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

294 Pages·2016·5.78 MB·English

by  Thompson

Hunter pointing out to me the skill of his shooting, somewhere in a California forest, 1964. He is
holding his .44 Magnum, probably his favorite gun.

With deepest gratitude to my wife, Jennifer Winkel Thompson, and
to Deb Fuller, who together showed me my father’s hidden
language of love. It has made all the difference.
To my son, Will, whom I have loved with all my heart from the
moment he was born, and will always love without condition or
limit.
FORGIVING OUR FATHERS
Dick Lourie
for M.K.
maybe in a dream: he’s in your power you twist his arm but you’re
not sure it was he that stole your money you feel calmer and
you decide to let him go free
or he’s the one (as in a dream of mine) I must pull from the water
but I never knew it or wouldn’t have done it until I saw the
street-theater play so close up I was moved to actions I’d never
before taken maybe for leaving us too often or
forever when we were little maybe for scaring us with unexpected
rage or making us nervous because there seemed never to be
any rage there at all
for marrying or not marrying our mothers for divorcing or not
divorcing our mothers and shall we forgive them for their
excesses of warmth or coldness shall we forgive them for
pushing or leaning for shutting doors for speaking only
through layers of cloth or never speaking or never being silent
in our age or in theirs or in their deaths saying it to them or not
saying it— if we forgive our fathers what is left
C
ONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PREFACE
ONE My Father as a Young Man
“Nothing but a smart hillbilly”—The Air Force or jail—The writing life:
New York, San Francisco, Big Sur, Aspen—Partying with Ken Kesey and
the Hells Angels motorcycle gang—Elk liver in an unheated shack
TWO Memories Begin: ages 2 to 10
Owl Farm—The Success of Hell’s Angels—Early working habits—Guns,
motorcycles, friends in the kitchen—The Jerome Bar—Washington, D.C.,
the Free School
THREE Awakening: ages 10 to 13
A young horseman and his lamb—Building fires, hauling firewood—
Trouble with guns—I was a teenage hit man—The Beating—My fear,
bitterness, and shame
FOUR The Breakup
“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”—
Broken glass in the morning—Victim, witness, judge—In the Bahamas with
Buffett—California, the Promised Land—Police in the night—Leaving for
the last time
FIVE The In-Between Time: ages 13 to 18
The ugly divorce—Drugs and vandalism—Andover, Concord, the call of the
East—Movie night with Dad—Cleaning the guns—Hawaii
SIX Independence: ages 18 to 24
Tufts—The cub reporter—Priorities—Rolling Stone—Al-Anon in earnest—
The letters—A year abroad—The correspondent’s coat—Graduation with
honors
SEVEN Getting Straight: ages 24 to 30
The ashram—Jennifer—The burning of the ham—The Bomb—The wedding
—“I never liked you anyway.”
EIGHT Reconciliation: ages 30 to 41
The hidden language—Better Than Sex—The letters books—Still cleaning
the guns—Building the fire—“Ace” and the birth of a grandson—
Celebrated in Louisville—The titanium spine
NINE The Last Day
TEN The Funeral
ELEVEN What Changes, What Remains the Same
Lawyers, guns, and money—Symposium—Documentaries—The medallion
HONOR ROLL
P
REFACE
T
HIS IS A MEMOIR, not a biography, a highly subjective and unreliable memoir
of how my father and I got to know each other over forty-one years until his
suicide in 2005. It is filled with exaggerations, misstatements, faulty
recollections, obfuscations, omissions, and elisions. It also contains a lot of truth
about my father and me, more truth than falsehoods, I think.
If I am deceiving you, though, I am deceiving myself first of all. It’s just that
all I have is memory, and memory is a treacherous thing, treacherous, as in
unfaithful and perfidious. Double-crossing and underhanded. Memory is not
objective. It is not an impartial recorder, but instead a selective, changeable, and
unreliable record being constantly revised and edited to suit our needs and
desires. Yet our lives and our identities are largely built upon our memories, and
we trust them implicitly so we can draw our conclusions about our lives and the
people in them. So we do the best we can, knowing we are fooling ourselves a
good part of our lives. We go forward in spite of it. I go forward in spite of it.
These are the stories I tell myself.
Hunter S. Thompson was a complex man, far too complex for me to
completely know or understand. He was famous, almost worshipped in some
circles, unknown in others, brilliant, a grand master of the written word and one
of the great writers of the twentieth century. He was an alcoholic and drug fiend,
a wild, angry, passionate, sometimes dangerous, charismatic, unpredictable,
irresponsible, idealistic, sensitive man with a powerful and deeply rooted sense
of justice. Most important to me, though, he was my father and I was his son.
And no son can escape the claim of that relationship. Good or bad, weak or
strong, alive or dead, close or distant, our fathers are with us. This is the story of
how my father and I went very far away from each other, and over twenty-five
years managed to find our way back before it was too late.
ONE
M F Y M
Y ATHER AS A OUNG AN
“Nothing but a smart hillbilly”—The Air Force or jail—The writing
life: New York, San Francisco, Big Sur, Aspen—Partying with Ken
Kesey and the Hells Angels motorcycle gang—Elk liver in an
unheated shack
A
STORY NEEDS a starting place. In this story, the starting place is my father’s
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 haven’t 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 Louisville’s 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 hadn’t
managed to lie his way into a job as the sports editor for the base newspaper, The