I’m very much into rhythm—writing in a musical sense.
I like gibberish, if it sings.
—HST to author, 1990
Unemployment did not last long. After a brief visit to Louisville, Hunter placed a my-services-available ad in Editor and Publisher magazine and found himself the subject of a small bidding war. The Tribune, an hour due north from Louisville in Seymour, Indiana, quickly came to an agreement with Hunter. He would get $260 a month as the Tribune’s wire editor. But after striking the deal, Hunter got a call from the Jersey Shore Herald in Pennsylvania, offering more money ($325 a month) and a better job: sports editor. He packed his bags after Thanksgiving and headed off in his 1949 Chevy to start his first full-time civilian job on December 9, 1957.
He didn’t last the month in Jersey Shore.
Innocently, Hunter had believed that the name of the town implied that New Jersey was nearby . . . and that the town was near water. A branch of the Susquehanna did wrap itself around Jersey Shore, and there was something nearby called Rosencrans Bog, but who would want a shore by that? It was sort of like the frozen tundra packaging itself as “Greenland,” when the closest green was across the ocean in Iceland.
Jersey Shore was a miserable little town in the middle of Pennsylvania, bowled out of the Endless Mountains. Almost immediately on arrival, Hunter regretted having taken the job. The newspaper was lousy and the town was worse. “If a man really wanted to bury himself,” he wrote his mother, “I can think of no better place to do it than Jersey Shore.”
His apartment was above Regan’s Grill, a greasy diner, and the rear view from Hunter’s apartment was rural; he shaved while viewing a dilapidated barn. What social life there was also was stifling. The Herald was an afternoon paper, so he was at work by seven in the morning and done for the day by two. He joined the Elks Club so he could drink in the evenings, yet the Elks Club was not a good place to meet women. “The only women under forty in Jersey Shore go to high school,” he carped to a friend. He was caught in a trap—the bad job made his life in Jersey Shore impossible; the life in Jersey Shore made his bad job even worse. He wrote a letter berating the travel adviser for the American Automobile Association for creating the road map that had guided him to the town. “It was nice of you to get me routed,” he wrote, “but it would have been nice if all the roads had been out.” Jersey Shore was, he said, “totally inadequate for my every need.”
There was one tolerable Herald employee, an older gent with the soul of a poet, who taught occasionally at a nearby teachers college and wrote features for the paper. As capital W Writers (as they saw themselves), Hunter and his friend gravitated toward each other and commiserated about the sorry state of Jersey Shore. They hatched a mutually beneficial plan.
The Poet had a daughter, recently graduated from college and working in Chicago for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She planned a visit for the Christmas holidays. Want to meet her? Hunter lunged at the opportunity. The Daughter arrived by train, and the trio retreated to the Poet’s home, a modest farm outside town. A torrential rainstorm hit during dinner, and when Hunter suggested he take the Daughter for a ride, the Poet, contemplating the less-than-impressive Huntermobile, gave him the keys to his car. It’ll be better in the mud, the Poet said.
Strange time to go for a drive, but Hunter was desperate for conversation. He exploded with talk, rambling on like a lonely fool. “I hadn’t seen a human being in about five weeks,” he said. He was “very pleased, like some guy who’d been given a great present” to have this beautiful young woman all to himself. It was a monsoon, and they were raving drunk on a Pennsylvania brew called Ram’s Head. Then the car got stuck in the mud. While the girl stayed in the car, Hunter foot-slogged it up the road and woke a pissed-off Pennsylvania Dutch farmer at two in the morning. The farmer helped free the car, but the bumper and door were ripped off in the process. Hunter limped the water-logged car back to the Poet’s house and got back into his ’49 Chevy and retreated to his loathsome apartment.
Next morning, Hunter was going through wire dispatches at his desk when he heard a horrible sound outside. Other staff members rushed to the windows to find the source of the metallic grinding. It was the Poet, driving the defiled car up the street, door and bumper dragging. Hunter caught a glimpse of his face, a mask of ferocious anger.
Seemed like the whole staff headed to the parking lot at the back of the building to see the enraged Poet park the car. As the newsroom emptied, Hunter walked out the office’s front door, quickly packed his meager belongings, and pointed his car east. He never returned to the Herald office and didn’t pick up his last paycheck. As he wrote a friend, “This romp with the young woman would have been all the excuse the Quaker bastards needed to emasculate me,” so he felt the urgent need for an exit.
