and I wanted to flee immediately. Long Island had broken my spirit. It is an island of poison gas surrounded by a sea of garbage, and I feared I was becoming a part of it. The time had come. The jig was up. Ten days in the flashy core of Long Island had been like ten weeks on a burning garbage scow.

  Even the fabled Garden City Hotel had lost its magic for me, and I was deeply afraid of having to wake up there one morning all alone after the polo people were gone. Next week’s crowd would be different. The events board in the lobby said the Critical Care Associates were coming in, along with a regional convention of lingerie and rubber merchants. I was not even tempted. It was time to leave—before something terrible happened.

  The hotel lobby was empty when I came in. There was nobody behind the reception desk. On my way to the elevators, I noticed that the lights were still on in the Polo Lounge, so I decided to stop for a nightcap and see what I could find out from Hugo. I knew he hated Harriman and would be eager to pass along any vile gossip about him, especially to me. But Hugo was nowhere in sight, and when I strummed the glass rack for service, an unfamiliar face emerged from the kitchen and said he was the new bartender.

  “Where is Hugo?” I asked him. “I want to speak with him immediately.”

  He stiffened and backed away. “Who wants to know?” he asked nervously.

  “Me,” I said. “I’m his family doctor.”

  He moaned, and a shudder went through his body.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “Hugo is dead,” he replied in a trembling voice. “They found him in the pool, floating facedown with a big rat perched on his back. He died a horrible death.”

  This news shocked me, but I tried to act normal. It was a hideous image. “His back was clawed all to pieces,” said the bartender. “There was a cloud of blood all around him in the water. Half of his scalp was chewed off.

  “It was no accident,” he continued. “Somebody had it in for him. He had a lot of enemies. He was weird.”

  I nodded solemnly. “You bet,” I said. “I knew him well—but, Jesus, how weird do you have to be to get murdered in water by rats? What kind of monster would even think of doing a thing like that? Has anybody confessed?”

  “Not yet,” he said, “but they arrested your friend Mr. Harriman, and I heard they were looking for you.”

  “What?” I blurted. “Who’s looking for me?”

  He was trembling badly. “The goddamn stinking police. They were here about an hour ago.”

  I left quickly, saying nothing. My heart was pounding, and my brain was swamped by confusion. But not for long. By the time I got to the room, I knew what I had to do. I called United and booked a seat on the morning flight to Denver. It would leave LaGuardia in two hours.

  There was no sign of Tobias and no time to do any packing. Fuck this mess, I thought. He can pack it all up in boxes and send it by Federal Express. I flogged a few things into my satchel and called the concierge for a fast cab to the airport. There was no other way.

  I felt a certain amount of guilt about leaving Harriman alone in jail to face murder charges, but so what? I knew the Polo Attitude, and so did he. We were warriors, but he was in jail, and I wasn’t—and besides, I knew he was guilty. He had murdered poor Hugo just as surely as I was now on my way to the airport at top speed in a blind panic. I couldn’t help Harriman now. He was doomed, and I didn’t want to be doomed with him. It would be boring, and who would take care of my ponies?

  I never heard from Harriman again, but Tobias told me that his trial had been put off indefinitely for lack of evidence . . . In my heart I know that the world is a better place with Hugo dead, but I keep it to myself. You can’t be too careful.

  Epitaph

  Veni, Vidi, Vici

  Life is different for me now. I go to all the tournaments. I do my shopping at Lodsworth, I am seen with Deborah Couples, and I fly to Argentina in the winter—me and the weird Dukakis sisters. Last month it was Palm Beach; now it’s the U.S. Open, and then down to Buenos Aires. We live in our own world, we live our lives like dolphins.

  I am a polo person now, and I know the Polo Attitude. I smoke the finest opium, and I drive a Ducati 916. Birds sing where I walk, and my home is a magnet for children.

  I have come a long way from Uncle Lawless’ barn. I have my own ponies now. I whack polo balls around my yard with a thirty-inch foot mallet from Gray’s, and I was named to the board of trustees at the recent Polo Ball. My neighbor De Lise is a two goaler, and we spend five hours a day in the practice cage, hitting balls against the backstop at one hundred miles per hour and trying to hook each other. It is wrong, but we do it anyway. That is
the Polo Attitude—and if polo is wrong, so am I.

