Conrad was right: “Exterminate the brutes.”
Or was that Mistah Kurtz talking?13
We’ll never know, eh? And it don’t make no never mind anyway, right now, except to explain why the memo I scribbled to you in my last frenzied hours on that stinking island was not entirely satisfactory in terms of context, background, plot lines, etc. It focused entirely on a new and sudden understanding of the characters in the Galveston story that came to me for reasons I’d just as soon never understand—in the foulest and darkest depths of personal despair.
Rather than send you that frantic gibberish, however, I am going to run the risk of trying to translate it onto the typewritten page, and hopefully in some kind of context that will give you something a bit more tangible than a few pages of admittedly brilliant character development in a story I referred to only by accident in the letter, since my only purpose in writing it was to tell you that I felt I’d suddenly solved what I felt was the Main Problem with the Galveston story—which was WHO the characters were and WHY they were tangled up in this ugly & disastrous gun-running trip. The general outline of the plot has always seemed pretty clear to me, but until that hideous night in Trinidad I had never seen the characters in any kind of focus—never really seen them at all, for that matter, and if we are going to proceed, as I normally do, on the notion that Character is Destiny, there is no way to write a convincing story about people neither one of us feel we know.
I have that feeling now, but at this point I have no more idea than you do whether I can make any coherent sense of that feeling in two or three pages on very short notice … and it’s also possible that this “feeling” I dredged up from the bowels of my own rage & terror is nothing but a crude & pitiful delusion that won’t make the slightest fucking sense to anybody, including me.
But what the hell? I got the impression from our phone talk earlier today that you were anxious to see something tangible from me on this Galveston story, and that a crazed memo about characters and motivations would not make the nut, on your end … so, not entirely in accord with my better judgement, I figure I might as well sit down at this wretched machine and try to get a few basic things down on paper—so we’ll at least have something to look at, for good or ill.
And for christ’s sake don’t give me any cute nazi bullshit, like last time, about the stilted language of this letter. My sanity is hanging by a thread at this point, and I can’t stand any abuse…. About 30 minutes before you called today, I learned that Juan had accidentally disposed of $4,000 (that’s FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS) while I was in Tobago/Trinidad. Gone. Sent off in the goddamn mail. He has spent the last 24 hours hiding somewhere in town, and Sandy won’t tell me where….
Anyway, I’m trying to put this down in a form that might make sense to somebody besides you & me, so you’ll just have to live with this High English I tend to drift into whenever I see a sheet of carbon paper in my typewriter. Selah.
And now … well … let’s see what I can make of this fucker: From here on, I’m just going to wing it & hope for something coherent … but it might dissolve into gibberish at any moment, and if that happens I’ll send it anyway….
For the record, I’m still thinking purely in terms of “a story,” without trying to make any distinctions in my own mind or on paper between film or print, although probably I’ll be seeing the story as a book, because if I start trying to see it through the eye of a camera I’ll go mad in 20 minutes—and that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time: ZANG! With a running start I could be around that Final Bend before anybody caught on that this time I was really making a run for it….
Yeah … but let me give a bit more thought to this thing, first. I’m not sure why, but I’m broke again and I have to do something, so why not this?
One thing I’ve already taken care of, for instance, is the music, the sound track. The name is Russell Smith, and before you argue, go out and buy a new album by the Amazing Rhythm Aces, called Too Stuffed to Jump. Listen to it twice, by yourself, sitting in a totally dark room, and that should take care of the music.
As for the story … well … shit. Let’s keep on calling it “Galveston” for now, although we could just as well call it “Brownsville” or “Beaumont” (no, scratch “Beaumont”)…. But there is a finality about “Galveston,” to me at least, that matches my sense of the story. I want to make sure that every human being who sees or reads this thing will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives. That’s why I want the title to be a word that will keep popping up—on maps, in Time & Newsweek, in random conversations, on the network news, in jigsaw puzzles … I want to make the word “Galveston” completely synonymous in the American language with absolute and inescapable doom. I want to make it the Guernica,14 a dark and ominous word that can never be said with a smile….