The road wound through Pennsylvania farmland and, two hundred miles later, over the New Jersey flats. Manhattan had a magnetic pull on the Huntermobile. The Bohemian romance of the city beckoned him, and he was stunned by his first sight of the skyscrapers. Finally: New York City.
“All of a sudden, it was looming up in front of me,” he recalled, “and I almost lost control of the car. I thought it was a vision.”
His first stay in New York was brief and primarily for strategizing. He hooked up with Jerry Hawke, an Air Force buddy attending Columbia Law School. Hawke said Hunter could crash at his Morningside Drive apartment until he could make permanent living arrangements. Hawke had two roommates, but the apartment wouldn’t be too crowded during the holidays.
Hunter was full of half-formed plans, including the idea that he could join Hawke as a Columbia student. After a quick trip back to Jersey Shore to surreptitiously pack his remaining belongings, he returned to New York on Christmas Eve to plot his next move.
He gave himself a January 11 deadline—the date of the College Boards at Columbia—to decide what direction to go: either back to newspapers or on to college. He also had a slim shot at Vanderbilt and had gotten some of his friendly commanding officers from the Air Force (and there were one or two of them) to send letters to Nashville on Hunter’s behalf.
There was always the pull of home—and, beyond that, the pull of St. Louis. Maybe the Post-Dispatch wasn’t an unreasonable goal, after all, and Kraig Juenger was there. He wrote to suggest that if school or job didn’t pan out, he might show up at her door.
In the meantime, it didn’t hurt to put in applications, starting at the top—the New York Times—and moving through the rest of the city’s newspaper food chain: the Herald Tribune, the Telegram, the Journal, the Daily News, the Mirror, and on down. “If there is a Jesus,” he wrote Susan Haselden, back in Louisville, “he will then have one of his finest chances to gain a convert. I now have the sum total of $100. When that runs out, there will have to be a Jesus—or a job.”
It would require deep faith to be rewarded with a job on the Times, so Hunter spent the holidays not just drinking but also working on his craft. He picked up a raft of papers each day, picked out sports stories in each that he liked, then methodically rewrote them to see whether he could improve them . . . Hunterize them. Immediately, it became apparent that getting a job in this city would be tough.
Hawke’s roommates welcomed Hunter into the Columbia University social circle, and one of them, John Clancy, took Hunter along to hear Thurgood Marshall, then the chief counsel of the NAACP, speak at the law school. Hunter wasn’t used to seeing a black man hurling such authority, especially in front of an all-white all-privileged audience of Ivy Leaguers. Marshall’s basso profundo, bold confidence, and powerful personality impressed Hunter.
Unemployment meant lots of time to read and write. He began writing short stories, using the pseudonym Aldous Miller-Mencken, after three of his heroes: Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, and H. L. Mencken. By January 15, Hunter was down to $4.46 and still unemployed. Highlife with friends continued. His Athenaeum friend, Paul Semonin, was studying at the Art Students League. Another Louisville buddy, Floyd Smith, was also at Columbia. Gerald Tyrrell was at Yale and Ralston Steenrod at Princeton. There were drinks to be drunk. He developed a new motto: To hell with the rent . . . I’ll drink instead.
After a month of looking, a job fell from the sky: He was hired as a copyboy for Time magazine, earning $200 a month, far below his Jersey Shore salary and in a much more expensive place. Still, it was Time magazine, a great foot in the door, and even though it seemed like a bottom-dweller job, it required a three-hour interview and had heady competition. His fellow copyboys had degrees from Harvard and Yale and were multilingual.
He did not start the job until February 1, so he still had to coast to the end of January on the fumes in his wallet. He wrote his mother, fishing around to see if his grandmother had any money to throw his way; he was desperate, but too embarrassed to call and ask Memo himself. He had also written to Eglin Air Force Base to beg the financial affairs office to send an overdue $70 check owed as part of his separation agreement.
As if he needed to sell the Time magazine job to his mother, he pointed out that the magazine would help with tuition at Columbia. He was able to register for courses in literary style and short-story writing.
Once again, he managed to fall into yellow daisies. Hawke and Clancy had been benevolent landlords, but Hunter felt he had overstayed his welcome. He was offered a new residence as an apartment sitter nearby, on West 113th Street, the West Side Highway providing the steady drone of background music for his writing. He was on his own, but not overly satisfied with his new lodgings (“a cramped dungheap”), and not admired by neighbors. He threw garbage cans down the marble hallways to amuse himself with the racket. He pounded on the doors of the attractive women and terrorized the next-door Chinese tenant with his tirades. But he was able to stay at the apartment through April, when he finally found another, in Greenwich Village.
