CHAPTER TEN

A Writer Resurgent

“Polo Is My Life” is where Hunter tried most consciously to evoke the spirit and style of his hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it was set on Gatsby’s turf. But “Fear and Loathing in Elko” was so dark, it made Vegas look like a tale of innocence—and it was as funny as anything he had ever written.

COREY SEYMOUR was an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone in 1992.

Nobody told me what to expect, or what was required of me, when Hunter came to town. Jann told me, “Just meet him at the airport and see what happens.” I had no idea what he looked like—I actually seemed to believe that some sort of Ralph Steadman caricature was going to walk off the plane. Hunter walked right past me, and I had to scramble to meet him down at baggage claim. He looked pretty tired and pissed off—he was sitting on the floor surrounded by a half-dozen pieces of his Halliburton metal luggage—and he stuck his hand out, and as I went to shake it, he almost yanked me to the ground and barked, “No, goddamn it!! Help me up!!”

When we walked into the Carlyle, I guess I was a little paranoid. I thought that the people behind the front desk might run screaming from the concept of Hunter checking into their beautiful, elegant hotel, but he was greeted like a returning hero. When we got upstairs to his suite, Hunter started railing about “this fucking dump” and calling the concierge to get the temperature adjusted—he was demanding a bigger suite and basically telling this guy he was lied to—but somehow he calmed down and we hit it off well and had a few drinks, and the phone in his suite started ringing almost immediately. Jann was on his way over. Terry McDonell was on his way over. Ed Bradley was on his way over with Kathleen Battle, the opera singer.

It was the night before Rolling Stone’s twenty-fifth-anniversary party at the Four Seasons restaurant, and Hunter wanted to surprise Jann with this shotgun-art portrait he’d made of Jann with a bullet hole through his heart and blood-red paint exploding all around it. Hunter was in a great mood, and all the men except Jann got summoned into Hunter’s bedroom for the unveiling of the portrait. He had a shroud over it, and he whisked it off in this grand manner—he was so proud of it—and everyone sort of universally agreed, “It’s beautiful, Hunter, but you can’t give that to him tomorrow night. He’s going to be sitting at the front table next to Yoko Ono. You can’t unveil a picture of Jann with a bullet through his heart.” Hunter looked abjectly demoralized, but he kept a brave face while everyone was still there.

At the end of the night, though, when it was just him and me left in his suite—well, let’s just say his mood fell. Everything turned black. Almost as soon as the door shut when Jann left, Hunter started cursing and going on about how the art was stupid, he shouldn’t have brought it, the trip was a failure, he wasn’t going to the party, he wanted to leave. And then he hit on the solution, or at least a partial solution: He said, “Well, fuck. Help me throw this fucking thing out the window,” and started dragging this large framed portrait over toward the window. He started screaming at me, “C’mon, goddamn it! Help me!” but somehow I was able to convince him that that wouldn’t be a good idea.

TERRY MCDONELL

Every time he was in New York was like showtime.

COREY SEYMOUR

The next day I brought over an Armani tux that the Rolling Stone fashion department had arranged for Hunter to wear, and he had to try it on so I could see how it fit and check the hem on the pants. But Hunter’s interest at this point was in two things—or three, if you count cocaine—CNN and room service. As I would soon learn, he went large on breakfast. The first time he told me his order, I cracked up laughing, which seemed to make him angry. He gave me this stern look and said, “Do you think I’m fucking joking?!” I remember him sitting on the sofa in his robe, grinding up coke and mumbling, “Uhhh . . . ahhh . . . two pots of coffee . . . uhhh . . . six-pack of Heineken, uhh . . . two pitchers of Bloody Marys, corned beef hash . . . white toast . . . better make that four orders of white toast . . . uhhh . . . large basket of fresh grapefruit . . . lemons, yeah . . . better get some limes too . . . couple jars of peanuts . . . uhhh . . . and get something for yourself too.” But beyond that, I never saw him eat much.

DEBORAH FULLER

When he woke up, he liked eating a really big breakfast—always with fresh fruit and usually eggs and sausage or bacon. He’d usually start out with orange juice, coffee, and whiskey—Chivas, snow cone–style with a lot of ice—and a Molson or a Grolsch beer. He liked the big bottles of Grolsch because he could recap them.

COREY SEYMOUR

After Hunter ate and drank his breakfast, he muttered something about taking a bath. He ambled into the bathroom, shut the door, and I heard the sound of gigantic amounts of rushing water. Almost an hour later, I started to worry and knocked on the bathroom door and called his name and finally cracked the door open—and saw Hunter, naked and completely submerged beneath a full-throttle Jacuzzi. He was doing some weird Axl Rose–like underwater horizontal serpentine dance with his arms going crazy like he was trying to fly. I shut the door.

Eventually he got himself dressed, and we were now late for meeting Lynn Nesbit downstairs for drinks before the party. Hunter was smoking dope out of his skull pipe, and refused to leave his suite until he’d thrown a piece of crumpled paper into the wastebasket from across the room. And it needed to be a clean bucket too—no off-the-rims and no off-the-wall rebounds. But he kept missing, and he was getting angrier and angrier. Then he made one clean, stood up, pumped his fist, and let out a roaring “WHOOOP!” Between that exact moment and the moment he kissed Lynn’s hand downstairs, he’d somehow transformed himself from unhinged childlike maniac to Hunter S. Thompson, southern gentleman and man of letters.

As our car pulled up to the Four Seasons on Park Avenue, Hunter became very jittery and nervous about his appearance and his entrance—there were paparazzi waiting, but with Lynn and me in tow, he made his way inside to an adoring and celebrity-laden crowd, where he was besieged by people wanting their picture taken with him. The only problem was the speech he was scheduled to give—he hadn’t written it yet, of course, so midway through the cocktail hour in the Grill Room, I tried to keep his audience away from him while he jotted some things down at the bar.

A few minutes later, as Hunter was being introduced, he plopped down on the floor of the Pool Room, Indian-style, took his coke grinder out of his sock, and leaned forward with a hollowed-out Bic pen up his nose. This was right in front of the dais and right next to several tables of guests—including the head table with Jann and Yoko Ono and David Bowie, among others—who were now looking at me strangely, as if they were waiting for me to explain what was going on. I was trying to very consciously act normal—“Nothing weird happening here, folks”—and Hunter cracked me hard on my shin with his knuckle and barked quietly, “Shield me, goddamn it!!!” When he stood up, his glasses were sideways on his head, so I straightened them out and reminded him to wipe his nose.

