Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (102 page)

Bruno

Kuralt had mailed Thompson a new essay book
: The Best of the National Observer,
which included more articles by Thompson than by any other journalist
.

October 19, 1966
Aspen, Colorado

Dear Charley—

Thanks for the book. I appreciate the idea of making permanent print, as it were, and in spite of my grumbling I also appreciated the check—which kept the phone company from putting me in isolation again.

As for the choice(s) of my stuff, I figure you're not to blame so I can tell you I'm appalled. I suppose that “timelessness” factor might explain some of it, but even taking that into consideration I can point to at least ten better pieces I did in those years. But what the hell? I don't see any sense in bitching to Bill Giles—who can't be blamed either and who's already torn enough hair on my account—so I thought I'd aim this at you and consider the matter ended.

Or almost ended, and on this other count I think you ain't blameless. That is the matter of bylines in sniper-vision type, which I think reflect poorly on the value the
Observer
places on the people who write these articles. I may be unique on this score, but not one of those seven pieces in
the book originated in anybody's mind but my own; nor were any written with the help of expense money. What I mean is I figure some of that was my world, too, and my ego doesn't fit real well into footnotes. So those are my bitches and I figure you owe me some drinks on the latter score, at least. When I get East I'll try to collect. […] OK for now.

—Hunter

Alverson was a friend of Thompson's who worked at
The Wall Street Journal.
He provided Thompson with police documents regarding the Hell's Angels
.

November 28, 1966
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, Colorado

Chuck—

Sorry to be so late with an answer to your last. You sounded pretty down, but I hope things got straight with Jane—or at least straighten. What the fuck made you divorce her in the first place? I don't know any secret formulas or potions—not even my own—but if it's any comfort to you, rest assured that I'll keep your action in mind the next time I consider leaving Sandy.

And now to better news: Money. I've been trying to figure out ways to send you $150, but since my bank account is $67 overdrawn and steadily rising, it's been hard. Finally, in a flash of insight, I sent Random House a bill for your services (to be taken out of my royalties) and to my astonishment they agreed to pay. If you don't get a check from them within two weeks, let me know at this address and I'll bug them again. They insisted on paying Sonny [Barger] $25 for his telegram to Lyndon (I wanted to make it $1000 until I learned it was coming out of my alleged royalties) so I think they'll send you $150 without much argument. The book is due on January 27, barring further delays. I no longer give a fuck. There must be an easier and less painful way to make a living. You asked about the Angels stomping me. Indeed. It came as a total surprise, with no warning, but it put me in the emergency ward of the Santa Rosa hospital and caused me to look with new affection on my .44 Magnum. Sonny wasn't around and I didn't talk to him about it afterwards, so all I know is what little I can piece together from the day that led up to the outburst.… Labor Day run, I wanted a book cover photo to counter Random's idea of using some phony design work, vaguely uneasy reception at the gathering point, Fat
Freddy trying to run me down with his bike about noon, then 5 or 6 hours of loose and easy talk with people like Zorro, Jimmy & Magoo (& Tiny, who cashed a check for me), but all the while a mean undertone from a lot of new Angels I didn't know.… I guess my mistake was in thinking Sonny, Tiny, Terry & Co. would keep the uglies from giving me a hard time. I forgot bylaw No. 10: “When an Angel punches a non-Angel …” So when somebody teed off on me, whamo!

Everybody else joined in. Not a hint of warning. Tiny got me on my feet after a while and probably saved my life. (See the book for details.) It was a cheap, chickenshit show—like the Big Nigger incident in Oakland
¹⁷

—but when I went over the book galleys afterward the only change I made was the adding of a postscript. Validation by fire, as it were. If you talk to Sonny and he offers an explanation, I'd be curious to hear it. But I'm not about to ask for one myself. As far as I'm concerned I've already written it. OK—write.

Hunter

Thompson had failed to send
The Nation
his promised article on the extreme right in California
.

December 8, 1966
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, Colorado

Dear Carey—

I feel guiltier every time I hear your name, which for some reason is quite often. You came up in a conversation with Bob Craig (ex–Aspen Inst.) the other night, and again when I talked to Shir-Cliff at Ballantine … and also about two weeks ago when I was talking with a copy editor at Random House.

Anyway, I want you to know I haven't forgotten the California piece, nor have I put it aside. I've made about four false starts and the focus keeps changing so radically that I'm no longer sure what I'm writing. The only line I want to keep out of what I have is this one, from a draft done more than two weeks ago: “It seemed like a good time to be leaving California.” What started out as a detailed, political prediction sort of piece was ruined by Reagan's election, which took all the foresight-wisdom out of my approach
and made me sound like just another headline-sifter. (Another example: two weeks or so ago I predicted sarcastically in a letter to Random that John Wayne would unseat Kuchel
¹⁸
in 1968—and this morning I read (in the
Denver Post
) an interview with Wayne, somewhere in Mexico, in which he denied any intention of running for the Senate. Probably if I joked tonight about Walt Disney running in 1968, I'd read Drew Pearson's column tomorrow and find that the Disney PR firm had decided to make the big move in 1970, on the assumption that George Murphy
¹⁹
will have moved up to the presidency in 1968.) The dark fog of madness is moving in on California politics so fast that it's no longer possible to joke about it. When I wrote the non-student piece, for instance, I could mock the Nazi camp and even Clark Kerr … but with a vague, bottom of mind sort of instinct that Reason would prevail and that I'd eventually sound like a seer. Now I feel like anything I write could send me to jail when I go back to the coast … or, if not that, I don't know what manner of vicious absurdity I can write about without having my thesis cut out from under me by tomorrow's headlines. I kept telling my Liberal compatriots that Reagan would win by a million votes and put them all behind bars, but I didn't really believe things were that bad until about two weeks ago—when Reagan announced that he'd take the oath at 12:10 a.m. There was no doubt, at that point, that Dr. Strangelove was real.

