Thompson Hunter S. - Stories I tell myself : growing up with Hunter S. Thompson

H ONOR R OLL

H UNTER USED TO INCLUDE an Honor Roll in his later books. I will continue that tradition. The people on this list contributed to this book being written, whether directly in the case of my editor, Victoria Wilson, and my agent, Lynn Nesbit, whether in the form of great patience, constant support and encouragement from my family and friends, or support in the form of reading the early drafts and making recommendations. I especially want to thank Paul Scanlon for his invaluable assistance. Many others provided indirect support by playing an important supportive role in my or Hunters life. A number of people helped keep my family and me on the rails when my father died, support for which I am forever grateful.

To all of you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for helping to make this book possible.

Jennifer Winkel Thompson

Will Thompson

Deb Fuller

Lynn Nesbit

Victoria Wilson

Jann Wenner

Paul Scanlon

Tom Gilboy

Johnny Depp

Christi Dembrowski

Norm Todd

John Equis

Joel Mandel

Hal Haddon

Doug Brinkley

Loren Jenkins

Kevin Breslin

Ed Bastian

Tim Ferris

Ralph and Anna Steadman

Richard Brennan

Sandra Wright (previously Thompson)

Hal Wakefield

Jimmy Buffett

Jane Buffett

Tom Corcoran

Tom Benton

Betty Benton

Brian and Michelle Benton

Marci Benton

Doris Kearns and Dick Goodwin

Oliver Treibick

Laila Nabulsi

Bob and Gabby Rafelson

Brad Laboe

Carol and Palmer Hood

George and Patty Stranahan

Cliff Little

Rhett Harper

Ann Dowell

Nicole Fulcher

Virginia Thompson

Davison and Adelaide Thompson

Robin, Adelaide Hunter, and Susannah Thompson

Patrick Krause

Chrissy Sawtelle

John, Kristi, Jack, and Will Doherty

Andrea Winkel Haines

Paul Haines

Ella and Will Haines

Carrie Watson and Phil Fontana

Ellis and Madelyn Fontana

Pamela Reich

Jack Thibeau

Gene McGarr

Debra Wilde

Marla Bonds

Shannon Jones

Lyle Lovett

Julie Conklin

Bob Braudis

Joey DiSalvo

Jeff Armstrong

Ed Bradley

Patricia Blanchet

Dana Krafchik

Tami Hogan

Alisa Winkel

Pete Laborde

Tory Read

David Grinspoon

David Monsma

Walter Isaacson

Alex Gibney

Trish, Steve, and Hayden Setlik

The Tiberi family

Dede Brinkman

Todd Divel

Eddie Mize

Bill Murray

Don Stober

Gerry and Chris Goldstein

Dan Dibble

Michael Cleverly

Cass Cleverly

John Zajicek

Jeff Kass

Marea Evans

Nicole Lefavour

Stevens Brosnihan

ONE

M Y F ATHER AS A Y OUNG M AN

Nothing but a smart hillbillyThe Air Force or jailThe writing life: New York, San Francisco, Big Sur, AspenPartying with Ken Kesey and the Hells Angels motorcycle gangElk liver in an unheated shack

A STORY NEEDS a starting place. In this story, the starting place is my fathers early life, because he, like everyone, was to some degree a product of his upbringing. The very brief biographical sketch that follows is intended to familiarize those readers who havent heard of him before and to lay out some essentials of his early life before and following my birth in 1964.

Hunter was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His family had been in Kentucky for generations, and there are names like Semeranis Lawless and America Hook in our Thompson family tree. He sometimes called himself nothing but a smart hillbilly. He was born in 1937 and had two brothers, Davison and Jim, both younger. His father was an insurance salesman, and his mother was a stay-at-home mom until his father died suddenly when he was a teenager and she had to go to work. He attended public school, read constantly, spent time with the children of Louisvilles Old Money families, and scraped through high school not due to lack of intelligence but because of boredom and hostility to authority. He also got into a fair amount of trouble, so that at age seventeen he spent thirty days in the county jail for a bogus petty robbery charge. It would have been sixty days except the judge gave him the option of joining the Air Force in return for the reduced sentence.

He enlisted and was initially trained to be a radio technician. He despised everything about the military and probably would have spent four years in solitary confinement for chronic and unrepentant insubordination if he hadnt managed to lie his way into a job as the sports editor for the base newspaper, The Command Courier. This made all the difference. He worked his own hours (slept late, worked late), came and went as he pleased, did unauthorized freelance writing for a local civilian paper, and wrote entertaining, flattering, and wildly exaggerated articles about the base sports teams. This curried favor with the base commander, who in turn excused Hunter from the customary airman duties and shielded him from the constant complaints of other officers. In this way he survived three years of the Air Force, got an early honorable discharge, and gained some solid experience as a journalist. He also understood that he wanted to be a writer, and a damn good one. Not a journalist, but a novelist, like Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

Hunter fully intended to go to college as soon as he was out of the Air Force on a journalism scholarship. Somewhere along the line, though, that became less important, and he never did attend college, with the exception of a couple of night classes at Columbia University in New York in 1959. He told me much later that he realized that in order to be a great writer he needed to write, not go to school. After I had graduated from college, he said the only reason to attend college was to have four years to read.

After his discharge, he held a couple of brief jobs on newspapers on the East Coast, including a stint as a copy boy at Time magazine. He was either fired from or quit each of these jobs, and soon realized he would never be able to work in an office for a boss, that he wasnt wired for it. It became clear to him that working as a salaried journalist was not going to allow him to be the kind of writer that he wanted to be. So, he became a freelance journalist, at starvation wages, but with the freedom to work on his own terms.

Not that he was lazy. He worked hard on his first novel, Prince Jellyfish (never published), cranked out freelance articles, and wrote a vast number of letters to friends around the country. He looked at letter writing as not only a way to keep in touch and debate ideas, but as a writing exercise, so that when he wasnt sleeping or in the bar with friends, he was writing. He moved constantly, went through a long string of old and worn-out cars, slept during the day and worked at night, borrowed money (and lent it when he had it), stayed one step ahead of the bill collectors, and left a trail of small-time debt across the country. He also kept carbon copies of everything he wrote in neatly organized and carefully labeled folders.

In New York City he met my mother, and then spent several months traveling around South America as a freelancer for The Nation and The National Observer, a weekly paper published by Dow Jones. He and my mother lived in Puerto Rico for a while (which provided the raw material for his first and only published novel, The Rum Diary), got married and headed west to California, lived in Big Sur for a bit, headed to a happening place in the Colorado Rockies called Aspen that some friends had just discovered, spent a year or so there, then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963.

I was born in March of 1964. At that time Hunter and Sandy were living in an unheated shack in Glen Ellen, California, about sixty miles north of San Francisco. He was traveling quite a bit, freelancing for several newspapers and magazines and making hardly any money. My mother did secretarial work, providing a minimal steady paycheck to compensate for Hunters irregular freelance income. For food, he would occasionally shoot a deer or an elk. My mother told me that for the duration of her pregnancy she lived on elk meat (especially elk liver), salad, and milk.