Thompson - MESCALITO

Dear Maurice:

Hello. Have a nice day. Yes. Mahalo. Stand back. I have finally returned from the Wilderness, where I was chased & tormented by huge radioactive Bobcats for almost 22 weeks. When I finally escaped they put me in a Decompression Chamber with some people I couldnt recognize, so I went all to pieces & now I cant remember anything or Anybody or even who I was, all that timewhich was exactly since Groundhog Day, when it started.

Anyway, thats why I fell behind in my correspondence for a while. I could not be reached except by the Animals, and they hated me. I never knew Why. There was no explanation for it.

* * *

So what? Who needs reasons for a thing like that? Escape is all that mattersexcept for the horrible scars, but that is a different question. Today we must deal with The Book, which requires my total attention now.

A brainless whore would not say this, Maurice. The Truth is not in them. But I am not a brainless whoreand if I was, I dont remember it. Who cares? Shit happens. On some days I dont miss my memory at all.... Most days, in fact. It is like knowing that you were a Jackbastard in yr. Previous Life, then somebody tells you to be careful not to scream in yr. sleep anymore.You start to feel afraid.... But not me, Maurice.

As for the ORDER, I think Screwjack should be last & Mescalito firstso the dramatic tension (& also the true chronological weirdness) can build like Bolero to a faster & wilder climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, & then drop him off a cliff.... That is the Desired Effect, and if we start with Screwjack it wont happen. The book will peter out.

* * *

Okay. Thats about it, for now. We can wrap this thing up very quickly, I think.... Indeed. And so much for all that. I have to go out in the yard to murder a skunkand if I fail, he will murder me. Some things never change.

In closing, I remainyr. calm & gentle friend,

Hunter

FEBRUARY 16, 1969

Again in L.A., again at the Continental Hotel... full of pills and club sandwiches and Old Crow and now a fifth of Louis Martini Barbera, looking down from the eleventh floor balcony at a police ambulance screaming down toward the Whisky-a-Go-Go on the Strip, where I used to sit in the afternoon with Lionel and talk with off-duty hookers... and while I was standing there, watching four flower children in bell-bottom pants, two couples, hitch-hiking toward Hollywood proper, a mile or so up the road... they noticed me looking down and waved. I waved, and moments later, after pointing me out to each other, they hoisted the V signaland I returned that. And one of them yelled, What are you doing up there? And I said, Im writing about all you freaks down there on the street.We talked back and forth for a while, not communicating much, and I felt like Hubert Humphrey looking down at Grant Park. Maybe if Humphrey had had a balcony in that twenty-fifth-floor Hilton suite he might have behaved differently. Looking out a window is not quite the same. A balcony puts you out in the dark, which is more neutrallike walking out on a diving board. Anyway, I was struck by the distance between me and those street freaks; to them, I was just another fat cat, hanging off a balcony over the strip... and it reminded me of James Farmer on TV today, telling Face the Nation how hed maintained his contacts with the Black Community, talking with fat jowls and a nervous hustler style, blundering along in the wake of George Hermans and Daniel Schorrs condescension... and then McGarr talking later, at the Luau, a Beverly Hills flesh pit, about how he could remember when Farmer was a radical and it scared him to see how far hed drifted from the front lines... it scared him, he said, because he wondered if the same thing could happen to him... which gets back to my scene on the balconyHubert Humphrey looking down at Grant Park on Tuesday night, when he still had options (then, moments later, the four flower children hailed a cabyes, cab, taxiand I walked down to the Kings Cellar liquor store where the clerk looked at my Diners Club card and said, Arent you the guy who did that Hells Angels thing? And I felt redeemed.... Selah).

FEBRUARY 18

L.A. notes, again... one-thirty now and pill-fear grips the brain, staring down at this half-finished article... test pilots, after a week (no, three days) at Edwards AFB in the desert... but trying to mix writing and fucking around with old friends dont work no more, this maddening, time-killing late-work syndrome, never getting down to the real machine action until two or three at night, wont make it... especially half drunk full of pills and grass with deadlines past and people howling in New York... the pressure piles up like a hang-fire lightning ball in the brain. Tired and wiggy from no sleep or at least not enough. Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the endof anything.

And now the fire alarm goes offin the hall... terrible ringing of bells... but the hall is empty. Is the hotel on fire? Nobody answers the phone at the desk; the operator doesnt answer... the bell screams on. You read about hotel fires: 75 KILLED IN HOLOCAUST: LEAPING OFF BALCONIES (I am on the eleventh floor)... but apparently there is no fire. The operator finally answers and says a wire got crossed. But nobody else is in the hall; this happened in Washington too, at the Nixon gig. False alarms and a man screaming down the airshaft, Does anybody want to fuck? The foundations are crumbling.

Yesterday a dope freak tried to steal the Goodyear blimp and take it to Aspen for the Rock and Roll festival... carrying a guitar and a toothbrush and a transistor radio he said was a bomb.... Kept authorities at bay, said the L.A. Times, for more than an hour, claiming to be George Harrison of the Beatles. They took him to jail but couldnt figure out what to charge him with... so they put him in a loony bin.

Meanwhile the hills keep crumbling, dropping houses down on streets and highways. Yesterday they closed two lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway between Sunset and Topanga... passing the scene in McGarrs little British-souvenir car on the way to Govers house in Malibu... we looked up and saw two houses perched out in space, and dirt actually sliding down the cliff. It was only a matter of time, and no cure, no way to prevent these two houses from dropping on the highway. They keep undercutting the hills to make more house sites, and the hills keep falling. Fires burn the vegetation off in summer, rains make mud-slides in the winter... massive erosion, fire and mud, with The Earthquake scheduled for April. Nobody seems to give a fuck.