Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (78 page)

Thanks,
Hunter

Letter from JSW to HST

December 13, 1991

VIA FAX
Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, CO 81656

Dear Hunter:

After the last minute, I have decided to go for an Elko cover. Ralph is sending in a portrait of you he has already done for this purpose. We should have it Sunday. If it suits, then it’s a go.

Here are the cover heads. If you can improve them, please do ... but not at any great length.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN ELKO

By Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

A Wild and Ugly Night with Judge Thomas ... Sexual Harassment Then and Now ... A Nasty Christmas Flashback ... A Nation of Jailers . . .

All best,
Jann

JSW/mm

Hope you’re pleased! I am!
Xxx J

January 23, 1992

Dear Jann,

God
damn
, I wish you were here to enjoy this beautiful weather with me. It is autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown, and the warmth going out of the sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and all the flowers die from freezing.

Oh, God! You should have been with me yesterday when I finished my ham and eggs and knocked back some whiskey and picked up my Weatherby Mark V .300 Magnum and a ball of black opium for dessert and went outside with a fierce kind of joy in my heart because I was Proud to be an American on a day like this. It felt like a goddamn
Football Game
, Jann—it was like
Paradise
... You remember that
bliss
you felt when we powered down to the Farm and whipped Stanford? Well, it felt like That.

I digress. My fits of Joy are soiled by relentless flashbacks and ghosts too foul to name ... Oh, no, don’t ask Why. You could have been president, Jann, but your road was full of forks, and I think of this when I see the forked horns of these wild animals who dash back and forth on the hillsides while rifles crack in the distance and fine swarthy young men with blood on their hands drive back and forth in the dusk and mournfully call our names . . .

O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again.

Right, and so much for autumn, the trees are diseased and the Animals get in your way and the President is usually guilty and most days are too long anyway ... So never mind my poem. It was wrong from the start. I plagiarized it from an early work of Coleridge and then tried to put my own crude stamp on it, but I failed.

So what? I didn’t want to talk about fucking
autumn
, anyway. I was just sitting here at dawn on a crisp Sunday morning, waiting for the football games to start and taking a goddamn very brief break from this blizzard of Character Actors and Personal Biographers and sickly
Paparazzi
that hovers around me these days (they are sleeping now, thank Christ—some even in my own bed). I was sitting here all alone, thinking, for good or ill, about the Good Old Days.

We were Poor, Jann. But we were Happy. Because we knew Tricks. We were Smart. Not Crazy, like they said. (No. They never called us late for dinner, eh?)

Ho, ho. Laughs don’t come cheap these days, do they? The only guy who seems to have any fun in public is Prince Cromwell, my shrewd and humorless neighbor—the one who steals sheep and beats up women, like Mike Tyson.

Who knows why, Jann. Some people are too weird to figure.

You have come a long way from the Bloodthirsty, Beady-eyed news Hawk that you were in days of yore. Maybe you should try reading something besides those goddamn motorcycle magazines—or one of these days you’ll find hair growing in your palms.

Take my word for it. You can only spend so much time “on the throttle,” as it were ... Then the Forces of Evil will take over. Beware . . .

Ah, but that is a different question, for now. Who gives a fuck? We are, after all, Professionals ... But our Problem is not. No. It is the Problem of
Everyman
. It is
Everywhere
. The Question is our
Wa
; the Answer is our Fate ... and the story I am about to tell you is horrible, Jann.

I came suddenly awake, weeping and jabbering and laughing like a loon at the ghost on my TV set ... Judge Clarence Thomas ... Yes, I knew him. But that was a long time ago. Many years, in fact, but I still remember it vividly ... indeed, it has haunted me like a golem, day and night, for many years.

It seemed normal enough, at the time, just another weird rainy night out there on the high desert ... What the hell? We were younger then. Me and
the Judge
. And
all
the others, for that matter ... It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We
trusted
each other. Hell, you could
afford
to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days—without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money, or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of
possibility
. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko when you were lost in a midnight rainstorm—and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California.