He gave a long speech with a number of detours in it that I thought was pretty good, but Ed Bradley, who was the MC, had to gently give him the hook to keep things moving. As Hunter made his move to leave the podium, he took a wrong step and hit the ground, spilling someone else’s drink but, incredibly, not his own. After the speech a lot of people came up to me and said, basically, “What the fuck?” They couldn’t understand a word of what Hunter had said.

I passed by a hallway a little later during the party and saw him talking alone with Keith Richards, which was absolutely amazing to hear. It sounded like two dogs barking at one another, or the secret language of dolphins. It was almost nonverbal, but they both seemed to understand what the other one was saying.

Later, as we were walking out with Jann, Hunter took great glee in bursting the helium party balloons that people were carrying out by burning them with his lit cigarette. He progressed from popping nearby balloons to actually lobbing his lit cigarettes across the Pool Room of the Four Seasons to try to hit faraway balloons until Jann told him, basically, to cut it the fuck out. We went back to Jann’s house, where the first thing Hunter did when he walked in the door was grab a tangerine out of a bowl and throw it through the only open pane in Jann’s window from about fifteen feet away.

On the day Hunter was supposed to fly back to Colorado, I had a fax waiting for me when I got to the office from his girlfriend-assistant Nicole out in Woody Creek:

To: Corey

URGENT!!!

Hunter has just gone down for some desperately needed sleep. However, we need your help this morning to wake him.

Faxes and phone calls will not suffice—Hunter would like you to make sure he gets up by 10:30 a.m. (best achieved by pounding on door w/ rm service coffee/fruit/pastries in hand).

Corey, this has to be done, in person, if Hunter is to wake.

I will do what I can from this end, i.e. continual phone calls.

Please call when you get this—I will be by the phone, just SCREAM into it . . . I too, may fall asleep—please scream—

This is very important. Call ASAP.

When I finally got in the room, Hunter was completely comatose on the bed. For a while I thought he might be dead, but I got Deborah on the phone and told her what was going on, and she said, “Go into Hunter’s shaving kit in the bathroom—you’ll find some big Black Beauties down toward the bottom. Take one and put it in his mouth and massage it down his throat; make sure he gets some water with it.” I think Deborah could sense the desperation in my voice, so she told me a secret: “Don’t use this too often, because if Hunter catches on, you’re a dead man, but use the word ‘professional’ around him—just say things like, ‘Well, I guess we’ve got to be professionals about this’ or something like that. That’ll usually help.”

I did the business with the pill and the water, and Hunter eventually stumbled out in his robe and sat down and started grinding up some coke. We ordered breakfast, and a couple of hours later we were in the cab going to the airport, and by that point everything was kicking in. His whole face was twitching and sort of jumping, and I asked him some simple question, but he wasn’t really quite speaking English—he clearly knew what I was saying, but he was just making these strange squeaking sounds, and he was pouring sweat.

He had taught me how to pack up his carry-on briefcase with his coke in it—in two double-sealed Ziploc bags. I’d dump two room service jars of peanuts all over the inside of his briefcase and then squeeze lemons over everything, then seal it tight, and then give it to him. He’d have his plastic grinder in his sock for the flight.

When we got to the airport he handed me his wallet and told me to check him in and headed straight for the bar. I’ve never seen anyone more completely blasé about the prospect of missing their flight. He just sat down on a bar stool and casually ordered us up a couple Heinekens. And he handed me a $100 bill and said, “You did a good job. Oh, and if anyone asks you if you saw me do drugs, tell them no. For that matter, you didn’t even see me drinking—okay?” Then he ordered another round.

BOB BRAUDIS

Hunter called me one night and said that Nicole was unconscious on the kitchen floor and unresponsive. I called Hunter’s next-door neighbor and told him to grab another neighbor and go down to Hunter’s to help. On the way to the hospital she stopped breathing, but they got her to the hospital, they treated her, and then she moved into my guesthouse and got healthy. Hunter was not insensitive to her medical condition, but he had that rule—Never Call 911. He called me instead. Nine-one-one wasn’t necessary. There weren’t people bleeding with gunshot wounds.

Hunter was real pissed at me that I was housing his gal—who refused to communicate with him—but I said, “Hey, Hunter, don’t give me any attitude. She wants to be here. She’s a friend too.” Eventually she packed up and went back to Cincinnati or wherever she came from.

JAMES CARVILLE was chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992.

We used to drink a lot. He hung out at the Capitol Hotel in Little Rock, where I lived, and we always hit it off. I mean, we weren’t that far apart in age—he was seven years older than me. He grew up in Louisville; I grew up in Louisiana. And Hunter did something that none of us had the guts to do—he led the kind of life that secretly all of us would like to have had the guts to lead. To hell with the whole thing, just stay drunk and high and smoke and hang out and write outrageous things. He’d never lived his life on anybody else’s terms.

He had a way of describing Clinton attacking a plate of french fries that was just the funniest thing ever. We all couldn’t stop laughing. His powers of observation were only exceeded by his powers of exaggeration. I remember that he had this crazed story in his head with about 5 percent of truth to it about how I stole his jacket. And what Hunter would do is find something with the slightest grain of something to it and make it into this hilarious thing. He had this whole thing he’d written about this kind of death struggle that we were in and so forth. We were mightily entertained by this kind of story, and in the midst of being entertained there were a bunch of insights.

JANN WENNER

It was Hunter’s idea that the political wizards of Rolling Stone should go down to Little Rock as a group to meet this new person that had just become the Democratic nominee—actually, by that point it was pretty clear that he was going to be the next president. So Bill Greider, P. J. O’Rourke, Hunter, and I flew down on my plane. Mark Seliger, our photographer, was also with us. Hunter brought along some high-end super–video camera to record the encounter—the assembled wisdom of Rolling Stone on the road. It was quite a team, and Hunter was at the center of it.

WILLIAM GREIDER was the national-affairs editor at Rolling Stone in 1992.

My knee went out just as we were getting on the airplane at Teterboro, and Hunter helped me onto the plane. He was quite solicitous and so forth. Usually when that happened with my knee, the pain would come back in a hour or so and then go away, but this time it didn’t. We got off the plane in Little Rock and I was in serious agony—although we’d had a lot to drink by that time. But I got into a wheelchair, and we went to this famous Little Rock political hotel. Hunter wheeled me into this lobby crowded with people, shouting, “I want the best sports doctor in Little Rock—immediately!”

