CHAPTER TWO

An Itinerant Professional

Hunter used to tell us that he was going to be a great writer but that he figured he’d have to do some sort of journalism to make a living in the meantime. He wasn’t too happy about this, but he figured that if Hemingway did it, he could too.

DOUG BRINKLEY

The air force was his college. He learned a lot from various military types, and used this knowledge in his writing a lot—how the hillbilly grunt has to deal in a world of hard-nosed authority. Imagine such a rebellious spirit being forced into boot camp and mess hall drills and having to keep his boots polished perfectly and observe lights-out. Hunter would brag about his deviation from the rules, but that was one percent of the time. Ninety-nine percent of the time it was “Yes, sir!” But he was constantly studying the military culture. He really respected most of the officers; he became friends with a lot of them.

PORTER BIBB

We sent a lot of letters back and forth when I got to college. He’d gone off with the air force, so I started writing him as if he were my gay lover—thinking that the air force would read his mail—and he never responded. He didn’t take the bait. But right after college I went into the Marine Corps, and he started writing letters to me as my gay lover (I was in Parris Island), and they definitely opened our mail and read it. They read it to the whole platoon.

JERRY HAWKE served in the air force from June 1955 to May 1957, assigned to the Public Information Office at Eglin Field in Florida.

Part of the function of my department was putting out the Command Courier, the base newspaper. Not long after I got there, Hunter came aboard as sports editor. He had been assigned to a radar unit, which was clearly not his bag. He managed to get transferred to the base newspaper. He loved sports, so it was a natural for him. He also had a moonlighting job with the local civilian newspaper, the Fort Walton Playground News. Hunter was a very good-looking kid, a boyish-looking guy, and even then he was something of a cutup. He had a very provocative sense of humor.

We had a common friend, a lieutenant colonel named Frank Campbell, who was the deputy head of the information services office. Frank was a delightful fellow, a former newspaper man, I think, a very literary guy. I had been an English major at Yale and had pretensions of being a writer. I had spent a summer at Oxford and was planning to go back there to read English. The four of us—Frank and his wife and Hunter and I—became very good friends. I would play duplicate bridge with Pauline and Frank, and Hunter would sit around and drink beer.

I remember very clearly talking about the great writers from the twenties and thirties—Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Frank was a big influence on Hunter—he really provided kind of a home away from home, and he encouraged Hunter’s literary interests. Hunter was trying to do creative writing at the time. I remember his remorse for not having gone to college and his hope that when he got out he would go to Vanderbilt.

LOU ANN ILER

He came to see me in December of ’56, just showed up at my door. He was still in the service, but he really wanted to start a relationship again, and I did not. He was not too happy, but . . . there’s alcoholism in my family, and the pain that it caused me was something that I saw could happen with Hunter, and I wasn’t going there. It was really a survival decision. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for him. We parted as friends.

Hunter probably got in more trouble than other people, but he wasn’t that different in terms of his actual drinking. There was just always that energy, that tension. I don’t know that he had the ability to stop himself once that energy took over. Hunter was exciting and had that edge that a lot of men didn’t have. You’d be drawn to him like a moth to the flame. And when he wanted to, he could fit right in. It just seemed like every so often he had some energy that could not stand that type of constraint.

DOUG BRINKLEY

All in all, Hunter had a great billet. He was in Fort Walton Beach when it was still pristine, before it got developed. The most beautiful emerald waters in America are on that Florida Panhandle, and Hunter and his friends would go out swimming and surfing, and they drank. He would overdrink, but you didn’t often find a twenty-year-old in the military who wasn’t drinking a lot; they didn’t hold that against him. It was just another part of being in the military—that wild male culture of strip clubs, boozy nights, a really raucous kind of comedy, and a kind of verbal hazing of each other. Hunter was a ringleader in all of those macho coming-of-age rituals.

He was pushing envelopes a lot with his sports coverage for the Command Courier, the base newspaper, and he wrote some extra stuff for the Playground News under the pseudonym Thorne Stockton. The officers eventually had to censor him and shut him down, but it wasn’t out of disdain for Hunter. That’s why he got the honorable discharge—he charmed those officers a lot too.

I think there is a misimpression that Hunter’s air force years were one of him just flipping off authorities. In truth, he was an integral part of what was going on on the base and was respected by superior officers and the enlisted men. He just got into a tangle with some of the rules as a journalist. Quarterback Bart Starr was apparently finagling special treatment from the air force top brass so he could sign with Green Bay. Hunter found this appalling—or at the very least worth noting—so he snuck into base headquarters and found Starr’s sui generis discharge and snuck it onto the front page of the Command Courier at the last minute. He had also made fun of radio and TV personality Arthur Godfrey when he had come to the base. Hunter was just pushing it too far; they had to call him on it.

GENE MCGARR lived and worked with Hunter in New York City after Hunter was discharged from the air force.

The last thing he did, in November of 1957, was to write up a press release describing a riot that took place at Eglin when the enlisted men attacked the women’s quarters and the officer’s mess—stole all the booze, got drunk as shit, attacked the women, beat up the officers. It was a very funny and colorful story—completely fictional, of course—and he sent a copy of it to the AP and to UPI, left a copy on his captain’s desk, then drove like a son of a bitch for the gate.

He headed north; he’d read in Editor & Publisher about a small town newspaper that wanted a sports editor. He wrote them a letter, and they said to come up. This was a place called Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania.

Now, it turns out that Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, was just a bleak, hideous place with coal dust in the air. Dreadful, and no women in town that were worth looking at. Hunter got a room over a bar and started working for the paper, describing horse pulls and wrestling matches with “Popo the Killer Jap” and all kinds of things with this peculiar Dadaist approach. He wrote everything deadly serious. These things—like pro wrestling matches—were supposed to be laughed at to a certain extent. Everybody knows how it’s phony as baloney, but he played it straight. Well, not exactly straight; he was writing things like “People were carried out of the ring with broken backs,” “his neck was broken in three places”—stuff like that. Apparently nobody really cared whether it was true or not.

He’s working there for a couple of months when the editor’s daughter comes home for Christmas. She’s a nice-looking girl, so Hunter immediately hits on her. They get together. One night, he takes her on a drive into the countryside in the editor’s car. They pull into this side lane and start making out. They’re having a fine time, but when Hunter tries to back out to take her home, he’s mired up to the hubcaps in mud.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. There’s a farmhouse with a tractor sitting outside. Hunter goes up to the house, and he’s loathe to wake up a farmer at that hour. The tractor’s got the key in it, so he climbs up on the tractor, starts the goddamn thing, figures out how to put it in gear, turns it around, and runs it back down to the car. There’s a chain at the end of the tractor to pull all kinds of farm equipment, so Hunter attaches the chain around the car’s back bumper, puts the tractor in gear and eases out the clutch—and immediately rips the bumper half-off.

By this time, the farmer’s running down the hill with a shotgun. Hunter explains everything to him, and the farmer calms down and actually decides to help him. He shows him, basically, how you don’t put the chain on the bumper, you asshole, you put it on the axle. So he puts it on the axle and tows them out. Hunter’s in the driver’s seat and he’s got the door open and he’s looking backward to see where to steer, but he doesn’t notice this tree. The tree catches the door and bends it completely forward. So now he’s got a door and a bumper both hanging half-off.

They drive home. Hunter leaves the car in front of the editor’s house, goes back to his apartment, and packs all his bags. He goes to the office and is waiting for the editor when he hears this horrible scraping noise coming down the street. It’s the editor driving to work with the door and the bumper scraping the ground. Hunter gets up, walks out the door, gets into his car, and drives immediately to New York. That was the end of his Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, experience.

JERRY HAWKE

I got out of the air force in May of ’57. The Oxford plans had been scrapped, and I went up to Columbia Law School and was living in a shared apartment in New York City with my brother, who was a year ahead of me at school, and a fellow named John Clancy, who was a classmate of my brother. Clancy was a great character, a very bright, florid-faced Irishman. We all lived together in this old railroad flat at 110 Morningside Drive near Columbia.

Hunter called me and said he was leaving Jersey Shore and needed a place to stay. He wanted to come to New York. The way he put it, they sort of ran him out of town. He had to leave town so quickly that he left his watch in a pawnshop.

He enrolled in the School of General Studies at Columbia and took some courses. We had a deal where he wouldn’t have to pay any rent but he had to do dishes and stuff like that.

One of the things Hunter did was sign up for book clubs. They’d offer you four free books up front if you agreed to buy so many books over the course of the year. Hunter would sign up, get the free books up front, and never order any other books—or if he did, he wouldn’t pay for them. So he would get notices from these book clubs and would stiff them, or he’d send back some minuscule payment, which would only force them to trigger their whole process all over again.

ROGER HAWKE is Jerry Hawke’s brother.

They’d send him letters, one after another. Finally when it got to a certain point, Hunter wrote them back, starting off very rationally but gradually getting crazier and crazier, to the point where he’d end up claiming that they owed him money—but that he didn’t want their money and they could keep it. After that he’d never hear from them again. He used to read them to us. They were real gems.

JOHN CLANCY was one of the roommates.

Hunter used to tell us that he was going to be a great writer—he’d mention Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the same sentence—but that he figured he’d have to do some sort of journalism to make a living in the meantime. He wasn’t too happy about this, but he figured that if Hemingway did it, he could too.

GERALD TYRRELL

I went down from Yale to Hunter’s place in New York on spring vacation of my sophomore year to see him. He was living in this barren flat up by Columbia. I had to sleep in my overcoat on the floor. The only thing he had to eat in the refrigerator was a jar of peanut butter. I’m not even sure he had bread. There was a Chinese girl who lived next door, and Hunter said she fed him a lot.

GENE MCGARR

Around this time, Hunter and I started working together at Time magazine as copyboys. We worked the same daytime shift, starting at about seven-thirty or eight a.m. It was a miserably paid job, but a simple one. You deliver newspapers in the morning and then run copy from the editor back to the writer and from the writer to the editor and so on. Flunky work.

