Kingdom of Fear (20 page)

. . .

I had been making cranberry and tequila, because the margarita mix had run out. I was in that kind of mood.
Let’s all have a few margaritas.
And she—that sot—she belted them down. We all did, no doubt; that’s what it was all about. Some margaritas to celebrate. . . . We were on about the third jug in the blender, or fourth jug, or fifth perhaps, when we switched to cranberry juice, and she had been getting louder and more randy. She was making open cracks to Cat, asking: “Who are you to Hunter?” She grabbed me and said, “Who’s this girl? Why is that other girl here? We don’t need her around.”

Shortly after Tim left, I reached for the phone and told the Witness,
“Let’s call a goddamn taxi for you.” As I dialed the “T”—in 925-TAXI—she rushed over, knocking the phone down, and cut me off. It was a quick, startling movement. She leaped, surprisingly fast for a rhino, from five or six feet away.

“Oh no, don’t let it end like this,” she pleaded. “You were always my hero.” I was curt with her; she had no business here. I had not encouraged her in any way.

I tried to call for the taxi a second time. She immediately reached over, a long reach, with her hairy tentacle of an arm to hang up the phone, and I was shocked that anybody would dare to do that. I screamed at her: “Get the fuck away!” and I think Cat actually restrained her. That was the second rush; she made three rushes on the phone. On this second one, the cabbie heard a bit of the ruckus. Later, we had to get him to testify, and it was very tricky—to establish that I did call and that she had cut it off.

She was warned twice, and then she had a pretty clear shot at me on the third attempt. I was trying desperately to get through to the taxi company. I could see her coming as I began to call again; this time I had just started to stand up. As she came rushing at me, her hip crashed into the cutting board and the cranberry juice fell onto the tile floor. The juice bottle went bouncing around and interfered with her rush. I was cursing her: “You goddamn idiot, what the fuck are you doing?” I was trying to get up, and she came at me then, angry, very angry now—she had hurt herself, hitting the cutting board.

I remembered the “prefrontal lift,” which is my most dependable way of ending an argument, particularly when somebody is coming at you. In this move you hit them in both shoulders with the heels of your hands, using a lifting motion. She was coming at me with speed, so I applied a little force. . . . Considerable motion was employed. Usually the attacker helps you a lot, because you can’t do a prefrontal lift on anybody who’s not coming at you. It doesn’t work and looks like a fag punch.

The prefrontal lift stopped her, although her feet were still moving, and she went back on her large butt with a kind of THUMP and ended up sitting on the floor against the refrigerator. I was satisfied. I had been cursing her for an hour. Everything she did was rotten;
her questions were stupid. “I want you out of here,” I said. There was never any pretense about this. She had a hideous penchant for coming in my area, hassling me, and she was very stupid. Big, stupid, and I was never entirely sure whether she had her own police agenda or not.

. . .

It was five days later at about ten o’clock in the morning when my neighbor appeared outside, right below the kitchen window. He was very agitated, and he looked like he had come in a hurry. I walked out and said, “Hi, come on it. Have a beer.” He said, “No, I can’t do that now.” He had left his car running. He seemed agitated and afraid of me. He was parked far away from where he usually did, with his car almost backed into the bushes.

“They’re going to come and search your house,” he said. I walked down the driveway, to get closer to him, and he mumbled, “Those bastards are . . . they’re coming out here . . . they’re gonna come get you with a search warrant.” I couldn’t put it together, so I asked, “What crime? What for? What are you talking about?”

The Night Manager, 1985 (Michael Nichols / Magnum Photos)

The night does not belong to Michelob; the night belongs to Hunter Stockton Thompson.

—Curtis Wilkie,
The Boston Globe

The noonday flight out of Denver is running late today, another brainless jam-up on the runways at Stapleton International—but no matter. The passengers are mainly commercial people—harried-looking middle-aged businessmen wearing blue shirts with white collars and studying Xerox copies of quarterly sales reports.

Across the aisle from me is a rumpled-looking potbellied wretch who looks like Willy Loman, slumped in his seat like two bags of rock salt and drinking Diet Coke. He is reading the money section of
USA Today.

In front of me are two giddy young boys wearing matching Walkman machines with built-in mikes that allow them to talk to each other through the headphones. They have removed the armrest between them and are now necking shamelessly and bitching occasionally at the stewardess about the lateness of our arrival. . . . The San Francisco airport is closed by violent weather and we are into a long holding pattern, which will cause them to miss an important business appointment. . . .

So What? We are all businessmen these days. Ray Stevens said it twenty years ago—“Take care of business, Mr. Businessman.”

. . .

The bell rang for me last night—about 13 hours ago, in fact, and now I am slumped and jittery like some kind of lost polar bear across two first-class seats on UAL #70, from Denver to San Francisco, and my business on this trip is definitely not the kind of all-American nuts-and-bolts hokum that I feel like sharing with my fellow businessmen across the aisle.

There is not a bull market for raw sex, amyl nitrites, and double-ended Greek dildos in the friendly skies of United.

Some people sell U-joints and others are in the meat service and human commodity business. But I have nothing in common with these people.

I am in the sex racket, which is worth about $10 billion a year on anybody’s computer—and I am flying to San Francisco to take on the whole city government; the mayor, the D.A., and the police chief.

(And now into SF again—the sleek green hills and the wretched white salt flats beyond the Berkeley Hills, etc.)

The Mitchell Brothers—Jim and Artie—will be waiting for me at the gate, along with my personal road manager, Jeff Armstrong, who is also executive vice president for The Mitchell Brothers Film Group.

These people drive big Mercedes-Benz sedans, the kind of cars favored by Josef Mengele and Ed Meese.

This is the fast lane, folks . . . and some of us like it here.