There were Laws, but they were not feared. There were Rules, but they were not worshipped ... like Laws and Rules and Cops and Informants are feared and worshipped today.

Like I said: it was a different time. And I know the Judge would tell you the same thing, tonight, if he wanted to tell you the Truth, like I do.

The first time I actually met the Judge was a long time ago, for strange reasons, on a dark and rainy night in Elko, Nevada, when we both ended up in the same sleazy roadside Motel, for no good reason at all ... Good God! What a night!

I almost forgot about it, until I saw him last week on TV ... and then I saw it
all over again
. The horror! The
horror
! That night when the road washed out and we all got stuck out there—somewhere near Elko in a place just off the highway, called Endicott’s Motel—and we almost went
really
Crazy.

It was just after midnight when I first saw the sheep. I was running about eighty-eight or ninety miles an hour in a drenching, blinding rain on U.S. 40 between Winnemucca and Elko with one light out. I was soaking wet from the water that was pouring in through a hole in the front roof of the car, and my fingers were like rotten icicles on the steering wheel.

It was a moonless night and I knew I was hydroplaning, which is dangerous ... My front tires were no longer in touch with the asphalt or
anything else. My center of gravity was too high. There was no visibility on the road, none at all. I could have tossed a flat rock a lot farther than I could see in front of me that night through the rain and the ground fog. There is a total understanding, all at once, of how the captain of the
Titanic
must have felt when he first saw the Iceberg.

And not much different from the hideous feeling that gripped me when the beam of my Long-Reach Super-Halogen headlights picked up what appeared to be a massive rock slide across the highway—right in front of me, blocking the road completely. Big white rocks and round boulders, looming up with no warning in a fog of rising steam or swamp gas . . .

The brakes were useless, the car was wandering. The rear end was coming around. I jammed it down into Low, but it made no difference, so I straightened it out and braced for a crash that would probably kill me. This is It, I thought. This is how it happens—slamming into a pile of rocks at one hundred miles an hour, a sudden brutal death in a fast red car on a moonless night in a rainstorm somewhere on the sleazy outskirts of Elko. I felt vaguely embarrassed, in that long pure instant before I went into the rocks. I remembered Los Lobos and that I wanted to call Maria when I got to Elko . . .

My heart was full of joy as I took the first hit, which was oddly soft and painless. Just a sickening
thud
, like running over a body, a corpse—or, ye fucking gods, a crippled two-hundred-pound
sheep
thrashing around in the road.

Yes. These huge white lumps were not boulders. They were
sheep
. Dead and dying sheep. More and more of them, impossible to miss at this speed, piled up on each other like bodies at the battle of Shiloh. It was like running over wet logs. Horrible, horrible . . .

And then I saw the
man
—a leaping Human Figure in the glare of my bouncing headlights, waving his arms and yelling, trying to flag me down. I swerved to avoid hitting him, but he seemed not to see me, rushing straight into my headlights like a blind man ... or a monster from Mars with no pulse, covered with blood and hysterical.

It looked like a small black gentleman in a London Fog raincoat, frantic to get my attention. It was so ugly that my brain refused to accept it ... Don’t worry, I thought. This is only an Acid flashback. Be calm. This is not really happening.

I was down to about thirty-five or thirty when I zoomed past the man in the raincoat and bashed the brains out of a struggling sheep, which helped to reduce my speed, as the car went airborne again, then bounced to a shuddering stop just before I hit the smoking, overturned hulk of what looked like a white Cadillac limousine, with people still inside. It was a nightmare. Some fool had crashed into a herd of sheep at high speed and rolled into the desert like an eggbeater.

We were able to laugh about it later, but it took a while to calm down. What the hell? It was only an accident. The Judge had murdered some range animals.

So what? Only a racist
maniac
would run sheep on the highway in a thunderstorm at this hour of the night. “Fuck those people!” he snapped, as I took off toward Elko with him and his two female companions tucked safely into my car, which had suffered major cosmetic damage but nothing serious. “They’ll never get away with this Negligence!” he said. “We’ll eat them alive in court. Take my word for it. We are about to become
joint owners
of a huge Nevada sheep ranch.”