Kingdom of Fear (18 page)

“Chemists have told us that the water from the ponds had a copper content that was a zillion times the lethal level for trout,” Sheriff Braudis reported at a Tavern meeting of the Woody Creek Caucus, an informal assembly of valley landowners and residents that includes both Watkins and Thompson. The sheriff’s investigation concluded that the ponds had been poisoned not by antisocial outsiders but “by accident,” by Watkins’s own son and his Mexican majordomo.

“We have a difference of opinion here,” Watkins defiantly told his neighbors, to hoots of derisive
laughter. Refusing to accept the sheriff’s verdict, he cited his own fish biologist, Dr. Harold Hagen, who insisted that the level of Cutrine Plus in the water could not have been enough to massacre the trout. More hoots. “My ranch is different from George Stranahan’s or yours, but it doesn’t make any difference,” Watkins finally blurted out. “Do you mean I don’t have the right to paint my house pink if I want to? And you have a right to paint your house blue?” Referring to one of Thompson’s accusations that only a “vampire or a werewolf” would want to live in his house, Watkins said, “Well, I’m neither a vampire nor a werewolf, but I can tell you one thing: I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in Hunter’s house. But I don’t care if he lives there.”

Everyone cracked up, and in the spirit of goodwill that reigned until the end of the meeting, Thompson withdrew his original charge about the Watkins house. “I apologize for the vampire thing,” he said. “I was in a weird mood. But we are not talking about whether we like or dislike your house. No one is oppressing you. It is not about individual rights. We all live in this valley; this is a one-road community. We all have to live here, you included, and we are sliding into weird squabbles here. But the point is that we don’t want to see the life of this valley poisoned—that is as bad as poisoning fish.”

. . . “The truth is that Woody Creek has become urbanized in the last twenty years,” Sheriff Braudis says rather sadly. “I’ve told Hunter that, and I’ve told him he can’t be out shooting on the road as he used to. His neighbors are complaining more and more about his peacocks screeching and the gunshots in the night. Today Woody Creek is
different. What is happening now is that the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires.”

Thompson knows this, of course, and says that perhaps if he could afford to move—and could find somewhere as interesting to move to—he would. But he can’t and he won’t. Sometimes, though, he gets tired. “Living out here like this doesn’t go with being pushed around and run over by yo-yos,” he says. “It isn’t that you can’t win against them—it is that you don’t want to fight them all the time. I don’t mind fucking with Floyd, but that is not my job. If both of us are going to continue to live in this valley, he is going to have to learn that he has to live with us more than we have to live with him.”

As of this writing, Watkins has imported two Bengal tigers to inhabit the new caged run along his driveway. “Everyone is holding their breath while we wait to find out what’s going to be next,” says Guenin. “We have reached the ultimate in ridiculousness.” Hunter S. Thompson, meanwhile, is talking about getting some elephants.

That is the famous story of Floyd and the Giant
Porcupine,
as told by my good friend Loren Jenkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for
Newsweek
and
The Washington Post
and currently Foreign News Editor for NPR. . . . Back then, in 1990, he was editor-owner of the venerable
Aspen Times
and I was a major stockholder in a slick new magazine he started in New York called
SMART.

In truth, I was probably a minor stockholder, but I had a keen personal interest in it—a profoundly
vested
interest, which I immediately put to good use when I was suddenly threatened with the possibility of going to Federal Prison on RICO charges of attempted/premeditated Murder with Intent to Kill, felony possession and public use at midnight of automatic weapons, and a fistful of other degrading charges ranging from Dangerous Drugs to Animal Cruelty and Gross Sexual Imposition.

It was an extremely bad moment, on its face, and many people said I was
done for.
“He’s gone too far this time,” they said. “What kind of dangerous maniac would attack a man’s home with machine guns in the dead of night and then poison all of his fish the next day?”

Well, shucks. Only a
real
vicious dope fiend, I guess, some white-trash shithead with nothing left to lose. The jails are full of those bastards. Kill them all at once, for all I care.

It was not easy for me to retain a reputable attorney under those circumstances. Nobody wanted to touch it.

A mood of desperation settled over the Owl Farm. My girlfriend went off to Princeton, and I was left alone to barricade myself inside the compound and wait for the attack I knew was coming. I was receiving daily ultimatums from the ATF and the District Attorney. They wanted
all
my guns immediately or they would come out with a SWAT team and get them. The fat was in the fire.

(Lalia Nabulsi)

. . .

My mood became dangerously confrontational in those weeks. I was angry and lonely and doing a lot of target shooting day and night. My friends worried that I was being pushed over the edge by this constant barrage of threats and sudden death by violence. I was always armed and sullen, living from moment to moment and ripped to the tits on my own adrenaline. I look at Deborah’s photos from that feverish time and think, Ye fucking gods. This man appears to be criminally insane. It looks like some horrible flashback from
Reefer Madness
and
The Crays
and
Scarface
and
Boogie Nights
all at once. The photos still give me the creeps.

God damn it. I have bitten the front of my tongue again! Why? What have I eaten tonight that would cause me to draw blood from my own tongue? Where is the Percodan? Where is Anita? What is that noise in the bushes? Why am I so crazy all the time?

There was a time when I was vaguely worried by questions like these, but no longer. There are some questions that you can only worry about for
so
long, until finally they become meaningless . . . and it is never healthy to start questioning your own sanity. Being free and happy on the street is evidence enough of sanity these days.

Why is it that so many people have gone insane since the end of the American Century and the horrible Bush family was restored to power? Why is the teenage suicide rate going up? Is the President a clone? Is my car going to explode? Why does my sweetheart suddenly have all these lewd tattoos on her body?

