Kingdom of Fear (22 page)

And how we prevailed, on the sea—how we caught a fine fish—when all the others had gone south to Pacifica that day—and how we then came to the profoundly high decision to run straight through that maniac crease in the breakers and into Bolinas harbor—because we were thirsty and tired and we had our elegant 16-pound salmon—and because I knew a man with the whiff who lived in a small wooden house that we could almost see from a mile or so out on the ocean.

The Great Scorer will like that story—and when he adds it in with the others, he will know that he is dealing with a warrior.

HST at work in Rio de Janeiro (Robert Bone)

Okay. I don’t want to get mushy here. All I did in the beginning was invite you over to my weird new office at the Theatre—which I knew you’d enjoy, and also because I figured that part of my new job as Night Manager was to keep these two sleazy, baldheaded bastards out of jail by making them so suddenly hip and respectable in the public prints that no judge in SF—not even a Nazi—would feel comfortable about putting them on trial in the eye of a media circus.

That strategy worked nicely. If I’d billed the Mitchells for my work as a media-political consultant, the tab would have run at least $400K net. I did my work well, and I’m proud of it.

Indeed—and history is rife with these horrors—that the foul and notorious Mitchell Brothers should soon go free like friendly neighborhood raccoons, while I the Night Manager would eventually be jailed and pilloried and denounced in the public prints and 3,900 other newspapers all over the nation for running the company car up the tailpipe of a slow-moving, left-drifting Pontiac on the Bayshore Freeway while driving back from the airport after pimping their new movie in L.A. all afternoon with moguls from the Pussycat Theatre chain—

—No, none of this seemed possible when I first came down from the mountain to take a job in the city and live among allegedly civilized people. It frankly never occurred to me that I would have any dealings with the Law—much less be arrested six times in three months—outside of my admittedly strange new duties as Night Manager of the O’Farrell.

I have made three appearances in traffic court in 34 years of driving fast cars in wild conditions all over the world from Kentucky to Hong Kong—and two of them happened in the space of three days, in Leonard Louie’s court.

Teddible, teddible
—as Ralph would say—and the scars have not yet healed. The judge has somehow made himself a partner in my settlement with the whiplash boys, and if I make one mistake on the road in the next three years, I will be slapped in the SF County Jail for six months.

Bad business. If there is any way we can ease off the menace
of that “probation,” we should do it. Our lives will be easier, and so will Leonard Louie’s. NOBODY needs me in that jail. I have learned my lesson: Drive carefully; there are people out there who really don’t like me, and if I give them any handle at all, they will use it, and they will flog me . . . and we have better wars to fight and more honorable ways to spill our blood in public.

Anyway—for Joe/FYI—Jim Mitchell assumes that his insurance company is “first” re: the whiplash boys.

I agree. I took the rap and I spent all night in jail—alone; I didn’t know you’d gone to Washington—with two Nazi cops who called me “big boy.”

It happened in the course of “my duties”—for the O’Farrell and also for
Playboy.

So let’s try to settle this insurance claim and get me off of this queasy “restitution” spike. Jim Mitchell is not going to quarrel if his insurance pays off the whiplash boys. Fair is fair. I was the Night Manager—and I was driving them back from the airport in the official Night Manager’s car. Both of our insurance rates are already fucked, anyway—so let’s not haggle about it. What is it worth to Leonard to get the “restitution” matter settled by October 18?. . .

. . . Everybody in the world seems to be after me for money now, and this would not be a good time to go belly up in public for small debts.

HUNTER

There was no laughter tonight, only the sounds of doom and death and failure—a relentless torrent of death signals: from the sheriff, in the mail, on the phone, in my kitchen, in the air, but mainly from Maria, who said she felt it very strongly and she understood exactly why I was feeling and thinking the way I did/do, but there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t help herself. It was the death of fun, unreeling right in front of us, unraveling, withering, collapsing, draining away in
the darkness like a handful of stolen mercury. Yep, the silver stuff goes suddenly, leaving only a glaze of poison on the skin.

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colorado, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.

The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.

And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.

They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., Dulles in D.C., and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully loaded fuel tanks—which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now—with somebody—and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious
hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead”—or even dead, for all we know—but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bull’s-eye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing—not even George Bush’s $350 billion “Star Wars” missile defense system—could have prevented Tuesday’s attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed—for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job—armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses, and only the ghost of bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.

OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.

The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.

The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don’t say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.

September 12, 2001

Dr. Thompson and Col. Depp take delivery of a matched set of rare .454 Casull Magnums—at a gun store somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, Summer 1997 (Deborah Fuller)

. . .

Johnny Depp called me from France on Sunday night and asked what I knew about Osama bin Laden.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all. He is a ghost, for all I know. Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m terrified of him,” he said. “All of France is terrified. . . . I freaked out and rushed to the airport, but when I got there my flight was canceled. All flights to the U.S. were canceled. People went crazy with fear.”

“Join the club,” I told him. “Almost everybody went crazy over here.”

“Never mind that,” he said. “Who won the Jets-Colts game?”

“There
was
no game,” I said. “All sports were canceled in this country—even
Monday Night Football.”

“No!” he said. “That’s impossible! I’ve never known a Monday night without a game on TV. What is the stock market doing?”

“Nothing yet,” I said. “It’s been closed for six days.”

“Ye gods,” he muttered. “No stock market, no football—this is Serious.”

Just then I heard the lock on my gas tank rattling, so I rushed outside with a shotgun and fired both barrels into the darkness. Poachers! I thought. Blow their heads off! This is War! So I fired another blast in the general direction of the gas pump, then I went inside to reload.

“Why are you shooting?” my assistant Anita screamed at me. “What are you shooting at?”

“The enemy,” I said gruffly. “He is down there stealing our gasoline.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “That tank has been empty since June. You probably killed a peacock.”

At dawn I went down to the tank and found the gas hose shredded by birdshot and two peacocks dead.

So what? I thought. What is more important right now—my precious gasoline or the lives of some silly birds?

Indeed, but the New York Stock Exchange opened Monday morning, so I have to get a grip on something solid. The Other Shoe is about to drop, and it might be extremely heavy. The time has come to be strong. The fat is in the fire. Who knows what will happen now?

Not me, buster. That’s why I live out here in the mountains with a flag on my porch and loud Wagner music blaring out of my speakers. I feel lucky, and I have plenty of ammunition. That is God’s will, they say, and that is also why I shoot into the darkness at anything that moves. Sooner or later, I will hit something Evil and feel no Guilt. It might be Osama bin Laden. Who knows? And where is Adolf Hitler, now that we finally need him? It is bad business to go into War without a target.

In times like these, when the War drums roll and the bugles howl for blood, I think of Vince Lombardi, and I wonder how he would handle it. . . . Good old Vince. He was a zealot for Victory at all costs, and his hunger for it was pure—or that’s what he said and what his legend tells us, but it is worth noting that he is not even in the top 20 in career victories.

We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for “a very long time.”

Generals and military scholars will tell you that 8 or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history—which is no doubt true—but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.