Kingdom of Fear (17 page)

That is what I mean by “theologically conscious,” but so what? I
enjoy
the company of religious scholars and even Jesus freaks from time to time, as long as they have a sense of humor and a bit of fine whiskey to oil the exotic machinery of speculations about the Meaning of God in Modern America, or Why Child Rape is
good
for Catholic priests and punishable by DEATH in the suburbs of San Diego. . . .

Smart boys from Tibet or the Society of Jesus are always fun for this kind of banter, and I am always on the lookout for these people, but rarely for anything except as sparring partners. There is nothing like a corrupt Jesuit or a high-rolling Buddhist to sharpen up with. And some are even
wise
in their own shrouded way.

Big-time lawyers and Appeals Court judges are also a morbid
kind of fun in times of personal darkness. I have many close friends on that side of the law, and I derive a lot of grim pleasure from them. They have a good sense of what is
possible
within the law, and what is probably Not. . . . That is what lawyers are all about. Most of them have spent enough time in Law School to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the Judicial system operates.

Never Be Late for Court When You Are the Person on Trial
is a good one to remember, for instance, and another is
The Cops Will Never Play Fair.

Justice Is the Whim of the Judge
is an axiom that I picked up a long time ago at the Columbia Law School in New York, where I also learned how to handle large sums of money and how to smoke marijuana in polite company without making a scene and acting like a junkie.

DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON AND THE LAST
BATTLE OF ASPEN
B
Y
L
OREN
J
ENKINS
,
S
MART
MAGAZINE
, J
AN
./F
EB
. 1990 (I
NTERVIEW
TOOK
PLACE
IN
S
EPTEMBER
1989, 3 ½
MONTHS
BEFORE
G
AIL
P
ALMER
CAME
TO
VISIT
.)

The Rocky Mountain night is cold and still except for the occasional screeech [sic] of the peacocks that stalk the darkness just off the wooden deck where Hunter S. Thompson sits drinking under the iron bat sculpture that decorates his front porch. A week earlier, he had been caught out in the dead of night firing an assortment of weaponry over the house of a neighbor and had just barely avoided a felony indictment on gun charges. Now, with the September stars twinkling overhead, he is trying judiciously to explain the exact nature of the fear and loathing that have crept into the lush, quiet valley of Woody Creek, where he has made his home for the past two decades.

“I ran for sheriff in Aspen years ago to try to stop the greed heads from ruining the place,” Thompson says in his singular stop-start, mumbling cadence. “Now . . . uhhh . . . they’re . . . trying to move on me right here where I live.” Indeed, land developers, the final plague of all paradises lost, have pretty much overwhelmed the once-funky mountain town. . . . And now the developers are reaching downvalley to Thompson’s own pastoral backyard, disrupting his life and work and bringing him quixotically to center stage in a drama that the more sentimental locals have taken to calling the “last battle in the lost war for the soul of Aspen.”

. . . That’s why Thompson has become embroiled in a bitter dispute—nay, a modern-day range war—with a newcomer named Floyd Watkins, who, for Thompson, embodies all that is evil in Aspen. A rich man with a dubious past and the habit of getting his way, Watkins moved upstream of Hunter’s house four years ago like a bad omen. Nothing has been the same since. Until then, Woody Creek was in a Western time warp, a valley of blue-collar bartenders and construction workers, a couple of aging hippies, and one famous writer. It was a place where locals prided themselves on their rural individualism, their isolation from increasingly ostentatious Aspen, and their unpaved roads and rough-hewn log houses.

The community center was a log post office and the adjoining Woody Creek Tavern, a smoky bar where cowboys and construction workers played pool, gambled on ball games, and occasionally brawled. Thompson used the tavern as a kind of office, a semi public haven for his eccentricities. Taking calls, meeting people who flew in to see him on business, he set a hilarious, outlaw tone that
his neighbors sympathized with immediately. He was a lot of fun, even if he did set off the occasional smoke bomb and raise his voice from time to time. It was a real Western.

