Kingdom of Fear (6 page)

It is not a criminal life, or a hurricane zoo of never-ending craziness. It may look that way, from a distance, but I consider it eminently sane, and most of my friends agree.
Sane
is a dangerous word. It implies a clear distinction, a sharp line between the Sane and the Insane that we all see clearly and accept as a truth of nature.

But it is not. No. The only real difference between the Sane and the Insane, in this world, is the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up. That is the bottom line. CLANG! Go immediately to prison. You crazy bastard, you should have been locked up a long time ago. You are a dangerous freak—I am rich, and I want you castrated.

Whoops, did I say that? Yes, I did, but we need not dwell so long on it that it develops into a full-blown tangent on the horrors of being locked up and gibbed like a tomcat in a small wire box. We have enough grim things to worry about in this country as the 21st Century unfolds. We have Anthrax, we have smallpox, we have very real fears of being blasted into jelly in the privacy of our own homes by bombs from an unseen enemy, or by nerve gas sprayed into our drinking water, or even ripped apart with no warning by our neighbor’s Rottweiler dogs. All these things have happened recently, and they will probably happen again.

We live in dangerous times. Our armies are powerful, and we spend billions of dollars a year on new prisons, yet our lives are still ruled by fear. We are like pygmies lost in a maze. We are not at War, we are having a nervous breakdown.

. . .

Right. And enough of that gibberish. We are champions, so let’s get back to the story. We were talking about the Witness, the large and
sleazy woman who came into my life like a sea snake full of poison and almost destroyed me.

There were two other people in my kitchen that night, and a girl who kept popping in and out. So let’s say there were five people in the house, including the Witness. She was happy to be there, she said, because she had some questions to ask me.

“Not now,” I said. “We’re watching the basketball game.” I said it sharply, more in the manner of a command than a gentle request from the host. Normally I don’t speak in that tone to first-time visitors, but she was clearly not a woman who was going to pay attention to gentle requests. I was not rude to her, but I was definitely firm. That is a point I like to make immediately when a dingbat comes into my home and gets loud. That is unacceptable. We have Rules here: They are civilized rules, and oddly genteel in their way, yet some people find them disturbing in their eccentricity. Contradictions abound, as well as dangerous quirks that sometimes make people afraid—which is not a bad thing on some days: Fear is a healthy instinct, not a sign of weakness. It is a natural self-defense mechanism that is common to felines, wolves, hyenas, and most humans. Even fruit bats know fear, and I salute them for it. If you think the world is weird now, imagine how weird it would be if wild beasts had no fear.

That is how this woman tried to act when she came into my home on that fateful February night. She pranced around and wandered from room to room in a way that made me nervous. She was clearly a refugee from the sex business—a would-be
promoter
of Sexual Aids & first-class organ enlargement. . . . That was her
business plan,
in a nut, and nobody wanted to listen to it.

“Shut up!” Semmes screamed. “Can’t you see that we are watching a goddamn basketball game?”

She ignored him and kept babbling. “What kind of Sex do you like?” she asked me. “Why won’t you talk to me?”

I am not a Criminal, by trade, but over the years I have developed a distinctly criminal nervous system. Some people might call it paranoia, but I have lived long enough to know that there is no such thing as paranoia. Not in the 21st Century. No. Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

There may be flies on you and me, but there are no flies on Jesus.

—Hunter S. Thompson

My father had a tendency to hunch darkly over the radio when the news of the day was foul. We listened to the first wave of Pearl Harbor news together. I didn’t understand it, but I knew it was bad because I saw him hunch up like a spider for two or three days in a row after it happened. “God damn those sneaky Japs,” he would mutter from time to time. Then he would drink whiskey and hammer on the arm of the couch. Nobody else in our family wanted to be with him when he listened to the war news. They didn’t mind the whiskey, but they came to associate the radio with feelings of anger and fear.

I was not like that. Listening to the radio and sipping whiskey with my father was the high point of my day, and I soon became addicted to those moments. They were never especially happy, but they were always exciting. There was a certain wildness to it, a queer adrenaline rush of guilt and mystery and vaguely secret joy that I still can’t explain, but even at the curious age of four I knew it was a special taste
that I shared only with my father. We didn’t dwell on it, or feel a dark need to confess. Not at all. It was fun, and I still enjoy remembering those hours when we hunched together beside the radio with our whiskey and our war and our fears about evil Japs sneaking up on us. . . .

I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on Fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. My father taught me that, along with a few other things that have kept my life interesting. When I think of him now I think of fast horses and cruel Japs and lying FBI agents.

“There is no such thing as Paranoia,” he told me once. “Even your Worst fears will come true if you chase them long enough. Beware, son. There is Trouble lurking out there in that darkness, sure as hell. Wild beasts and cruel people, and some of them will pounce on your neck and try to tear your head off, if you’re not careful.”

It was a mean piece of wisdom to lay on a 10-year-old boy, but in retrospect I think it was the right thing to say, and it definitely turned out to be true. I have wandered into that darkness many times in my life and for many strange reasons that I still have trouble explaining, and I could tell you a whole butcher shop full of stories about the horrible savage beasts that lurk out there, most of them beyond the wildest imagination of a 10-year-old boy—or even a 20- or 30-year-old boy, for that matter, or even beyond the imagination of a teenage girl from Denver being dragged away from her family by a pack of diseased wolves. Nothing compares to it. The terror of a moment like that rolls over you like a rush of hot scum in a sewer pipe.

(HST archives)

. . .

Here is a story I wrote for the
Atheneum Literary Association
magazine and tried to insert into
The Spectator
when Porter Bibb was editor—he was a numb-nuts creep in those days, but so what? We loved each other—and I was after all, the Art Director. . . .