Everybody else in our party headed off to the bar or to their rooms, but Hunter took care to get me up to my hotel room, and I was lying on the bed while he literally called every hospital in Little Rock demanding that they send over an orthopedist or a sports doctor immediately, and he couldn’t understand why these hospitals wouldn’t comply. Finally he called the Clinton campaign and got hold of Carville or somebody. I remember Hunter saying, “What?! I wanna know the doctor, the candidate’s doctor. Get him over here.” Finally I said, “Hunter, I really appreciate it . . . but why are you doing this?” He said, “I can’t stand to be around pain.”

JAMES CARVILLE

I was in the middle of a presidential campaign, so the last thing I was doing was staying out drinking at night, but I remember that we were all having dinner, and the Rolling Stone people would disappear for five minutes and come back kind of refreshed. I said, “Gee, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen people do that.”

WILLIAM GREIDER

When we did the Clinton interview, Hunter, as he often did, had constructed a sort of dramatic arc to this event that he was living out and that we were all invited to live with him. The narrative for that event was that Jann and P.J. and Hunter and I were all flying down to Little Rock to “deliver the Rolling Stone vote” to Clinton for that election. That was kind of his running gag. On another level, he really did seem to think that there was something momentous happening in this event. He had packed up a photograph, which he entitled “Politics Is a Dirty Business,” which was a picture of him in Woody Creek, sitting on his haunches with a rifle he had just fired at a big drum of gasoline. This huge burst of flame was flying toward him. It’s quite dramatic. Hunter had a three-by-four-foot framed blowup of this photo shipped down from Colorado to give to Clinton. Hunter brought it to the interview at Doe’s Eat Place, and we were all pretty primed. We were also all hung over.

JANN WENNER

Everyone on our team had their own agenda. P.J.’s was to throw these very arcane intellectual curveball questions at Clinton. He was going to trap him in some dilemma based on some idea from a conservative think tank that he had come up with. But while he was quizzing Clinton, P.J. was also trying to eat a tamale. He was trying to cut it with a knife and fork without unwrapping it and was about to eat the paper. Clinton calmly leaned toward P.J. and said, “Here’s how you eat that.” That sort of took the wind out of P.J.’s sails.

Hunter wanted to ask about the Fourth Amendment and drug searches. He leaned back and did one of these long windup Hunter kind of things where everybody is supposed to be amused by it all, and Clinton wasn’t going to have any of it. Hunter was pouring sweat at this point, and his question was way off the point of what we needed to talk about with the soon-to-be president. Search and seizure was not really an issue in the campaign, but it gave Clinton an opening to talk about drugs, and he whacked Hunter. I’m pretty sure that Stephanopoulos set him up. He was trying to insulate Clinton from being too associated with someone like Hunter, and I think Stephanopoulos had warned Clinton about what to expect. Clinton came back with this really tough, aggressive answer involving his brother Roger’s cocaine problem and how he had seen the horrors and destruction of drugs.

We were all unprepared for the intensity of his response, and Hunter was especially taken aback. The interview then went back and forth between Greider and myself and Clinton. Hunter essentially withdrew. There was no “ho-ho” component, which Hunter had hoped to establish. Carville understood Hunter and appreciated him, but George was way too serious an operator to let his need to protect Clinton every second be overrun by Hunter’s charm and fun, or as a little favor to Hunter. Forget it. George was cold.

WILLIAM GREIDER

Hunter wilted. It was almost poignant because as much as he wanted us to think he was running a gag, he was also quite sincere about the Fourth Amendment. He had a kind of little-boy’s innocence sometimes, and then Clinton, for his own purposes, just smacked him down verbally.

I think that innocence is what kept Hunter going for so long. I feel like that’s the core of who he was, and also why he was such a great writer—so expressive and so real and all the other things he was. That innocence and sweetness were driving him. He knew the world was big and bad and ugly, and he would take it on the way a little boy takes on a demon. And sometimes he’d get smacked.

Hunter got up from the table right after Clinton’s response. He just stopped asking questions. He wandered back after a while with a drink in his hand and sat down, and I suppose he said a few other things, but it was like the dream had been smashed, and what was the point of going on with this? I think after you saw that sort of thing about Hunter up close, you felt a sort of protectiveness and forgivingness toward him.

JANN WENNER

When it came time to publish the interview, I wanted to endorse Clinton, and I wanted each of us to write his own statement. I wrestled back and forth with Hunter. He had these deep reservations about him based on something—either that incident turned him off, or he had something intuitive he knew about a type of southerner that we just didn’t get. Ultimately Hunter came around, though somewhat tepidly.

The Clinton candidacy was frustrating for him. By that time the politics of the country had kind of passed him by—it wasn’t clear-cut good-versus-evil as Nixon seemed then to have been. Clinton was a centrist, but more than that, I think we were now dealing with what was now such a technological and complex society that decisions couldn’t really be deeply ideological anymore.

DOUG BRINKLEY

In 1993, I had done my doctorate in history at Georgetown and was teaching at Hofstra University on Long Island. I was talking with my students about Harry Truman’s Independence as different from Dwight Eisenhower’s Abilene, but without going there and seeing it for ourselves, it all seemed stilted and remote. So I created a class called “The Majic Bus” with the insight that instead of students going to Europe for a semester, they would stay in America, get on a bus, and live for a semester on the road. Our bus driver looked like Buffalo Bill, and he called his bus the Highway Hotel. We read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and then visited Whitman’s grave in Camden, New Jersey; we read Willa Cather and then went to her home in Nebraska; we read John Steinbeck and toured his museum in Salinas.

But I also wanted to bring in living writers. My students were reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as we were coming through Colorado, and I had sent Hunter a couple of books I had just done with a note to him saying we had mutual friends in George McGovern and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Hunter’s then-assistant Nicole Meyer called and said that Hunter really liked the idea of the bus thing we were doing and would like to meet me and my students. She told me that Hunter’s hours were erratic, and that we should just show up at the Woody Creek Tavern with the bus.

