Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson

  As I pulled into the parking lot, the Jackpot Express plane passed overhead. So long, Judge, I thought to myself. You’re a brutal hustler and a Warrior and a great copilot, but you know how to get your way. You will go far in the world.

  That’s about it for now, Jann. This story is too depressing to have to confront professionally in these morbid weeks before Christmas ... I have only vague memories of what it’s like there in New York, but sometimes I have flashbacks about how it was to glide in perfect speedy silence around the ice rink in front of NBC while junkies and federal informants in white beards and sleazy red jumpsuits worked the crowd mercilessly for nickels and dollars and dimes covered with crack residue.

  Christmas hasn’t changed much in twenty-two years, Jann—not even two thousand miles west and eight thousand feet up in the Rockies. It is still a day that only amateurs can love. It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to believe in Santa Claus—but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year ... Some people can accept this, and some can’t. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season, and also why criminal shitheads all over New York City will hit you up for $100 tips or they’ll twist your windshield wipers into spaghetti and urinate on your door handles.

  And that’s about it for now, Jann. Christmas is on us and it’s all downhill from here on ... At least until Groundhog Day, which is soon ... So, until then, at least, take my advice, as your family doctor, and don’t do anything that might cause either one of us to have to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States. If you know what I’m saying . . .

  Yes. He is Up There, Jann. The Judge. And he will be there for a long time, waiting to gnaw on our skulls ... Right. Put that in your leather pocket the next time you feel like jumping on your new motorcycle and screwing it all the way over thru traffic and passing cop cars at 140.

  Remember F. X. Leach. He crossed the Judge, and he paid a terrible price ... And so will you, if you don’t slow down and quit harassing those girls in your office. The Judge is in charge now, and He won’t tolerate it. Beware.

  __ __ __ __

  Hunter’s Clinton Problem

  On Friday, July 31, 1992, in the heat of that year’s presidential campaign, the Rolling Stone National Affairs team—Hunter, Jann, William Greider, P. J. O’Rourke, and Eric Etheridge—sat down with Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton at Doe’s Eat Place in Little Rock, Arkansas. The result was a lively roundtable discussion about issues and policy, personalities and music for all involved—except, perhaps, Hunter, who walked in the place hoping for a kind of rapport with the candidate or, barring that, hoping to engage Clinton in the kind of extended, unguarded, revealing conversation that was Hunter’s specialty. What he found was a polished candidate adept at playing a low-risk political strategy that was, in his eyes, no fun. Having had his early questions quickly debunked or dismissed by the candidate, Hunter simply got up from the table and headed for a perch at the bar, where he sat and watched the rest of the interview take place from a distance. From this moment on, his attitude toward candidate, and soon president, Clinton was fixed; Hunter tried to chalk it up to his policies, or even a supposed run-in decades earlier, when Hunter claimed to have driven his car across the lawn of the house that Bill and Hillary rented in Washington, DC, on his way home from a George McGovern staff party in 1972. It wasn’t that complicated, really; Hunter spelled it out in the introduction to his story on the lunch meeting: “Bill Clinton has no Sense of Humor.”

  Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood

  September 17, 1992

  MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

  DATE: August 4th, ’92

  FROM: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

  SUBJECT: The Three Stooges Go to Little Rock ... Tall Gibberish at Doe’s Café . . . Where Were You When the Fun Stopped? . . . Mean Is Not Enough; Say Hello to President Clinton.

  I have just returned, as you know, from a top-secret Issues Conference in Little Rock with our high-riding Candidate, Bill Clinton—who is also the five-term governor of Arkansas and the only living depositor in the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh who wears a Rolling Stone T-shirt when he jogs past the hedges at sundown.

  Ah, yes—the hedges. How little is known of them, eh? And I suspect, in fact, that the truth will never be known ... I wanted to check them out, but it didn’t work. My rented Chrysler convertible turned into a kind of Trojan Horse in reverse—and frankly, I was deeply afraid to stay for even one night in Little Rock, by myself, for fear of being tracked and seized and perhaps even jailed and humiliated, on instructions from some nameless Clinton factotum.