You couldn’t get the job if you wanted to be a writer. They didn’t want aspiring writers working as copyboys because all of a sudden, they would be rewriting the articles themselves and bugging editors with their own stuff. They wanted premed students or poor goofy anybodies, but no writers.

JERRY HAWKE

Hunter would get absolutely smashed and go around mouthing off and insulting all of his superiors at Time. He could drink a lot, and that got him into trouble. He eventually got fired because of that. He probably didn’t last more than three or four weeks.

JOHN CLANCY

We lived uptown until the summer, and then Hunter and I shared a place in the Village. There was one bed, and a cot in an alcove that was very hard to sleep on. There was no mattress or anything, so we kind of shared the one bed. I worked as a teamster down on the docks. I’d go to work at seven at night and come home at eight in the morning. He’d be off to work at dawn, so we never saw each other during the week. But I’d come home around noon on Saturday after drinking with my coworkers—our “Friday night” started at eight a.m. Saturday morning—and Hunter and I would crank up what he called “the Fun Machine,” with me on no sleep. We’d drive somewhere, or we’d just run all over the Village and drink and smoke and talk and argue and chase girls. And then on the weekends, if one of us didn’t sleep in some girl’s bed, we had to fight over who the fuck was going to actually use the bed instead of the horrible cot.

GENE MCGARR

Hunter almost never talked about his sex life, or about sex in general. You could never pin him down. He would never admit to having had sexual relations with anybody, or give you any details, except a couple of times. He told me once that if a girl wouldn’t blow him, he wouldn’t see her again. As far as he was concerned, a girl who wouldn’t suck cock wasn’t worth hanging out with, no matter how good-looking she was.

And I recall another time, we had met a stripper, a very pretty, nicely built girl, at Dirty Julius’s or the Riviera, and he had a little affair with her. And there was something about the “standing tree” position—the girl was light and strong and athletic enough to perform in the standing tree position. Exactly what the hell the “standing tree” position was, I never found out, but it blew his mind.

JOHN CLANCY

I was going out with a girl that lived in an apartment down the street, and she had a roommate from Smith College who had a separate room. This girl and I were hot and heavy, and one night, about six months later, she told me that Hunter had been sleeping with her roommate. He’d been coming over the roof and down the fire escape and going in through the roommate’s window. But the thing that impressed me was that Hunter had never said one word about any of this to me. I said to myself, “There’s a man of principle.”

GENE MCGARR

I was living on the Lower East Side, between the Bowery and Second Avenue, on the fifth floor. It was so bad that you could have cardiac arrest by the time you got up the stairs. I never locked my apartment door because I had nothing to steal—and if anybody actually wanted to climb those five flights, he deserved whatever he would steal. Hunter comes up one night, with a few other people, to visit me, and I’m not there, I’m out driving a cab. And I don’t get any sense of what happened until the next day.

He’s in there sitting with his friends and waiting for me, and drinking beer. And at one point, he gets up and takes his belt off. It’s a hot summer night and all the windows are open all over the block, including mine. And Hunter starts whipping the wall, and he’d whip and then scream, “AAIIIIIGH!!!” Whip, “AIIIIIGH!!! Whip, “AAAAAHH!!!” It was loud. Everybody on the block could hear this. And every now and then he’d stop and he’d go, “Do it again, do it again!” Whip, “AAAAAHH!!!” “You can’t do that, you son of a bitch!!”

Of course, to the neighbors, it’s an outrage, a fucking outrage. Somebody calls the police, and two beefy cops come bounding up five flights of stairs—they probably had apoplexy by the time they got to my apartment—and pound on the door.

The cops come in and bark, “What the hell is going on?” They check everybody for marks, but nobody has any marks on them—they’re sitting quietly drinking beer at the kitchen table. So there was nothing to be done about it, no law being broken, nothing violated. They just split.

I came home that night at about three o’clock in the morning. And I don’t know what’s happened. There’s a note, “We waited for you but you weren’t home” from Hunter.

The next day, as I’m coming up the stairs with a bag of groceries, I meet this Chinese guy from just below me. We’d always gotten along fairly well—“good morning,” “good evening,” smiles, pleasantries. I think I borrowed some salt from him once. But he’s coming down as I’m going up, and as I approach him, he flattens against the wall, shoots me this horrible look, and starts mumbling in Chinese. And I’m wondering, “What the fuck is wrong with him?” I climb up another flight of stairs and finally get to my floor, and there’s a little girl who lives down the other end of the hallway playing in the stairwell. Her mother is working in the kitchen, and their apartment door opens, the mother sees me—and runs out, grabs the little girl, runs back in the apartment, and slams the door. Then she peeks out through the door to see if I’m still there. I’m thinking, “What’s wrong with these people?” Then I hear the story from Hunter about what happened the night before. From then on, I was treated like King Beast.

PAUL SEMONIN

I had a small room over on Charles Street right off West Fourth, which was only a block away from Hunter. We were practically roommates from April of ’59 right on through the summer and into the early fall, until the winter of ’60, when Hunter took off for Puerto Rico. We were getting more and more into the beatnik culture, reading Kerouac and Ginsberg. And of course Norman Mailer’s early stuff was really important. That was teething for us until we were starting to live those kinds of personas in a way. That whole period forms this kind of continuum when you might say there was a kind of brotherhood of dare, a brotherhood of rebellion. Hunter was starting to work on Prince Jellyfish, which is the first novel or manuscript that I remember him actually sitting down to try and write.

As I recall, the essential character, the protagonist, is someone called Welburn Kemp. And those two names were a conjoined name of two different people from Louisville, one of whom had been killed in a car wreck—Welburn Brown—and another one, Penny Kemp, who was severely brain damaged in an auto wreck. They were heroes for young Louisvillians, in a certain way. And they both had tragic ends.

But Hunter hadn’t found a voice. He didn’t like what he was writing, but he never confessed to being inadequate. He just felt limited in a way that he didn’t like.

GENE MCGARR

Hunter’s place on Perry Street was two blocks up from the Riviera Bar and a fairly nice apartment house for Greenwich Village. It was a step above a tenement. But he was in the boiler room in the basement. Just an outrageous cave. I mean, the first time you brought a girl down there it was, “Holy shit.” Because you went down the back rickety stairs and into the backyard, and you had to be very careful, particularly at night, to not strangle yourself on the clotheslines, which were all at about throat level if you were tall. You ducked under those and you got to this door and when you opened the door the first thing you’d see were the flames coming out of the boiler—the furnace—because the door was slightly broken and it wouldn’t shut completely. The flames were dancing on the walls all around you, and the first door, right next to the furnace, was Hunter’s apartment.

Hunter painted the entire interior black. Ceiling, walls—everything totally black, just to add to the atmosphere, presumably. The only way you could tell whether it was night or day, when you woke up, was one whole wall was barred windows that opened up on an air shaft, and you had to get on your back and press your head against the bars to look up. And there was a little triangle of the sky that you could see at the top of the air shaft. If it was blue, it was day.

I had been smoking marijuana since I was twelve or so, but marijuana was the first thing that Hunter and I did together. He didn’t do it that much, and we weren’t out looking for it, but if somebody turned up with some marijuana, we’d smoke it. The first time Hunter ever smoked, he got as sick as a dog. Later on, we did a lot of cocaine, a lot of acid. We kind of discovered a lot of it together. Something would come along, and we would try it. I think I was the one to introduce him to mescaline. He tried to get me into Adrenalin—shots of Adrenalin. I don’t know where he got the stuff from. He once stuck a hypodermic full of Adrenalin into his ankle, and by accident he hit an artery and a needlelike thickness of blood just hit the wall of the room. He was a gorilla for a while once it kicked in, but at the same time scared shitless because this stream of blood was an awesome thing to see. He had to go to the hospital because it wouldn’t stop.

One night, hot as shit, July, one hundred degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity, and it’s midnight. We’re with our girlfriends, and we can’t stand Hunter’s apartment anymore so we decide to go down to the Leroy Street pool a few blocks away. We climb over the fence, boosting the girls. And we strip down to our Skivvies and jump into the water and swim around. And, God, it’s cool. But all of a sudden, over the fence come these five guys—local guineas—who decide that this is their turf. They start throwing our clothes in the water, and I start to get out of the water, but my future wife, Eleanor, gets there first and starts yelling like shit about throwing the clothes in the water, and these guys immediately turn to me, get around me, and start pegging me. So I start moving fast and pegging back at them, and then along comes Hunter. He jumps on one of the guy’s backs and beats the shit out of him, and then he grabs another one. Between the two of us, we drive them back over the fence. We gather all our clothes up and figure we’d better get the hell of there, but before we’re finished, over the fence come ten guys right at us. Well, it’s another melee, but now there are too many of them. I’m getting hit, Hunter’s getting hit. But somehow or another, we drive them off.

We finally put our clothes together and turn around to leave, and behind the fence we just came over must be fifty of them. I told my wife, “You and Connie”—I think it was Connie—“you get over the fence, and don’t look back. I don’t think they’re going to bother you. They want us. Run for Seventh Avenue and do whatever you can to find a cop. Run like hell.” So they go over the fence, and then Hunter and I gathered ourselves. Hunter was as brave as a lion. He waded right in. There was no fucking around. They started wailing and we started wailing. They started hitting me with bottles, and in the meantime, I can’t see what’s going on with Hunter. Thank God it only lasted about a minute. Somebody had called the cops, and the cops were right there. If the fight had lasted two minutes, both Hunter and I would have been dead.

PAUL SEMONIN

I arrived on a motor scooter just afterward. Both Hunter and Gene had a flair for the dramatic, and they could make it into almost an operatic event, but it was nasty—really nasty.

GENE MCGARR

The cops get an ambulance to take us to St. Vincent’s Hospital. There’s so much broken glass on both of us, they have to put us in this big room and hose little pieces of glass off of us. They have to sew up a cut over my eye and a cut above my right elbow. We get dressed and, as instructed, we go down to the precinct station house. They ask us what are we were doing at the pool. And I say, “Oh, shit—it was a hot night. We climbed over the fence to go swimming.” They say, “Look, if you press charges against them”—and they’ve rounded up about ten of the guys by now, and they’re in the station house—“they’re going to press charges against you, and then we’re going to have to keep you all in jail.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. Just give us a head start, and we’ll leave.” And sure enough, they did.

