Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Everybody I know on the activist circuit is buying guns. When the bastards start using shotguns to defend a vacant lot, we are not far from the Big Hammer. It may be that events will empty the prisons in ways you never plotted … I hope not, but I’m damned if I see any light at the end of this stinking tunnel. Anyway, stop by for a peaceful visit while there’s still time.
Ciao …
Hunter
TO THOMAS H. O’CONNOR, IRVING LUNDBORG & CO.:
Even if he had gone “establishment” enough to be building a stock portfolio, Thompson drew the line at investing in communications monopoly American Telephone & Telegraph, and he let his broker know it.
Tom O’Connor
Irving Lundborg & Co.
San Francisco, CA
May 19, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Tom…
I was expecting a call of some sort tonight—for no particular reason—but, failing that, I thought I should take to the writing machine to advise you that the idea of owning stock in ATT is so wholly and basically repugnant to me that I can’t possibly live with it. I don’t care if it’s guaranteed to double in six months—or even triple. I want no part in it.
Why don’t you take the ATT chunk of the $5000 and put it into Smith & Wesson, or whatever specific division it is of Bangor Punta that deals heavily in riot-control equipment—Mace and that sort of thing. Ideally, I’d like to buy S&W/Bangor Punta stock now, then spend all summer driving it up, then sell in the fall. Firearms are getting to be like diamonds—and ATT is a clunker’s gig, for sure, so let’s get right into the action. Dump the ATT stuff & buy Bangor Punta—or Smith & Wesson if you can narrow it down that far. I can live with British Petroleum and Yellowknife Bear Mines, but I’ll be goddamned if I want to look in my mirror each morning and see an ATT shareholder. OK for now …
Hunter
TO THE DISABLED AMERICAN VETERANS ASSOCIATION:
Thompson crafted a thoughtful anti–Vietnam War response to a fundraising appeal from the Disabled American Veterans Association.
May 19, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Disabled American Veterans
Cincinnati, Ohio 45214
Gentlemen …
I am returning your stamped envelopes. My son ran off with the small green license tags you sent. … But I doubt if they would be much use to you anyway. The stamped envelopes are legal tender, however, and maybe you can use them for something else.
My first impulse was to send you a check … but I caught myself on some vagrant memory of having read somewhere that the DAV fully supports the War in Vietnam … which, if true, strikes me as a stupid, ignorant and half-mad stance that no American citizen in his right mind could possibly endorse, even tacitly, by sending a contribution. The senseless butchery in Vietnam is too awful for any words—from me or anyone else. And the only thing more awful and senseless than the butchery is the twisted reality of an organization like the DAV supporting the war.
If I’m wrong on this point, please inform me at once—with a copy of some pertinent DAV statement or position paper—and I’ll send you a check for $50 … along with a very sincere apology. But if I’m right, I suggest you abandon this vicious, demented hypocrisy and look for honest work. Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
Box 37 …Woody Creek
Colorado 81656
TO VIRGINIA THOMPSON:
Thompson’s mother had written to tell him that she was selling the house he grew up in.
May 23, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Mom …
It’s 4:30 Saturday morning here, and I’m just getting to work—far behind on everything, stone broke again, and coming to hate the sight of a typewriter. Your news about the house is good, I guess, but I naturally view it with mixed feelings. There is definite irony—for me, at least—in the fact that I got your letter the morning after I spent hours on the midnight phone, settling a very complicated deal to buy this place. Since I have no income of record, no property, no credit, no job history, no education and no advancement prospects—it takes a considerable amount of fine haggling to get hold of a $77,000 property in the midst of a spiraling land market. I think I’ve sent pictures of this house, which is part of the deal—along with the smaller, next-door house that Noonan is living in, and about 25 acres with a spectacular view and another fine house-site. You’ll have to get out here and see the whole thing, once it’s settled. I assume it’s set, but I won’t be sure until around mid-July—about the same time Sandy is due.
Anyway, it is weird to get your news of the house-sale just as I’d bought one for myself. Under the circumstances, $18,000 seems low—but that’s only by comparison with this fiendishly inflated land market around Aspen, which is totally out of control. Quarter-acre lots in town sell easily for $15,000 and up, and raw pastureland five miles from the nearest road goes for $3000 an acre. It would take me several hours to explain how I fell into this deal. I have to take some pictures of the whole area soon, for survey and contract purposes, and I’ll send you some prints. If the deal goes through, my life will be considerably less pressured, since I’ve been living for the past year with the knowledge that it was only a matter of time before the whole place would be sold out from under me.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to Louisville sometime this summer, for a farewell visit with the house. Let me know more specifically when you plan to move, and where. The next few months are going to be a nightmare of complicated action, with a book due July 1 (impossible), a baby due July 15 and the house sale to watch over—along with a necessary research trip to the Coast for several weeks, and god only knows what else. My Doberman bitch is expecting pups in a week or so, the cat is ready to drop kittens, and … well, why go on? Let me know more about the house situation when you can, and tell Jim we’ll be expecting him for a visit when he gets fired. OK for now …
Love,
H
TO SELMA SHAPIRO, RANDOM HOUSE:
Publicist Selma Shapiro was Thompson’s biggest booster at Random House, always telling the higher-ups that he had more talent—if less discipline—than Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe.