Indeed … and in order to do that we will need three very believable characters that at least 50 million people between the ages of 25 and 45 can somehow identify with: Not freaks, not bikers, not psychotics or politicians or bodybuilders or hookers or perverts or rich or poor or black or crazy or powerful … but three people—one male aged 34, one male aged (aged? is that a word?) 41, and one female aged 27. All three will be just a little bit brighter and prettier and more adventurous and more successful at coping with life than the people around them…. But only a little bit, because I want them to be mirrors, not comets, because the only way to lure the reader or the viewer into this hellbound train is to make sure they first identify in some personal way with the characters … and then, after setting the identity hook, we offer these three characters an opportunity to make a lot of money by doing something just risky enough to be genuinely dangerous, but not so dangerous that most viewers/readers wouldn’t at least think they might be capable of doing it themselves—like quietly dropping out of their own separate realities for two or three weeks and delivering a 2-ton U-Haul truck full of M-16s from a warehouse in Salt Lake City to a dock in Galveston, for a quick and seemingly foolproof profit of $100,000. Maybe more, maybe less; these are the “details” I’ll have to deal with under the heading of research. And the reason for research is to make a fictional story with fictional characters appear to be true—at least for the life of the story, and hopefully for the next 300 years. I want to know exactly how many M-16s will fit in a 2-ton truck, exactly how much a truck-load of M-16s stolen from the Army will cost in Salt Lake City, and exactly how much they will sell for on a dock in Galveston—not because the numbers or figures themselves are so important, but because every small truth in a fictional story makes it that much more believable, and unless the first half of this story is irresistibly believable, the second half will seem like a bad joke … but anybody who believes that the first half could easily be true is going to take a brutal hammering in the second half, to wit:
The kink in the story is the same one we’ve talked about, although not in much detail: Everything goes according to plan until the trio reaches Houston, where they find themselves two days ahead of schedule. They have to be at the dock in Galveston at exactly 6:00 p.m. on Friday—so on Wednesday afternoon they check into a motel on South Main that is near a congenial roadhouse called The Blue Fox, owned by a friend of a friend, etc…. and on Wednesday night one of the three pulls the pin in the story by saying something half-serious about their “truckload of machineguns….” Right, and on Thursday night their truck disappears out of the motel parking lot. Stolen. No clues, no way to report it, no way to get it back—a U-Haul truck full of M-16s stolen from the U.S. Army and paid for in Salt Lake with fronted money.
(Goddamnit, Bob, the mail goes out in exactly 46 minutes and there’s no way I can finish this thing by then…. So I think I’ll do as much as I can in the next 30 minutes, then mail this, and then go into town and xerox the Trinidad letter and mail that in Aspen…. So you’ll be getting two letters & they might not arrive in the same mail, but the second will be just a few hours behind the first … and it’s going to take
me another day to weave this thing together anyway, so for now I’ll just do what I can and we’ll talk on the phone when you get both letters….)
Anyway, the terror begins when they realize the truck has been stolen. They (and the reader/viewer) are 99% sure the owner of The Blue Fox (somebody a bit like Bob What’s-his-name who owns Galena Street, a clean-cut criminal who is also into Houston politics) had the truck stolen or at least knows who stole it, but at this point he is also their only possible hope for getting it back … and it is at this point that all three of them begin to understand (one at a time) that they have moved outside the world of “law” and relatively civilized behavior that has both restricted and protected them all their lives. …It is free-fall now, the law of the jungle, the tooth and the fang, etc…. and their first move, once they understand how helpless they are, is to turn the girl over to the owner of The Blue Fox. The girl for the guns, right?
Wrong. The girl is the first to understand what’s happening, and by noon on Friday she has clearly gone over. The 34-year-old protagonist (see enc.—goddamnit I’ll just send the whole packet at once—you rotten bastard! How did you get me into this madness? The goddamn mail leaves in 13 minutes & I’m still down here in the basement & not even started on the characters …).
The 41-year-old ex–dope dealer from LA is not far behind the girl, but he is the one who got the front money from “the mafia” and he knows he can run but he can’t hide—and his friend (let’s imagine J. Buffett at 34, bored with success and looking for some money-action) wants to stay and force some kind of solution. I haven’t figured out what kind of madness he might want to try, but whatever it is, it’s doomed. But for about two hours on Friday afternoon it looks like his plan might work—and then, with no warning at all, he opens a door somewhere in Galveston and gets his spine severed with a .357 Magnum. Paralyzed forever.
They drifted into The Deep End.
And now I have six minutes to get to the WC store with this fucker. OK for now. Call me when you get work.
H
TO JIMMY CARTER:
Thompson had interviewed Carter several times over the preceding two years, but now found himself in the awkward position of covering the 1976 campaign for Rolling Stone after having advised the Democratic candidate.
June 29, 1976
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Jimmy …
In case I haven’t reached you by telephone before you get this letter, let me explain what I’ll have in mind whenever I do reach you by phone—so I won’t have to waste a lot of time explaining why I’m calling.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I’ve agreed to do another long Rolling Stone article on Campaign ’76—which means, in effect, that I’ll be covering the Demo Convention in NYC and then writing a long article right afterwards; and since I can’t count on the convention itself to generate the kind of adrenaline-action that I need to get me to the typewriter for another long bout with political journalism, it occurred to me tonight that the sanest, easiest, most mutually comfortable and in fact the most potentially meaningful thing I could do at this point would be to sit down with you in some kind of relatively relaxed situation and have another one of our more or less “annual tape talks.”
Looking at the calendar, I see that my first encounter with you was on the first Saturday in May, 1974 (the Law Day speech), and my second was almost exactly a year later—after you’d made your candidacy official—when I came down to Plains in May of 1975.