  It was ugly, Bubba. We were under intense surveillance the whole time, despite our desperate efforts to act like just another gang of Good Ol’ Boys for Clinton ... Which we were, I guess, since our eager, farseeing Editor had already decided on his formal RS endorsement for Clinton and already scheduled Big Bill for the cover ... And since Clinton and his People understood this, our efforts to deal mercilessly with the candidate were pretty much neutered from the start.

  We were like the Three Stooges. Clinton already had the endorsement and cover, so anything he said to us—me, P.J. O’Rourke, and “Dollar Bill” Greider—was pretty much a matter of Filigree.

  We flew down to Little Rock in high style. The six of us lounging around on a jet plane the size of a Greyhound bus—with only six seats, two telephones, and gold-plated fixtures in a bathroom larger than some of the editorial offices at Rolling Stone.

  We were the Strike Force, the Rolling Stone Blue Ribbon Presidential Forum—zooming into Little Rock at six hundred miles an hour to confront Clinton and see who he really was.

  It is hard to know exactly what an RS cover is worth to a front-running candidate—but there was no question at all about the shitrain of Ugliness that could happen if the luncheon got out of hand. These drunken, brain-damaged brutes might do anything.

  Which is a nice kind of reputation to have, in some towns—but not in Little Rock, when you’re meeting in public with the next president in full view of the national press and fourteen Secret Service watchdogs. Nobody needs a headline like “Clinton Injured in Wild Brawl with Dope Fiends: Candidate Denies Drunkenness, Cancels Bus Trip, Flees.”

  Well ... that didn’t happen. It was T. S. Eliot, I think, who wrote, “Between the idea/And the reality ... Falls the Shadow.”

  Which turned out to be me.

  I was the Shadow. Bill Clinton was not comfortable being in the same room with me. He is, after all, a career politician only a hundred or so days away from the presidency—provided he makes no mistakes before Election Day—and being involved in some kind of fracas in the back room of a downtown bar and grill would definitely be a Mistake.

  Ah, but we’re getting ahead of our story.

  Let’s go back about twenty hours to our Commandolike drop into the Little Rock Airport—where a huge blue and white sign, bigger than two Greyhound buses, said, “Little Rock Is Bush Country.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered to P.J. “What are we doing here?”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said. “I feel right at home.”

  “Of course,” I said. “You Nazi swine.”

  He grinned and ate another Percodan to calm the pain in his gums.

  “Do you have any more of those?” I asked him. “My broken back is killing me.”

  “No,” he said. “I gave them all to Greider. I couldn’t stand his pitiful screams any longer.”

  We were all injured. The plane was like a Civil War hospital. Bill Greider, our éminence grise, had ripped all the tendons out of his knee in a freak accident only two hours earlier on the Teterboro, New Jersey, tarmac and was in extreme pain.

  “Don’t worry, Bubba,” I said to him. “I’m a doctor. Here, eat these pills.” I gave him sixteen Advils, which he
resisted but finally swallowed anyway.

  “I can’t stand pain,” I said. “Not even to be around it.”

  “Thank God you’re here, Doc,” Bill said. “We’re all in this thing together.”

  That elegant dictum, a testament to Brotherhood under stress, would be severely tested in the next twenty hours ... It was one nightmare after another as we were plunged into Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood.

  Cazart! Yes. I see it all very clearly now. I was blind as a bat, but no longer.... So let me share it with you, Bubba: the fruits of my hard-earned Wisdom. Stand back!

  Bill Clinton has no Sense of Humor. He eats a lot of French Fries and laughs at the wrong times and often manifests clinical signs of Schizophrenia. But he knows a good deal when he sees one, and on that murky Friday morning we were the good deal he was looking at—the Three Stooges, direct from New York on a big jet plane to legitimize the Deal.

  Don’t get me wrong, Bubba. We had fun, despite our various crippling injuries and my own humiliation when Clinton denounced every thought I uttered and every question I asked, as if I were criminally insane . . .

