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

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Most historians now agree that Clinton’s lasting image will be as the president who Legalized Sodomy and set millions of Americans free from the chains of prudery and hopeless Ignorance.

  Abe Lincoln freed the Slaves, Thomas Jefferson bought half of America for seventeen cents an acre, and Bill Clinton legitimized oral sex on the job. The real victim of this mess will be the vice president. It is no small thing for a sitting two-term president to leave his successor with near-record approval ratings. This means that the people are happy with the way things are and will expect more of the same. Al Gore will come under terrible pressure to maintain Clinton’s standard of lewdness. Yes, we are in the midst of a revolution. Should the vice president have any questions, he would do himself a favor to look up the definition of “lewd” in the Random House dictionary:

  lewd (lood) adj. -er, -est. 1 inclined to, characterized by, or inciting lust or lechery; lascivious 2 obscene or indecent, as language or songs; salacious 3 [Obs.] a) low, ignorant, or vulgar b) base, vile, or wicked, esp. of a person c) bad, worthless, or poor, esp. of a thing.

  Sounds bad, eh? Well, get ready to know it up close pretty soon, Bubba. The electorate has spoken, and it will speak again in the year 2000.

  __ __ __ __

  Reflections

  By the late nineties, Hunter had, for the most part, shifted his energies away from writing new material, concentrating instead on ensuring his literary legacy by organizing and publishing his massive trove of thousands of letters. The first volume, The Proud Highway, had recently been published to much acclaim, and the second, Fear and Loathing in America, was on the way. “Hey Rube” was a stealth move in both directions—new material, yes, but the sort of thing rarely seen from Hunter: extended, thoughtful self-reflection and unfiltered autobiography taking in everything from his regular late-night swims at his neighbor’s pool in Woody Creek; childhood visits to his grandmother while growing up in Louisville; his heroes Burroughs, Kerouac, James Dean, and Robert Mitchum; and the metaphysical matter of Music as Fuel.

  Letter from HST to JSW

  May 7 ’98

  Dear Jann,

  Congratulations on the General Excellence award & all the others. It was a Sweep & I’m proud to be part of it.

  How is your back?

  I plan to be in NY during the week of May 20.

  Enc. is the lead for a new story I’m working on, called HEY RUBE! Have a laugh & let me know if it interests you & maybe we can do some business.

  Okay. I’m going out to murder a skunk now.

  Soon come,

  HST.

  Hey Rube! I Love You: Eerie Reflections on Fuel, Madness & Music

  May 13, 1999

  Let our Lord now command thy servants to seek out a man who is a cunning player on a harp: and it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.

  —I Samuel 16:16

  It is Sunday morning now and I am writing a love letter. Outside my kitchen window the sky is bright and planets are colliding. My head is hot and I feel a little edgy. My brain is beginning to act like a V-8 engine with the spark-plug wires crossed. Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted and animals whisper at me from unseen places.

  Last night a huge black cat tried to jump me in the swimming pool, then it suddenly disappeared. I did another lap and noticed three men in green trench coats watching me from behind a faraway door. Whoops, I thought, something weird is happening in this room. Lay low in the water and creep toward the middle of the pool. Stay away from the edges. Don’t be strangled from behind. Keep alert. The work of the Devil is never fully revealed until after midnight.

  It was right about then that I started thinking about my love letter. The skylights above the pool were steamed up, strange plants were moving in the thick and utter darkness. It was impossible to see from one end of the pool to the other.

  I tried to stay quiet and let the water calm down. For a moment I thought I heard another person coming into the pool, but I couldn’t be sure. A ripple of terror caused me to drop deeper in the water and assume a karate position. There are only two or three things in the world more terrifying than the sudden realization that you are naked and alone and something large and aggressive is coming close to you in dark water.

  It is moments like this that make you want to believe in hallucinations—because if three large men in trench coats actually were waiting for me in the shadows behind that door and something else was slithering toward me in the darkness, I was doomed.

  Alone? No, I was not alone. I understood that. I had already seen three men and a huge black cat, and now I thought I could make out the shape of another person approaching me. She was lower in the water than I was, but I could definitely see it was a woman.

  Of course, I thought. It must be my sweetheart, sneaking up to give me a nice surprise in the pool. Yessir, this is just like that twisted little bitch. She is a hopeless romantic and she knows this pool well. We once swam here every night and played in the water like otters.

  Jesus Christ! I thought, what a paranoid fool I’ve been. I must have been going crazy. A surge of love went through me as I stood up and moved quickly to embrace her. I could already feel her naked body in my arms . . . Yes, I thought, love does conquer all.

  But not for long. No, it took me a minute or two of thrashing around in the water before I understood that I was, in fact, completely alone in the pool. She was not here, and neither were those freaks in the corner. And there was no cat. I was a fool and a dupe. My brain was seizing up, and I felt so weak that I could barely climb out of the pool.