Hunter was a wreck the next day. Fortunately, he had this lovely girl to take care of him. But he started carrying a knife after that, a big bowie knife or something like that. I suggested brass knuckles, but he liked the idea of showing a big blade.

PAUL SEMONIN

Hunter talked about it being a bunch of vandals or delinquents who had stolen clothes from them or something, but I’m sure there was a provocation as well from Hunter and McGarr’s side. They were always bristling and ready for fisticuffs if the chance arose, but this time it was a gang, and they were outnumbered.

GENE MCGARR

And of course there was the night of the cement in the Riviera. That was the day before he packed up and moved to Middletown, New York. He’d gotten some job as the sports editor of the Middletown Record. Eleanor and I went down to see Hunter, and he had a girlfriend with him in his apartment. He was excited. It was the last night in the dungeon, and he decided to celebrate by jumping up and grabbing a sack of flour and doing a dance all around his black-painted apartment until it looked like fallen snow everywhere. Then we walk out the door. He says, “Come on, I’ve got to go get stamps.” And where he buys stamps is down at the Riviera. So we step out onto the catwalk into the furnace room. And there’s this bag of cement, torn at the top, just sitting there outside his door, which really just looks like a bigger bag of flour. It was as though God wanted him to dance some more. Hunter grabs it, throws it onto his shoulder, and heads down the street to the bar. I say, “Hunter, what do you plan on doing with that cement?” He just says, “Stamps. I’ve got to have stamps.”

We get to the Riviera, and I say, “Hunter, you going to go into that place with that bag of cement?” Again: “I’ve got to have stamps.” I turn to my future wife and I give her my watch and my rings.

We open the door at the small end of the Riviera and march in. It’s a Saturday night, so it’s crowded. And as we walk through to the bar—silence. The whole goddamn place is quiet. Hunter gets to the middle of the bar, 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.

There are three bartenders on duty. There’s a kind of middle-aged guy in the center, and the other two appear to be twenty-five-year-old middleweights, one at either end. The guy in the center looks at Hunter in silence and finally says, “You can’t do this.” Hunter says, “I want some stamps. What do you mean?” And the guy just says, “You can’t do this.” He’s like a zombie, staring at the bag. Hunter says, “Come on, now.” I see one of the middleweights coming around one end of the bar and the other middleweight climbing over the other end. I say, “Hunter, they’re coming for us. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He grabs the bag, it tilts backward, and some guy yells, “My suit! My fucking suit, you son of a bitch!” Then some lady screams, and a general melee begins. Everybody heads for the door, only the door is at the narrow end of the bar, and it’s like a mob trying to get out of a fire. Hunter and I get swept along with them, and the bag keeps getting jostled more and more until finally it rips in half. And now everything’s white. You can’t see anything anymore. The stomping feet are sending the cement up into the air, the bag is in shreds, and we’re lost in the fog. Everybody is still pushing for the door. It’s a mob.

Outside, Hunter’s girlfriend and my future wife are standing in the doorway of the haberdashery across the street. They can’t see anything, and then all of a sudden—they later said it was like something coming out of a cannon—this incredible explosion of white powder comes bursting through the door, with arms and legs sticking out of it. Everybody empties out onto the sidewalk, and the stuff begins to settle on the two fucking middleweights. One of them chooses off Hunter. The other chooses off me. And the other people want to get in there and hit us, but one enormous guy takes control and decides to become the referee. And he insists on a fair fight.

About three punches are landed, and then we hear sirens in the distance. We run like hell up Tenth Street and down toward Hudson, and then sneak back over to Christopher to peer around the corner by the Riviera to see what’s going on. The cops are there. People are brushing themselves off, and everybody’s yelling and screaming. We all head to a bar about a block or two away, Hunter brushing himself off.

Later that night, we were sitting in a place called the Kettle of Fish, and this black guy came over and said, “I saw you! I saw you! That was the greatest thing I ever seen in my life!” Hunter had been wearing a trench coat that night, and this guy hands Hunter one of the shoulder epaulets that had gotten ripped off in the melee. The guy had saved it for him.

Hunter and I had to stay out of the Riviera for quite a while.

BOB BONE had just come back from Europe and resumed his job in Middletown, New York, at the Daily Record in the summer of 1958.

Hunter showed up at the paper soon after I returned. They hired him as a general assignment reporter. I think he may have covered some sports (because he was always interested in sports), but that wasn’t his job there. I’m not sure how he happened to leave Time. I had the feeling that he quit in a huff or they fired him, but everything was always an emergency of some sort with Hunter.

Hunter and I began running around with the same girls. He had this place over in Cuddebackville where he tried to do some serious writing, and for a long time, a lot of us used to hang out at a house in Otisville, which is also in Orange County. There was an older couple there who liked to have young people around, and we’d go out there and drink Ballantine Ale until we all fell asleep.

GENE MCGARR

The only major industry in Middletown was the state mental institution. It’s an interesting place. On Saturday night, when you party with these psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers, you begin to wonder how crazy the inmates might be, because these people were bananas.

BOB BONE

He was fired after just a few months for kicking in a candy machine. He was always skating on thin ice there anyway because he was too much of a character for the likes of the bosses. He didn’t like to wear shoes in the newsroom, for one thing. The city council came through one day, and the publisher was rather upset because there was a reporter running around barefoot.

But the candy machine incident was the last straw. Hunter couldn’t get anything out of the machine, so he just beat it—“savagely,” to use his word—until it dislodged his candy bar. The interesting thing about it was that Hunter only took what he had paid for, but the whole rest of the newspaper room, including all the guys in the back shop, were eating free candy bars from the broken machine when the wrong person walked in. Hunter was deemed responsible, and that was the end of the candy man.

GENE MCGARR

My wife Eleanor’s roommate at Goucher College in Maryland was named Sandy Conklin, and Sandy came down and hung out with us and met a guy who was a bond trader and hung out with him for a bit.

SANDY THOMPSON

I was going out with a guy who was a little older than me and who was in a stock brokerage firm in New York City. One night, Eleanor and I and Gene were at this bar called Christopher’s in Greenwich Village, and I was with this guy who actually knew Hunter somehow. Hunter walked in, and I didn’t really take much notice. Then Eleanor and I went back to college, and maybe a week later Eleanor said, “Oh, Sandy, I got this letter from Hunter. Do you remember Hunter? The big, tall, lanky guy?” I said, “Sort of.” “Well, he has a cabin in upstate New York, and he said, ‘When you and Gene come up to visit me, you need to bring whiskey, you need to bring blankets, and how about that girl—Sandy, I think her name was?’”

I graduated from college and got an apartment by myself on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, and one Sunday I went to Washington Square Park, and there was some kind of a classical concert. And I was lying out there on the lawn, and there was this nice-looking young man lying on the lawn as well, and we started talking. I felt a little attraction for him and he felt a little attraction for me, and so we started seeing each other. That was Paul Semonin.

PAUL SEMONIN

Sandy and I went out in the summer of ’59 for a little while. I took her out a couple of times, but once she connected with Hunter, that was it. It was never like someone stealing my girlfriend or anything.

SANDY THOMPSON

Paul and I were dating over that summer, and I remember times in August of ’59 when it would be the three of us—Hunter, Paul, and myself. Sometimes we’d go for long walks along the East River. And now when I saw Hunter, I thought, “Oh my, you know, this is really something.” There were two times when I was really, really taken in.

We were at Paul’s apartment, a tiny place in the Village. It was very, very hot, and there was no air-conditioning. The windows were open, and he had a standing fan. Paul was on the windowsill, and I had made dinner for them. Hunter just lay down on the floor, lifted his shirt off of his back, and he gave me this talcum powder and said, “Oh Sandy, you know it’s so hot. Do you think you could rub my back with this talcum powder?” So there I am, massaging this man’s back and shoulders, and Paul is looking at us.

Another afternoon we all went into the Village apartment of some friend from Louisville. It was Paul and myself, and Eleanor and McGarr. I remember lying on this sort of couch-bed and Paul was next to me, and everything’s fine, we’re all talking. And Hunter walks in down the stairs—this tall, lanky guy with Bermuda shorts and a big manuscript underneath his arm, which was Prince Jellyfish. And the only way to say it is that I was just gone. Absolutely gone.

The summer went on, and in September I started working for United Airlines. Paul and I stopped seeing each other. Paul was wonderful, but it just wasn’t working for both of us. Then on Christmas Eve I was outside getting coffee, and when I came back there was a message from Hunter Thompson. He was at Viking Books, and would I call him back? I kind of seized up and got really, really excited, really tense, and I called. Hunter said, “Oh, hi, well—yeah, ummm, I don’t really know why I called. Well, I guess—ummm, would you like to have a drink somewhere tonight?”

I was supposed to go out to my father’s house on Long Island that night to celebrate Christmas Eve and decorate the tree. It was my father’s new house, his new bride, my brother was coming home from college—everyone was going to be there. I called Daddy and I said, “I can’t quite make it at the time we talked about, but I’ll get there.” I walked over to the bar. No Hunter. Time passed. Still no Hunter. The bartender got a phone call from Hunter, and—this is a first and a last—Hunter actually called and said, “I’m going to be late. Buy her a drink, okay, and I’ll be there.” Maybe an hour later he walked in and immediately there was that chemistry, that seduction. We both sat there and talked, and about every hour I would go to the pay phone and call out to Long Island and tell them I was just going to be a little bit later. We were together for maybe three hours. The last train out to Port Washington was something like one o’clock in the morning. We were totally sensually connected, just wild chemistry. Hunter asked me whether I would come up to his cabin, and I told him I couldn’t, which was a good idea, actually. And so I left and caught the last train out.

This was probably the highest I had ever been in my life. I was just so charged with this magic, this charisma—all these feelings. I was on top of the world. The next morning, I remember telling my father, “I’ve met a wonderful, wonderful man.”