I had two busloads—twenty-seven students. We pulled in to the tavern and waited, shot pool, hung around. Nicole had come down and checked me out on a reconnaissance mission, and we talked for a while, and then sure enough Hunter came rolling in with a very expensive video recorder and started taping the students instead of them taping him, or he’d grab their video recorders and film himself. He was being very playful and was in a good mood, and the students were asking good questions. He had dressed to be the Hunter Thompson that the students were looking to see, with the Tilley hat, smoking a Dunhill with the holder and eating a snow cone margarita. Then he said, “I don’t know who really wants to come up to Owl Farm, but I’ll put some food on. We’ve got some beer if you want to come up.” So one group stayed and slept in the Woody Creek Tavern parking lot, and a second group came up to Owl Farm.

Instead of autographing the students’ books, he made them queue up and then took his gun and shot a hole in each of their copies.

Hunter had asked us to report back to him about the rest of our road trip after we’d left Colorado, and on one of our phone calls he said to me, “Look, Nicole and I were wondering if you would help me pull together this book I’m working on, Better Than Sex. It’s a disaster zone. It’s a lot of writing about Clinton. You’re a political historian. You know a lot about politics. Maybe you could come out for a week and help us.” Better Than Sex, at that point, was like a deck of cards in disarray; the writing was all there, but it needed to be shuffled in some direction or repackaged, fast. Hunter was in a jam.

I ended up going up there and doing my thing, and it worked, because Hunter and I had certain things in common. We both loved politics and literature. He loved talking to me about where he was at in the pecking order of journalism and literature—about David Halberstam, Maureen Dowd, Seymour Hersh, Scotty Reston, and Walter Isaacson, and others. I think Nicole liked having me around because she didn’t want any more female assistants for Hunter. Apparently they’d had some bad experience as a couple, and I came in as a kind of straight man to help them pull it together. It was a productive week. We got a result, which always meant a lot to Hunter. We didn’t waste time.

One of the other things we shared were the hours we kept, which was rare for Hunter. My most productive hours are from about ten p.m. until three or four in the morning, so when he called me at two-thirty or three, I was guaranteed to be up. That window of friends for Hunter was limited. And we both had the habit of writing or working with CNN on, so if there was a news flash, we’d call each other up. That became a big part of the relationship—our schedules.

JAMES CARVILLE

He used to send these faxes on this weird letterhead that said “Forget the Shrimp Honey—I’m Coming Home with the Crabs.” He’d write me these crazy memos—at three o’clock in the morning he’d fax me, and I’d come to work in the morning and there’d be three or four faxes waiting for me. And like an idiot, I didn’t keep them, but he published them anyway in Better Than Sex.

STACEY HADASH met Hunter in 1992 when she was working in the so-called War Room of the Clinton campaign.

After the campaign was over, Hunter was working on Better Than Sex, and he called me up and said, “Why don’t you come out to Woody Creek to help with the book?” I had been helping him out with stuff over the phone—questions about who ended up where and how the whole transition was working—and now he wasn’t meeting his deadline.

First I called Carville: “Hunter’s just asked me out to his place. I like Hunter a lot, but I’ve heard all these things about him attacking women and the guns and the explosives and the drugs and the knives. Do you really think that it’s safe for me to go out there?” James said, “Oh yeah, you’ll be fine.”

Owl Farm was bizarre. The first weekend I went there, sitting at the end of the table in the kitchen was Ed Bradley, smoking a pipe and reading the paper. The next time I went out there, Don Johnson was in the kitchen with a whole bunch of people, and everybody was fooling around and putting lipstick on—you know how Hunter loved lipstick. I was taking pictures—Hunter loved pictures—and naturally, D.J. did not really want to have pictures of him with lipstick on floating around. We ended up fighting, with D.J. trying to wrestle my camera out of my hand. Hunter was watching the whole thing—people were spread out through the room, tossing the camera around; it was this whole fight scene. It was bizarre. Everything around there was bizarre.

One night we went out for a drive on McClain Flats, which was his first test for me. We were heading back to Hunter’s house, going straight toward this hairpin turn. Of course Hunter was driving the Red Shark with his Chivas on ice and his sunglasses on and stepped it up to about a hundred miles an hour, heading straight for this curve in the road. All I saw was a mountain-face wall coming at me fast. I really did think I was going to die.

Before too long, I was riding on the back of Hunter’s motorcycle at a hundred miles an hour down to Basalt for lunch and then sitting there for four hours drinking margaritas before getting back on the bike and riding home.

We talked a lot about politics. Hunter was able to get to the heart of things, to simplify things, really quickly. He’d make these weird predictions that you’d say were totally crazy, but they’d turn out to be true. Hunter was disappointed in Clinton—really disappointed. He thought that Clinton had a position of power to do a lot of things and he let the Democrats down. Hunter thought that Bill Clinton didn’t fulfill his promises, basically.

SANDY THOMPSON

Hunter’s younger brother Jim was gay. I took care of Jim in San Francisco when he was dying in 1994. I begged Hunter to come out to see him, and he finally did.

PETE PETERS was Jim Thompson’s best friend growing up in Louisville.

Jim and I met each other in the eighth grade, but the first time I ever heard anything about Hunter wasn’t until years later, in 1967, right after he’d written Hell’s Angels. He told me that Hunter was going to be on To Tell the Truth, this prime-time game show on TV.

Jim always said the hitchhiker in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was him. He had taken the train out to Colorado to visit Hunter in the very early seventies. While he was away, I got an envelope in the mail from him, and on the back of the envelope was written “cunnilingus.” The only thing he wrote was “Just wanted to see if this would make it through the mail.” A couple of days later, I got a phone call from Jim. I said, “What the hell are you doing back home so early?” He said, “Hunter would get up and start smoking hash and drinking wine, and then his buddies would come over at night and they’d just get crazy. They’d drink and do acid—the only thing I could do was go sit on the porch, because it was sheer insanity.”

SANDY THOMPSON

We went to Jim’s when he was dying, and I think Hunter spent two days with him. Jim was very grateful. Hunter gave him a thousand dollars or something. Hunter did leave at one point, and he came back drunk and coked up. But Jim was just really, really glad that Hunter came to see him. They didn’t speak much. I’m sure that Hunter was embarrassed by Jim’s gayness earlier in his life. I don’t know if that was true later on. He might not have been. But they were real different people.

Hunter didn’t talk to his other brother, Davison, very much either. And he didn’t talk to Paul Semonin or a lot of other old friends. A lot of them just went by the wayside as his whole world changed.