We put out a quality magazine and we printed whatever we liked and we both had veto power, which was dangerous.

Except for
this
one. No. This one never saw print, until now. And God’s mercy on you swine for reading it.

SOCIETY HOUSEWIFE EXPOSED IN CHILD-SEX
SCANDAL; BLOODY AFTERMATH SHOCKS
EAST END NEIGHBORHOOD

I have not had the leisure to brood seriously on the nature and fate of true love in the 21st Century, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. Not at all. That kind of flotsam is never far from my mind. I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.

Let me give you one example: In the summer of my 15th year, the wife of a family friend bit me on the face and tore off some bleeding flaps of skin that would never grow back. The tissue failed to regenerate, as the medical doctors say, and ever since then my face has been noticeably crooked. The wound itself healed perfectly. I was lucky to be attended to by the finest Restorative Surgeons in a nine-state region between Baltimore and St. Louis, from Chicago in the north to the Caribbean island of Grenada 3,000 miles south. I have never entirely recovered from that episode, and I have never understood how it happened. The woman who bit me refused to discuss it—at least not with me—and as far as I know she never told her lascivious tale to any living person.

It was, however, a towering scandal that haunted our peaceful neighborhood for many years. Massive speculation was rampant almost everywhere in the East End of Louisville except in the local newspapers, which only made it hotter as truly unspeakable gossip. It was Unacceptable and Irresistible all at once.

Ho ho. Stand back, you churlish little suckfish! I have my own definitions of words like Unacceptable and Irresistible. I remember the
slope of her perfect little breasts and the panties she never wore. I remember exactly how she smelled and how she laughed when I sucked her nipples down my throat. I was her pimply sex toy, and she was the love of my life. I worshiped her desperate mouth and prayed at the shrine of her grasping pussy. Why she sunk her teeth into my face I will never know. Perhaps it was God’s will or the hex of some heinous Devil.

I look back on my youth with great fondness, but I would not recommend it as a working model to others. I was lucky to survive it at all, in fact: I was hounded & stalked for most of my high school career by a cruel & perverted small-town Probation Officer who poisoned my much-admired social life and eventually put me in jail on the night of my Class graduation.

Once Mr. Dotson came into my life I was marked as a criminal. He was an officious creep with all sorts of hidden agendas—or not that hidden—and he hounded me all through high school. It was an embarrassment, and it criminalized me long before I ever got to marijuana. All kinds of people who had no reason to be in contact with the Juvenile Court were contacted by this Swine, which accounted for a lot of my reputation. He was out of control, and people like that shouldn’t get away with abusing their power.

Especially as I hadn’t committed a crime. All we had wanted was some cigarettes.

We ran out of cigarettes on the ride home from Cherokee Park. I was asleep in the backseat passed out, or half passed out, and I remember thinking:
Cigarettes. Cigarettes. Cigarettes.

Max and Eric (or so I’ll call them) were up front. Eric was driving, and I guess it was Max who said, “Well. Let’s see if these people have any.”

I might have thought of that, too: Here are people, neckers, parked in the park at Neckers’ Knob, or whatever. Why not ask for a cigarette? That was Max’s logic, anyway.

So we pulled up beside them, which could have frightened some people. And Max got out and went over to a car with two couples in it and asked for cigarettes, and the driver said, “We don’t have any.”

That seemed fair, but something else was said. The car was seven feet away, and Max was a fairly violent bugger. The next thing I remember is him yelling, “All right, Motherfucker! You give me some cigarettes or I’m going to grab you out of there!”

Then he reached into the car and said, “I’m going to jerk you out of here and beat the shit out of you and rape those girls back here.” And that’s all it was.

Eric was driving, so I had to get out of the backseat and go over and grab Max, saying, “Fuck this. We don’t need any cigarettes.” I meant we didn’t need any fights. So I got back in the car and we drove off. That’s all it was, but they got our license plate number and reported it. . . . Then—you know Cops: a Rape Charge.

My Probation Officer knew it was wrong, he said later, in late-night chats with my mother, who was by then Chief Librarian at the Louisville Public Library and stocking my books on her shelves. My success was a joyous surprise to her, but she feared for the grievous effect it was having on my old nemesis, Mr. Dotson. He often stopped by our house for coffee, and he desperately begged her forgiveness for all the trouble he’d caused her.

She forgave him, in time, but I didn’t. I will spit on his memory forever. The last of many letters I got from him carried a postmark from the Kentucky State Prison at Eddyville. I was not even curious enough to read it and find out if he was a convict or merely a Guard. I had other lessons to learn. My continuing education in the nature of the Criminal Justice System was picking up speed.

I remember Juvenile Court Judge Jull saying, “Well, Hunter. You’ve made my life a nightmare for four years. You’ve been in and out of this Court. You’ve mocked it. And now you’re going to get away from me. This is my last chance at you. So now I remand you to the County Jail for sixty days.” That was their last shot.

But it was a total outrage. I became good friends with the “victims,” and they said the same thing. But this was Mr. Dotson and Judge Jull, and what they did was cause a huge rallying of support behind me. I
would never have gone into their jail, except that minors couldn’t make bail in Kentucky back then.

The only reason I got out in thirty days was because my eighteenth birthday came in thirty days, so they couldn’t hold me: I could make bail. They didn’t try to hold me; they had made their point. Last shot. That, and a group of powerful citizens and civic leaders had worked to get me out. But I was a hero while I was in jail—they decided they’d call me “The President,” and on my birthday, “Hit the Bricks,” they said, “My boy, ’Hit the Bricks.’” It became a cause, and I was a hero there for a while.