The “weekend” for Time employees was Monday and Tuesday. Hunter worked half days on Wednesday and Thursday and cranked up for twelve-hour workdays on Saturdays and Sundays. Time provided well for employees on deadline, serving a buffet and full bar in the newsroom. Bad idea. Someone on the staff usually got blind drunk and made a fool of himself. Hunter could hold his liquor, but it fueled his belligerence. Even though he was the new guy, he used the weekly buffets to insult staff members who outranked him and, since he was a copyboy, everyone outranked him. He was on thin ice from the beginning of his career. None of this kept him from feeling—and occasionally showing—contempt for the writers and editors he despised as hacks.
The magazine work schedule blended generously with the class schedule at Columbia, so he could devote two full and two half days to classes. Still, he was restless, and mused to friends about escaping New York (“a huge tomb, full of writhing, hungry death”), which quickly had lost its novelty. He dreamed of San Francisco, where he’d never been, and, beyond that, to other far-flung locales: Italy, Tahiti . . . somewhere in the sun.
But New York was the heartbeat of the world, and Hunter wanted to be close to the action. He continued to read and educate himself. He was still infatuated with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and, like many young writers, sought to also unmask the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He admired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which had been published the preceding year, but he did not embrace the beat-generation writers en masse. Kerouac’s other work did not impress him, but he considered him important “in the political sense.” Columbia University’s library was a hop-skip from his apartment, so he continued his studies with works by Norman Mailer, Isak Dinesen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson. He deeply admired Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley and also had the requisite infatuation with Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. He did all of the required reading of his generation: J. P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Friends thought Hunter was trying to live the life of Sebastian Dangerfield, the repellent yet fascinating protagonist of Donleavy’s book.
Louisville friend Floyd Smith started at Yale, but then transferred to Columbia and fell back into the Hunter Thompson orbit in New York. Hunter “was probably better read than any of us,” Smith said. “Philosophically, I always felt that he was firmly based in the stoicism of Hemingway and the hedonism of Fitzgerald.”
During his downtime at the magazine, Hunter squirreled himself away in his cubicle and deliberatively retyped The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms. Years later he said, “I’m very much into rhythm—writing in a musical sense. I like gibberish, if it sings. Every author is different—short sentences, long, no comma, many commas. It helps a lot to understand what you’re doing. You’re writing, and so were they. It won’t fit often—that is, your hands don’t want to do their words—but you’re learning.” Friends thought this was a nutty exercise, but Hunter defended it. “I just want to feel what it feels like to write that well,” he told Porter Bibb. It also alerted him to the importance of cadence in writing. “Basically, it’s music,” he said. “I wanted to learn from the best.”
The ebb and flow of Hunter’s mental stability was tied to his financial fortunes. Always on the verge of fiscal collapse, he spent much of early 1958 vacillating between the intense life of being a young writer in the center of the universe and the depressing reality of having no money and feeling outplayed by people with much more experience. To be a copyboy, laboring under the thumb of hacks, was galling. Yet what was he? He tortured himself in his self-analytical letters to the friends in this network he struggled to keep alive.
Gerald Tyrrell was lining up a shot at the pool table of his fraternity house at Yale when he looked up to see Hunter nonchalantly walk into the room, puffing on his pipe. They had been in touch by mail and seen each other in Louisville during holidays, but Hunter’s appearance in New Haven startled Tyrrell. Hunter invited himself along on Tyrrell’s date with a student nurse. “It was the last time I ever saw her,” he said. “She thought Hunter was acting weird.” Tyrrell returned the favor by visiting the city and found Hunter’s refrigerator bare but for a jar of peanut butter. “I think he was enjoying New York, from an impoverished point of view,” Tyrrell recalled. “He drove this old car and parked it with impunity, wherever he wished. And wherever he parked the car, he’d get a ticket. And he’d just slide that ticket into the glove compartment. At one point, I think he had 122 tickets.”