In a valley where individualism and personal freedom are the reigning ideology, Floyd Watkins should have a lot of friends. He is the type of person who, at one point, made the West what it is. . . . A self-made man who had amassed millions in Florida and California in the heady world of high-level bill collecting (his company, which he sold for millions in 1985, was called Transworld Systems), Watkins came here expecting the respect he enjoyed in his Miami home. To that end he set out to build a multimillion-dollar estate that would rival those that have turned Aspen into an alpine Palm Springs over the past decade.

. . . [But] in fact, Watkins’s insensitivity to the traditions of the old West in general and to the etiquette of Woody Creek in particular could not help but offend. He surrounded his spread with intimidating urban chain-link fences, built a massive rock-and-concrete gateway, laid tons of cement on his driveways, and began pushing to have the Woody Creek road paved to keep the dust out of his parlors. Worse, in a land where water is valued as much as gold, Watkins ran bulldozers through streambeds that his downstream neighbors used to water their cattle and fields and rerouted the creek through his front lawn; he planned to build artificial trout ponds, in defiance of official county disapproval, that he would turn into a commercial fishing camp.

Thompson later fictionalized these developments in his weekly column in the
San Francisco Examiner,
suggesting that nothing short of a Hatfield-and-Mc-Coy feud was about to engulf the valley. . . .

It was an adolescent act of common vandalism that
brought matters to a head. As Floyd Watkins later told the story, his work crews had hardly finished pouring a new driveway at his Beaver Run Ranch when someone unseen and unknown inscribed “Fuck you, prick” on his black-tinted concrete and an anonymous telephone call warned him: “No more concrete is going to be poured in Woody Creek.” Watkins said it was the final straw, coming as it did after a series of other incidents that he claimed ranged from an attempted poisoning of his dog, the shooting out of his night-lights, the sawing down of a Beaver Run Ranch sign on the main road, and the scrawling of graffiti on his imposing rock gateway labeling the place “Fat Floyd’s Trout Farm.”

“I called the sheriff’s office to complain, but they said they had only two deputies on duty and couldn’t send anyone up here,” Watkins said when I visited him to hear his side of the dispute. “I told the sheriff then and there that I was going to take care of things myself.”

The first sign that Watkins had gone on the warpath came that evening, when Gaylord Guenin, an amiable former journalist who runs the Woody Creek Tavern, was driving to his home, two miles up the creek beyond the Beaver Run Ranch. Watkins chased down Guenin’s pickup and forced him to pull over.

“He was furious and fuming and threatening,” Guenin recalls. “He talked about having Uzis and infrared scopes at his home and his ability to ’take care of people’ and be three thousand miles away when it happened. It was clear that I had been chosen to deliver a message.” Still shaken when he got home, Guenin called the Tavern and warned everyone that Watkins was on a tear. What no one knew, of course, was that Watkins had decided to spend the night well armed in his car, near his endangered driveway.

Watkins recalls some fifteen or twenty cars driving up the road that night, “all honking and jeering” as they passed his hidden four-wheel drive. Around 4
A.M
., he fell asleep. Then, “at about 4:30, I heard five blasts of a shotgun. At first I thought Roberto, my foreman, had shot a coon by the shed where I keep some ducks, and I started to go over there, when there were about twenty shots from an automatic weapon of some kind, then six shots from a pistol. I realized the shots came from down the road. I saw car lights from either a Jeep Cherokee or a Wagoneer. I started after them, and there was a high-speed chase in the dark.” Three miles down the road, the escaping vehicle slowed down and turned in to the Flying Dog Ranch, owned by George Stranahan, a respected physicist turned cattle rancher who also owns the tavern and is the valley’s most influential citizen. He is a very old friend of Thompson’s.