PETE PETERS

I never actually met Hunter until Jim’s wake. It was a bizarre day. As I understand it, their mother hadn’t had a drink for eighteen years until the day Jim was buried. At the burial at Cave Hill Cemetery, when the car showed up with Davison, Mrs. Thompson, and Hunter, Davison got out, and then Hunter got out and was trying to help his mom. And I’ll never forget this: I didn’t know if I felt worse for Mrs. Thompson because she was burying her youngest son, or if I felt worse for her because of the shape Hunter was in. It was just god-awful. He was like a six-year-old kid. It was pitiful. It wasn’t because he was drunk or drugged. I was just looking at a guy who was adult in body only. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to take care of her, how to help her. He looked like he was looking to her for guidance. He looked lost.

DOUG BRINKLEY

Hunter came down to New Orleans in April of ’94 for an event for one of his books, and I put him in touch with Stephen Ambrose, the late historian who wrote the three-volume biography of Nixon. They got along famously, but while Hunter was here, Nixon died. Hunter was staying at the Pontchartrain Hotel and wrote his obituary for Rolling Stone from New Orleans. He would go into the St. Charles Tavern, a twenty-four-hour bar-and-grill, and would sit and eat gumbo and watch CNN and write notes. He liked watching the trolley car go by. He said, “If I don’t write the obituary on Nixon and make it tougher on him than Mencken was on William Jennings Bryan, I will have utterly failed in my career.” He was obsessed with Nixon’s death. He felt he had spent all of his life going after him, and now he had to summarize it all. He felt that pressure to publish just the right statement intensely.

GEORGE MCGOVERN

It’s not any secret that Hunter had total contempt for Nixon. He just couldn’t handle him. When Nixon died, I went to his funeral. I figured that as he was a former president of the United States, and was my opponent, that that was the proper thing to do. I said a couple of words to his family and friends. That was the one exception Hunter drew to my honesty. He said, “Yeah, you went in the tank; you went in the tank.” He never forgave me for that.

COREY SEYMOUR

Most of my time with Hunter was spent in hotel rooms, just the two of us, or with a few of his friends over. But in 1994, I was with him at the Beat Generation Conference that Doug Brinkley had organized at NYU.

The conference was my first real experience of seeing what kind of an insane following he had. We were late, of course—I had my usual ordeal trying to get Hunter up. That day’s random time-stop was Hunter’s obsessive attention to a fax he was making to send Jack Nicholson, who had been in the news for bashing somebody’s car in with a golf club on a highway in California. Out came about seven of his thirty or so different-colored markers and pens that he always traveled with, and he started hand-detailing this note to Jack that said something like “Ho ho, bubba—you do know that if you would have come to New York with me like I’d told you to that none of this would have happened, right? Oh well—never mind. Selah, HST.”

When we finally got to the conference, Hunter was sitting up on the stage as part of a panel, and as soon as he sat down, he called up some student in the first row and gave him some cash and had him run out to buy him some beer. Hunter and I had a plan to watch a basketball play-off game afterward—we wouldn’t have time to get up to his hotel room, because we were all the way downtown—and we ran into some poor young NYU student who eagerly offered up the only set of keys to her apartment, which was a block away, for us to watch the game. We were all set to head over after Hunter’s talk, and then he got mobbed—really mobbed—by a couple hundred people. It didn’t get really ugly, but it was on the way to that. We had to rush him into a car, and people were jumping on top of the car and sticking their hands in through the windows to try to get him to sign things. He had to speed off with this poor girl’s only set of keys in his pocket. We never saw her again.

Hunter had told me some stories about Allen Ginsberg intervening with the Hells Angels during protests in San Francisco in the sixties. Hunter had actually been trying to reach Ginsberg since he arrived in New York—they hadn’t spoken in quite some time—and by coincidence, while I was walking home from the conference I stopped in a bookstore and sat down to read something. When I looked up, Ginsberg was standing almost directly in front of me, packing up his stuff after giving some kind of reading there. I introduced myself and mentioned that Hunter was trying to get hold of him. “I’ve been trying to call him at the Four Seasons,” Ginsberg said, “but they said there’s no Hunter Thompson staying there.” I told him to try again—“Hunter’s there, but he checked in under the name Ben Franklin.”

Ginsberg thanked me, asked me to help him finish the rest of his soy milk, and left. When I told Hunter about this, he mumbled something about Ginsberg being too embarrassed to see him ever since some weird time in the late sixties when the two of them spent a lost weekend together—something about running around in the woods together in California. “It’s a little-known fact, Corey, that Ginsberg was a horrible drunkard.” They ended up having dinner that night.

DEBORAH FULLER

Hunter hated Christmas. One year it was just the two of us at Owl Farm, and we were in heaven—not having to go out to any of these big events. Hunter canceled everything and we drank, caught up, played loud music, watched TV—just “whooped it up,” as Hunter would say—and then he decided to call up everybody he knew, and in a very weird voice left his “Christmas greeting”: “This is Santa Claus—ho, ho, ho—I shit down your chimney.” He called Jann; he called everybody he could find in his Rolodex at all hours of the morning—waking some people up, of course. “Ho, ho, ho—I shit down your chimney.” We taped them all and would laugh hysterically in between each call. We had such fun—and remember: Hunter was a fun hog.

JANE WENNER

One Christmas when the kids were small, Jann and I went to Aspen and rented a house on Red Mountain. Hunter and Deborah came over with Juan and brought presents for all the kids—he bought one a black plastic rat and one a wig. But the big thing was the Bedazzler, which was a small machine that you could order on late-night TV, and you could fasten bits of colored plastic, like jewels, to your T-shirts or jeans or whatever. Hunter had this Bedazzler, and he let the kids play with it, but he wouldn’t give it to them. And I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t give it to them. They Bedazzled all day, and then he took it away. But they were happy with the plastic rat and the other things, and we had a lot of fun. Juan used to stay with us on summer visits, so for all of us, it was a mellow family Christmas.

Years later, right after Jann and I were separated, out of the blue Hunter sent them the Bedazzler. Around this time I was tussling around with my son Theo, and I sort of absentmindedly said to him, “How did I get such a crazy kid?” and he said, “Well, you know, I’m not as crazy as Uncle Hunter.” I said, “Really, Theo? What do you think it is that we do with Uncle Hunter?” He said, “I think you stay up late, you eat fire, and you Bedazzle all night.” And I looked at Theo and I said, “Yeah, that’s about right.” Hunter loved that.

