Kingdom of Fear (2 page)

Hunter’s writing is, first of all, extremely funny; he ranks among the finest American humorists of all time. It is also, like all real humor, essentially serious. At its center resides a howling vortex of outrage and pain, which Hunter has managed to transmute into works of lasting value. These works have the additional virtue of being factually reliable, so long as he intends them to be. Hunter is a meticulous reporter who wasn’t joking when he told an audience at The Strand in Redondo Beach, “I am the most accurate journalist you’ll ever read.” Over the thirty years that we’ve been friends he has corrected my grammar and word usage more often, and more accurately, than I have corrected his—and not just because he is customarily armed with, say, the .454 Magnum pistol with which he shot up one of his many IBM Selectric typewriters. (“That gun really is too much, unless you want to destroy a Buick at two hundred yards,” he recalled, musing over the Selectric-shooting episode. “The bullet went through the typewriter at such a speed that it just pierced it, like a
ray
of some kind. You could hardly see where it hit. So I went and got a 12-gauge Magnum shotgun and some .00 buckshot. That produced a very different shot pattern.”) He is capable of sea-anchoring an otherwise sheets-to-the-wind drinking fiesta with studious ponderings about matters ranging from whether to credit a rumor, at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, that George McGovern was about to offer the second spot on his ticket to United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock (Hunter decided that he didn’t trust it, and as usual was proved right) to browsing thesaurus entries for the word
force.
(“They include
violence, vehemence, might, rigor, impetuosity, severity, fierceness, ferocity, outrage, eruption, convulsion, violent passion
. . . . It’s scary; kind of a word picture of
me.”)

But then, with little more than a barely perceptible signal, his works slip anchor and venture into a kind of hyperspace, where the facts shrink to a pinpoint like a cosmonaut’s view of the receding Earth, and
the goal shifts from factual literalness to a quest for deeper truth. Few readers can infallibly detect these points of departure, so many have raised the recurring question: How much of Hunter’s accounts of his own escapades—the fast cars, furious motorcycles, big-bore firearms and powerful explosives, the beautiful women and mind-warping drugs, the frightening misadventures and reckless flirtations with imminent disaster that have made “fear and loathing” part of the language—are exaggerated?

Not nearly enough for comfort.

Hunter is a lifelong student of fear—and a teacher of it, too. He titled a song that he wrote recently with Warren Zevon “You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared,” and he doesn’t feel that he knows you properly until he knows
that
person. On various occasions he has lunged at me with an evil-looking horse syringe; brandished loaded shotguns, stun guns, and cans of Mace; and taken me on high-speed rides to remote murder sites in the dead of night—and I doubt that he finds my reaction to such travails particularly interesting, since I have always calmly trusted him with my life. Those whom such treatment transforms into someone more apt to arouse Hunter’s infared sensors of viperous curiosity are in for an interesting evening.

At the same time, this howling violence freak, habitually loaded with potent intoxicants and a skull full of Beethoven-grade egomania, is studious and thoughtful, courtly and caring, curiously peace loving in his way, and unwaveringly generous. When he and I were young and broke, and I was fired from the last job I’ve ever held, the first thing he did was offer to send me four hundred dollars—which, although he didn’t know I knew it, was all the money he had left in the bank at the time. His fundamental decency helps explain how he has managed to survive his many excesses, as does the fact that he’s blessed with extraordinary reflexes. I once saw him accidentally knock a drink off a table with the back of his hand while reaching for a ringing phone and then catch it, unspilled, with the same hand on the way down. When we onlookers expressed astonishment at this feat, he said, “Yes, well, when we’re applauding my aptitude at making rescues, we should keep in mind who causes most of the accidents in the first place.” I’ve never met anyone who really knew Hunter who didn’t love him.

So what we have here is a thrilling if frightening man of action, as
spectacular and unpredictable as a bolt of lightning, being observed by an owl-like, oracular author who, although he shares his skin, is as perpetually surprised and bemused by his behavior as the rest of us are. In
Kingdom of Fear,
the interactions of this curious couple informs adventures like Hunter’s predawn excursion to his old friend Jack Nicholson’s house, his Jeep loaded with “all kinds of jokes and gimcracks” intended to gladden the hearts of Nicholson’s children: “In addition to the bleeding elk heart, there was a massive outdoor amplifier, a tape recording of a pig being eaten alive by bears, a 1,000,000-watt spotlight, and a 9-mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol with teak-wood handles and a box of high-powered ammunition. There was also a 40-million-candlepower parachute flare that would light up the valley for 40 miles for 40 seconds that would seem to anyone lucky enough to be awake at the time like the first blinding flash of a mid-range nuclear device that might signal the end of the world.” When the detonation of these devices from a precipice overlooking the Nicholson household fails to produce the anticipated joyful welcome, Hunter feels, disconcertingly, that he is “being snubbed.”

“I was beginning to have mixed feelings about this visit,” he confesses, while preparing to leave the bleeding elk heart on Nicholson’s doorstep, but he soon cheers up, wondering, “Why am I drifting into negativity?”