There were two people in the car, according to Watkins, and one—a girl—ran up to Stranahan’s house while the other started to get out on the driver’s side. “I had these spotlights on the car,” Watkins says. “I turned them on and saw Hunter Thompson. I said, ’What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Hunter?’ And he came up to me, jabbed me in the chest, and said, ’You have been given a warning; there is to be no trout operation or any more concrete poured in Woody Creek.’”

The official version that Thompson later gave to the
Aspen Times Daily
from my kitchen telephone was somewhat different. Thompson denied that he was firing at Watkins or his house or delivering any personal warning. He said, instead, that he was heading up to Watkins’s ranch when he came face to face with a giant porcupine. “Don’t
laugh,” Hunter told the reporter Dave Price. “Look at Jimmy Carter. He was attacked by a killer swamp rabbit and had to beat it off with his oar. I was attacked by this huge porcupine. I stopped to look at it and it attacked me, so I blasted it.” The porcupine, alas, was never found.

That there was a confrontation with Watkins in the driveway of Stranahan’s Flying Dog Ranch is not in dispute. Thompson maintains, however, that he was the master of diplomacy, telling Watkins that he, Hunter, was his only friend. “I even offered him my last beer and invited him to come down to my place later in the day to watch the ball game.” But Watkins went home, called Sheriff Bob Braudis, and demanded that Thompson be prosecuted for what Hunter later said was “everything from the Manson family killings to shooting his mules.”

(Tom Benton)

That was an exaggeration. But Mac Myers, the deputy district attorney whose office conducted the investigation, came within a hairbreadth of bringing charges against Thompson for firing an automatic weapon. In the end, he couldn’t prove such a weapon had been fired. Thompson had a permit for a nonfunctioning automatic weapon, and when he was asked to turn in the gun for inspection, he presented a destroyed machine gun that had been packed in viscous antitrust naval jelly that rendered ballistics tests inconclusive.

Three days after the shooting, while the district attorney’s office debated whether to press charges against Thompson, Watkins woke to a nightmare. The ponds he had stocked with trophy-sized trout during the past three years were shimmering with the silver bellies of dead fish. More than six hundred trout, some weighing up to twenty pounds, were dead. The waters had been poisoned in the night, and Watkins immediately blamed the slaughter on his neighbors, charging them with employing “terrorist tactics” against him because they didn’t like his tastes and style. He went on to say that the multimillion-dollar, seventeen-thousand-square-foot main house of his estate would not be completed for another two years, but he’d be damned if he was going to let anybody scare him off his land. “I’m just gearing up to get tough,” he told reporters, warning that he would hire gunmen, and “if I have to, I will put guards all along that road. I can afford it.”

. . . The level-headed Stranahan shared the sheriff’s concern, and they issued joint statements calling for everyone to calm down before someone was hurt. Down at the Tavern, where talk of Watkins’s problems was normally greeted with raucous jokes, there was disbelief that someone
from the valley would actually poison Woody Creek’s waters, Watkins or no Watkins. This is the West, after all, and water isn’t messed with. The new mood was illustrated by the large glass that appeared on the Tavern’s bar, accompanied by a sign that said: “We’re sorry the trout died. Your $ can put a trout back in Floyd’s ponds. Woody Creek wants the world to know we don’t think killing trout is a way to solve the problems. Let’s put the trout back, and then we will talk about the differences.” Thompson, resentful of innuendos that he might have been behind the fish poisoning, offered a $500 reward to anyone who could clear up the mystery and said that perhaps he should poison some of his peacocks.

The collection jar had just begun to fill with bills when Watkins’s fish story began to unravel. A disaffected Beaver Run Ranch employee quit his job, and soon he was signing a sheriff’s affidavit testifying that the night before the trout kill, Watkins’s twenty-three-year-old son, Lance, and Roberto, the Mexican foreman, poured from four to five gallons of an algaecide called Cutrine Plus into the fish ponds. Cutrine Plus is a copper-based chemical normally used to control algae growth.