  The encounter took place in the back room of an artificially degraded replica of a standard-brand southern diner called Doe’s Eat Place (which I will hereafter and previously refer to as Doe’s Café, because I like café and I can’t stand the cuteness of the other) . . .

  The encounter was what we had come for, the Mano a Mano gig with the man we all agreed would probably be the next president—unless ... Remember Willie Horton. Remember Gary Hart. Indeed. There are many rooms in the mansion, and there will always be wreckage in the Fast Lane. This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It’s all true.

  So it is probably not Fair to dismiss Clinton as a Cowardly Craven Fool for feeling a touch apprehensive when his scheduler set him up for an unprecedented and utterly unpredictable Lunch Forum ... It was a high-risk venture, for sure, and I had to like him for doing it.

  Still, it seemed clear as we sat down for a lunch of Tamales, Tuna Fish, and French Fries with the Next President that he was not real eager to be there. He behaved in a queer, distracted manner and crushed my knuckles together when we shook hands. I shouted with pain, and Jann quickly intervened, saying: “Calm down, Governor. We’re on your side.”

  I nodded meekly and sat down in a tin chair at what was either the Head or the Foot of the table, thinking that the Candidate would naturally sit at the Other End, far out of reach of me.

  But no. The creepy bastard quickly sat down right next to me, about two feet away, and fixed me with a sleepy-looking stare that made me very uneasy. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and at first I thought he was dozing off ... But he appeared to be very tense, as if he were ready to pounce.

  Ye gods, I thought. What’s happening here? This is not what I had in Mind. The interview had turned weird, and so had the governor ... No one else seemed to notice I was paralyzed with fear. But I was not totally brain-dead. Just as I felt myself on the brink of passing out, I remembered I had a gift for Clinton, who continued to stare at me darkly.

  I reached quickly into my rumpled shirt pocket and pulled out a brand-new Vandoren tenor-saxophone reed, which had been entrusted to me by the famous photographer Fulton of Aspen, who also plays the tenor sax and had caught Clinton’s act on Arsenio.

  I got the governor’s attention by gently waving the elegant little piece of cane back and forth in front of his eyes until he came vaguely alive and smiled at me. Hot damn, I thought. That was close. He seemed almost friendly now. I explained that the reed was a gift from a fellow musician who wished him well, then I pressed it into his outstretched palm. The Secret Service boys reacted like Dobermans when I unexpectedly made uninvited physical contact with the Candidate and then gave him a small, unidentifiable object to put in his mouth, but I waved them off with a friendly smile. “Relax, boys,” I said. “It’s only a harmless reed—a tribute to the governor’s art.”

  What happened next was so strange that I would have shrugged it off as one of those random, paranoid hallucinations that occur now and then, even to sane people—except that I have the whole long moment on Sony Hi8 Metal-E60 videotape, and there were also five or six witnesses who later recalled the incident with stark clarity and a creepy sense of dismay that none of them wanted to talk about or even acknowledge at the time. But it was true:

  Clinton stared balefully at the reed for what seemed like a very long time, like a Chimp peering into his first Mirror ... There was a sense of puzzlement on his face as he silently pondered the thing.

  It was an awkward moment, Bubba. Very awkward. Nobody knew how to handle it. He seemed unhappy, almost angry as he fondled the reed distractedly, saying nothing ... Then he rolled his eyes back in his head and uttered a wild quavering cry that made my blood run cold.

  The others tried to pretend that it wasn’t happening. We were, after all, in the South—and in some tangled way we were also the governor’s guests. Or maybe he was ours. Who knows? But there was no doubt at all that somebody was drifting over the line into unacceptable rudeness, and I didn’t think it was me. Greider was sobbing quietly, and P.J. sagged limply in his chair. Jann began jabbering frantically about “the Generation Gap.” A pall of helpless craziness came over the table, a sense of unknowable Doom . . .

