November 18, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Ralph …
You’re right, somehow, about me and the perverse hibernation syndrome. Ever since I got back from Chicago I’ve been a ball of fangs, ready to tackle almost anything except this goddamn long-range never-ending book on the American Dream—which I’m coming to NY in a few weeks to discuss, etc. Maybe we can have a beer and ponder any ideas you might have. As a writer, I don’t see where I have any obligation to deal with the saleable-idea market. That’s what editors are for … and besides that, I’ve never had a good article idea in my life. Journalism, to me, is just another drug—a free ride to scenes I’d probably miss if I stayed straight. But I’m neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy … so if you have a good pill I’m open; I’ll try almost anything that hasn’t bitten me in the past.
I’ll be in NY on Dec 6–7–8. And maybe Dec 5 & 9, too. Why don’t you leave word with Jim Silberman at Random House, so we can at least have a drink. Okay …
Hunter S. Thompson
TO THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION:
The failings of KREX-TV had grown so unbearable that Thompson took his complaints over the station manager’s head all the way to the FCC.
November 26, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Federal Communications Comm.
Washington, DC
Gentlemen …
I’d like to register a formal complaint against station KREX-TV in Grand Junction, Colorado—and if this isn’t the Proper Procedure for filing complaints, then please send me all the proper forms.
I’ll assume, however, that a coherent letter is as good a form as any—at least for the moment. And I might also add that I’m complaining on behalf of my four-year-old son. To wit:
For the past two Sundays—Nov 17 and Nov 24—KREX-TV has preempted “Lassie” in favor of full, half-hour advertisements for Black & Decker power tools. This has been done without explanation and despite the fact that KREX-TV has listed “Lassie” in the 5:30 p.m. time slot (in TV Guide) on both Sundays. So as far as I’m concerned this is not only a case of the station running paid commercials in prime time—and half-hour, 30 minute commercials at that—but also Fraudulent Advertising. If KREX-TV has sold that time slot to Black & Decker, they should say so in their listings. Please advise me as to what can be done about this.
Thanks,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO LYNN NESBIT:
Thompson’s friend Bill Cardoso, who had just been named editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, would coin the term “gonzo journalism” in 1970.
December 16, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Lynn …
Thanx for the Xmas card & tell Richard I may be in touch with him sometime soon. For good or ill.
Inre: The inauguration, I’m definitely going—and if nothing turns up in the way of fat assignments on your end I think I can get $300 from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. A friend of mine has just become the editor and he is, in truth, a giant real freak … the fact that the Globe would make him editor of their Sunday mag fills me with a kind of mean karate optimism for the future. Billy Cardoso—remember that name; he’ll probably be editor of Esquire in two years. The freaks are being sucked into power against their will. Cardoso is the reality of the New Journalism, a generation ahead of Willie Morris & that ilk. I talked to him on the phone today & it was astounding to realize that I could actually talk to an editor like talking to a person who knew what I was talking about. My normal reaction to editor-calls is a nervous sense that I’m busting the routine in an Old Folks home.
Anyway, I told Cardoso that I’d like to write him a weird, free-wheeling piece on Nixon’s inauguration, but that I couldn’t tell him anything definite until I checked with you, to see if anything else was happening on the fat-money front. If we can’t find anything fat, I’d just as soon go ahead and do a short piece for the Globe for $300 and press credentials out of their Washington Bureau. And maybe some minor expenses. Since I’m going anyway, I might as well enjoy it and drag down some dollars for a $1500 word outburst on The Death of Hope.
I’d naturally prefer a $3000 assignment, and I’m sure you would, too. But if all else fails, let’s deal with Cardoso … as a matter of fact unless we can get something at twice the price he can pay, I’d prefer to write for him. Let’s put the line at $1000; Cardoso’s offer beats anything under that—but anything above is a different ballgame. I leave it with you.
Have you tried the Oil Shale thing with True?