(EDITOR’S NOTE)

Wait a minute. Time out! Why am I writing all these things on this primitive red electric typewriter when I can read them all in real time on the goddamn overloaded Internet with the flick of a mouse or a button? Am I a Fool? Have I been bogged down in Alzheimer’s all these years? What does it all mean, Homer?
Okay. Back to business. The Giant Porcupine story did not go away. Finally, to avoid deadly violence and another five years in prison, I was compelled to sacrifice my precious Smyser Nazi machine gun—I chopped it up with a heavy industrial grinder and had it formally delivered to the forces of law and order in a large white bag filled with poison grease that would eat the flesh off of anyone who touched it.

And that was that, as I recall. It was never mentioned again, and neither was the Porcupine. My new assistant arrived on Xmas—on loan from the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications—and I settled down, as it were, to finishing my long-overdue book,
Songs of the Doomed,
which was still only half written—another deadline agony. They are always painful. . . .

. . .

Christmas came and went in a frenzy of work. The big snow fell and the thermometer plunged to 10 or 15 below zero. The Democrats had lost another election and Bush was still the new President. But not much had changed since the 80s, when the looting of the Treasury was running in high gear and the U.S. Military was beginning to flex its newfound money-muscle. When, everywhere you looked, the flag-suckers were in charge.

We invaded a bunch of tiny helpless countries like Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama, just for the practice, and it was about that time that I went to work as a columnist for the Hearst-owned San
Francisco Examiner
and discovered feminist pornography and moved to Sausalito with Maria.

It was a wild and savage time, Bubba. All hell broke loose, in a phrase. . . . Moving down the mountain has always been dangerous for me, because of the Space problem, but San Francisco in the 1980s was a genuine Adult Dose.

I was shocked. In 1981 I was 44 years old and I saw myself in the mirror as a grizzled veteran of many wars, untold violence, a respectable eight or nine jails all over the world. I had ridden the wild beast of Passion through so many jungles and nightmares and devastating personal disasters that I felt about 200 years old. My heart was strong, but my body was scarred and broken and warped from a life-time
of dangerous confrontations. . . . I was old beyond my years, as they say, and I had developed a curious habit of survival. It was the only way I knew, and I was getting pretty good at it, on the evidence. . . .

I had even survived my time as Night Manager of the depraved O’Farrell Theatre, along with being arrested seven times in six weeks for crimes that you can’t avoid committing when the Police are admittedly tracking you 24 hours a day and routinely busting you for things like Open Container and running yellow lights and being naked at night in Golden Gate Park for no apparent reason.

Ho ho. Of course there were reasons. There are always
reasons.
Even the blood-thirsty Manson family had reasons. They were stupid murdering swine, for one, and they also had way too much Time on their hands.

My own situation was exactly the opposite. I had too much Action on my hands. I was a notorious best-selling author of weird and brutal books and also a widely feared newspaper columnist with many separate agendas and many powerful friends in government, law enforcement, and sociopolitical circles.

I was also drunk, crazy, and heavily armed at all times. People trembled and cursed when I came into a public room and started screaming in German. It was embarrassing. . . . Maria and I spent more and more time hiding out in obscure places like Stinson Beach or Harding Park in the fog belt and even the Crime-ridden San Bruno Municipal Parking Garage.

It was a sweet time, all in all. In some ways it was a depraved and terrifying adventure in the darkest side of life, and at least half the time it was like being shot out of a beautiful cannon in some kind of X-rated Peter Pan movie. I would definitely
do it again. . . .

Hi folks, my name is Marvin and I’m here to sell you this amazing beautiful old typewriter, which is guaranteed to do for you exactly what it has done for me. This one is a
monster,
folks. Writing a book with this thing is like sitting in a pool of LSD-25 and suddenly feeling yr. nuts on fire. . . . Yes sir, that is a
lifetime guarantee.
Think about it. . . .

So let me ask
you
a fat little question, friends, and I want you to
think
about this real carefully before you spit out yr. answer—this one is BIG. This is the one query you are going to
have
to answer when you come face to face with GOD ALMIGHTY!

He will ask: “What can I
do
for you, boy? What is the
one
thing you could ask me to do for you
right now???
What is it? WHAT?
Speak up!
NOW! Or I will send you straight to Hell. . . .

What will you
say,
brother? What is the one true answer you will give to Almighty God when you get your final chance? And
remember
—he will Judge you by yr. answer. He will
JUDGE you!
And if you say the wrong thing, you will
suffer
for it. You will eat shit and
die.

(Long pause filled with weeping and babbling and noise of chairs being pushed around. . . .)

OKAY! OKAY, brother—Relax and feel happy. Fear not, for I am with you and
I will tell you the answer!
Hallelujah
Mahalo.
You are saved!

THE ANSWER YOU WILL GIVE TO GOD ALMIGHTY WHEN HE COMES TO JUDGE YOUR FATE IS Yes Yes Yes, yr. honor. I thought you’d never ask. What I want, of course, is a BRAND-NEW WILD AND SUPERCOOL MODEL 22 IBM SELF-CORRECTING FIRE-ENGINE RED MAGNUM SELECTRIC TYPEWRITER exactly like this one! JUST LIKE MINE. . . . That is what you will say in yr. magic moment of judgment.

Help me, Lord, for I am watching Gail Palmer’s movies again. It is a desperate habit that I formed many years ago when I was preparing to go to Trial. That is always an awkward moment in a smart man’s life. I was looking down the barrel of the end of the world, as I knew it. And I understood that I was coming to a major Fork in my road of life—to live
free
like an otter, or to die like a stupid young bee in the web of the federal law-enforcement system. There was no middle way. I had no choice. The deal was going down.