  Then the governor dropped the Reed on the table like it was just another half-eaten Potato scrap, brushing it blankly aside and suddenly smiling warmly at all of us, as if he had just emerged from a Pod and was happy to be among friends. “No more music,” he said firmly. “Let’s have some food, I’m hungry.” Then he grasped the wicker basket of French Fries with both hands and buried his face in it, making soft snorting sounds as he rooted around in the basket trying vainly to finish it off.

  I was afraid, but Jann was quick to recover. “Easy, Governor, easy,” he said in a suave voice. “Let me help you with that, Bill. Hell, we’re all hungry.” He smiled and reached out for the half-empty basket of fries, as if to share the burden—but Clinton snatched it away, clutching it to his chest and turning his back on us—a horrible thing to see.

  Somewhere behind me I heard a kind of hissing, moaning sound as Eric, our hapless editor, stood up and bolted out of the room, slamming between two startled SS agents, and then locked himself in the bathroom. I heard a croaking noise, then a rush of water.

  Well, I thought. This is probably about as weird as it can get, without all of us going to jail, so why not relax and act normal—or at least try? These things happen. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Welcome to Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood.

  The Wisdom

  I came away from Little Rock with mixed feelings. Bill Clinton and I did not hit it off real well, but so what? I got into politics a long time ago, and I still believe, on some days, that it can be an honorable trade . . . That is not an easy belief to hang on to after wallowing for thirty years in the belly of a Beast that has beaten and broken more good men and women than Crack and Junk Bonds combined. Politics is a mean Business, and when September rolls around in a campaign, it gets mean on a level that is beyond most people’s comprehension. The White House is the most powerful office in the world, and a lot of people will tell you nothing is over the line when it finally comes down to winning or losing it. Nobody is safe and Nothing is sacred when the stakes get that high. It is the ultimate Fast Lane, and the people still on their feet in September are usually the Meanest of the Mean. The last train out of any station will not be full of Nice guys.

  Look at Bush. He has worked overtime to give Politics a bad name. He is a mean-spirited wimp and a career bureaucrat who has arguably committed more high crimes and misdemeanors in and around the Oval Office than Nixon would have been Impeached for if he hadn’t resigned ... Nixon was genetically Dishonest, and so is Bush. They both represent what Bobby Kennedy called “the darker impulses of the American Spirit . . .”

  And Bill Clinton does not. That is the nut of it. Clinton is a decent man and a cred
it to his race ... Ho, ho. That’s a joke, Bubba. Bush wouldn’t laugh at it, and neither did Mr. Bill when I shook his hand and said it to him with a nice smile. He gave me another one of those weird, sleepy-eyed stares and wished me good Luck for the rest of my life.

  I am now going back to the drawing board to come up with a better and more valid reason to vote for Clinton in November—which I plan to do, but my reasons are no more concrete today than they were on the flight down to Little Rock. I like him a little better, but there was nothing in what he said for the record to excite anybody except cops, money mongers, and elitist policy wonks. The rest is all a matter of blind faith and reading between the lines.

  Let’s face it, Bubba. The main reason I’ll vote for Clinton is George Bush, and it has been that way from the start ... There is no way around it (for me) and no reason to apologize for it. George Bush is a dangerously failed President and a half-bright top-level Nerd who has spent the last four years avoiding grocery stores and gas stations while he tried to keep tabs on the disastrous fallout from the orgy of greed and short selling that was the “Reagan Revolution.”

  We still have a problem with my inability to explain why I feel very strongly about voting for Clinton—except that another four years of the Reagan-Bush bund will mean the Death of Hope and the Loss of any sense of Possibility in Politics for a whole generation that desperately needs that fix and will wither on the vine without it.

  That is reason enough to vote for Clinton. It helps that I like him as a person and trust him enough as a quality politician to believe that I can occasionally turn my back on him when he moves into the White House—which he will, I think—and I will help him in every way I can, short of guaranteeing in print that President Clinton/Gore will solve all our problems and give forty acres and a mule to everyone who votes for him.

  Nobody is going to do that. And especially not George Bush. But Bill Clinton will at least try, and that’s good enough for me. He is a high-stakes gambler, and he can take a punch better than anybody since Muhammad Ali . . .