At the bar, Hunter had asked me if I’d like to go out when he was back in town the next week, and when I got back to the city, I actually called people I had been dating and made a date for every single night that week. I was certain that Hunter wasn’t going to call, and I just didn’t want to be sitting and waiting for the telephone to ring.

On Tuesday or Wednesday the phone rang—of course, at three o’clock in the morning. I really should have known right then. “Hi. Well, I’ll be in town later today. How about we get together tonight?” I called whoever I had to call, and I didn’t say that my grandmother was ill, and I didn’t say that I was ill. I said, “I have just met the most extraordinary man, and I’m really sorry, but I can’t go out with you tonight.” Hunter came over. I had a friend from college visiting me, and then she left, and Hunter and I spent the next seven days in my little railroad apartment. I had a tiny, tiny bedroom—just big enough for a single bed and a chest of drawers. The bathtub was in the kitchen. It was a sweet little place, and it was fifty-nine dollars a month. I think we actually went out once or twice to get more to drink. I had a little food in the refrigerator. But it was more about making love, talking, talking, drinking Christian Brothers brandy—really awful stuff, but when you’re that young, you can drink anything.

After our seven days, Hunter went down to Puerto Rico.

BOB BONE

After my work in Middletown, I got this job in Puerto Rico, and then Hunter followed me and we began having some adventures down there too. The Record had sent me to Puerto Rico on assignment earlier for a story on migrant workers because we used to have a lot of them in Orange County. While I was down there, I met this fellow who had just started the San Juan Star, Puerto Rico’s first English-language daily paper, and he hired me. That’s where Bill Kennedy also worked.

WILLIAM KENNEDY was the managing editor of the San Juan Star in 1959.

In 1956, I heard about a new newspaper starting up in Puerto Rico and I applied for the job and got it. I was sick of Albany’s journalism and politics and social life, a dreary dead end. I heard good things about Puerto Rico, and it was an expatriate life—Hemingway and Fitzgerald go to Paris, go to Spain, go someplace. Puerto Rico was as far away as I could get at the time. I figured I’d rise in the world and become some kind of foreign correspondent. But the paper, a broadsheet called the Puerto Rico World Journal, lasted only nine months.

I met Dana in December and married her in January, the week after the paper folded. We went to Miami and I got a job at the Herald. But we loved San Juan and I quit journalism for the first time and went back to live there and write a novel. I became the Time-Life stringer and freelanced for magazines to stay alive while I wrote the novel. In 1959 the World Journal’s editor started the San Juan Star and hired me as managing editor. I put the novel aside and took the job. Before publication we advertised for a sports editor, and Hunter answered the ad.

Hunter was twenty-two. He said he was twenty-four in his letter. In his application to be sports editor he said that the job interested him because it was in Puerto Rico, outside of the “great Rotarian democracy.” Our publisher was a Rotarian, so that was the first misstep. He said he had kicked in the candy machine at the Middletown Record because it ate his nickel, and had gotten fired for it. He wrote, “I have given up on American journalism. The decline of the American press has long been obvious, and my time is too valuable to waste in an effort to supply the ‘man in the street’ with his daily quota of clichés. . . . There is another concept of journalism. . . . It’s engraved on a bronze plaque on the southeast corner of the Times Tower in New York City.” Then he added that he had to get back to his novel, which was with the Viking Press in New York.”

In my introduction to Hunter’s first volume of letters, I wrote about this time:

As managing editor of the fledgling Star, I wrote him explaining that our editor was a member of Rotary, that we had a staff of offbeat reporters (and editors) who, like him, were writing fiction, and suggested he return to his novel, or perhaps start another, building his plot around the bronze plaque on the Times Tower. “You should always write about something you know intimately,” I wrote, and added that if we ever got a candy machine and needed someone to kick it in, we’d be in touch.

He received my letter at his home in Louisville in the same mail that brought Viking’s rejection of his novel, and he sat down and wrote me: “Your letter was cute, my friend, and your interpretation of my letter was beautifully typical of the cretin-intellect responsible for the dry-rot of the american press. But don’t think that lack of an invitation from you will keep me from getting down that way, and when I do remind me to first kick your teeth in and then jam a bronze plaque far into your small intestine.”

I wrote back, saying that since he was the bushy-tailed expert on journalism’s dry rot, we would pay him space rates to summarize its failings in three double-spaced pages that we would run in our first edition, along with our exchange of correspondence. I said I didn’t know another publication that would give him the time of day, and signed it “Intestinally yours.”

There was a fellow named Bob Bone who had worked with Hunter in Middletown, and we hired him as a reporter-photographer for the Star. Hunter had corresponded with him and then applied for a job at a new bowling magazine in San Juan and got it. Hunter showed up in the Star’s city room one day—presumably to kick in my teeth, but he proved to be very friendly. We went back to my house for dinner, and that was the beginning of our friendship.

Hunter stayed on in San Juan for a couple of months, but the owner of the bowling magazine proved to be insolvent, and Hunter never got paid for the stuff that he wrote, or paid very little. So he was just floating free. If I could have hired him at that point I would have, but there was never an opening.

I remember talking about an essay by James Baldwin about the writer’s quest for wisdom. Baldwin viewed the generation of American literary giants—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Faulkner—as looking at the world as “a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost.” Baldwin thought this was a simplistic vision, that the world was a much deadlier place now. This was 1962. The key phrase for Hunter was Baldwin’s view that “innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward the greater innocence called wisdom.” Baldwin was certain that “the curtain has come down forever on Gatsby’s career: there will be no more Gatsbys.” Hunter didn’t buy this. He thought of himself as Gatsby, and he reveled in that kind of fate—that green light always receding, boats against the current, borne back into the past, and so on. This was a romantic notion that prevailed in him until he died. It first surfaced in our conversation and letters as a result of that Baldwin essay.

Salinger was one of his heroes at that time. He identified with Holden Caulfield, the rebel in the society, and he was talking about confrontation all the time. I think that the rebelliousness in Holden—swinging a chain mace at society verbally—was something Hunter was very good at very early on. But we’d talk about everybody. I remember he liked Styron a lot—Lie Down in Darkness. He didn’t like Bellow very much. He tried Augie March and said it didn’t get to him. He liked Algren, and so did I. The Man with the Golden Arm was one of my major books when I was a kid writer. We both liked Baldwin’s essays, and I remember telling him to read Ellison.

He was reading voluminously—Ulysses, James Agee’s A Death in the Family, The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy, Dylan Thomas, Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, Dos Passos’s U.S.A., The Plague by Camus, Don Quixote, Proust, Huck Finn, D. H. Lawrence, The Sound and the Fury, The Decameron, The Inferno. It was the Western canon. He didn’t think there were any serious women writers. He didn’t know much about Flannery O’Connor, or if he did he didn’t value it. He did like Isak Dinesen’s Gothic Tales.

We often looked back on those days and those all-night conversations. Finally the sun would come up and we’d have some breakfast and call it a night. I remember how freewheeling it was. Also, we were drinking a lot of rum, one of the great liberating forces. “Drink is oil for unauthorized movement” is a line that came out of those conversations somewhere.

SANDY THOMPSON

I went down to Puerto Rico in March and spent a week with Hunter in Vieques, and again, it was total romance. Both of us were really smitten. I think Hunter really loved the fact that I had a college degree and that I had majored in international relations and then economics, and that I had traveled, and that I was a free spirit. And I had a great body. I really did. And Hunter—he was just gorgeous.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

Sandy was a beautiful girl, really gorgeous. They seemed to have a good relationship. We’d hang out and drink beer on the beach, or have dinner and the talk would be political or literary or about what was in the newspapers. I remember Hunter told her to bring money because he wasn’t solvent. “If you’re going to hang out,” he said, “you’ve got to be able to support yourself.”

SANDY THOMPSON

After a week with Hunter, I went back to New York. We decided that I would come back down in June, so I saved money and then went back. Hunter had this little concrete cabin right on the ocean about sixteen miles outside of San Juan. It was all jungle, and it was just the two of us at first. We had a single bed, with a net over it because they had mimis there, which are teeny, teeny mosquitoes that come out about four in the afternoon and cover everything. There were screens everywhere. This is where Hunter began The Rum Diary.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

He thought of The Rum Diary as The Sun Also Rises in Puerto Rico.

BOB BONE

After they lived in the cinder-block house, Hunter and Sandy lived for quite a while out at a place that had what he called a “voodoo center,” a place called Loiza Aldea. You could only get there by a ferryboat across the river. It was all very spooky.

SANDY THOMPSON

Paul Semonin came down toward the end of our time there. McGarr was the wild guy, but Paul was a wild thinker, very creative, very soulful. He was an artist—he wrote, he painted. He and Hunter would talk late into the night about all kinds of things.

PAUL SEMONIN

I followed Hunter down to Puerto Rico. We ended up living there for about nine months, and Hunter wrote a little piece about me for the Louisville Courier-Journal. The headline was something like “Louisvillian in Voodoo Country.” We were living out in a little place outside San Juan, which was a black community. It was pretty primitive—there were goats wandering around—and we had a little beachfront house there. But the myth surrounding it was that this was some sort of voodoo village.

Hunter did some interviews with me, but then when he showed me the draft of the article, every single quote from me was totally fabricated. I said, “Hunter, that’s not what I said.” But he sent it off and it was published. “Voodoo Country” is something that will grab the eye of any reader and pull him into the story, and Hunter was a master at that. That’s what purpose his exaggerations and his buffoonery served—fantastic, eye-grabbing stuff for the reader.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

He had no income, he was drinking rainwater and getting eaten by sand fleas and he lived in a concrete, corrugated-tin-roofed blockhouse on the beach. After a while he upgraded to a better block-house.