By April, Hunter had moved into a black-walled basement dive on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, accessible by a catwalk that led by an ancient furnace. He thought it was an artist’s conception of hell. He sublet the cave from a failed songwriter who’d nearly been driven insane by the subterranean darkness. The name on the lease belonged to a drug addict who was in Europe and who might return at any moment. It was a depressing home with walls and hand-me-down furniture all painted black. From the moment he moved in, Hunter wondered what sort of weird psychological effect the relentless darkness would have on his already disturbed psyche. To Susan Haselden, he wondered how long he could stand to live in the dump and said he longed for Owl Creek, the country club back in Louisville. He pictured himself floating in the club pool. Instead, he was in the middle of what he called a “virtual cave of howling drunken insanity,” playing host to a gaggle of charmed and enthusiastic friends who visited the city and crashed in his tomblike apartment. He described his situation to an Air Force buddy: “There are people sleeping everywhere—on my bed, on the couch, on the cot, and even on sleeping bags on the floor. Everything in the place is covered with stale beer, most of my records are ruined, every piece of linen, towel or clothing in the place is filthy, the dishes haven’t been washed in weeks, the neighbors have petitioned the landlord to have me evicted, my sex life has been absolutely smashed, I have no money, no food, no privacy and certainly no peace of mind.”
He worked his way through the coffeehouses and bars in the Village and found that he could still be surprised by life in the city. There were people who lived in bars, who received their mail there, and he even found people “so lonely” that he couldn’t “stand to talk to them.” After only six months in the city, he felt that he had sized it up pretty well: “Mid-town Manhattan is an unbelievable circus, Harlem is hell on earth, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn are all tombs, and this goddamned Village is enough to frighten any honest beachcomber to death.”
But intensity-of-life moments still overwhelmed him on occasion. “I rode down Fifth Avenue with the bus window wide open and a blasting wind in my face,” he wrote. “I can’t remember when I’ve felt more alive. With the searchlights from the Empire State Building sweeping the black night over Central Park, a full moon glimmering on the lake and the towers of Central Park West rising over the trees, I felt like I was gliding through a dream.”
Porter Bibb worked for Newsweek that summer, and Hunter invited him across the street to the weekend party nights for Time magazine’s deadlines. Hunter had no stature within the magazine, but nonetheless felt entitled to have friends eat at Henry Luce’s lavish trough of roast beef and salmon, and get shit-faced on the old man’s free booze.
Bibb repaid the favor by taking Hunter and Paul Semonin to the Yale Club Bar. Semonin brought a girlfriend who was a beatnik pinup girl. She gave them marijuana. Bibb remembered Hunter introducing him to black jazz musicians who were snorting cocaine, long before it became the fashionable drug of choice (and long before Hunter ever tried it). Bibb had never even heard of cocaine, but Hunter’s social sonar pulled him into new and bolder orbits.
In sober (and other) moments, Hunter continued to write short fiction that was routinely rejected. Along with that disappointment, he was imprisoned by his guests and his compulsion to socialize and began to resent his self-imposed party lifestyle. A great writer must be lonely, he thought, and what he missed, in an odd way, was loneliness. He went from the bottom-of-the-pot Jersey Shore to the nonstop Greenwich Village social whirl.
At Time, he’d met fellow copyboy Gene McGarr, who lived a few blocks away, but in an opposite world: McGarr’s apartment was at the top of a six-story building and accessible only by a ladder. They were drinking buddies, prank players, and both passing time until their genius was recognized.
Hunter and McGarr were artists at getting into trouble. One Saturday night, they visited the Riviera, a West Village bar that was packed on weekends. Hunter had discovered a bag of lime, the ground stone used to mark football fields, by the furnace outside his dank apartment. Hunter took the fifty-pound bag along on their bar-hopping. A slow leak in the bag ignited Hunter’s appetite for street theater. Hunter and McGarr and the leaking bag went into the bar. “Hunter takes the bag off his shoulder, slams it on the bar, and this kind of mushroom cloud of cement rises from the top of the bag,” McGarr said. Almost immediately, the well-dressed Saturday night crowd began yelling, “ ‘What the shit? Get the hell out of here!’ The bartenders start coming for us, and the bag spills.” As Hunter and McGarr backed out through the narrow entrance, Hunter grabbed the bag by its two corners and swung it, sending sheets of lime over the crowd, dusting them with a huge wall of powder. “My fucking suit, you son of a bitch!” one patron screamed. The beating they got from the bartenders was worth it, Hunter said.
Most of their after-hours journeys were not so extreme. They had the usual run-ins with drunks begging for a pull from the rum bottle they carried or got into shouting matches with obnoxious twits they prided in heckling.