  __ __ __ __

  Memo from the National Affairs Desk. To: Dollar Bill Greider

  August 24, 1995

  DATE: July 6, 1995

  TO: Dollar Bill Greider

  FROM: Hunter S. Thompson

  CC: P. J. O’Rourke

  SUBJECT: Dragging Me into Your Rude Political Debate with P.J. (rs 712-713)

  You screwhead pig! Look what you’ve done now. You have blasted to smithereens the once-proud Hubristic notion (look it up) that we of the highest rank & proudest voice of the Rock & Roll persuasion are Smart. You both made public fools of yourselves—and then you had the cheap, cowardly, skunklike sleaziness to blame yr. dumbness on some kind of pills that you claim I “sent you in the mail.”

  Ah, you dilettante bastards are all the same, aren’t you? First the gibberish, then the Treachery . . . And then you blame it on me.

  You remind me of Hubert Humphrey after he lost his nerve. In the end he was like a desperate old carrion bird. He hovered over the lives of decent people like a vulture over a barnyard—cackling & whining & drooling as vultures will—and then finally swooping and diving and then feeding crudely in public on the dreams of the Doomed down below.

  Hubert never saw it that way, of course, and I’m sure you won’t either . . . Ah, Billy, we are so lonely for heroes these days, aren’t we? It is like living on the Moors, waving lanterns & screeching frantically at each other in the fog that hangs over the peat moss, always weak & afraid of being suddenly attacked from behind by a huge killer hound from hell—some beast with a separate agenda like you or even P.J. . . .

  But he didn’t blame his dilettante gibberish on me or my “pills” like you did . . . Shame on you, Bubba. I think you owe me an apology. I have a lot of Pills, but I have nothing that will make a smart man act like Hubert Humphrey—and I wouldn’t send it to you if I did.

  Most people recognize a devious pig when they see one. But we are not pigs, and it brings us low when we act that way. It makes me uncomfortable to think that my best friends & allies in journalism are dumb boys. It is lonely Enough out here without that.

  OK. Thanx in advance for yr. cooperation.

  __ __ __ __

  Timothy Leary and William S. Burroughs, R.I.P.

  Though neither Timothy Leary nor William S. Burroughs was among Hunter’s inner circle, he’d met and corresponded with both; several years earlier he’d driven to Lawrence, Kansas, to visit and shoot with Burroughs, and in the last weeks and months of Leary’s life, he and Hunter had extended late-night telephone conversations. A proper RS send-off for both seemed only appropriate.

  __ __ __ __

  Memo from the National Affairs Desk. To: Jann S. Wenner

  August 8, 1996

  DATE: June 9, 1996

  TO: Jann S. Wenner

  FROM: Hunter S. Thompson

  SUBJECT: Mistah Leary, He Dead

  I will miss Tim Leary—not for his wisdom or his beauty or his warped lust for combat or because of his wealth or his power or his drugs, but mainly because I won’t hear his laughing voice on my midnight telephone anymore. Tim usually called around 2. It was his habit—one of many that we shared, and he knew I would be awake.

  Tim and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “after midnight, all things are possible.”

  Just last week he called me on the phone at two thirty in the morning and said he was moving to a ranch in Nicaragua in a few days and would fax me the telephone number. Which he did. And I think he also faxed it to Dr. Kesey.

  Indeed. There are many rooms in the mansion. And Tim was familiar with most of them. We will never know the range of his fiendish vision, or the many lives he was sucked into by his savage and unnatural passions.

  We sometimes disagreed, but in the end we made our peace. Tim was a Chieftain. He Stomped on the Terra, and he left his elegant hoof prints on all our lives.

  He is forgotten now but not gone. We will see him soon enough. Our tribe is now smaller by one. Our circle is one link shorter. And there is one more name on the honor roll of pure warriors who saw the great light and leapt for it.

  The Shootist: A Short Tale of Extreme Precision and No Fear

  September 18, 1997

  William had a fine taste for handguns, and later in life he became very good with them. I remember shooting with him one afternoon at his range on the outskirts of Lawrence. He had five or six well-oiled old revolvers laid out on a wooden table, covered with a white linen cloth, and he used whichever one he was in the mood for at the moment. The S&W .45 was his favorite. “This is my finisher,” he said lovingly, and then he went into a crouch and put five out of six shots through the chest of a human-silhouette target about twenty-five yards away.

  Hot damn, I thought, we are in the presence of a serious Shootist. Nicole had been filming it all with the Hi8, but I took the camera and told her to walk out about ten yards in front of us and put an apple on her head.