SANDY THOMPSON

I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to be doing, except taking care of Hunter. I hadn’t really thought much about a career. I had wanted to do something in international relations, maybe work at the UN. I also thought about being a photographer—I thought that would go well with Hunter’s writing—but my father wouldn’t put me through photography school after he put me through college. So I sunbathed a lot. I swam. I washed clothes. I fed him. I gave him feedback on The Rum Diary. I took care of him and made love.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

Hunter stayed in San Juan for a couple of months and then he got in a fight and was arrested. He wrote about this in The Rum Diary. Hunter and some friends walked out on a bar bill in this beachfront place near Vacia Talega, where he lived. I never knew what exactly happened, but some sort of fight erupted and the owner called the cops and Hunter and others went to jail. Somehow I helped him get out—I must have found someone who helped him post bail, but I’m very hazy on this. I told him he was nuts to get himself into that kind of a pickle, and then all of a sudden he was gone.

Hunter had written about tourism for a government PR agency and had gotten to know someone with a sailboat. I think they signed on as crew and went as far as Bermuda, where they were dropped off. I don’t know the circumstances, but it was a dead end and the wrong place to be stranded and broke.

SANDY THOMPSON

The three of us left Puerto Rico for St. Thomas and then crewed on a boat to get to Bermuda. The whole crew, I think, was eight guys. The captain was a slightly older Australian guy, and something like the chairman of IBM’s son was on the boat. We had these huge five-gallon containers of rum, and we drank a lot. Hunter would bark orders to me, and I was so used to it at that point—Sandy get me this, Sandy do this, Sandy do that—that I had no perspective. It was normal. I was young, and I was being told to do this or asked to do this, but by this extraordinary human being. I remember the IBM guy asking me, “What are you doing with this man?” I said, “Well, can’t you see how extraordinary—” And he said, “Extraordinary? He’s not being good to you.” And I said, “Oh, that’s just how it is.”

We arrived in Bermuda in a storm, and we didn’t go through customs. We didn’t know anything about immigration and customs or anything, and we had no money.

GENE MCGARR

Hunter just wanted to get out of the United States. My wife and I were living in Spain in a little town outside of Málaga at the time, and what we were doing intrigued him. We wrote a lot of letters back and forth, and my letters were jolly as far as living in Europe was concerned. Our money went outrageously far.

SANDY THOMPSON

My mother, who was a travel agent in Florida, had a friend in Bermuda who owned a motel, so we ended up there. He was this Dutch guy, a raging alcoholic, and he let Hunter and me sleep in a . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. It wasn’t a regular room. Kind of, sort of a room. And it had a kind of, sort of a bed in it. Paul slept in the park, and then he would go to the yacht club and get showered and dressed because Paul could pull that off.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

I got cards from Hunter and also Paul, who said that Bermuda was one of the ten bottom places of the Earth.

GENE MCGARR

They seemed to think that since Bermuda is out in the Atlantic Ocean, from there they could catch a trap steamer or something and just hop over to Europe. Well, there’s no traffic between Bermuda and Europe. There’s traffic between Bermuda and New York, which is where they had started. But they didn’t want to go back there.

SANDY THOMPSON

Hunter wrote an article for the Bermuda Gazette, and it was published with a picture of the three of us. Then we got a call from Immigration saying, “Wait a minute—who are you?” I was in the process of getting a job at a bookstore, and it was just about to happen, but you couldn’t get a job until you had gotten your papers in.

We went to the consul, all three of us. Hunter did his absolute best. He had this story: “We were on this boat, and we’re artists, and we’re this, and we’re that, and we’re planning to work, and then we’re leaving for Málaga . . .” And at the end of the story, the consul said, “Right. So what you can do is call your parents and have them send you a ticket.”

We got hold of friends and got tickets back to New York. Hunter and I went up to see the editor of the Middletown Record and her husband, who lived in the Catskills.

The four of us were downstairs in the living room, and later in the evening the husband and I ended up in the kitchen getting drinks. The conversation was all about Hunter and how madly in love with him I was, and when we came back out Hunter and the woman were gone. I went upstairs to our room, and Hunter was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. The room was dark. As soon as I walked into the room and knelt down on the mattress, Hunter lashed out at me—literally. It was something that would happen a handful of times later throughout our relationship, and there was a great deal of emotional abuse as well, but this was the first time it was physical.

It was about me being alone in the kitchen with her husband. What had I been doing in the kitchen with her husband? That should have been a wake-up call for me, but the only wake-up part of it was “Be careful. Be careful. Don’t make this man angry. Because maybe he’ll leave you—and you don’t want him to leave you, because this is exciting.” We were newly in love, newly whatever—seduced by one another—and all I wanted to do was just make it right. And somehow I did.

It never, ever occurred to me to get my coat, slam the door, and walk out in the middle of the night. It never, ever crossed my mind.

GENE MCGARR

Hunter wrote me this really awful letter from Bermuda about how he and Sandy were stealing cabbages out of gardens and living in a cave. They had no money at all. Hunter was always very, very good at getting what he needed from people—all his life—but when he pled for any help that he could possibly get from me, I took him at his word that he needed help.

I sent him what was half our passage money home (and this was four months before we were going to leave), and I told him, very explicitly, in the letter, that I had to have this money back by this date at the very latest because this is our passage money. We’ve got tickets; we have arrangements on a Yugoslavian freighter out of Tangiers for New York City. Something like a week before the deadline, I still hadn’t heard from him, so I wrote him a letter, saying, “Where the hell is the money?” The day after I send that letter off from Málaga, I get a letter from him saying he’s off for San Francisco, and since I’m flush he’s going to delay a little bit as far as the money he owes me. So I write a letter back to him saying, “You stupid son of a fucking bitch. You promised.” Now he knows fucking well I’m depending on that money. For several days I was going nuts. Then I get a telegram from Sandy saying, basically, “He’s gone.”

Sandy had to go to my mother to get the money for my wife and I to get home.

JOHN CLANCY

I moved to San Francisco in ’59, and Hunter came out west shortly after that, and then Sandy joined him a little later. Dennis Murphy had written a book called The Sergeant that was later made into a movie with Rod Steiger. It said on the book jacket that Dennis Murphy lived in Big Sur, and there was a picture of the Big Sur compound where he lived. Hunter and I both liked the book, and Hunter wanted to meet Murphy, which is why he went to Big Sur in the first place: to look him up. The two of them met, and we’d play touch football with Murphy and his Hollywood friends, which was great fun as long as you weren’t running hard toward the western part of the field because you might fall three hundred feet toward the ocean and die.

Hunter ended up living in the servants’ cottage near the Big House, which had originally belonged to Murphy’s grandmother. It was on the edge of a cliff. Dennis Murphy’s brother Mike was one of the two guys who would soon start the Esalen Institute on the property. We would sit for hours in these amazing hot baths, screaming at each other about political issues. We lay around and drank beer. It was paradise, really. I never wanted to leave, but you couldn’t make a living in the place.

One night Hunter and I were driving and a deer came off the side of the hill and crashed into the car, and it had a little baby with it. The deer itself was killed, and we threw it in the back and took it back with us and hung it up and gutted it and chopped it up into meat, but the little baby deer had a broken leg, so we put a splint on it. We got it hobbling around a little bit and drinking milk from a bottle, and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. A couple days later Alan Watts, the great Zen Buddhist guru who was very popular and had a lot of followers at the time, came by and looked at the deer. He said, “Oh, I think I can help the deer. This deer needs some of nature’s herbs.” He started collecting these pieces of plants and cut them up and fed them to the deer while he pronounced these weird mumbo-jumbo phrases and touched the deer. The deer lay down and went to sleep, and Watts said, “The deer’s going to be fine now.” Well, about an hour later the little deer stood up, cried out, went into these quick spasms, and died. Hunter was outraged. “That fucker, that quack, that fraud, that charlatan! I don’t believe in anything that he speaks. He killed a deer. He murdered it, that rotten prick!”

GENE MCGARR

The Murphys made him the caretaker for the place when they weren’t around or old lady Murphy was on her own. How he talked his way into that I don’t know. He was writing and living with Sandy in a nice little house that was very close to these fantastic hot spring baths. Two enormous square cement tubs with little ledges all the way around and the hottest fucking water in the world being fed right into it. Right in front of you was the Pacific Ocean, the rocks down below, sea lions barking—right there. And the sunsets were incredible.

My wife and I spent a few days with them. That first night I got so fucking drunk on red wine. One of the things that I recall, when I fell down into the weeds trying to get back to the house, was hearing my wife, Eleanor, say, “Leave him there. Don’t bother, leave him there.”

The next day, I really lit into Hunter about the money thing and his nonchalant “since you’re flush” comment. Jesus. And he just sat there with his head down while I ranted. He had fucked me, and he knew it. I was confronting him with his basic selfishness, and there was nothing he could say. He never apologized for anything. I’ve never heard Hunter say “I’m sorry”—ever. Hunter was shameless—borrowing money, asking people for help, making these weird deals—and he got away with it.

JOHN CLANCY

When my girlfriend Judith Spector and I got married, we had our reception at the Big House, and Judith had asked Hunter if he would please wear a tie for the occasion. As we drove in from the wedding to the reception, we saw a goat tied to a post out on the lawn. The goat was wearing a tie. Hunter never showed up.

SANDY THOMPSON

I was in heaven in Big Sur. Hunter was working hard. Jo Hudson, who became a friend of ours, was a sculptor who could do anything with carpentry and stone. He knocked out a whole side of our little two-story, one-room place and on the second floor he put in a giant plate-glass window facing the ocean. I found a job as a maid in a motel, and Hunter would write and get fifty dollars for something, or twenty-five dollars, or maybe even a hundred dollars. Our rent was only fifteen dollars a month, and once a week the postman would deliver food with his old station wagon because there were no stores anywhere nearby, and he gave everyone credit. We bought very little, but we’d get a gallon of cheap red wine, and Hunter always wanted these crescent pastry things—bear claws—and milk, eggs, maybe one box of groceries.

Joan Baez lived on the Esalen property too, on the other side of the canyon. She was living with a guy named Michael, and Michael’s sister Jenny was living with Jo Hudson, so Joanie and Jenny and I became friends. Joanie had just cut her first album. She and Hunter had a not very great relationship because Hunter would hunt, and Joanie was against anything like that. They didn’t connect.