Hunter took time in the late summer for a hitchhiking trip. He headed to Tallahassee to gauge how he felt about Ann Frick, expecting his feelings for her purged. Instead, he realized she was the woman with the strongest hold on him. Despite figuring she would remain only “a pretty picture in my wallet,” he found his feelings reawakened, and he told her, when he returned to his New York life, he had to dismiss a girl he’d been dating for several months because she didn’t meet his high standards after seeing her. He’d also begun early work on a novel, drawing on memories of debutantes and country-club dances in Louisville and how a Kentucky hillbilly fared in the big city. Not much of a stretch.
Impatient with Time, Hunter also began looking for other jobs, using unusual job-application tactics. Time had run a flattering piece on the Vancouver Sun. Hunter promptly sent the editor an application on the condition that the magazine piece wasn’t a tissue of lies. Hunter outlined his regard for his profession: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums and hacks, hagridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.” In a letter of complaint to Editor and Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry, Hunter let loose another tornado of blasphemy: “How many newspapers are there in the country today that actually command the respect of anyone who knows a damned thing about journalism? I’d have a hard time counting ten. And there’s where we come to the pith and substance of the whole problem: since journalism has lost its ability to command respect as a profession, it has sunk to the level of ‘just another job.’” At the conclusion of his diatribe, Hunter asked for a job with the magazine.
He needed one. To friends, he said that he “gave up on Time” just before Christmas 1958. Later, perhaps to enhance his reputation as a rebel, he said that he was fired for insubordination and that he had destroyed an office vending machine. The truth is probably somewhere in between. One certainty is that Hunter and vending machines never got along.
As a writer, Hunter often mixed fiction with fact, but rarely did it more skillfully than on his job application at the Middletown Daily Record in upstate New York. Nestled in the Catskills, sixty miles north of New York for the crows and a two-hour meandering drive for humans, Middletown was an attractive place to land: close to Manhattan civilization, yet wide open to possibilities as a proving ground for a young journalist working in a small town, stacking up clippings to fatten a résumé wanting to attract a better job.
The Daily Record was in its infancy, a three-year-old newspaper when Hunter joined, already turning heads for its typography and design. It was the first newspaper of its kind in America, a product of the new, offset printing method that was to become the norm in newspapers. As opposed to the noisy production of the cumbersome hot-type method (each letter being forged in lead that was cooled, then set into a form on a page), the Record was done by a photographic process. The stories and pictures were produced on paper, cut apart, and pasted onto a page to be photographed and burned onto a printing plate. Within fifteen years, most American newspapers were printed this way.
Hunter tacked two years onto his age and claimed he had graduated from college. He exaggerated his journalism experience and, to his delight and horror, was hired for the Record’s young city staff. Though he feared being unmasked as an unschooled imposter, he was pleased to be part of this new experiment in printing that had already earned comment from Time and Editor and Publisher magazines. He’d long since gotten rid of the Huntermobile, unnecessary in Manhattan, and so appealed to his mother to borrow $550 to buy a 1951 black Jaguar, a car befitting a serious young writer.
Almost immediately, Hunter was in trouble. When he dined at a restaurant across the street from the Record’s offices, he offended the owner by repeatedly sending back his order of lasagna. Finally, the owner confronted the tough-to-please customer and asked what was wrong with it. It’s rotten, Hunter announced. The owner attacked him with a wooden kitchen fork, and Hunter retaliated with his fists.
The next day, Hunter was summoned to the publisher’s office and found the fuming restaurant owner there, clad in his chef’s apron. Hunter was shocked when the publisher threatened to fire him over the lasagna incident. He’d been doing good work—better work than the Record deserved, in his mind—and all he’d done was send some rotten lasagna back to the kitchen, where it belonged. He mumbled the minimum required apology and choked on his anger.
Still, making friends was never difficult for Hunter. He met photographer Bob Bone at the Record and through him made several other friends from Middletown’s small supply of the young and hip. The social life centered on drinking and discussions of literature.
Hunter was doing all the usual small-town stories: town council, Lion’s Club, ambulance runs. Editor Al Romm thought Hunter had promise, but apparently not as much promise as Hunter felt he had. “He was already skating on thin ice since he refused to wear shoes while in the newsroom,” Bone recalled.
The last straw came when Hunter killed a vending machine. He’d gone to get a candy bar from the machine behind the composing room. One nickel, no action. Two nickels, no action. So he kicked it. The bottom tray fell out, spilling candy bars everywhere. Hunter took what was due him and shoved the other candy back into the storage tray under the machine. Later in the day, the composing room staff figured out how to get to all of the candy bars and snacked for free.