  Fuck this, I thought, I can’t handle this place anymore. It’s destroying my life with its weirdness. Get away and never come back. It had mocked my love and shattered my sense of romance. This horrible experience would get me nominated for Rube of the Year in any high school class.

  Dawn was coming up as I drove back down the road. On my way past the graveyard, I slowed down and tossed a quarter over the fence like I always do. There were no comets colliding, no tracks in the snow except mine, and no sounds for ten miles in any direction except Lyle Lovett on my radio and the howl of a few coyotes. I drove with my knees while I lit up a glass pipe full of hashish.

  When I got home I loaded my S&W .45 auto and fired a few bursts at a beer keg in the yard, then I went back inside and started scrawling feverishly in a notebook . . . What the hell? I thought. Everybody writes love letters on Sunday morning. It is a natural form of worship, a very high art. And on some days I am very good at it.

  Today, I felt, was definitely one of those days. You bet. Do it now. Just then my phone rang and I jerked it off the hook, but there was nobody on the line. I sagged against the fireplace and moaned, and then it rang again. I grabbed it, but again there was no voice. Oh God! I thought. Somebody is fucking with me . . . I needed music, I needed rhythm. I was determined to be calm, so I cranked up the speakers and played “Spirit in the Sky,” by Norman Greenbaum.

  I played it over and over for the next three or four hours while I hammered out my letter. My heart was racing and the music was making the peacocks scream. It was Sunday, and I was worshipping in my own way. Nobody needs to be crazy on the Lord’s Day.

  My grandmother was never crazy when we went to visit her on Sundays. She always had cookies and tea, and her face was always smiling. That was down in the West End of Louisville, near the Ohio River locks. I remember a narrow concrete driveway and a big gray car in a garage behind the house. The driveway was two concrete strips with clumps of grass growing between them. It led back through the vicious wild rose bushes to what looked like an abandoned shed. Which was true. It was abandoned. Nobody walked in that yard, and nobody drove that big gray car. It never moved. There were no tracks in the grass.

  It was a LaSalle sedan, as I recall, a slick-looking brute with a powerful straight-eight engine and a floor-mounted gearshift, maybe a 1939 model. We
never got it started, because the battery was dead and gasoline was scarce. There was a war on. You had to have special coupons to buy five gallons of gas, and the coupons were tightly rationed. People hoarded and coveted them, but nobody complained, because we were fighting the Nazis and our tanks needed all the gasoline for when they hit the beaches of Normandy.

  Looking back on it now, I see clearly that the reason we drove down to the West End to visit my grandmother on the Lord’s Day was to con her out of her gas coupons for the LaSalle. She was an old lady, and she didn’t need any gasoline. But her car was still registered, and she still got her coupons every month. That was why we went to her house on Sundays.

  So what—I would do the same thing myself if my mother had gasoline and I didn’t. We all would. It is the Law of Supply and Demand—and this is, after all, the final messy year of the American century and people are getting nervous. Hoarders are coming out of the closet, muttering darkly about Y2K and buying cases of Dinty Moore beef stew. Dried figs are popular, along with rice and canned hams. I, personally, am hoarding bullets, many thousands of them. Bullets will always be valuable, especially when your lights go out and your phone goes dead and your neighbors start running out of food. That is when you will find out who your friends are. Even close family members will turn on you. After the year 2000, the only people who’ll be safe to have as friends will be dead people.

  I used to respect William Burroughs because he was the first white man to be busted for marijuana in my time. William was the Man. He was the victim of an illegal police raid at his home at 500 Wagner Street in Old Algiers, a low-rent suburb across the river from New Orleans, where he was settling in for a while to do some shooting and smoke marijuana.

  William didn’t fuck around. He was serious about everything. When the Deal went down William was There, with a gun. Whacko! Boom! Stand back. I am the Law. He was my hero a long time before I ever heard of him.

  But he was not the first white man to be busted for weed in my time. No. That was Robert Mitchum, the actor, who was arrested three months earlier in Malibu at the front door of a hideaway beach house for possession of marijuana and suspicion of molesting a teenage girl on August 31, 1948. I remember the photos: Mitchum wearing an undershirt and snarling at the cops with the sea rolling up and the palm trees blowing.

  Yessir, that was my boy. Between Mitchum and Burroughs and James Dean and Jack Kerouac, I got myself a serious running start before I was twenty years old, and there was no turning back. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

  So welcome to Thunder Road, bubba. It was one of those movies that got a grip on me when I was too young to resist. It convinced me that the only way to drive was at top speed with a car full of whiskey, and I have been driving that way ever since, for good or ill.