OK for now; I’m still dingy from all that movement. I finished that trip driving 90 mph from Lansing, Mich. to the airport in Detroit … but I think I have a good thing. We’ll see.
Ciao,
Hunter
TO THE GENERAL MANAGER, DYNACO, INC.:
December 20, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
General Manager
DYNACO, INC.
3060 Jefferson St.
Philadelphia, PA 19121
Dear Sir:
Over a month ago I sent a one-dollar bill ($1) and a request for the Owner’s Manual for the PAS pre-amp, which I recently bought (slightly-used) along with a new Dyna stereo 70-A. You neither acknowledged my letter (containing the dollar-bill), nor sent the book on the PAS, so I’m writing again.
I have several problems with the PAS and the 70-A hook-up, and I need a book on the PAS so I can understand what I’m doing. One, of course, is the standard problem with all Dyna amplifiers—that of putting in a headphone jack. Another is figuring out how to record records on tape with the PAS/70-A set. I had the SCA-35 and had to build a switch into it so I could tape records without putting out a bunch of leads. It seems like you people could install these simple features at the factory … unless perhaps you have some institutional bias against headsets and tape recorders.
My other problem concerns the attachment of a center speaker to the 70-A. The book that came with the amp says I have to write the factory to find out how this is done, so this is what I’m doing—without much optimism, since I’ve already lost a dollar trying to get an owner’s manual on the PAS. By all means bill me for another dollar, if necessary. I want that owner’s manual at once. There’s no goddamn excuse for any reputable company taking a customer’s money and ignoring his query.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO PERIAN AND GLEASON, U.S. SENATE:
Thompson tested his new pseudonym, “Raoul Duke,” on two investigators for the U.S. Senate.
December 28, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Perian and Gleason
Hired Geeks
Juvenile Delinquency Committee [sic]
U.S. Senate
Listen you bastards have been lying about this gun control problem, it’s worse than you think and I want to warn you right now that if you don’t get [Tom] Dodd to pass a total confiscation bill pretty damn quick, a lot of people are going to be killed. I know what I’m talking about mainly because I’m a karate black-belt and I’m about to kill some of these gun freaks that keep writing letters. I’ll rip their goddamn heads off and don’t think I’m kidding. We have a lot better ways of croaking people in this country than old-fashioned bullshit like guns. I run a karate school out here and my people are so goddamn tough that bullets bounce off their bellies like popcorn balls. These gun nuts are a bunch of softies and if you don’t pass a law against them pretty damn quick I’ll turn my people loose to enforce the Natural Law. There are more of us than there are of them, don’t ever forget that.
In closing, I remain, yours for a violent solution to the gun problem …
Raoul Duke
TO WILLIAM J. KENNEDY:
William J. Kennedy—an old and trusted friend since the Puerto Rico days—would win the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Iron
weed.
December 28, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear William …
This will not be a good letter. I am going under and I can’t say why. Like Mailer, I am writing great sentences and paragraphs, but when I get beyond a page I go all to pieces trying to put too much in too little space.
Anyway, I may be in NY or Boston around the end of January, after attending the Nixon inauguration for reasons of my own. On the other hand, if my money problems don’t heal, I’ll come back here at once and begin writing anything that pays. If I were you I wouldn’t count on getting a fucking penny off your company-store principle. The idea, Dylan said, is to “get you down in the hole that he’s in. …” Fuck them.
Sandy is pregnant again and can’t travel by air, which is only an excuse for cancelling all social movements until I finish something in the form of a book for RH. That should be June or July at the earliest. After that we might get East, and if so we’ll definitely sock in on you for a while.
Here’s a note for you: the new editor of the Boston Globe Sunday mag is a natural freak named Bill Cardoso, who is looking for stuff beyond the New Journalism to “blow New England’s mind.” He doesn’t pay much, but there aren’t many editors who’ll assign a man to load up on dope in order to cover Nixon’s inauguration. He asked me to put him in touch with anybody who’s writing weird new stuff of any kind. Check him out if you can; I suspect he’s the wave of the editorial future—like [Clifford] Ridley, god bless him, was the wave of the past. I met Cardoso when I was looking at Nixon in N.H. … you’ll like him.