. . .

Whoops. We are out of gas now, dropping into Fresno like a falling rock—full flaps, reverse engines, then into full glide.

The pilot comes on the intercom and blames “crosswinds at SF International.” Bullshit. This is just another routine air-traffic control emergency. Free enterprise—a quick little taste of what’s coming in the next four years.

The passengers whine and moan, but nobody except me gets off in Fresno to make a phone call—even though the ramp sergeant makes a special effort to open a door.

Like sheep—and when I come back on the plane with a
Chronicle,
they turn their eyes away, shunning me. . . .

Finally the salesman sitting next to me asks if he can borrow the business section.

Why not? We are all businessmen these days. I am on my way to SF to market a rare porno film, and I am three hours late for a crucial screening with the Mitchell Brothers at their embattled headquarters on O’Farrell Street. The driver is waiting for me at the airport with an armored car and two fat young sluts from Korea.

. . .

We were somewhere on a main street in San Francisco, headed for the waterfront, when a woman walked directly in front of the car on her way across the street. I felt myself seizing up, unable to speak—until Maria poked my leg and whispered urgently: “Oh my god, Hunter, look at that beautiful spine!”

I was looking. We were halted for a red light, and the woman was walking briskly, also toward the waterfront, and now we were both watching her with unblinking eyes, not moving the car until some bastard honked and called me a
shithead
. . . . I honked my own horn and signaled as if I were stalled, waving him to come around me in the other lane, because I was helpless.

Just then the girl with the beautiful spine paused to examine what appeared to be a menu in the window of Vanessi’s, or perhaps the glass tank filled with seawater and large unhappy lobsters. Wonderful, I thought. I knew Vanessi’s well—and if this spine of a princess was going in there for dinner, so were we. I honked again, just to crank up the traffic confusion, and waved three more cars around me.

“You dirty motherfucker!” a well-dressed man screamed at me as he passed. “Eat shit and die!” He zoomed his huge SUV into low and roared away down the hill. But the other traffic had quickly adjusted to the problem and now ignored me, as if I were some kind of goofy construction project, leaving me in peace to keep an eye on this woman. It was good karma at the right moment, and I told Maria to make a note of it. I was feeling warm all over. “You asshole,” she said. “Get this car started! She is moving again. She is crossing Broadway and picking up speed, almost running. God, look at that spine.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her, reaching across the seat to grasp her thigh. “Hot damn, sweetie, what do you want to do with her?”

“Nothing
yet,” she hissed. “I just want to
look
at her.”

Indeed. It was just before dusk on Wednesday. The sun was still bright, the Bay was mildly choppy, and we were mercifully unburdened with appointments or professional responsibilities at the time. The day was a brand-new canvas.
Carpe diem.

. . .

The Goldstein situation developed very quickly, with no warning at all, about halfway through lunch at Pier 23 on a gray afternoon in mid-April, just a few days before the trial was set to begin. We had come through the general hysteria surrounding the “world premiere” on
The Grafenberg Spot,
and no disasters had happened. No scandals had erupted, nobody had been arrested, no personal or professional tragedies of any kind. I had lost my temper in public a few times and been rude to the local press, but so what? It was not my job to be nice. I was, after all, the Night Manager of the most notorious live sex theater in America, and my job was to keep it running. It was a strange obligation that I had somehow taken on, for good or ill, and if I failed, we might all go to jail.

Certainly the Mitchell Brothers would go, and the theater would probably be padlocked and all the fixtures sold to pay off the fines and the court costs. The lawyers painted a grim picture of disgrace, despair, and total unemployment for everybody, including me. Our backs were all to the wall, they said; Mayor Dianne Feinstein, now a senator, was full of hate and not in a mood to compromise. She had been trying to close the O’Farrell for most of her ten years in politics, and now she had everybody from Ed Meese and God to Militant Feminists and the president of the United States on her side. The deal was about to go down, they said. No more lap dancing in San Francisco, and never mind the busloads of Japs.

It was about this time, less than a week before the trial, that Al Goldstein arrived in town for a personal screening of the new film. It was bad timing, but there was no cure for it. Al is one of the certified big boys in the sex racket. He is the publisher of
Screw,
the film critic for
Penthouse,
and perhaps the one man in America whose opinion can
make or break a new sex film.
Penthouse
alone sells 4 million copies a month, at $2.95 each, and the prevailing retail price for X-rated video-cassettes is $69.95.

The wholesale net to the producer is about half that, or something like $3.5 million on sales of 100,000 in the first year—which is no big trick, with the combined endorsement of
Penthouse, Screw,
and Al Goldstein. So if only one percent of the people who buy
Penthouse
buy an X-rated videocassette that comes highly recommended by the magazine, the wholesale gross is going to be $1.5 million, before rentals. The retail gross will be about twice that—on a total investment of $100,000 or so in production costs and another $100,000 for promotion.

That is not bad money for a product that any three bartenders from St. Louis and their girlfriends can put together in a roadside motel across the river in Memphis. There is no shortage of raw talent in the industry, and posing naked in front of a camera is becoming more and more respectable. The line between Joan Collins and Marilyn Chambers is becoming very hazy. Not everybody on the street these days can tell you the difference between Jane Fonda in leotards and Vanessa Williams in chains.

I can. But that is a different matter, and it will take a while to explain it. We are dealing, here, with a genuinely odd contradiction in the social fabric. At a time when not only the new attorney general of the United States, and the president of the United States, and the president’s wife, and the president’s favorite minister, along with the Moral Majority and the Militant Feminists and the
TV Guide
and also the surly fat brute of a manager at the 7-Eleven store in Vernal, Utah, who refused to sell me a copy of
Playboy
at any price & then threatened to have me arrested when I asked why . . .