May 25, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Selma …
I just found the letter you wrote just before you left. I’m not sure what prompted me to root through my stack of unanswered mail to find it. Once a letter gets into that stack, it invariably disappears. The only ones I seem to answer are the ones I deal with at once … and since you were leaving, there was hardly any sense in replying at that point, when I got it.
Needless to say, the letter was vaguely embarrassing. Anything decent or human makes me nervous; I am much more at home with people I can abuse or play games with. Maybe that’s what you meant by my “WASP attitudes.” … (break) …I just had to rush outside with a shotgun to drive off a vicious tomcat who comes around every night to attack my pregnant female, but the bastard got away again. I guess this is a good example of my WASP attitudes. Well, what the hell? It used to worry me that I was really an evil redneck, but now I sort of like it … and with summer coming on, I may find time to exercise some of my ancient, brutal skills. The action in Berkeley is only the beginning, I think. Someday very soon, freaks are going to shoot back, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen after that. I’ve been amazed, in the course of my wanderings this winter, to find how many people are seriously preparing for a street-war—and most of them want it. All they need is an excuse to start shooting, just enough chaos to guarantee they won’t get caught. The more I learn about this country, the more I think I should live somewhere else. I don’t mind the idea of armed revolution as much as I fear the aftermath. I’d be locked up, regardless of who won. …
Well … fuck all that; it’s a depressing thing to write about except for money, and right now that’s exactly what I should be doing. I have a silly, useless article for Playboy due about 6 weeks ago, and I want to get rid of it
Actually, my main efforts for the past year have been in the area of seizing a land fortress in Woody Creek, and I think that’s finally happened. If you recall my compulsive rage at a publishing contract that seemed to cheat me out of $5000, consider the shape of my head after finally arranging a formula that would make it possible for me to buy a $100,000 piece of land (with two houses) for $77,000 … with only $4000 to my name at the moment & no real prospects for more, and no hope of bank financing. That last royalty check provided me with the illusion of vast wealth, so I was able to parlay a meagre nut into a brief but effective display of MONEY POWER … yes, heavy dealing. You’d be amazed at the reaction you can stir up by wandering around a boom-town like Aspen, spreading the word that you’re looking for a way to get rid of $10,000 instantly, waving a checkbook around, buying $2 drinks instead of beer … jesus, I had stockbrokers calling me from San Francisco, people with all manner of fantastic land and mining deals, dope dealers looking for a partner, gun runners from L.A. … and the end result was a mountain of instant-leverage to force this land thing through … and that’s all I really wanted in the first place. You’ll have to come out and see it next winter; arrange a publicity conference or something like that, tell them I’ve broken my spleen and can’t travel, so you have to come out here and confer.
Yeah …I know, I’ll have to write a dingbat huge-selling book to make it all work. So I guess I’ll have to bear down. It’s hard to take that whole gig seriously these days, particularly when I can’t think of anything else I have to do or prove. My only serious game at the moment is this notion of writing a fictional documentary and refusing to admit it’s fictional … but that’s a different kind of subject, and first I have to get this goddamn Playboy thing done. It’s 4:00 a.m. now and the 6:00 news is coming up, then the sun … and it’s getting so I hate to go to bed on these bright green mornings. The other day I was heading for the bedroom when I saw the tree-merchant out in the yard, so I loaded up on enough pills to carry me through the day and did a tree-planting act, with much beer and music … but now I owe for the trees, and a lot of other things, and the people who thought I was rich two weeks ago are due for a shock. In the meantime, though, I think I have the land-fort settled, and that’s as important as a book or any other breakthrough. I am tired of being driven around like a mangy dog; after 10 years of being evicted from every place I’ve lived in—without exception—the prospect of a personal fort has become an obsession, and now that I have it settled I may be able to focus on some newer and heavier main project.