The next day, Hunter had to pay for all of the stolen candy bars and was fired. Romm told him, “At this point in your career, your idiosyncrasies outweigh your talents.”
He had lasted six weeks.
As he described himself in a letter of application for a new job, Hunter admitted he was no day at the beach. “Some people find it exceedingly difficult to get along with me and I have to choose my jobs very carefully,” he wrote. “I have no patience with phonies, dolts, or obnoxious incompetents and I take some pride in the fact that these people invariably dislike me. I admire perfection or any effort toward it and I would not work with anyone who disagreed with me on this score.”
He received no response to his application. Unemployment was becoming a way of life. He had been living in Middletown in an apartment on Mulberry Street, but the income crash led him to find different accommodations. He found a cheap cabin in nearby Cuddebackville, a few feet from the banks of the Neversink River. It had unreliable heat and no electricity. Calling it a cabin dresses it up some. It was a two-room shack with one room a combination bedroom and kitchen.
The latest firing had put him at a crossroads: he could continue with the fantasy of being a writer, or he could actually make the commitment. He could turn the autobiographical sketches into a novel and become a real writer. He came to regard the firing in Middletown as a key event in his life, because it forced him to put up or shut up. This was the time and the cabin was the place to become a writer.
He had always saved copies of his letters and made self-portraits by setting the timer on his camera. He became even more compulsive during his stay in the cabin: he photographed his empty rooms, his manly stance on the porch of his cabin, his solitude over his typewriter. He not only filled crates with carbon copies of his letters; he also kept files of his self-portraits. He had an enormous need for self-preservation and decided that he would document every stage of his life.
He started off by trying to look the part of a writer. He grew a beard, which some friends considered a Hemingway affectation, and played out the role by working endlessly in a hermetic existence, fed by newspapers, liquor, coffee, and the occasional can of tuna or soup. Few people intruded. Judy Booth, former girlfriend of his brother Davison, was a student at Smith College and came for a weekend. She and Hunter had an off-and-on romance that eventually stilled from Hunter’s unwillingness to develop a serious relationship.
Isolation from the city bred melancholy in Hunter, who had begun to feel ancient at twenty-one. “A thousand years from now our lives will be, at best, a few sentences in someone’s history book,” he wrote Ann Frick. “Time seems to be going much faster,” he lamented. “I’m beginning to get the idea that life is short. It makes me feel that whatever I do in the next few years will be very important.”
There were other artists in those woods. Composer David Amram, already well known for his collaboration with Jack Kerouac, “Pull My Daisy,” had a country place near Hunter’s rented cabin. “There was a tiny road side store called the Huguenot Superette,” Amram recalled. “It was almost always empty, and the owner, after months of stony silence, finally spoke to me confidentially one afternoon about seeing flying saucers and saucer people in the field across the road, and how he had never dared to tell anyone, except for two people. Those two people were myself and someone else he described as ‘that crazy writer upon the hill in the cabin.’ ”
It wasn’t long before Hunter and Amram sought out each other. “He was very lean,” Amram remembered, “and he had real intense eyes. He was a very good-looking guy, very slim and kind of dynamic and healthy-looking. I visited him at his cabin once or twice. It was a nice little place up on the hill. It was very unspoiled country.”
Hunter had outgrown his Kerouac fixation; in fact, he disliked everything that had been published since the success of On the Road and thought the writer might be a one-trick pony. He wasn’t starstruck around Amram, but admired him as a successful artist who did not compromise talent to match public taste. Amram remembered him as a young man hungering for other people who read. What Hunter missed about daily life in Greenwich Village was talking to people who took literature seriously. He was lucky to find a gifted musician picking through the loaves of week-old bread at the Superette.
He once said that he truly became a writer in the cabin on Highway 209, aligning himself with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, even keeping tallies of rejection slips relative to their various ages. Hemingway suffered eight years of rejections before publishing his first story in the Atlantic Monthly, and Fitzgerald papered his walls in the 122 rejection letters he got before his first sale. Hunter calculated that at the three-rejections-a-week pace he’d established by the summer, he would catch up with Fitzgerald a few months into the 1960s. He pinned his greatest hopes on his novel in progress, and figured he might actually find success ahead of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald pace.
Hunter would escape to New York in his black Jag and spend drunken weekends seeing his friends. He’d seek out Amram at his city apartment when he got to the Village. “We’d go to the Lion’s Head Bar and the White Horse and different places people would go to hang out,” Amram recalled. “The writers that went to these places were also equal in numbers with the everyday people like carpenters. The writers didn’t get special treatment. Hunter was very comfortable with the nitty-gritty. He understood the Southern concept of ‘down home,’ of the very important link to being a human being.”
