The Kitchen Readings
Read The Kitchen Readings Online
Authors: Michael Cleverly
Untold Stories of Hunter S. Thompson
and
Bob Braudis
This book is dedicated to the memory
of our dear friend
Tom Benton
The title
The Kitchen Readings
refers to Hunter's writing process. He loved to hear his own words read aloud. He would write; his friends would read. This is how he edited, how his work evolvedâ¦on into the night. That process took place in the kitchen at Owl Farm, Hunter's home in Woody Creek, Colorado. The kitchen was the center of life at Owl Farm and it was the engine room for Hunter's literary juggernaut. The kitchen may indeed be the hub of many American homesâand though life at Owl Farm was Hunter S. Thompson's life, it certainly was not traditional American fare, nor was it quite the life that might be imagined by the many thousands of Hunter's fans. Hunter made himself the hero of his books. He also manipulated the tools of the information age to create a mystique
that stood apart from his writing. Hunter has a huge base of people who love his writing and a second, perhaps even larger, fan base of people who are drawn to his mystique. Hunter's admirers base their knowledge of him on three sources: his writings, the image he crafted in his writing and projected in his life, and the almost endless stream of superficial profiles created by journalists who would briefly visit Owl Farm and rush home to crank out their “Hunter Thompson in Woody Creek” story.
Doc, Cleverly, and artists Mary Conover and Earl Biss enjoy a quiet evening in the kitchen.
Over the years, we have watched Owl Farm visitors come and go, the famous and the forever unknown, celebrities and artists, intellectuals and fools. Many of them took a turn reading in the kitchen, and we were there. We were part of Hunter's life on a daily basis.
Pitkin County sheriff Bob Braudis, one of your narrators, was Hunter's closest confidant for many years. He was told that
he had earned the right to “show up anytime” without invitation or notice, a reward for loyalty, professional problem solving, and tolerance. Hunter intimidated most people, but not the sheriff. Hunter and Bob came to each other as equals, and this created a healthy atmosphere that they both relished.
Hunter would use Bob to ease the tension during difficult business negotiations, or anytime, in fact, that it was to Hunter's advantage for a guest in the kitchen to remain calm and unterrified. How bad could things get with the sheriff there? Bob would also act as interpreter. It took years for Hunter's friends to get used to his mumble. Learning his language would occur through some sort of weird osmosis over a long period of time. At some point it would simply dawn on you that you could understand every word that Hunter was saying, while those around you were just staring at him and nodding or scratching their heads. First you'd ponder just how the hell this had happened, and then you'd begin to worry about what exactly it meant. Both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp managed to find a way to mimic Hunter's speech while keeping it intelligible, an astounding feat, but not one Hunter was interested in duplicating. Bob Braudis was fluent in Hunter's mumblese and would fill the interpreter role with diplomacy and charm. He could be counted on to keep to himself what transpired, and to offer an intelligent, objective perspective when needed.
In the 1970s, Hunter was in and out of the Roaring Fork Valley looking for stories, and he actually wrote some of them. Bob would always be there when Hunter returned, to give him the inside scoop on whatever had happened at home during his absence and to provide an honest sounding board for Hunter's tales of his own adventures. The two men who rarely needed backup from anyone could lean on each other. Bob says that if
you held his feet to the fire he'd have to say that Hunter gave him more than he gave Hunter, but neither of them kept a ledger.
Bob Braudis has been Pitkin County sheriff for the last twenty years and was recently elected to another term. Before that, he spent nearly a decade as a sheriff's deputy and two years as a county commissioner. Bob came to Aspen seeking the life of a ski bum, but the ski bum life is that of a single man, and Bob had a family. After eight years he finally surrendered and found a “straight” job. That job was in law enforcement, and the rest is history.
Cleverly enjoying a beverage with Doc on the deck, perhaps straining to understand the words coming out of Hunter's mouth.