Jesus, I have just 2 more hours until the news, so I’ll have to quit this rambling. Looking at your letter again, I see Frederick Exley’s name;17 I’m reading his book now. There is something very good and right about it, hard to define. He’s not a “good writer” in any classic sense, and most of what he says makes me feel I’d prefer to avoid him … but the book is still good. Very weird. I suppose it’s the truth-level, a demented kind of honesty…. As for Portnoy’s Complaint, I can’t get up the interest to deal with it. Philip Roth has never interested me as a writer; maybe he’s different in person. But I’ll read the book and say something to prove I got through it. Or maybe not. I recall feeling the same way about Styron’s book,18 but I finally abandoned it—despite my 10-year booster’s campaign for Lie Down in Darkness, which I still think is one of the best books in English. But maybe that’s just my WASP thing … although I think Malamud19 is as good or better than anybody I can think of right now. I’ve never paid much attention to the Black/Jew/WASP problem; it strikes me as a waste of time and energy. My prejudice is pretty general, far too broad and sweeping for any racial limitations. It’s clear to me—and has been since the age of 10 or so—that most people are bastards, thieves and yes—even pigfuckers. There are not many good people in this world, and in terms of racial action I like Dick Gregory’s notion: “This isn’t a matter of black and white—it’s a matter of right and wrong.”20
OK … and so much for all that. I’m enclosing a matchbook cover from a restaurant that comes to me on the highest recommendation, a neighbor of mine who owns the Paragon (french restaurant in Aspen) which enjoys the high praise of that [Craig] Claiborne fellow from The NY Times. Anyway, Bruce LeFavour says the King Wu is the best Chinese restaurant he’s ever been in—and Bruce is a certified gourmet, a graduate from some famous chef’s school in Paris and does all the cooking for the Paragon. If you can make it out here for a conference of some kind, I’ll buy you a dinner there. I won’t ski with you, but what the hell … you can’t have everything.
Probably I’ll get to NY sometime this summer. I have a hell of a lot to do, mainly on both coasts, and I have to be here in July when Sandy is due to hatch a second mutant Thompson. The cat and my Doberman bitch are also ready to hatch … every female in the area is pregnant. I feel like Johnny Appleseed—dogs, cats, children, trees, grass, huge wooden structures, pottery, metal sculptures; I have a euphoric sense of building a dynasty of some kind. So maybe I should grow a beard, along with all the rest. We’ll see …and in the meantime, tack this King Wu ad someplace where you won’t lose it, and when I get to NY we can go down there and try it. See you then. …
Love,
Hunter
TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:
Thompson submitted an inventory of all the periodicals he was reading in his daily pursuit of the Death of the American Dream.
May 25, 1969
Woody Creek, CO
Dear Jim …
Here is a relatively complete list of the various newspapers and magazines I’ve subscribed to in the course of my far-flung research on the Death of the American Dream. Some are obviously more relevant than others, and the list includes a few I’d obviously get anyway, but none that can’t be reasonably linked to the subject-matter—and your title.
The most pertinent objection, as I see it, is that no human being could read all this bullshit and still have time to write a long book. Accordingly, I am letting a lot of the subscriptions lapse—things like Business Week and … jesus, I guess that’s it … and in scanning the list I notice a few that Sandy left off: the American Rifleman, La Raza, New Left Notes, Rolling Stone (the paper, not the book), Washington Monthly, The Nation … goddamn, it boggles the brain.
Anyway, please send the funds. My secret land purchase and other long-term investments have left me naked of cash. That $5000 for the first third of the book looks better and fatter every day. The moment I finish this rotten Playboy article, I’ll bear down on it. I’ve written a complete outline of the book, but I think I’ll wait a while before sending it along. The fiction aspect is so prominent that I want to be sure it’s going to work before committing myself. OK for now … and thanks:
Hunter
Magazine/Newspaper
Date Subscribed
Cost
New York Times
4/8/68
$22.60
Newsweek
4/18/68
2.97
Foreign Affairs
4/21/68
8.00
American Scholar
4/21/68
5.00
Time
4/23/68
2.40
Conservative Book Club
4/25/68
4.81
Business Week
4/25/68
10.00
Transaction
4/25/68
6.00
Columbia Journalism Review
4/25/68
6.00
National Observer (Newsbooks)
4/28/68
4.45
Ramparts
6/2/68
12.50
New Republic
6/18/68
10.00
San Francisco Chronicle
6/24/68
12.00
Current
6/24/68
2.00
Time
7/24/68
3.97
Life
7/24/68
2.97
San Francisco Chronicle
9/24/68
12.00
Psychology Today
10/17/68
6.00
Mayday
11/2/68
7.50
John Wilcock’s Newsletter
11/30/68
6.00
New York Times
12/2/68
21.50
Life
12/2/68
3.98
Esquire
12/2/68
15.00