Hunter S. Thompson - Screwjack

Screwjack

by Hunter S. Thompson

eVersion 1.0 / See Notes at EOF

Book Jacket:

Hunter S. Thompson's legions of fans have waited a decade for this book. They will not be disappointed. His notorious Screwjack is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since the private printing in 1991 of three hundred fine collector's copies and twenty-six leather-bound presentation copies. Only the first of the three pieces included here -- "Mescalito", published in Dr. Thompson's 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed -- has been available to the public, making the trade edition of Screwjack a major publishing event.

"We live in a jungle of pending disasters," Thompson warns in "Mescalito", a chronicle of his first mescaline experience and what it sparked in him while he was alone in an L.A. hotel room in February 1969 -- including a bout of paranoia that would have made most people just scream no, once and for all. But for Thompson, along with the downside came a burst of creativity too powerful to ignore. The result is a poetic, perceptive, and wildly funny stream-of-consciousness take on 1969 America as only Hunter S. Thompson could see it.

Screwjack just gets weirder with it's second offereing, "Death of a Poet". As Thompson describes this trailer-park confrontation with the dark side of a deservingly doomed friend: "Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train."

The heart of the collection lies in its final, title piece, an unnaturally poignant love story. What makes the romantic tale "Screwjack" so touching, for all its queerness, is the aching meloncholy in its depiction of modern man's burden: that "we are doomed. Mama has gone off to Real Estate School... and after that maybe even to Law School. We will never see her again."

Ostensibly written by Raoul Duke, "Screwjack" begins with an editor's note explaining of Thompson's alter ego that "the first few lines contain no warning of the madness and fear and lust that came more and more to plague him and dominate his life...." "I am guilty, Lord," Thompson writes, "but I am also a lover -- and i am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you...."

Nor has Hunter S. Thompson been to American Literature. Quite the contrary: what the legendary Gonzo journalist proves with Screwjack is just how brilliant a prose stylist he really is, amid all the hilarity. As Thompson puts it in his introduction, the three stories here " build like Bolero to a faster and wider climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, and then drop him off a cliff.... That is the Desired Effect.

TO MONA

for making this outburst possible

SIMON &SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the American

New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

places, and incidents either are products of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1991 by Hunter S. Thompson

Copyright 2000 by Gonzo International Corp.

All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

Simon & Schuster and Colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America is available

ISBN 0-684-87321-4

MESCALITO

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 I afternoon with Lionel and talk with off-duty hookers... and while I was standing there, watching four flower children in bell-bottom I 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 I other, they hoisted the "V" signal -- and I returned that. And one of them yelled, "What are you doing up there?" And I said, "I'm 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 neutral -- like 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 he'd maintained his contacts with the Black Community, talking with fat jowls and a nervous hustler style, blundering along in the wake of George Herman's and Daniel Schorr's 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 he'd 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 balcony -- Hubert Humphrey looking down at Grant Park on Tuesday night, when he still had options (then, moments later, the four flower children hailed a cab -- yes, cab, taxi -- and I walked down to the King's Cellar liquor store where the clerk looked at my Diners Club card and said, "Aren't you the guy who did that Hell's Angels thing?" And I felt redeemed.... Selah).

February

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 don't work no more, this maddening, time-killing late-work syndrome, never getting down to the real machine action until two or three at night, won't 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 end of anything.

And now the fire alarm goes off in 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 doesn't 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 couldn't figure out what to charge him with... so they put him in a loony bin.