JANN WENNER

After Hunter stopped writing big pieces for us, he struggled with his craft, essentially doing a lot of ephemeral writing in tiny bursts, nothing inspired or meaningful. Then suddenly came what were his two last major pieces, which I thought were two of his best—“Fear and Loathing in Elko” and “Polo Is My Life.” They were really different: not reportorially based but just great, flat-out pieces of expansive, elaborate, swinging writing.

“Elko” was one of my favorites, and it came out of nowhere. It was hysterical, but it was also dark and evil. He made me reread Vegas and compare it to that, which at the time we thought was dark. Well, “Elko” makes Vegas look like a tale of innocence—which in fact it was. “Elko” was a nightmarish piece about sex and torture. It’s also as funny as anything he’s ever written.

From “Fear and Loathing in Elko”
Rolling Stone 622; January 23, 1992

On my way to the kitchen I was jolted by the sight of a naked woman slumped awkwardly in the corner with a desperate look on her face, as if she’d been shot. Her eyes bulged and her mouth was wide open and she appeared to be reaching out for me.

I leapt back and heard laughter behind me. My first thought was that Leach, unhinged by his gambling disaster, had finally gone over the line with his wife-beating habit and shot her in the mouth just before we knocked. She appeared to be crying out for help, but there was no voice.

I ran into the kitchen to look for a knife, thinking that if Leach had gone crazy enough to kill his wife, now he would have to kill me, too, since I was the only witness. Except for the Judge, who had locked himself in the bathroom.

Leach appeared in the doorway holding the naked woman by the neck and hurled her across the room at me. . . .

Time stood still for an instant. The woman seemed to hover in the air, coming at me in the darkness like a body in slow motion. I went into a stance with the bread knife and braced for a fight to the death.

Then the thing hit me and bounced softly down to the floor. It was a rubber blowup doll: one of those things with five orifices that young stockbrokers buy in adult bookstores after the singles bars close.

“Meet Jennifer,” he said. “She’s my punching bag.” He picked it up by the hair and slammed it across the room.

“Ho, ho,” he chuckled, “no more wife beating. I’m cured, thanks to Jennifer.” He smiled sheepishly. “It’s almost like a miracle. These dolls saved my marriage. They’re a lot smarter than you think.” He nodded gravely. “Sometimes I have to beat two at once. But it always calms me down, you know what I mean?”

Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train. “Oh, hell yes,” I said quickly. “How do the neighbors handle it?”

“No problem,” he said. “They love me.”

Sure, I thought. I tried to imagine the horror of living in a muddy industrial slum full of tin-walled trailers and trying to protect your family against brain damage from knowing that every night when you look out your kitchen window there will be a man in a leather bathrobe flogging two naked women around the room with a quart bottle of Wild Turkey. Sometimes for two or three hours . . . It was horrible.

He reached into a nearby broom closet and pulled out another one—a half-inflated Chinese-looking woman with rings in her nipples and two electric cords attached to her head. “This is Ling-Ling,” he said. “She screams when I hit her.” He whacked the doll’s head and it squawked stupidly.

TOBIAS PERSE was an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone in 1993.

Somehow it was decided that the U.S. Open of polo, which was being held at Bethpage on Long Island, would be the beginning of this whole gear-up for “Polo Is My Life.” At the time—or, I should say, in Hunter Time—it was like the whole world revolved around this tournament. There were four or five people in the galaxy of this story, and Hunter was at the center, with everyone else moving around him to plan and coordinate and pay for everything. It was a general attitude that pervaded everything: Hunter Is Coming, and Corey would be introducing me to him. I remember this look of relish in Jann’s eyes when he knew that I didn’t know what I’d be getting into. He said, “Don’t forget that you have a job.” But I never was sure what the expectations were.

When Hunter had asked for help with the research, I jumped on it because it all somehow felt like journalism to me in some way. It felt like the job. But it wasn’t journalism to research luxury hotels in Garden City, Long Island. It wasn’t journalism to find out what color Lincoln he’d be getting.

Jann understood that Hunter’s expenses had to be contained and what that meant, but I fucked everything up constantly. It was decided that Rolling Stone would pay for Hunter’s hotel room, but under no circumstances would they pay for any incidentals—or damages. That was part of the deal. Deborah told me all about these special requirements about Hunter’s airplane reservations, and there were concerns about Hunter’s expenses that I had no idea about. I got Hunter’s first-class tickets for him, but then I had to get another set of first-class tickets just in case he didn’t make the first flight. Later on, this became a matter of course, but Deborah was very insistent on all this from the beginning.

He FedExed cocaine to me before his trip, and on the phone there was that strange code or etiquette of drug users. It took me years of later experience to really recognize how much cocaine he was sending, but one day I got a package containing a thick pile of National Geographics with a hole cut out inside—like the way you’d cut out the inside of a Bible to put a gun in it. It was sealed with tape on every side and sprayed with Right Guard, and it arrived via FedEx. I got a call from Owl Farm: “Did you get the FedEx? Um, I think you’ll find one of those National Geographics has something in it. Keep that for when Hunter arrives.” This was three hundred grams, four hundred grams in two Ziploc bags. It was a huge amount of cocaine, and it was sent using Jann’s FedEx account, which we were never supposed to use, of course. We had an Airborne account for normal use, one FedEx account that we could use if we got permission, and then Jann’s FedEx account. Hunter just sent the coke on Jann’s FedEx to “Tobias Perse” with no return address.

In addition, Deborah had given Corey strict instructions to buy blow-up sex dolls for the hotel room.

DEBORAH FULLER

Hunter thought blow-up sex dolls were fun, mostly just for the reactions he could get. He would always think of something new to do with them—throw them off balconies, down into the lobbies of hotels. He threw one out on the street into traffic once, and this guy thought he was running over a real woman. Mona was always his favorite name for them. When a reporter was on camera interviewing Hunter at home, or just when he was expecting people, Hunter would sometimes take the lid off the hot tub in the Water Room and throw a bunch of sex dolls in there, and he would take these unsuspecting people around the house and he’d remove the top of the hot tub, and there’d be all these dolls floating inside.

TOBIAS PERSE

All in all, he was on Long Island for two weeks, and we didn’t go to more than four matches. I remember them distinctly, though, because everyone there was looking at us. Hunter had . . . not exactly a diaper, but this weird thing on his head. He looked bizarre. He was enjoying himself thoroughly, but part of the enjoyment was in shocking the people there. When Jann and his wife got there, they didn’t seem embarrassed by it, but I was.