Back in the Catskill cabin, Hunter diligently worked on his novel. By the end of June, he’d finished three chapters of Prince Jellyfish and planned to ship off the work in progress to Robert Ballou at the Viking Press. He’d sent a query letter to Viking and gotten the standard response from the publisher, but Hunter hadn’t been rejected enough to recognize a form letter. All he knew is that he had a name—Ballou’s—and that gave him a glimmer of hope that a real person, an editor at a major publishing house, would read his book. He immediately wrote back to Ballou that his note made him feel more like a writer.
He suddenly developed a deep kinship with all who’d worked the lonely trade, and even reached out to some. To William Faulkner, he wrote about the place of the writer in the modern world. “As far as I can see, the role, the duty, the obligation, and indeed the only choice of the writer in today’s ‘outer’ world is to starve to death as honorably and defiantly as possible. This I intend to do, but the chicken crop in this area is going to be considerably depleted before I go.”
No response from Faulkner, but Hunter’s spirits remained high. He felt part of the tribe. Euphoric despite his poverty, he wrote Ann Frick to have faith: “They ain’t throwin’ dirt on my coffin yet.”
Prince Jellyfish wasn’t just close to the bone; it was in the marrow. He wove friends’ names and places from his past into the narrative. The hero, Wellburn Kemp (named after two admired—and dead—Louisville friends), was a transplanted wastrel in New York, adrift and floating above the struggles of other mere mortals, as a jellyfish. The strongest literary influence was J. P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man. Like that novel’s Sebastian Dangerfield, Kemp is selfish and arrogant and yet too charming to be firmly repellent. Much like his life, Hunter’s novel was episodic and included insight into what it was like to be inside Hunter Thompson’s head during a job interview. As an editor asked Wellburn Kemp lame questions, acid responses welled up inside until Kemp was able to spit out a more acceptable answer. Hunter wanted to make things come out better in fiction that they had in his life, and so when Kemp was offered a copyboy’s job, not the job he expected to be offered, he indignantly walked out. In another section, Kemp returned home for a vacation and took a nostalgic turn through Cherokee Park. Kemp, the idealized Hunter, had of course done no jail time and has finished college. Even in those years when he sat in his drafty cabin, trying to write the great American novel, it seemed that whatever Hunter started out writing about, he ended up writing about himself.
“As things stand now,” a twenty-one-year-old Hunter S. Thompson wrote in June 1959, “I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says, ‘You are nothing,’ I will be a writer.”
Hunter’s idyll at Cuddebackville ended in early August. He spent the summer living hand to mouth, working on Prince Jellyfish and his always rejected short stories, with no success or even a glimmer of interest from the outside world. He lost his thirty-dollars-per-week unemployment insurance and fell behind on his rent. To try to extort blood from this stone, his landlord (“a down-to-earth bastard,” Hunter called him) removed a wheel from Hunter’s incapacitated Jaguar (the steering was giving out) and held it hostage. Hunter’s car insurance also was cut off for lack of payment. While hectoring Rust Hills at Esquire to accept one of his short stories, “The Almost Working Artist,” Hunter said he would accept $900 or best offer for the Jag. “If you know of anyone who wants to hire a neo-literary mountain hermit, please let me know.”
There was only one thing to do: escape. He ran away to the home of friends, towing the falling-apart black Jag down Highway 209 in the dead of night to the nearby town of Otisville. There, he moved into the house of a couple he’d gotten to know through friends at the Record. Ann and Fred Schoelkopf gave him sanctuary and a level of stability he hadn’t had since leaving Louisville.
“He stayed in and out of our place,” Fred Schoelkopf remembered. “He had a room in our house. There were four rooms on the second floor, and we said he could use one as long as he needed. He’d go off on one of his adventures and leave his stuff here. We didn’t pay too much attention to his comings and goings. Sometimes, he was there every day for weeks and months, working on his writing. We kept a free and easy place, and the doors were open for Hunter.”
With this stability, Hunter had his refuge with the Schoelkopfs in Otisville, where the isolation fed his writing. He was also not far from the bacchanalian pleasures of his life in the city and his network of friends there, his collection of women, and several couches open for Hunter in those odd moments when he needed sleep.