Glad to hear you liked [Beat poet Allen] Ginsberg. Actually, I made up that quote in my book that goes: “for a guy that ain’t straight at all, he’s pretty goddamn straight. …” Or something like that. He’s one of the few honest people I’ve ever met, for good or ill.
Hello to Dana. I’ll call from NY if I make it.
Yours in fear and loathing …
Hunter
1969
THE BATTLE OF ASPEN … LOCAL POLITICS WITH A VENGEANCE, DEATH TO THE GREED-HEADS … FIRST VISIT WITH MESCALITO, DANGEROUS FUN WITH THE BROWN BUFFALO … DEATH TRIP TO THE WHITE HOUSE, NIXON ÜBER ALLES …
The author with nemesis J. Edgar Hoover.
(PHOTO BY DAVID HISER)
Owl Farm, 1969.
(PHOTO BY MICHAEL MONTFORT)
Marlboro man, 1969.
(PHOTO COURTESY OF HST ARCHIVES)
Thompson on bear hunt, Montana, 1969.
(PHOTO COURTESY OF HST ARCHIVES)
Owl Farm: Posing for L.L. Bean ad, 1969.
(PHOTO COURTESY OF HST ARCHIVES)
TO OSCAR ACOSTA:
The wild Chicano crusader from East L.A. had sent Thompson his play The Last Laugh of an Indian Gandy Dancer for a critique, though probably not the one he got—especially after a lecture on the joys of settling down.
January 3, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Oscar …
OK, I got the play today—haven’t read it, of course, due to spending most of the day in bathtub reading that heinous Don Juan book—A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Very weird; that old man really fucked the kid around, eh?
But maybe he had something with that Four Enemies bit. You should give that one some thought. Particularly in light of your ugly (self-proclaimed) outlook on the Revolutionary front. What makes you think you’re going to catch a stray bullet during some demonstration? Shit, you’ll never be that lucky. When it’s all over, you’ll still be sitting there fasting, waiting for the TV cameras …a Yaqui way of publicity. Fuck It; I’m tired of all that bullshit.
If you had any sense, you’d steal some money and buy a ranch on the Western coast of Mexico. Get hold of a good green hillside looking down on the sea and build something on it. Make a decent human place where people can come and really feel peace—if only for a few hours, before rushing out again to that stinking TV world. You may well be, as you noted, well on your way to becoming the “… middle-aged, loud-mouthed, so-called revolutionary …” that you say you deplore. But your concern for your “image” suggests that you like that scene too much—all those microphones and cameras and people asking for statements.
Which is fine … but where do you go at midnight, when the last act ends? By doing it that way, you become a freak/pawn in their game. During the five years I worked at jobs, I got fired from every one, without exception …and with the single exception of this place I’m in now, I’ve been evicted from every place I’ve ever lived. Which proves, of course, that I was right all along …and let me tell you why. Shit, my reasons would fill 200 garbage cans. …
Well, maybe I’m leaning too far in my own direction here, maybe trying to justify my efforts to build a personal fort where the pigs can’t get me except on my own terms … but even if I’ve overdone my thing out here, I’m convinced the instinct is valid … like Don Juan’s idea of a sitio.1 I think you need at least a claim on a sense of internal order before you can rush out and rip at the world. Who the fuck are you to be preaching about the eternal verities when you can’t even manage to find a door to close behind you? What have you built? What have you left behind?