Hunter was really interested in the polo equipment, and after the matches, we’d go around to the vendors’ tents and look at things like high-end Argentinean leather saddles. Hunter was really serious about it and was asking people questions. A lot of this detail showed up in the story, which at the time I didn’t understand at all. He wasn’t taking notes.

The low point was probably when Hunter interviewed a dentist by mistake. We were out at the polo fields, and Hunter was supposed to have interviewed one of the Gracida brothers, Carlos and Memo—or Hector and Homo, in Hunter’s coinage—the premier polo players in the world, or their team owner. But Hunter either mistook the meeting place or mistook a random man for being the owner of their team and was interviewing this completely normal-looking guy for about fifteen minutes. At some point it became apparent that this guy wasn’t a player or an owner, but just a local dentist who liked to watch polo now and then. But it had taken Hunter a long time to uncover that—long enough that he was really angry. That turned out to be the beginning of the end of the trip. It started to get ugly.

COREY SEYMOUR

Later that night, Hunter was late to meet Ginger Baker and some of the other polo crowd at the Huntington Hilton. I’m not sure if we knew if Hunter really wanted to go out or not, but at the same time he seemed furious that he was late. When we got downstairs, the car was taking a few minutes longer than expected to arrive from the valet—he was barking that it had taken “forty-five fucking minutes!” when it really had only been maybe ten minutes, and then yelled to anyone within earshot, “I’M BEN FRANKLIN, AND I WANT MY FUCKING CAR NOW, GODDAMN IT!!! THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!”

When the car finally showed, I made a move to drive it myself. “Fuck that!” was Hunter’s response. Inside the car were broken wineglasses and empty wine bottles; in the backseat, empty Chivas bottles and liquor stains on the white leather seats; on the dashboard, smudged streaks of a white powdery substance. I really think the whole thing was just too much to comprehend for the valets to really do or say anything about anything. We were supposed to wait for Tobias to lead us to the next hotel, as he had directions or a map, but when I mentioned this to Hunter, I got another, “Fuck that!!” He gunned the car over a couple of speed bumps in front of the hotel and then hit both the front and rear bumpers of the car squealing out onto the road. We were going sixty-five or so in a twenty-five zone, but we had no idea which direction we should be going. Hunter was seething with rage, and I wasn’t sure where it was directed. He seemed really angry at me for not knowing how to get where we were going, and he seemed furious at not being able to find his radar detector, which he blamed on “that fucking cunt Shelby!! Bitch!!” whom he had been driving around with the previous night. I asked him to pull over to a gas station so I could ask for directions, which he did, but when I got back in the car after talking with an attendant for maybe eight seconds, he gave me a cold stare and seemed to accuse me of being some kind of traitor: “What the fuck took you so long? What the fuck were you talking to him about?”

He gunned it down the Long Island Expressway at a little over a hundred miles an hour with complete nonchalance: He held the steering wheel with only his thumb and his two smallest fingers; between the two other fingers on that hand was his cigarette, in his other hand was his tumbler of Chivas—rotated on some sort of unconscious axis to counterbalance the g-forces when the car cornered sharply—and, at Hunter’s request, I’d light up his skull-shaped hash pipe and hold it to his lips as he turned sideways to toke.

Then he turned off the lights. At this point, I went from thinking I might die to knowing that I was gonna die. We were floating back and forth from lane to lane, I had a shaving kit full of enough drugs to put one or both of us in prison for the rest of our lives, and Hunter was driving drunk and enraged. And the dome light was on. I was half into the backseat, rooting around double-dong dildos and beer bottles and wineglasses and oddball porno magazines trying to find the goddamned Fuzzbuster, when Hunter found it on his own—in the glove compartment. Again, my fault.

TOBIAS PERSE

The thing about those unpleasant nights is that they didn’t really end. The unpleasantness wasn’t a quick outburst.

At some point a couple of days later, he turned the wheel over to me. He just said, “You drive.” Hunter was a great driver, and more than that was a confident driver, so this was saying a lot. And then I hit a bump, and he spilled a drink on himself. Then it happened again, and he said, “If I spill one more drop of whiskey on myself, I’m going home tonight.” Well, I wanted him to go home more than anything in the world, so I sped up suddenly and then braked suddenly to go over a speed bump—on purpose. Hunter spilled his drink everywhere and just started beating the dashboard—“That’s it. I’m going home.”

I went upstairs and booked the first flight I could. I arranged for a limo with the concierge—who hated us—and then at seven a.m., a van arrived. Hunter had no baggage except for his leather satchel with the Chivas and the bucket of ice and the Heinekens in his pockets, and he got on with a beer in his hand. What we didn’t know, but what we learned quite quickly, was that we were in a van that was making multiple stops to pick up business types in these upper-middle-class suburbs of Long Island.

By this point there was no way Hunter had slept in two or three days, and he kept lighting cigarettes, and each time the driver got angrier and angrier. Hunter just kept putting his cigarettes out on the floor of the van. He was talking to himself and making these weird sounds, and everyone else in the van was completely silent.

We finally got to the airport, and Hunter stepped out right in front of two cops, drinking his beer and carrying the bucket of ice. As he lit a cigarette, the cops told him that he couldn’t drink beer, and I stepped in and said, “That’s Hunter S. Thompson—believe me, it’s not a problem. He’s in and out of this airport all the time—they all know him.” Hunter kept walking a straight line. The cops were kind of bewildered because Hunter didn’t even look at them. I checked him in. Walking toward the metal detector, he set the ice bucket down on the floor and kept going—smoking, of course. Security was getting into it, but he didn’t interact with anyone. I got to the metal detector with him and explained that I was his assistant and I’d be checking him onto the flight, and he walked through. At this point we were not talking at all. I got on the fucking plane with him, and Hunter sat and leaned his head to one side and looked like he was going to go to sleep, but just before I left him, he raised his fist and just said, “Take no shit.”

And he went home and “went down,” as Deborah always called it when Hunter slept. That in itself was a great thing: If you worked for Hunter and he went down, that was thirty-six hours that school was out. You may be back to answering the phone at work, but you’ve had this amazing experience.

I think I spent a year working on that piece. It was always an interesting give and take with Jann. He kind of disapproved and approved of it at the same time. He disapproved that Hunter required that, but approved of doing it if that’s what it took, and if I was willing to do it.