  The girl in the photos with Mitchum looked about fifteen years old, and she was also wearing an undershirt, with an elegant little nipple jutting out. The cops were trying to cover her chest with a raincoat as they rushed through the door. Mitchum was also charged with Sodomy and Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor.

  I was having my own troubles with police in those years. In the fifth grade I was officially apprehended by the FBI for turning over a U.S. mailbox in front of a bus. Soon after that, I became a frequent detainee in various jails around the South on booze, theft, and violence charges. People called me a criminal, and about half the time they were right. I was a full-bore Juvenile Delinquent, and I had a lot of friends.

  We stole cars and drank gin and did a lot of fast driving at night to places like Nashville and Atlanta and Chicago. We needed music on those nights, and it usually came on the radio—on the fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel stations like WWL in New Orleans and WLAC in Nashville.

  That is where I went wrong, I guess—listening to WLAC and driving all night across Tennessee in a stolen car that wouldn’t be reported for three days. That is how I got introduced to the Howlin’ Wolf. We didn’t know him, but we liked him and we knew what he was talking about. “I Smell a Rat” is a pure rock & roll monument to the axiom that says, “There is no such thing as paranoia.” The Wolf could kick out the jams, but he had a melancholy side to him. He could tear your heart out like the worst kind of honky-tonk. If history judges a man by his heroes, like they say, then let the record show that Howlin’ Wolf is one of mine. He was a monster.

  Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.

  I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. A V-8 Cadillac will go ten or fifteen miles faster if you give it a full dose of “Carmelita.” This has been proved many times. That is why you see so many Cadillacs parked in front of truck stops on Highway 66 around midnight. These are Speed Pimps, and they are loading up on more than gasoline. You watch one of these places for a while, and you see a pattern: a big fast car pulls up in front of the doors and a wild-looking girl gets out, stark-naked except for a fur coat or a ski parka, and she runs into the place with a handful of money, half crazy to buy some flat-out-guaranteed driving music.

  It happens over and over, and sooner or later you get hooked on it, you get addicted. Every time I hear “White Rabbit,” I am back on the greasy midnight streets of San Francisco, looking for music, riding a fast red motorcycle downhill into the Presidio, leaning desperately into the curves through the eucalyptus trees, trying to get to the Matrix in time to hear Grace Slick play the flute.

  There was no piped-in music on those nights, no headphones or Walkmans or even a plastic windscreen to keep off the rain. But I could hear the music anyway, even when it was five miles away. Once you heard the music done right, you could pack it into your brain and take it anywhere, forever.

  Yes sir. That is my wisdom and this is my song. It is Sunday and I am making new rules for myself. I will open my heart to spirits and pay more attention to animals. I will take some harp music and drive down to the Texaco station, where I can get a pork taco and read a New York Times. After that, I will walk across the street to the post office and slip my letter into her mailbox.

  Res ipsa loquitur.

  __ __ __ __

  His Last Bow

  While the 2004 election seems almost like a fait accompli in retrospect, it was still an all-hands-on-deck, down-to-the-wire dogfight when Hunter was writing what turned out to be his last post from the National Affairs desk—and his final Rolling Stone story. George W. Bush wasn’t declared the winner until the day after the election, when John Kerry elected not to contest the official result in Ohio, and Hunter used his bully pulpit to encourage readers to get out and vote in a direct, pragmatic way that was unlike almost anything he’d done since . . . well, since trying to muster votes for his own run for sheriff of Aspen himself some thirty-four years earlier—the foundation, of course, of his first piece for the magazine. The snake was eating its own tail.

  If there’s nostalgia or sentimentality in this piece, it’s in Hunter’s remembrance of his first meetings with John Kerry in 1972 when they were both demonstrating against the Vietnam war in Washington, D.C., “angry and righteous,” and Hunter was “trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the president’s lawn.” It was a brutal contrast between those “white-knuckle days of yesteryear” and the nation’s contemporary political climate, in which the big question was not “whether President Bush is acting more like the head of a fascist government” but “if the people want it that way.”

  How bad was Dubya? Bad enough to make Hunter long for his old nemesis Tricky Dick: “If he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.” Less than four months later—at the end of the football season, and one month after Bush’s inauguration for a second term—Hunter would be dead.

  The Fun-Hogs in the Pass
ing Lane

  November 11, 2004

  Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004

  Lyndon Johnson and the Pig Farmer . . . The Stink of a Loser . . . The Drug of War . . . President Nixon, Now More Than Ever . . . Revenge of the Fun-Hogs . . . A Sacrifice to the Rat Gods

  Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners. Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

  Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him “Mister President,” and then I felt ashamed.

  Karl Rove, the president’s political wizard, felt even worse. There is angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe—and that is Rove’s problem. His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of sixty million voters.