Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (90 page)

Hubert never saw it that way, of course, and I’m sure you won’t either . . . Ah, Billy, we are so lonely for heroes these days,
aren’t we? It is like living on the Moors, waving lanterns & screeching frantically at each other in the fog that hangs over the peat moss, always weak & afraid of being suddenly attacked from behind by a huge killer hound from hell—some beast with a separate agenda like you or even P.J. . . .

But
he
didn’t blame his dilettante gibberish on
me
or my “pills” like you did . . . Shame on you, Bubba. I think you owe me an apology. I have a lot of Pills, but I have
nothing
that will make a smart man act like Hubert Humphrey—and I wouldn’t send it to you if I did.

Most people recognize a devious pig when they see one. But we are
not
pigs, and it brings us low when we act that way. It makes me uncomfortable to think that my best friends & allies in journalism are dumb boys. It is lonely Enough out here without that.

OK. Thanx in advance for yr. cooperation.

__ __ __ __

Though neither Timothy Leary nor William S. Burroughs was among Hunter’s inner circle, he’d met and corresponded with both; several years earlier he’d driven to Lawrence, Kansas, to visit and shoot with Burroughs, and in the last weeks and months of Leary’s life, he and Hunter had extended late-night telephone conversations. A proper
RS
send-off for both seemed only appropriate.

__ __ __ __

August 8, 1996

D
ATE
: June 9, 1996
T
O
: Jann S. Wenner
F
ROM
: Hunter S. Thompson
S
UBJECT
: Mistah Leary, He Dead

I will miss Tim Leary—not for his wisdom or his beauty or his warped lust for combat or because of his wealth or his power or his drugs, but mainly because I won’t hear his laughing voice on my midnight telephone anymore. Tim usually called around 2. It was his habit—one of many that we shared, and he knew I would be awake.

Tim and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “after midnight, all things are possible.”

Just last week he called me on the phone at two thirty in the morning and said he was moving to a ranch in Nicaragua in a few days and would fax me the telephone number. Which he did. And I think he also faxed it to Dr. Kesey.

Indeed. There are many rooms in the mansion. And Tim was familiar with most of them. We will never know the range of his fiendish vision, or the many lives he was sucked into by his savage and unnatural passions.

We sometimes disagreed, but in the end we made our peace.
Tim was a Chieftain. He Stomped on the Terra, and he left his elegant hoof prints on all our lives.

He is forgotten now but not gone. We will see him soon enough. Our tribe is now smaller by one. Our circle is one link shorter. And there is one more name on the honor roll of pure warriors who saw the great light and leapt for it.

September 18, 1997

William had a fine taste for handguns, and later in life he became very good with them. I remember shooting with him one afternoon at his range on the outskirts of Lawrence. He had five or six well-oiled old revolvers laid out on a wooden table, covered with a white linen cloth, and he used whichever one he was in the mood for at the moment. The S&W .45 was his favorite. “This is my finisher,” he said lovingly, and then he went into a crouch and put five out of six shots through the chest of a human-silhouette target about twenty-five yards away.

Hot damn, I thought, we are in the presence of a serious Shootist. Nicole had been filming it all with the Hi8, but I took the camera and told her to walk out about ten yards in front of us and put an apple on her head.

William smiled wanly and waved her off. “Never mind, my dear,” he said to her. “We’ll pass on that trick.” Then he picked up the .454 Casull Magnum I’d brought with me. “But I will try this one,” he said. “I like the looks of it.”

The .454 Casull is the most powerful handgun in the world. It is twice as strong as a .44 Magnum, with a huge scope and a recoil so brutal that I was reluctant to let an eighty-year-old man shoot it. This thing will snap back and crack your skull if you don’t hold it properly. But William persisted.

The first shot lifted him two or three inches off the ground, but the bullet hit the throat of the target, two inches high. “Good shot,” I said. “Try a little lower and a click to the right.” He nodded and braced again.

His next shot punctured the stomach and left nasty red welts on his
palms. Nicole shuddered visibly behind the camera, but I told her we’d only been kidding about the apple. Then William emptied the cylinder, hitting once in the groin and twice just under the heart. I reached out to shake his hand as he limped back to the table, but he jerked it away and asked for some ice for his palms. “Well,” he said, “this is a very nasty piece of machinery. I like it.”

I put the huge silver brute in its case and gave it to him. “It’s yours,” I said. “You deserve it.”

Which was true. William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear. He would have fired an M-60 from the hip that day if I’d brought one with me. He would shoot anything, and he feared nothing.

March 19, 1998

The devil made me do it the first time.
The second time I done it on my own.

—Waylon Jennings

That is how it goes with politicians. The worst are relentless greedheads, and the best can’t control their own lusts. Spiro Agnew took brown bags full of cash, and Bill Clinton will suffer the little children to come unto him. Some people go to jail or get impeached for these things, while others are hailed as New Age Wizards and stylish rogues with unfortunate personal addictions. One man’s Innocent Child is another man’s Raging Slut—and, as always in combat, one loose cannon on your own deck is more dangerous than six enemy cannons.

Welcome to Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood, folks. It may be weird, but it’s ours. We like it here—except for a handful of worrywarts and Sex Nazis who will never be happy anyway. They are in the Minority now, and their atavistic thinking is about to take another serious whack. They hate perverts, but so what? They hated Joey Buttafuoco, too, and he became a major folk hero and a legendary Sodomite in spite of them.

Ah, but we are not talking about Joey Buttafuoco here. We are talking about William Jefferson Clinton from Hope, Arkansas, the forty-second president of the U.S.A.

Try a booming 73 percent approval rating in the polls, Bubba—up from 51 percent before the Sex Scandal. That’s not a bad bump on the
charts for a lame-duck, degenerate president with a minority in both houses of Congress and a whole raft of sex-related lawsuits on his hands from women who may or may not be claiming that they were preyed upon by a brute worse than Hermann Goering or even Benjamin Franklin.

Seventy-three percent is big numbers on the campaign trail, Bubba. Very big. I would feel safe in betting heavily that there aren’t too many members of this Congress who came in with 73 percent of the vote. That is a Landslide. That is Victory.

Newt Gingrich had his victory, too. Remember the Republican Revolution of 1994? Now the only people who still have any respect for it are cops, preachers, and creeps who hang out on the fringes of Klan rallies and worship Charlton Heston. And in November, Gingrich is looking at a Total Loss of personal and political power as the year 2000 looms down on us. Things happen faster and faster in the nineties.

And the difference between Winning and Losing is very big. Look what happened to the dumb bastards who accused Richard Jewell of being the “mad bomber” of the ’96 Atlanta Olympics. They got shamed, humiliated, and ripped to shreds for their carelessness. Some people take these warnings seriously. I know I do. The Lewd Revolution is coming; that is the message, and Bill Clinton is only one of its messengers. Never mind what William Bennett says. Anybody who writes a best seller called
The Book of Virtues
is riding for a serious fall—and now we are back in Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood, at the nexus of the Lewd Revolution . . . That is what is happening, that is the message, and anybody against it will be like King Canute trying to hold back the sea.

Bill Clinton has been worried about the nature of his Legacy in History, but he should worry no longer. He can shuck off his list of previous accomplishments: ending Welfare as we knew it, presiding over the greatest peacetime prosperity since Octavian, paying off the Federal deficit, opening up the entire hemisphere to free trade, and engineering Wall Street’s great six-year Bull Run.

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.

__ __ __ __

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.

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.