… And now, looking back on the past two years and all the things that have happened since we first met, it occurs to me that we both have a sort of esthetic debt to history to keep this strange movie rolling as long as we can, or at least as long as it’s comfortable …
… and that, of course, would be a significant turn in the story-line, regardless of which fork it took. Unlike Time, I don’t see anything especially “bizarre” in our relationship as one decent human being to another, but I might as well admit that in almost any other public or private context I can see why there are a hell of a lot of people—including some of my best and most intelligent friends—who are honestly puzzled by what they perceive as a weird and neo-ominous “alliance” between two people who seem to represent two of the most extreme & opposite poles on the socio-political spectrum. People like Alan Baron and Dick Goodwin, for instance, are genuinely baffled by most of the things I’ve said about you—and the main reason for their bafflement, I suspect, is that I’ve never properly explained why the obvious difference in our private lifestyles and political backgrounds doesn’t necessarily preclude either a personal friendship or a real mutuality of interests when it comes to presidential politics.
This is a thing I’d like to be able to explain and get down on paper, once and for all—and in order to do this, I think we need another good, relaxed and wide-ranging (taped) conversation about whatever seems important at the time.
That would amount to the Third Annual “Carter/HST Live & Random Conversations” vis-à-vis an era in U.S. history that I think will prove out, in history, to be one of the most interesting, meaningful and historically critical eras this nation will ever go through.
I could, of course, be wrong. I have been wrong before, but not very often—and right now I’ll match my published, on-the-record outbursts of political “wisdom” against anybody else in the business, including Apple and Broder and Germond15 and that crowd…. So I’m riding pretty high right now, but just between you and me, I’m not quite as sure of the reason(s) for my success as I’d like to be….
… And that’s why I’d like to sit down and have another fairly long and relaxed talk with you. The last year I backed a winner in presidential politics was 1960, but that time it was mainly a matter of being sure who I was against— which is always a lot easier and more defensible than being for a candidate; and let me tell you, my friend, that you have given me more than one anxious moment in the past six months….
… And no doubt there will be a few more, but what the hell? For a variety of strange reasons that neither one of us ever really encouraged, I now feel saddled with a personal stake (with regard to my own judgement & credibility) in your candidacy, your views, and in the success or failure of what I’ve been telling people for the past two years is the very likely prospect of your presidency. I am stuck with you now, for good or ill—and although I’m not nearly as worried with that prospect as a lot of my friends tell me I should be, I feel a very powerful obligation to at least understand who and what I’m stuck with. It makes me nervous to feel responsible for the actions of any person except myself—especially if that person happens to be the President of the United States—and that’s precisely why I think it’s time to tape Chapter Three of this “bizarre” and unlikely saga.
We would need a framework of about 24 hours, to do it right—either another visit to Plains or maybe a long talk during the convention in NY—but, if absolutely necessary, I could probably do it with 12 more or less consecutive hours in either Plains or NYC, provided we could spend at least half of those hours (6) in relaxed and mutually comfortable circumstances, with time to talk at length about whatever aspects of a Jimmy Carter presidency most concern both of us. In 1972, my “story” on the Demo convention in Miami turned out to be a very long & detailed (taped) conversation with Rick Stearns on the real, bottom-line mechanics of how McGovern’s strategists managed to clinch his nomination on the first ballot…. And that’s the same sort of thing I have in mind for my Demo ’76 story, except that this time the conversation will have to be with you, instead of one of your colonels….
… Or even a general, for that matter, because the dramatic tension of the story (and the reason why it’s worth $5000 to Rolling Stone) lies almost entirely in my personal relationship, such as it is, with you, and not with “the Carter Campaign.”
So …I assume you see what I’m talking about; and just in case there’s any misunderstanding, let me say here & now that what I am not talking about is
another jury-rigged travesty like that “interview” we had to cope with—courtesy of Pat and Hamilton16—on the plane from Orlando to Chicago on the morning after the Florida primary. I had serious problems with Rolling Stone about justifying that trip for expense-account purposes. That was the time I had to get off your plane in Chicago and fly at once back to Tampa for one of my “speeches” inre: “the real meaning” of Campaign ’76 … and, yes, that was also the time I tried to burn Ham out of his room in the Carleton House.
We don’t need any more scenes like that one; the stakes and style of this drama have escalated quite drastically since then, and I doubt if your Secret Service detail would see much humor in the spectacle of the Democratic nominee’s campaign manager getting immolated by a crazy, fire-breathing journalist in the lobby of New York’s Americana Hotel…. So, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to try to orchestrate this Talk/Conversation/ Etc. as painlessly as possible, and I urge you to approach it the same way.
After all the strange water that’s passed under both our bridges since my first appearance at The Mansion in May, 1974, I think we owe ourselves the luxury of a visit we can both have some fun with…. And if your new realities make a thing like that impossible; well, then I guess that’s the story … but in any case I’ve come to the point where I need either an ending or a new chapter for this tale, and just as soon as I finish this letter I’ll mail it and then get on the phone to Ham, Jody17 or Pat, to get the thing set up … so if you start getting messages that I’m trying to reach you, at least you’ll know what I want.