Again, maybe I’m projecting … and maybe your play will explain it all. But I don’t have much faith in words; people buy them and print them for no reason except that maybe they’ll sell. The validity of writing a book (or a play) is about on par with the validity of “making law.” Which is no reason for not doing it, but only a fool takes it seriously. Your whole lifestyle (and mine, for that matter) is horrible mute testimony to your reverence for “the law.” The men who wrote the Volstead Act2 thought they were laying God’s own truth on us … and even the editors of Time magazine think they’re doing the world a favor; they have their own weird reasons, like The Pope has his, but every one of the fuckers thinks he’s doing God’s work.
So fuck them all.
And now, two days later, I’ve finished reading your play—or, more precisely your rewrite of that TV script you sent me about 6 months ago … What the fuck makes you think I’d like it any better now than I did then? You think my head is getting soft? That I wouldn’t remember it? You’ll recall, I hope, that I sent you some comments after reading the first draft, and I find this one essentially the same—although perhaps toned down a bit here and there. But not much. It’s still a race/culture exercise, with every character a stereotype—including Jose, the stoic Chicano hero solving the riddle for the rest of society’s leftovers. The Eden-Oak bit strikes me, then and now, as a flimsy attempt to wrap your preachings in some kind of neo-dramatic framework … but I’m damned if I have any idea why those people were gathered in that auditorium, or what the fuck that man with the Harvard accent was trying to prove.
Maybe I’m thick; you’ll have to figure that out for yourself … and this may be the finest piece of dramatic writing ever conceived by human hand. I’d like to think so, because I’d like to see you get rich and powerful in the film racket—so you could give me a job here and there. But I doubt if this thing is the ticket. Why don’t you try writing about life and reality for a change? Your novel at least had good dialogue—but in this thing you’ve resorted to the wooden puppet-talk of an old-time morality play. Come down off your fucking cross and look at the world. You’ve been trying to get yourself crucified for about ten years now, and it’s getting so obvious that only your friends are likely to indulge you. I think we could manage it out here for $200 or so, with photos—nail you to a tree above Snowmass, or maybe in Basalt. And for another $100 I could make up a mind-rattling press release and arrange to have it distributed. Why not? You could even arrange to have your biography printed privately….
But that’s too easy. They won’t even let you starve to death on TV in LA … they’ll jam a tube down your throat and put you back on the street. That’s the real punishment, and frankly I deplore it … but why get into that? Writing and politics are all part of the same foul game & I have enough shit on my h
ands out here without adding your christ-complex to my list.
Yeah … and how’s that for the naked criticism you asked for? Probably you’d be better off sticking with the lily-livered liberals—because they pay good money for a lot of crap far worse than this thing of yours. The crucial difference is that yours is obvious; it’s too awkward and serious in a direction they don’t want because it’s not entertaining. With half the time and effort, you could write a very saleable, harmless thing for TV, and by adopting that viewpoint you wouldn’t have to endure this kind of crap from people like me.
Which you asked for … right? “I wish you wouldn’t hold back,” you said. I have it here in print. And so much for that.
As for the acid problem, I don’t know what to make of it. All I know is that I wouldn’t pay a dime a cap for that acid you gave me in LA. I had the same problem with that big mescaline score I was onto; it turned out to be pure shit. I bought 20 caps for $30, and it was all a bad hype. Since then, however, I’ve discovered a sporadic supply of excellent mesc. for $3 a cap …but if you stumble on anything good in SF I’ll happily send you $20 for 20, if that’s the price. My stuff is so strong that a full cap means the loss of a night and the next day. I’d like something a bit cheaper and less violent, so consider me good for 20 when you go up to SF—providing you try it and say it’s OK.
And that’s it for now. I have to get to work. Everybody in the world is shitting on me for not producing, and although I don’t see much point in it, I guess I have to write something—if only to pay the rent and taxes. In the meantime, let me know if you can manage to get an address and a phone number. This is the last thing I’ll send to 408 Spring.
Ciao …
HST
TO THE EDITOR, ASPEN TIMES:
As Aspen continued to develop from a quiet mountain town into a swank playground for the rich, famous, and security-conscious, Thompson feared their encroachment down the valley toward Woody Creek.