I had two abortions when we lived in Big Sur. There was absolutely no way that we were ready, and we didn’t discuss it. I just told him that I was pregnant and that I would take care of it. I knew that if I had a baby, Hunter would leave me. There was no question. We weren’t married. We had no money. He would have had to have left me, for himself. I mean, as a child he was a narcissist, and later he became a very well developed narcissist—a polished narcissist, actually.

I asked an ex-boyfriend for the money for one and my mother for the other one. They were very dramatic, especially the second. Hunter came with me to Tijuana both times, and the second time was all messy and ugly.

We were really poor for a long time. Every once in a while I would ask my mother for a hundred dollars, and she would always send it. Every once in a while she would send a little food. Being poor was actually kind of great, because once there was money, which was a lot of years later, then there was money to go out and drink.

We had to leave Big Sur after a year because Hunter had written an article for a men’s magazine called Rogue about Big Sur and the baths. There was sometimes a gay scene at the baths, and Hunter mentioned this in the article. Well, when someone showed the article to Vinnie Murphy—the matriarch, the grandmother of the whole property—she flipped out. Her husband had this dream of the property becoming this incredible health spa and healing place, and she didn’t know about the gay scene, and she didn’t want anybody else to know about it. She came striding out with her assistant and said very majestically, “You’re out of here!” Our fifteen-dollars-a-month place.

So we wound up back in New York. I got a job at a travel agency, and I would get dressed and put my hair up and put on high heels and go and make money, and when I came back, Hunter was writing. I had a steady income, and Hunter knew he could write; he just didn’t think he could make a living at it yet.

I remember a couple of nights when he didn’t come home until really, really late. That was my first inkling that he was more than a one-woman guy. I was worried and jealous. I’d call apartments at three in the morning to try to find him. Then Hunter left for Aruba. Right before he left, I came across a letter he wrote inviting another woman down there with him.

He was writing for the National Observer and some other papers, and he would send me articles and I would type them up. At first there was no such thing as a copy machine, so I had to type maybe ten copies of each article and send them out to New Orleans, Cleveland, wherever. The articles in those days had to be published some distance apart, like a hundred or two hundred miles apart. Hunter was a stickler for perfect copy: no mistakes, perfect margins. And then he made his way down to Colombia and then Rio.

BOB BONE

Hunter wanted to go to South America. He figured that was where the interesting stuff was. He had begun to make contact with the National Observer, which was becoming interested in South America, and he decided he was going to go down on a smuggler’s boat. He’d heard that in Aruba people smuggled liquor and cigarettes into Nicaragua or somewhere like that, so he took a flight to Aruba and did indeed go on a smuggling boat into South America—to hear him tell it, anyway.

I had taken a job editing this small English magazine in Rio and got to Brazil ahead of Hunter. He was still up in Peru or Bolivia or somewhere, but he knew I was in Rio, and we eventually met up. I was there for slightly under a year in ’62 and ’63.

SANDY THOMPSON

During the time when Hunter was in Rio, I met this guy who was a law student at Harvard—nice-looking guy, wealthy. And he and I went out walking one night in New York, and we crashed a Leonard Bernstein party, which was interesting. I ended up getting to babysit Leonard Bernstein’s children out on Fire Island. But this fellow invited me out to the end of the island on this big motorcycle, a BSA. The next day we went to the beach, and I had a bikini on while I rode on the back. He’d given me his helmet, and he made a sharp turn, flipped the bike, and I landed on my head unconscious. The next thing I know I’m in the hospital for a week—which meant that I couldn’t type any of Hunter’s things. So Bob Bone, who was living with me in New York (not romantically, though I always thought he was a little jealous that I wasn’t involved with him), wrote Hunter a letter saying, basically, “Sandy can’t do this. She can’t write for you because she was in a motorcycle accident and she’s in the hospital right now.”

I got a letter from Hunter when I got back to the city that said, “It’s over. You’re on a motorcycle with some guy. That’s it.”

BOB BONE

Hunter could be absolutely, shockingly jealous. His letter to Sandy was brutal. Sandy was claiming it was all a very innocent thing, but Hunter was really upset about that and extremely intolerant. It shocked me because I had never seen him get that angry before.

SANDY THOMPSON

At the time, I was working in Queens as a receptionist for a company called Nuclear Research Associates. There were these young fellows there who were chemists, and they were making speed on the side. One day one of them came up to me and said, “You don’t look so happy.” I said, “Well, I’m in love with this man and he’s somewhere in South America.” The guy said, “We could make you a little happier.”

They had four different levels of speed. I started out with the lowest amount. It definitely did make me feel better. I felt together, and sort of “up”—and then it got to be more and more, and of course I couldn’t sleep.

When I came back and I read Hunter’s letter, it felt like the end of the world. I don’t remember how much speed I took, but it was a lot, and I took a bunch of writing paper and went to the top of the Empire State Building. Higher than a kite, but with a clear head, I wrote him this long letter about why we needed to be together. And it worked.

Then Hunter sent me a letter. He was writing me constantly—I went to the main post office in Manhattan every day—but this letter said, “I’m in Rio now, and Rio looks like a good place. It looks like finally I should settle here for a little bit, and this is where you should come.” That’s all I needed to hear. I quit my job and got a one-way ticket and wrote Hunter a letter saying I was coming. He sent me a telegram: “Don’t come down yet—but when you do, I want you to bring my .44 Magnum.” Which was in Louisville, Kentucky.

Well, I didn’t want to wait, and I also didn’t want to go to Louisville on the bus and break that gun down and then fly in a week, two weeks. I was ready. So I wrote him and said, “I’m coming,” and I left. I had the speed with me. When I got off the plane, I called Bob Bone. Bob said, “Uh, hi, Sandy . . . well . . . Hunter, um, Hunter was not wanting you to come down right now, you know. He wanted you to wait until . . . he’s not . . . he’s not happy.” Bob told me to get a room at the such-and-such hotel, which was right on the beach, and that maybe, maybe Hunter would come by. I said, “Okay, Bob. Okay.”

BOB BONE

He was very upset when Sandy came down to Brazil when she wasn’t expected to. I supported a lot of people in those days, including Hunter. None of us had much money, and Hunter thought it was quite an imposition for Sandy to suddenly become a responsibility or a liability in Brazil.

SANDY THOMPSON

I get over to the little hotel on the beach, get myself a room, take a little more speed, and I’m waiting and I’m fine. I’m fine because I’m high. There’s a knock on the door, and Hunter comes in, and both of us just dissolve. We went out for dinner, he introduced me to friends. Everything was very, very “up,” and then the next day he said, “I have to leave. You stay here, but I’m going to take an assignment”—I don’t remember what country he went to, I think it was Uruguay—“because I’m so angry with you. At the same time, I’m madly in love with you, but I’m also so angry with you for disobeying me that I have to leave.” And so he did, for about two weeks. And I was just fine. I got a cheaper room in the hotel, down in the basement. I started taking guitar lessons and learning the bossa nova. I worked on my tan. I wandered around the streets. I started learning Portuguese. And then Hunter came back, and he was okay. We moved into an apartment on the seventeenth floor, one block from Copacabana Beach.

BOB BONE

I was driving an old MG convertible with a friend of mine along Copacabana Beach, and I suddenly saw Hunter loping along. We picked him up, so now it was three of us piled in this tiny MG convertible. Hunter was a little bit drunk, but he said, “That’s nothing. The thing that’s drunk is in my pocket.” He had a drunk monkey in his pocket. The way he explained it was that he got off the plane in Rio with the monkey and went to a bar, and somebody said they would buy him a drink as long as they could buy the monkey a drink at the same time. It probably was a bit of an exaggeration, but back in the MG the monkey had thrown up in his pocket for real, and he was kind of smelly.

That monkey eventually committed suicide. We figured it had the DT’s. The maid saw it jump off the tenth-story balcony of the apartment.

Hunter had another animal back in his room. He was staying in some crazy little hotel, and we went back, and there was an animal there called a coatimundi. The Brazilians call them coatis. They’re sort of a cross between a rat and a honey bear. Hunter’s coati had no hair on his tail. Hunter claimed that he’d rescued it in Bolivia, that he’d bought it from some people who were mistreating it. Hunter had named it Ace, and Ace became famous for two reasons: One, he liked to play with soap; and two, he learned to use the toilet.

SANDY THOMPSON

One night just before carnival I was out on the street right in front of the building, and there was a samba group playing. And there was this guy, and he came behind me, and he was beginning to put his arms around my waist or something or other. I loved to dance, and Hunter loved to see me dancing. So I moved. The next thing I know, Hunter’s got this Brazilian by the scruff of his neck, or maybe by his shirt. He’s picked him up. And he says, “Tienes problemas!” Hunter would not let me out on the street after that. He locked me in the apartment for the rest of carnival.

BOB BONE

Another time Hunter and somebody else (I can’t remember who it was) were shooting rats in a dump somewhere in Rio, and somebody called the cops, who came around and pulled them in. Hunter, of course, claimed that it wasn’t them doing the shooting, that it must have been somebody else. As usual, he made friends with the cops, and they were all getting along great. And then at some point, Hunter put his feet up on the cop’s desk, and bullets rolled out of his pocket. They threw him back in jail, but things turned out all right eventually. They called the consulate, and by that time Hunter had a little bit of cachet with the National Observer. It all blew over somehow.

SANDY THOMPSON

I was afraid to ask Hunter about marriage. I was afraid to bring it up, because I was afraid he’d say no, but I remember asking him once there. I don’t remember his response exactly, but it was along the lines of “That’s up to me.”

Hunter decided that it was time to leave Rio and that he was going to continue on in South America and write more articles for the National Observer and that I would go back to the States.

CLIFFORD RIDLEY was Hunter’s editor at the National Observer.