“He rarely slept when most people would sleep,” Schoelkopf recalled. “He worked into the night. If there was something to drink available, he drank it. When we talked, he always wanted to talk about writing. He was really a writer. He was on our phone constantly, trying to get something published.”
He became close to the couple and was spoiled by Ann’s home-cooked meals and by the cash they gave him every now and again for writing supplies—and for cigarettes and booze. “If it hadn’t been for Ann and Fred Schoelkopf,” Hunter wrote, “God knows what sort of dire fate I’d have come to.”
Still, Hunter hated the feeling of imposition, so he decided he needed a change of scenery to make the final push to finish his novel. That meant home. But before heading west, he decided to visit friends in New York. He and Gene McGarr were back in a hell-raising mood, so they climbed the fence at James J. Walker Park, on Leroy Street in the Village, and skinny-dipped in the park pool with their dates. Four young thugs showed up and announced that the pool was their territory. They kicked the clothes into the water, but Hunter and McGarr leaped out and began beating the kids, tossing them into the pool. Hunter was pummeled with sticks and eventually lost consciousness. He awoke in an emergency room, on a tile floor next to McGarr, being hosed down, their blood swirling down the drain in the floor. After that, Hunter claimed, he rarely visited the city without a lead pipe.
His driver’s license had expired, so he hitchhiked to Louisville. Since many of his friends were gone and he was older, the city had lost many of its mysteries, but home was home. “You may not appreciate this,” he wrote to his mother by way of warning, “but what I’m going to do now is . . . shut myself in the back bedroom and finish this novel.”
By early September, he was laboring on the book. On his return to Louisville, he sent three chapters and an outline to Viking Press to get the fabled advance. He got the standard “we would not care to publish” form rejection letter. He immediately fired back a letter to the rejecting editor, Jack Benson, vowing to make him regret the day he turned down the opportunity to publish a book by Hunter S. Thompson. Since the letter offered no suggestions for improvement or made any comment on the novel’s worth, Hunter told Benson he was incompetent.
Correspondence distracted him from the book. Before leaving New York, he had applied for a job on the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico, leaving his mother’s address on his application. In his insufferably high-minded letter to the Star’s editor, he spoke with disdain of the American press and offered as his ideal the philosophy of Joseph Pulitzer reproduced on a bronze plaque, which claimed that a newspaper’s loyalty was to truth and the public welfare and not to government or profits. Hunter also bragged of his prodigious writing talent and his manuscript under consideration by Viking. He was rejected with a smart-ass letter that infuriated him. He had included his killing of the candy machine on his résumé (he had to explain why he’d been at the Record so short a time), and William Kennedy, managing editor of the Star, said that if they ever got a candy machine and decided that it needed to be kicked in, they would be sure to call him.
Hunter immediately wrote back and offered to kick in Kennedy’s teeth and shove Pulitzer’s bronze plaque up his ass. It was, of course, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Finishing the novel was hell. The rejection from Viking was depressing, but Hunter tried not to get discouraged. He wrote William Styron, whom he admired, to ask the name of a literary agent who might help sell Prince Jellyfish. Styron, unlike Faulkner, wrote back and offered the name of his agent, Elizabeth McKee.
By November, he was back in his bedroom at the Schoelkopfs’ house in Otisville with portions of his novel in the hands of an agent, which subsequently was rejected by some of America’s finest publishers. He also stayed with Paul Semonin at his cabin in the New Jersey woods and with Eugene and Eleanor McGarr in the city. He was dependent on the kindness of friends and always tried to repay hospitality as best he could.
Hunter was restless. Bob Bone, his friend from the Middletown Record, had surfaced at the San Juan Star, and Hunter wrote to ask what it was like to work there. Puerto Rico had to be preferable to another winter in some dim, bone-chilling outpost like the Cuddebackville cabin. Hunter’s correspondence with Kennedy had quickly gotten through the threatening stage of getting-to-know-you formalities and become a creative outlet for both of them. Hunter further delayed finishing his novel by writing a one-act play for Kennedy (about the decline and fall of American journalism) and indulging in hipster-speak. Kennedy encouraged Hunter to come to Puerto Rico, so they could exchange insults in person over drinks.
Hunter read the Editor and Publisher want ads and applied for anything that looked interesting. His application letters were confident, even arrogant, and challenged employers to write back. Eventually one did. Amazingly, it was an editor named Philip Kramer who was starting a new magazine in Puerto Rico that he said would be “the Sports Illustrated of the Caribbean.” It was exactly what Hunter was looking for.