Which, if you drain off the color and turn down the volume, is pretty much the human condition. We do things without knowing why, wonder at the consequences, and know neither where we came from nor where we are going. Robert Frost wrote that we dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the center and knows. Hunter dances, all right, but rather than suppose, never ceases striving to know. His aim, as Joseph Conrad put it in his preface to
The Nigger of the Narcissus,
a work that mightily impressed a young Hunter (“That was something to roll around in my craw and compare myself to; it set a high standard”) is “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel . . . to make you see,” to bring us “encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

And that, in part, is why we love him.

I was watching the Denver—Oakland football game on TV last night when it was interrupted by a “BREAKING NEWS” bulletin from the FBI about unknown terrorists who were planning to destroy major targets all over the United States, perhaps within 24 hours. The FBI had learned this from trustworthy sources, the unseen voice explained. The American people were advised to be totally vigilant & ready to be evacuated at any moment. . . . Any person who talks suspiciously or looks dangerous should be reported to your local police or law enforcement agencies immediately! We were into
Condition Red.

“Shit! Not again!” cried my lawyer. “I have to fly to Boston tomorrow. What the fuck is going on in this country?”

“Never ask that question,” I warned her, “unless you already know the answer.”

“I do,” she said. “We are fucked, utterly fucked.”

The Author’s Note—if it exists at all—is invariably the worst and lamest part of any book, my own included. That is because it is necessarily the last and most blind-dumb desperate “final touch” that gets heaped into a book just before it goes to the printer—and the whole book, along with the two years of feverish work and anguish, is doomed to failure and ruin if the author won’t produce the note in time for publication.

Make no mistake about it. These 4 pointless pages of low-rent gibberish are by far the most important part of the book, they say Nothing else matters.

And so, with that baleful wisdom in mind, let us get on with the wretched task of lashing this “author’s note” together, for good or ill. I am not really in much of a mood to deal with it, no more than I am eager to take a course in how to write commercial advertising copy for my own good, at this time.

I savagely rejected that swill 40 years ago because I hated it and I hated the people who tried to make me do it. But so what, eh? We are somehow back to square one. . . . Is this a great country, or what?

. . .

The safe answer to that question is “Yes, and thank you for asking.” Any other answer will get your name on the waiting list for accommodations at Guantánamo Bay.

How’s that for a great country, dude? It’s all yours now, and good luck in jail. Cuba is a beautiful island, perhaps the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. They don’t call it
The Pearl of the Antilles
for nothing. The white sand beaches are spectacular, and every soft Caribbean breeze that you feel in the midnight air will speak to you of love and joy and atavistic romance.

Indeed, the future looks good for Cuba, especially with the
dollar-economy
that will come when the entire island is converted to a spacious concentration camp for the U.S.A., which is already happening. Little did President Theodore Roosevelt know, when he effectively annexed Cuba in 1906, that he had seized for his country what would later become the largest and most permanent prison colony in the history of the world.

Good old Teddy. Everything he touched was doomed to be beautiful. The man could do no wrong.

. . .

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Raiders were whipping the shit out of the heavily favored Broncos, who were wallowing in their own Condition Red. Their top-ranked Defense had gone all to pieces, and now they were being humiliated.

“George Bush is far greater than Roosevelt,” said my lawyer. “I wish we could be with him now.”

“You fool,” I snorted. “If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, he would
be so ashamed of this country that he would slit his own wrists.”

“So what? I still have to get to Boston tomorrow,” she muttered. “Will any planes be flying?”

Just then the football game was interrupted again—this time by a paid commercial about the terrors of smoking marijuana. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Now they say that if I smoke this joint, I’ll be guilty of murdering a federal judge—Hell, that’s a capital crime, the death penalty.”

“You’re right,” I replied. “And if you even
offer
the filthy little thing to
me,
I will be guilty under the law of
conspiring
to murder a federal judge.”

“Well, I guess we will have to stop smoking this stuff,” she said mournfully, as she handed the joint to me. “What else can I smoke to relax after a losing day in court?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Especially not Xanax: The Governor of Florida just sentenced his own daughter to jail for trying to buy Xanax.”

And so much for drug talk, eh? Even talking about drugs can get you locked up these days. The times have changed drastically, but not for the better.

. . .

I like this book, and I especially like the title, which pretty well sums up the foul nature of life in the U.S.A. in these first few bloody years of the post-American century. Only a fool or a whore would call it anything else.

It would be easy to say that we owe it all to the Bush family from Texas, but that would be too simplistic. They are only errand boys for the vengeful, bloodthirsty cartel of raving Jesus-freaks and super-rich money mongers who have ruled this country for at least the last 20 years, and arguably for the past 200. They take orders well, and they don’t ask too many questions.

The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation’s problems would be another 100 Year War.

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to
live
for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

Ho ho ho. Let’s not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discounted. The only freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters.

My life has been the polar opposite of safe, but I am proud of it and so is my son, and that is good enough for me. I would do it all over again without changing the beat, although I have never recommended it to others. That would be cruel and irresponsible and wrong, I think, and I am none of those things.

Whoops, that’s it, folks. We are out of time. Sorry. Mahalo.

HST

P.S. “The difference between the
almost-right
word & the
right
word is . . . the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

—Mark Twain