There wasn’t anything in his background that said that he was going to be good—his only credentials that I remember were from the Middletown paper—but we knew that he was good when we got his first piece. We were a national newsweekly, a broadsheet owned by Dow Jones that had just started up. Hunter probably wrote a piece a month when he was in Latin America, and a lot of them ended up running on the front page. We were fairly flexible about length—if something was good and it was long, we had the space—but he probably averaged in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred words, for which we paid him a hundred fifty, or two hundred dollars if it was a helluva job. With rare exceptions, he didn’t mind the editing, though in fairness to him, he was three thousand miles away and wasn’t seeing his stories for six weeks or so after they came out.

We didn’t have a problem with him injecting himself into his stories. We were going in the direction of personal journalism at that point, experimenting with allowing more personality in our pieces. Given today’s journalistic climate, though, we might be a lot more skeptical about some of his details; the rich British man hitting golf balls from his penthouse terrace over the downtown slums of Cali, Colombia, in-between sips of his gin and tonic is a little too perfect. He may have embellished just a tad . . . but there was no arguing over the quality of his writing. He was extraordinary for us, and for journalism at that time.

I found him quite easy to deal with, aside from his letters and cables perpetually bitching about money, and subsequently about being sick. The needing-money part we basically accepted as true. We didn’t pay a lot, and as far as we knew he wasn’t writing for anybody else. The other stuff about his health—well, obviously hyperbole was Hunter’s stock-in-trade, and we understood that. Did we literally believe every account of his health, when he’s saying that he’s so hobbled that he was using a leg of his camera tripod as a cane to help him walk at the rate of a hundred yards an hour? No. I would read excerpts from Hunter’s letters to me to the other editors nearby, and eventually one of us said, “Maybe we oughta run some of this stuff.” So I pulled a piece together out of the best parts.

His ambition, from the moment that he and I started dealing with each other, was to be a novelist. He’d refer to The Rum Diary, which he carried around with him, and his idols were the literary heavyweights. It was clear to me that his aspiration was to one day have his name among them.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

For Hunter it was a career and lifestyle breakthrough. His life was professionally itinerant after he went to South America for the National Observer. He went anyplace and wrote whatever moved him in his own way—up to a point. It was heavily edited, and there were limitations on what he could say. But it established his name, modestly, and he managed to distinguish himself through subject matter and attitude. He had an editor he respected. But after a few years and a couple of rejections he soured on the paper—which was rather straitlaced, with a centrist Republican attitude. He called it a “dead man’s train.” And eventually he moved on.

He was having no success with The Rum Diary, which he thought was his best work up to that point. He was finding success with everything journalistically, but he still wanted to become a novelist.

After I got a couple of rejections of my novel as being too downbeat, I advised him to write an upbeat novel. But he didn’t, and neither did I. We exchanged stories of grief and rejection and he sent word if he got some money. Once he won sixty dollars on a quiz show.

What we didn’t know was how you got published. After Hunter left San Juan, there was a lot of correspondence back and forth about agents and publishing. I got an agent who had an A-list of writers, and I sent Hunter over to him, but he said he didn’t want to represent anything like what Hunter was doing. Hunter eventually found someone to represent Prince Jellyfish and later another agent to represent The Rum Diary before it was finished.

We were very honest about one another’s work. He wrote me after I published The Ink Truck in ’68 and said, “I haven’t read The Ink Truck. Sandy read it, and she didn’t like it through the first half and then the second half she sort of liked it. But if I do read it, I’m not going to admit it.” I presume this was in retaliation for my negative input on The Rum Diary. I was rooting for him to publish, but not that work as it was; and I was hardly alone in this view. The book was full of digressions and wisdom—his essays on the state of the world, the nation, journalism, Puerto Rico.

SANDY THOMPSON

I worked for my mother’s travel agency for a couple of months, and then one weekend I decided to go up to Louisville to see Hunter’s mom. While I was up there, we got a phone call or a letter or a telegram saying that Hunter was on his way home. In fact, I think he was in Florida, and he was going to take the train, or the bus.

I remember Virginia saying to me that whenever she knew that Hunter was coming home to Louisville she was scared. She knew there would be tension.

That same day, some friends of Hunter’s came over. They were being very gracious and asked if I’d like to come out and ride with them. I loved to ride horses, so we went out. I did not realize that this was a polo pony—not only a polo pony, but a green polo pony. I wasn’t on this horse five minutes when he threw me and I landed on my shoulder. I just went back to Virginia’s, and that night I couldn’t sleep, so we went to the ER. It was a dislocated shoulder.

The next day Hunter was home, and there I was in the hospital. I knew that wasn’t going to go over well. The hospital told me that I was free to leave, but I was in this wheelchair with my arm in a sling when Hunter came in. We hadn’t seen each other in months. Hunter said, “Well, that’s the end of that.” And I’m thinking, “The end of what?”

I found out later he had had great plans to come home and sweep me off my feet and get married. We went home to his mother’s—she was at work in the library—and with my arm in a sling we broke her bed making love. She was under the illusion that we were each sleeping in separate rooms, even though we had been living together for three years, and she came back, and she was just wild from this terrible, terrible thing having happened in her home.

The next afternoon I was upstairs, and Hunter and his two brothers, Jim and Davison, were downstairs, and Hunter called up and said, “Sandy, come on down.” I came downstairs, and we got into the car with the two brothers. Hunter and I were in the back, Davison was driving, and I said, “Where are we going?” Hunter said, “Indiana.” I said, “What for?” Hunter replied, “To get married.” That was my proposal. I said, “Oh.”

GERALD TYRRELL

Hunter’s mother persuaded Hunter to get married, so he got married across the river from Louisville in Jeffersonville, Indiana, in a marriage parlor.

SANDY THOMPSON

So we went to this town in Indiana. The first thing we had to do was get our blood test, and then we had to wait overnight for the results. We went to this cabin on a property that was owned by one of Hunter’s wealthy friends, and it was all lovey-dovey, and we were lying—once again—on a mattress on the floor, naked and half-asleep, and all of a sudden there was this banging on the screen door. Hunter got up, pulled on his drawers, and went to the door. It was the owner of the property, the father of his friend, this Scotsman wearing a kilt, and he yelled, “Who is cohabitating in my house? You will get out of here. You will be out of here within an hour, or I am calling the law.” Hunter had already been in jail, and this wouldn’t help. So we got out of there (I don’t remember where we stayed) and made it to the justice of the peace the next day.

I’ve got my arm in a sling and I’m wearing Hunter’s big sweater, and the justice of the peace starts reading this thing—you know, sacred stuff—and he looked over at me and said, “What happened to your arm?” I said, “I fell off a horse.” He said, “You fell off a house?” I said, “No, a horse.” “Oh. Okay, you’re married.” That was May 20, 1963.

GERALD TYRRELL

Jimmy Noonan had an impromptu party afterward, and that’s the only time I met Sandy. Hunter had been down in South America doing some kind of drugs, and he was strung out. He was having trouble talking; his whole manner of speech had changed. He was speaking in this guttural, staccato way, where he’d spit things out quickly and you’d have trouble understanding him. He seemed to be having a hard time finishing sentences.

SANDY THOMPSON

From Indiana, we went down to my mother’s in Florida and spent a little time there. My mother adored Hunter. But my father thought otherwise. Anything he had ever heard about him was terrible.

My father was a serious Republican, and straight—really straight—and my mother was soulful, passionate, and an alcoholic. Virginia told her, when we got married, “I’m worried for Sandy. You know Hunter. He’s a lot to handle. Trust me: He can be really . . .” She probably wouldn’t have said “violent.” She might have. And my mother said, which I’ve never forgotten, “Don’t worry about Sandy. She’ll take care of herself.”

SANDY THOMPSON

My whole life was completely wrapped around Hunter. I would send my father articles, but my father wouldn’t respond. My mother kept in touch with me because she wanted to make sure that I was okay. But when people in my family died, or when there was a wedding in my family, I was not there.

We headed back to New York, and then Hunter and Paul got a job delivering a somebody’s things cross-country.

LOREN JENKINS met Hunter in the fall of 1963 in Aspen.

I’d been in Africa teaching school for the Peace Corps and was about to go up to graduate school. Hunter and I had a mutual friend, a lady from Louisville, Peggy Clifford, who had a bookstore in Aspen. She said, “You two should meet. You have a lot in common.” And Hunter breezed in. He had a job driving someone’s stuff out to California and had a full truckload.

So we met, we talked, had a drink, and then he went west and I went east, and after my first year in graduate school, by process of elimination, I decided that the only hope for me was journalism, and the only person I knew at the time who’d been a journalist was Hunter. So I wrote to him and asked him, basically, “How do you break into this racket?” He wrote me back a very funny letter, a typical Hunter screed about how fucked the profession is, but then he wrote, “There are two things you should know if you’re going to get in to do this. First, all editors suck. Second, if you correct something on a manuscript when you’re typing, don’t use x’s. It doesn’t look neat. Use alternate m’s and n’s—it makes it neater.” These were his two pieces of advice.

SANDY THOMPSON

By the time I flew out to meet Hunter, Paul was living in a cabin in the Aspen mountains, and Hunter and I visited him before renting a small house on the Woody Creek Road. I remember being at Paul’s and pouring them wine. Paul had an outhouse, and I went out to the outhouse and I got sick. And I thought, “What’s this?”

I saw the doctor that week, who confirmed that I was pregnant. I don’t remember Hunter’s reaction exactly, but it definitely wasn’t bad. I was incredibly happy.

Hunter shot elk so I could eat elk liver, which is what I ate the whole time I was pregnant with Juan—after which of course I never wanted to see another piece of elk or venison ever. I had that and salad and powdered milk. Hunter was kind and thoughtful all through the pregnancy, and then we were getting ready to leave for California. We were going to stay in some fantastic cabin that Denne Petitclerc, who was a fairly successful screenwriter, had outside of Santa Rosa, outside of Glen Ellen on the top of a mountain. I was eight months pregnant, and in February it was thirty below in Colorado.

It was not exactly Hunter’s idea of the American dream—going across the country in an old Nash Rambler with almost no money and his wife eight months along. But we got there, and Hunter went to meet Denne, and I could see them talking, and Hunter looking really, really agitated, and then Hunter came back to the car and said, “He’s already rented it.”