The writing part of it was torturous. I went out to Owl Farm twice specifically for that reason. I took a week off work, and Hunter put my flights on Michael Stepanian’s credit card, but by the end of the trip, things had turned sour between us or I’d just really want to go home. Hunter would always rally for a strong good-bye, though. Sometimes it would involve an act of contrition—I’d admired the white dinner jacket and white pants that he was wearing earlier, and now he was saying that he wanted me to have something, which in a certain sense seemed to mean, “I’m sorry for everything that went bad,” and all of a sudden I now had this white alcohol-soaked tuxedo. I tried it on for him, and he was straightening it out and manhandling me as if he was a professional tailor, turning me around and telling me where to take it in a bit and checking to see if there was enough fabric in the sleeve. He said, “You look really handsome in that.”

He had been writing me into the “Polo” story as a character, and that character went from being kind of fierce—beating people with golf clubs and that sort of thing—to being introduced like this: “The magazine sent me an assistant, a tall, jittery young man. He said, ‘My name is Tobias, but my friends call me Queerbait.’” Over four months, I cut “Queerbait” every time I sent it back to him, and every time he’d change it back. I finally had it cut in the copy department just before we closed the issue.

From “Polo Is My Life: Fear and Loathing in Horse Country” Rolling Stone 697; December 15, 1994

Polo meant nothing to me when I was young. It was just another sport for the idle rich—golf on horseback—and on most days I had better things to do than hang around in a flimsy blue-striped tent on a soggy field far out on the River Road and drink gin with teen-age girls. But that was still the old days, and I have learned a lot since then. I still like to drink gin with teen-age girls on a Sunday afternoon in horse country, and I have developed a natural, friendly feeling for the game.

Which is odd because I don’t play polo, and I hate horses. They are dangerously stupid beasts with brains the size of cue balls and hoofs that can crush your whole foot into bone splinters just by accidentally stepping on your toe. Some will do it on purpose. I have been on extremely mean and stupid horses that clearly wanted to hurt me. I have been run against trees by the bastards, I have been scraped against barbed-wire fences and bitten on the back of the head for no reason. . . .

At the age of 5, I got trapped in a stall for 45 minutes with a huge horse named Buddy, who went suddenly crazy and kicked himself to death with terrible shrieking noises while I huddled in the urine-soaked straw right under his hoofs.

My uncle Lawless, a kindly dairy farmer, was flogging the brute across the eyes with a 2-by-4 and trying to get a strangle rope around his neck, but the horse was too crazy to deal with. Finally, in desperation, he ran back to the house and got a double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun—which he jammed repeatedly against the horse’s lips and teeth until the beast angrily bit down on the weapon and caused both barrels to fire at once.

“So much for that one,” he said as he dragged me out from under the dead animal’s body. I was covered with blood and hot, steaming excrement. The brute had evacuated its bowels at the moment of death. . . .

No one seemed to know why it happened. “It was a suicide,” the vet said later, but nobody believed him. Uncle Lawless loved animals, and he was never able to reconcile murdering that horse with his basic Christian beliefs. He sold his farm and went into the real-estate business in southern Indiana, and finally he went insane.

The main problem with horses is that they are too big to argue with when they’re angry—or even bitchy, for that matter, and highbred horses are notorious for their bitchiness. Which might be cute or fey in a smaller animal, but when a beast that weighs 1,200 pounds goes crazy with some kind of stupid pique or jealousy in a room not much bigger than the handicapped stall in the Denver airport men’s room, bad things will happen to anybody who tries to argue with it: fractured skulls, broken legs, split kidneys, spine damage and permanent paralysis. The kick of a horse at close range, a hoof flicked out in anger, is like being whacked in the shins with a baseball bat. It rips flesh and shatters human bones. You will go straight to some rural Emergency Room, and you will be in a cast by nightfall . . . if you’re lucky. The unlucky will limp for the rest of their lives.

TOBIAS PERSE

Once all that was finally finished, it was time for him to start reporting the second installment of the story down in Palm Beach. By the time I got to the Breakers, where he was staying, it looked like he’d been up for a long time. He was wearing pajama bottoms—or maybe wrestling pants. Hunter normally put so much time and preparation into how he looked, but this was the opposite. Maybe he’d put that time in three days ago, but this was day three, and people were staring.

I’d lie to Jann. He’d ask me how the writing was going, or how many matches Hunter had been to. The answer was usually none, but I’d brazenly say, “I think he went to a few chukkers,” because I felt it reflected on me—as if I had any bearing on what he would do.

Jann would ask, “Has he been doing a lot of cocaine?” What was I going to tell him? “Uh, yeah, he’s doing more cocaine than any person that I’ll ever see in my entire lifetime—in fact, he’s gone through almost all the stuff he FedExed to me at the office on your personal account?” I would be kind of low-key: “Uh, I don’t think a lot . . .”

He never finished part 2. Unfortunately, it took about a year and a half to figure out he wasn’t going to do it.

While I was down there, somebody had found Hunter’s Lincoln Town Car on an abandoned polo field that had been absolutely ripped to shreds. The car had been sitting there for two or three days; Hunter had apparently just abandoned it and seemed to have no memory of it. I remember the detail that he loved: The keys were still in the ignition, and the door was ajar and still pinging.

I didn’t say anything to Jann about it; I just rented another Lincoln Town Car. When the expenses came in, they were sent to me—on top of all my other jobs, I was the accounting liaison for the trip. I’d try to trickle the bills through the finance department instead of submitting them all at once, and Hunter would say things like, “Good boy.” There were things on the Breakers receipt like a $7,500 charge for “incinerated sofa.” The expenses on that were enormous—maybe $25,000 or so—and he wasn’t there for more than a week.

Hunter could be incredibly vicious. His voice could be so fraught with what seemed like an unreasonable anger, an illogical anger at some perceived incompetency or fuckup. And the allegation that you could be ineffectual would be the gravest offense—that Hunter seemed to imply that you weren’t an expert in what you did, that you weren’t professional, or that you, in Hunter-speak, “went sideways” on him. The pressure was extreme but intelligent in a particular way. He used to say things to me like, “By the time I was your age I’d written Hell’s Angels; what have you done today?”

Jann was the only person in Hunter’s life who would tell him no. I was always really impressed at Jann’s confidence, and at the way Hunter would accord him respect. Hunter could be excoriating toward Jann—he was always talking of this hidden stash of first editions; he had calculated the cost on a piece of paper with amounts written down, like $1.2 million, $900,000. But Hunter would get people riled up about Jann and then as soon as somebody else said something bad about him, he’d turn on them. Ultimately, Jann was sacrosanct.