Sheriff Braudis, not showing the strain of his friendships with
Your other narrator, artist Michael Cleverly, migrated to Aspen in the early seventies. Back then, Aspen was a classic ski
town and still retained some of the charming qualities of small-town America. Aspen's artists and writers were an intimate community, and it would have been impossible for Cleverly and Hunter not to meet. In fact, Cleverly's studio was in the
Aspen Times
building, right next to the Hotel Jerome and its famous “J-Bar.” A hardworking painter needs a break sometimes, and quite often Hunter would be at the far end of the bar having “office hours.” Cleverly and Hunter shared many interests, and the two became close. Later Cleverly would move to a cabin in Woody Creek, just up the road from Owl Farm. Already friends, when they became neighbors Cleverly and Thompson found their contact evolving into an almost daily (or nightly) event. Hunter had someone he could trust just minutes away, and that meant a lot to him. Cleverly spent more waking hours in Hunter's kitchen than in his own living room.
The stage for the earliest stories in this book is Aspen, Colorado. In the 1970s the J-Bar was the hip gathering place in Aspen. Movie stars mingled with construction workers, wealthy trust-funders with ski bums. There was a wonderful democracy about the town in general, and the J-Bar in particular. It was a comfortable atmosphere for artists and writers, and it was where we spent our “off” hours. It became the clubhouse. “The J-Bar” was our name for what was officially “The Bar at the Hotel Jerome.” Happy hour was “roll call,” and attendance was required. If you didn't show up, people worried and got on the phone. The bar was the scene of many legendary events, and of some stories that can't be told even decades later. Our friend Michael Solheim ran the place, the waitresses were all young and beautiful, and the bartenders were our buddies. It was a happy family of people whose only common denominator might have been their madness. Our gatherings there went on for years, maybe a little lon
ger than they should have. We began to lose friends to rehab and jail. Eventually the hotel renamed it “The J-Bar” and lettered that on the windows. By then we had pretty much stopped going there. We gave it up to the next generation and the principal action moved down valley, to the Woody Creek Tavern.
Legendary Tavern bartender Steve Bennet and waitress Cheryl Frymire with young Bob and Doc; Cleverly with friend and neighbor Sue Carrolan. Sue was at Owl Farm with Cleverly the Friday night before Hunter died.
Waitress Cheryl with Doc and Johnny Depp. The Tavern staff got a little mileage out of the celebrities who visited.
The Tavern was located just over a mile from Owl Farm, so getting home from there was a lot safer than driving all the way back from Aspen after a hard night. The only word in the English language that begins to describe the décor of the Tavern is
eclectic
, but that doesn't really do it. The slightly decaying Victorian opulence of the J-Bar was easy to envision; the Tavern was the polar opposite. The walls were covered with photographs, and news
paper and magazine clippings that went several layers deep. The visual chaos made it impossible for the eye to rest on the few pieces of framed art that shared the wall space. The place was basically an insult to Aspen snootiness; it looked as if the interior decorating decisions had been made with an eye toward withstanding a chair-swinging barroom brawl rather than to make the customers feel special. The fact that it was located in the middle of a trailer park was perfectly consistent with its overall “no-frills” working-class ambience. Of course, by the time Hunter died, Woody Creek had seen its fair share of celebrities move in, along with the building of monster homes by the superrich. But in the beginning the Tavern was a place for regular folks, where Aspen types came on safari, and Hunter was king.
The Kitchen Readings
are tales of events that took place in the Jerome, the Tavern, and, of course, the Owl Farm kitchen. There are also stories that take us to exotic locales, such as Vietnam during the fall of Saigon, Grenada as the U.S. invades, and New Orleans with its pub crawls and transsexuals. The stories are compiled from our own recollections and those of Hunter's other close friends and neighbors, people who tend to keep their memories private, but who disinterred them for us. The stories span a period from 1968, when Hunter first arrived in Woody Creek, delivering a load of furniture for art dealer Patricia Moore, to the day of his death. They deal with his 3:00
A.M
. phone calls to discuss vital, urgent, matters such asâ¦firewoodâand the 5:00
A.M
. drive-bys, with Hunter leaning on the horn in the predawn darkness and pitching explosives out the window of his car. His idiosyncrasies and bizarre habits are explored at length and in depth. We'll both be writing first-person accounts of our adventures with Hunter, so we'll identify who's speaking (Braudis or Cleverly) at the beginning of the chapters. The stories that are a
result of our interviews with others close to Hunter are written in the third person.