He said that there was a place on the property, but that it wasn’t a whole lot. It was actually a shack—not a bad shack, you know, but a tin shack with a little kitchen and a big room, and then a little room off that which became Juan’s bedroom. It was great. It had electricity and running water.

At nine months, at about six o’clock in the morning, my water broke. Hunter drove me to Santa Rosa Hospital. Juan was very easy. The doctor said that I could have had this baby in a field. I was just elated, and I was very glad that it was a boy. I thought that Hunter really wanted a boy. That was March 23, 1964.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

Hunter loved Fitzgerald, and he named his son Juan Fitzgerald Thompson after Scott and also after the other Fitz—John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

SANDY THOMPSON

When we brought Juan home, he slept with us. We had a Doberman at the time, Agar, and the dog slept with us too. Agar was the first, but later we had other Dobermans: Darwin, who was the all-star, and Benjie, who had two litters of puppies. We kept one of them and called him Weird. His actual name was Speed Wizard, and he was very weird.

The mattress was on a box spring, not on the floor, so we were getting up in the world, you know? I nursed Juan, and I was in absolute heaven. Here’s Hunter and here’s my son. It was an extraordinary feeling of power, of love, of everything good.

I got pregnant again a year or two later. Hunter didn’t want another child, but I definitely did. I wanted another Hunter, of all things. But I’m Rh-negative and Hunter is Rh-positive, and in those days, if that was the case, only your first child lived.

None of my other children lived after Juan. There were five. The first one was probably at two or four months, and it was a true miscarriage. And then I had a full-term baby. Well, she was born with the cord tied around her neck, and she was blue. She was Rh-positive, and Aspen Valley Hospital didn’t have blood. When the baby was born I didn’t look at her because I sensed that something was wrong.

I dealt with it initially by just going crazy, by going out into the field, in my head, next to the hospital bed, and nothing was real. There were all these flowers out there. And in my mind, I thought, “You know, if nothing is real, the baby’s not dead.” I went into this place, and Hunter looked at me, and he said, “Sandy, if you want to leave, if you need to leave and go out there for a while, then you do that. But you have to know that Juan and I need you.” It was one of the most beautiful things he ever did, and of course I came back.

Hunter and a friend buried the baby—Hunter had named her Sara—by the Roaring Fork River.

MICHAEL SOLHEIM was a bartender in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1963.

Hunter came up to Sun Valley to talk to some people who knew Ernest Hemingway for an article he was doing for the National Observer. He and a local guy walked into the little bar I had, called the Leadville Espresso House, which used to be a church and still had a steeple and a bell. It was a bar disguised as an espresso house. I had had conversations with Hemingway there.

Hunter was asking this guy questions about Hemingway and taking notes, and then he and I talked for a little, and I said to myself, “I’m going to like this guy.” It was that quick. I ended up closing down early, and we went back to my cabin and talked more, and at some point late in the night, Hunter wanted to know if we could go up to Hemingway’s house in Ketchum, so up we went. The door was open, and we could hear the caretaker snoring in the background. For Hunter it was all about going into the vestibule, the enclosed space where Hemingway had shot himself. I hit the light switch and the sconces came on and we stood there.

Hunter would come back to Sun Valley or Ketchum now and again and see my wife and me. He’d write us a lot and he’d let us know when he’d be coming through. Our time together was as simple as listening to comedy LPs and smoking weed. I’d put on these albums from Beyond the Fringe and Peter Sellers; at one point I put on General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech, his address to the joint House session. “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

Another time he was writing an article for Pageant about Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, and I had some stuff I’d got in the mail from some kind of a sex club lying around my place, and with it came this postcard. You could write on the back of it and check off boxes to express your interest in some of the damndest things you ever heard of in your life, and this club would promise to put you in touch with somebody in your neighborhood with similar views. It was called Club Wow. So Hunter, in his article, accused McNamara of wearing a Club Wow button on his lapel.

DR. BOB GEIGER met Hunter in Sonoma, California, in 1964.

I had just started my practice in orthopedic surgery and my then wife and my daughter, who’s Juan’s age, maybe a year old at that time, were out in the town square. My wife came home and said, “I met this gal, and she had a baby, and we started talking.” Turns out her husband’s a freelance writer, and my wife said, “I told her that, ‘Gee, my husband’s a doctor, but he writes.’ So I invited them over for dinner.”

Hunter and I hit it off, and from then on they were both around. He was about twenty-seven, and I was thirty-three. There was a series of misadventures that ended up getting Hunter and Sandy and Juan thrown out of the little house they were living in just above Sonoma. Hunter and I were doing a little target practice at four in the morning, and the landlady—it was this little cottage on some property out in the country—lived next door. There were some gophers in the lawn out in front of this place, and the obvious way to kill gophers is to shoot them. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It made sense to us. But it didn’t make sense to the landlady. So the next day, Hunter and Sandy moved in with us in Sonoma. We were house-sitting at a condo complex with a pool, and there was no one else in this complex. We had a three-bedroom place, so there was room for Hunter and Sandy. Sandy could hang around the pool with Juan, and so it worked out real well.

I had published a novel, and Hunter had this horse’s-ass idea that it was supposed to be important to be a fiction writer. I would try to point out to him, “Hunter, you are writing fiction. All writing is fiction. Experiences you experience, and words are words, so everything is fiction. This is just its own kind of fiction.” We’d argue about that.

PAUL SEMONIN

A couple of years after we were in Puerto Rico together, when Hunter was down in Latin America and South America writing stuff for the National Observer, I was becoming much more politicized. I went to Africa and ended up at the University of Ghana getting a master’s degree in African studies. There was a colony of African American exiles in Ghana, including people like Maya Angelou and Julian Mayfield; Malcolm X came to visit, and I met him and became very interested in the political direction he was taking just before he was assassinated, and of course I was writing to Hunter about some of this stuff. But as I was writing and identifying in some ways with the black struggle, the civil rights struggle—but even more with black radicals—Hunter addressed one of his letters to me as “Niggerboy.”

I mean, that’s it in a nutshell. He pulled a deep race card out of his pack and used it as an insult. Although if you look at many of the letters he wrote, he would often use these ridiculous “Dear so and so” addresses. Part of it was insulting and part of it was humor and part of it was just provoking you. But there was always this race element buried in his character which popped out every now and then, and it was nasty.

Hunter was always pushing you, always testing you, seeing how far you’ll go before your loyalty breaks, or before you’ve had enough. And it created a kind of inner circle of people who stood the test. It’s like hazing, but there could be that feeling, if you’re on the other end of it, that he was mocking you in some way. It was a part of his character from a very early stage. And it was partly what later led to us parting ways. It grew kind of tiresome and unproductive.

DR. BOB GEIGER

I know that different people have accused Hunter over the years of having kind of a Neanderthal attitude towards blacks or minorities. Sometimes he would use the word “nigger” when he was writing, and he was very quick with racial jokes and things like that. But in terms of where his real sentiment was, it was the opposite. When we were getting together, we would get all fired up about this shit. At one time, Hunter and I were planning to—thank God we didn’t do it—we were going to get a truck and run guns down to Mississippi to help out with all this crap that was going on in Mississippi in ’64 and ’65. We figured that maybe we ought to level the playing field, and a truckload of guns would do that.

Hunter and I each tended to have our own ideas. Hunter was a great guy to argue with because he would listen to what you said. Very few people do that. He would change his mind on the basis of what you said. And if someone’s going to actually pay attention to what you’re saying, you argue a little differently than if you’re just saying things to hear yourself say it, though when when you got Hunter and Clancy and McGarr and I together, you couldn’t hear anything.

JERRY HAWKE

Hunter and John Clancy were kind of kindred souls. Clancy had a really wild streak to him, and that appealed to Hunter.

I used to get telephone calls from Clancy and Hunter in the middle of the night. They would generally be drunk. It started when they were together in San Francisco; later, they would put in conference calls. I remember listening to operators come on at two o’clock in the morning: “Will you accept a collect conference call from John Clancy and Hunter Thompson?” “No!” So a few minutes later, they’d ring back with a paid call and Hunter would say something like, “I’ve got a very important question. Do you still feel the same way about The Great Gatsby?”

JACK THIBEAU is a poet and actor who met Hunter in 1964.

Clancy was a vicious attack lawyer. You wound him up and it never stopped. He would come after you with guns, knives. Because he was crazy, and he had no mercy. And he was brilliant; he was at the top of his class at Columbia.

ROGER HAWKE

Clancy was insane.

DR. BOB GEIGER

McGarr was not eminently sane, either. He was a very handsome big guy who would come on to all the chicks. Hunter and I and Clancy would usually just insult them. Even if Hunter tried to not be insulting, he would insult the girls. So you always had this dynamic: If McGarr would come on too strong, Hunter would get upset at that. It didn’t bother me that much. If McGarr was coming on to my wife, I’d just say, “Well, that’s McGarr.” Hunter, though, would get very defensive, and say that McGarr was abusing me. He was very loyal and protective that way, surprisingly.

Hunter went after McGarr with a tire iron one time for coming on to my wife. McGarr and I were out in the front yard boxing at my place in Sonoma. Bare-knuckled boxing, which was a mistake. McGarr was a good boxer, but we weren’t hitting each other hard. We were playing, really, but McGarr had been coming on to my wife, and Hunter walked out and thought we were serious. He went to his car and got this tire iron and started chasing McGarr around, and then suddenly he got in his car and disappeared for two days. He was embarrassed that he overreacted. Sandy was looking frantically for him. I said, “I think he drove off like a dog that’s bit somebody and doesn’t want to get caught.” But you have to realize that this was booze too. This wasn’t high-powered drugs or anything. Maybe there was a little grass around.

Hunter decided he wanted to be closer to the action, so they moved down to a place right across from the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. He and I rented a trailer and I moved them down, which was another adventure because the mattress flew out of the trailer, as it usually does.

It was there where he mostly wrote Hell’s Angels.