  William smiled wanly and waved her off. “Never mind, my dear,” he said to her. “We’ll pass on that trick.” Then he picked up the .454 Casull Magnum I’d brought with me. “But I will try this one,” he said. “I like the looks of it.”

  The .454 Casull is the most powerful handgun in the world. It is twice as strong as a .44 Magnum, with a huge scope and a recoil so brutal that I was reluctant to let an eighty-year-old man shoot it. This thing will snap back and crack your skull if you don’t hold it properly. But William persisted.

  The first shot lifted him two or three inches off the ground, but the bullet hit the throat of the target, two inches high. “Good shot,” I said. “Try a little lower and a click to the right.” He nodded and braced again.

  His next shot punctured the stomach and left nasty red welts on his palms. Nicole shuddered visibly behind the camera, but I told her we’d only been kidding about the apple. Then William emptied the cylinder, hitting once in the groin and twice just under the heart. I reached out to shake his hand as he limped back to the table, but he jerked it away and asked for some ice for his palms. “Well,” he said, “this is a very nasty piece of machinery. I like it.”

  I put the huge silver brute in its case and gave it to him. “It’s yours,” I said. “You deserve it.”

  Which was true. William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear. He would have fired an M-60 from the hip that day if I’d brought one with me. He would shoot anything, and he feared nothing.

  Memo from the National Affairs Desk: More Trouble in Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood

  March 19, 1998

  The devil made me do it the first time.

  The second time I done it on my own.

  —Waylon Jennings

  That is how it goes with politicians. The worst are relentless greedheads, and the best can’t control their own lusts. Spiro Agnew took brown bags full of cash, and Bill Clinton will suffer the little children to come unto him. Some people go to jail or get impeached for these things, while others are hailed as New Age Wizards and stylish rogues with unfortunate personal addictions. One man’s Innocent Child is another man’s Raging Slut—and, as always in combat, one loose cannon on your own deck is more dangerous than six enemy cannons.

  Welcome to Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood, folks. It may be weird, but it’s ours. We like it here—except for a handful of worrywarts and Sex Nazis who will never be happy anyway. They are in the Minority now, and their atavistic thinking is about to take another serious whack. They hate perverts, but so what? They hated Joey Buttafuoco, too, and he became a major folk hero and a legendary Sodomite in spite of them.

  Ah, but we are not talking about Joey Buttafuoco here. We are talking about William Jefferson Clinton from Hope, Arkansas, the forty-second president of the U.S.A.

  Try a booming 73 percent approval rating in the polls, Bubba—up from 51 percent before the Sex Scandal. That’s not a bad bump on the charts for a lame-duck, degenerate president with
a minority in both houses of Congress and a whole raft of sex-related lawsuits on his hands from women who may or may not be claiming that they were preyed upon by a brute worse than Hermann Goering or even Benjamin Franklin.

  Seventy-three percent is big numbers on the campaign trail, Bubba. Very big. I would feel safe in betting heavily that there aren’t too many members of this Congress who came in with 73 percent of the vote. That is a Landslide. That is Victory.

  Newt Gingrich had his victory, too. Remember the Republican Revolution of 1994? Now the only people who still have any respect for it are cops, preachers, and creeps who hang out on the fringes of Klan rallies and worship Charlton Heston. And in November, Gingrich is looking at a Total Loss of personal and political power as the year 2000 looms down on us. Things happen faster and faster in the nineties.

  And the difference between Winning and Losing is very big. Look what happened to the dumb bastards who accused Richard Jewell of being the “mad bomber” of the ’96 Atlanta Olympics. They got shamed, humiliated, and ripped to shreds for their carelessness. Some people take these warnings seriously. I know I do. The Lewd Revolution is coming; that is the message, and Bill Clinton is only one of its messengers. Never mind what William Bennett says. Anybody who writes a best seller called The Book of Virtues is riding for a serious fall—and now we are back in Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood, at the nexus of the Lewd Revolution . . . That is what is happening, that is the message, and anybody against it will be like King Canute trying to hold back the sea.

  Bill Clinton has been worried about the nature of his Legacy in History, but he should worry no longer. He can shuck off his list of previous accomplishments: ending Welfare as we knew it, presiding over the greatest peacetime prosperity since Octavian, paying off the Federal deficit, opening up the entire hemisphere to free trade, and engineering Wall Street’s great six-year Bull Run.