Anyway, the only nut I have right now is that one sentence. I took it out of a 5–6 page start I made on a piece that was actually a midnight highway reflection that I worked up on napkin notes while driving from San Francisco toward Aspen on Election night. By the time I got to Reno the polls had closed on the coast, and by the time I got to Elko [Governor Pat] Brown had conceded and the Republican landslide was on. I drove all night across Nevada, so I had plenty of time to think … and although I had several good non-political reasons for fleeing to Colorado, probably my big reasons were indirectly political. The original title I had for the piece, “California, the Progressive Penal Colony,” now seems as apt as it does dated. Kesey went to jail, [the cops] busted the strike at Berkeley, and Reagan is making noises that should cause Eastern Liberals to forget about Germany and ponder their own Promised Land. I no longer see any point in making dire predictions about California; they'll all come true by the time the article is printed. The state scares me. The whole country scares me. And I don't say that in any abstract sense because I have a bad tendency to argue with strangers in strange places, and on several recent occasions
I've been given to understand that I'm not one of the boys. If my neighbors in Woody Creek could read my mail they'd have me locked up … although I get along fine with them when all we talk about is snow, horses and credit at the WC store.

Probably by now you have the drift of my thinking, which is largely out of focus. The only thing I can write with any sense of certainty that won't be dated by tomorrow's headlines is a sort of personal reminiscence about how it was in California Last Year, and How It Is Now. The vast alterations … the failure, as it were, of the Revolution of Expectations. (That's Adlai's phrase, by the way, and he originally said it in reference to South America about 1960 … and since then South America has been traveling the same route as California, only faster.… Brazil continues to interest me immensely, and especially since it's done a 180-degree political turn since I left in 1963, so if you know anybody who'd pay me to go back to Rio and write something profound, by all means let me know.)

I am, in fact, at loose ends for ideas. I have a contract with Random for two books in addition to
Hell's Angels
, but one is a novel that needs a total rewrite and the other is a non-fiction book with no subject or title.
²⁰
The novel was due last August 1, and the other is due August 1, 1967. So I'm in a definite bind. I finally got page proofs from Random and I'll send them to the Guggenheim people as soon as I can figure out what sort of project I want their money for. I've suggested to Random a book on Los Angeles as the Full and Final Flower of the American Dream, but they say it won't sell. Shir-Cliff wants something on Cops, but apparently somebody else is about to publish one like that. The Minutemen don't interest me and the only other thing I can think of is a mean exposé of pro football—which I'd like to do and could probably do pretty well. Not a [George] Plimpton-style job, but a real root-grabber. That's about all my ideas right now. About ten sentences from here I cut out for 30 minutes to shovel a cut in the snow so I can get out tomorrow. We had the heaviest storm since 1934 yesterday and today, and it's still coming. I can't let it build up on me, or I'll never get out. I'm the only dude in this far bend of the Woody Creek canyon; the other two are way down below—and this ranch has a history of breaking dudes' spirits … last winter both tenants fled, and it was a pretty mild winter. But I lived out here before (down the road a piece) when it got down to 40 below for 4–5 days at a stretch, and the sale of British rights on the Hell's Angels book (to Penguin) gives me enough to buy snow tires, chains and a big shovel. I also board 21 horses, one of which got loose when I was out shoveling a
while ago, and I had to chase him up the creek with a two-cell flash-light—in knee-deep snow. Horses regard strangers with the same amount of snorting, devious hostility that I learned to live with among the Hell's Angels … so I get along pretty well with them. So far. The Angels, as I think I told you, put me in the Santa Rosa emergency ward on Labor Day, and just as I was getting over that I slid down a shale cliff during an elk hunt and almost turned into a basket case. It's been a rough year. My only hope for salvation is that Random will promote the book in such a way as to make me a fortune.

That's about the story from here. I wish I could tell you I had four or five articles ready to send, but I don't—to you or anyone else. The last article I wrote, in fact, was the non-student piece. (No, I wrote one for
Playboy
on the Angels, which they first bought, then rejected when the
Saturday Evening Post
beat them to the stands … and I got a partial reprieve recently when
Esquire
bought part of the book for the upcoming January issue.… I have no idea what they plan to use.…

In all, I feel a need to write about what's happening—here, or anywhere else. If you think the California personal reflection piece sounds interesting, let me know and I'll do it. One of the best items I'd plan to include is a letter from Steve DeCanio (ex-editor of
Spider
), who is now a grad student at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] after spending all last summer in various jails, serving terms for the FSM and Auto Row convictions. It's a good commentary on the whole Berkeley scene.

Beyond that, I'll be happy to hear any ideas you have … for anything. But keep in mind I'm looking for a non-fiction book subject and would much prefer any article ideas to have book-length potential. Thanks for everything you can send. I meant to write a short note to cure you of any notion that I wasn't sending you articles because I'd become rich. That ain't the case. It's just that I had my original idea shot out from under me, and since then I've been groping. As a matter of fact I haven't written anything new since I finished the Hell's Angels book … and that makes me nervous.

Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson had learned about the death of his friend Lionel Olay from an obituary in the
Free Press.
Kunkin was the magazine's editor
.

December 14, 1966
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, Colo.

Dear Mr, Kunkin—

I was jolted to see your death notice on Lionel Olay in the December 9 issue, which got here today. I talked to Beverly on the phone right after Lionel had the second, bad stroke in the hospital and everything she said sounded bad … but then ever since I first met him in Big Sur Lionel always seemed on the brink of some new disaster, yet he always managed to prevail or at least endure. I wrote him at the hospital, expecting to get a hard-witted little note in return, but I guess I won't.