Kingdom of Fear (46 page)

Just then we passed two police cars parked on the side of the road, and I saw that we were going a hundred and three.

“Slow down!” Anita was screaming. “Slow down! We’ll be arrested. I can’t stand it!” She was sobbing and clawing at the air.

“Nonsense,” I said. “Those were not police. My radar didn’t go off.” I reached over to pat her on the arm, but she bit me and I had to pull over. The only exit led to a dangerous-looking section of Pismo Beach, but I took it anyway.

. . .

It was just about midnight when we parked under the streetlight in front of the empty Mexican place on Main Street. Anita was having a nervous breakdown. There was too much talk about jails and police and prisons, she said. She felt like she was already in chains.

I left the car in a crosswalk and hurried inside to get a taco. The girl behind the register warned me to get my car off the street because the police were about to swoop down on the gang of thugs milling around in front of the taco place. “They just had a fight with the cops,” she said. “Now I’m afraid somebody is going to get killed.”

We were parked right behind the doomed mob, so I hurried out to roust Anita and move the car to safety. Then we went back inside very gently and sat down in a booth at the rear of the room. I put my arm around Anita and tried to calm her down. She wanted gin, and luckily I still had a pint flask full of it in my fleece-lined jacket pocket. She drank greedily, then fell back in the booth and grinned. “Well, so much for that,” she chirped. “I guess I really went crazy, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said. “You were out of control. It was like dealing with a vampire.”

She smiled and grasped my thigh. “I am a vampire,” she said. “We have many a mile to go before we sleep. I am hungry.”

“Indeed,” I said. “We will have to fill up on tacos before we go any farther. I too am extremely hungry.”

Just then the waitress arrived to take our order. The mob of young Chicanos outside had disappeared very suddenly, roaring off into the night in a brace of white pickup trucks. They were a good-natured bunch, mainly teenagers with huge shoulders wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys and heads like half-shaved coconuts. They were not afraid of the cops, but they left anyway.

The waitress was hugely relieved. “Thank God,” she said. “Now
Manuel can live one more night. I was afraid they would kill him. We have only been married three weeks.” She began sobbing, and I could see she was about to crack. I introduced myself as Johnny Depp, but I saw the name meant nothing to her. Her name was Maria. She was seventeen years old and had lied about her age to get the job. She was the manager and Manuel was the cook. He was almost twenty-one. Every night strange men hovered around the taco stand and mumbled about killing him.

Maria sat down in the booth between us, and we both put our arms around her. She shuddered and collapsed against Anita, kissing her gently on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Nobody is going to be killed tonight. This is the night of the full moon. Some people will die tonight, but not us. I am protected.”

Which was true. I am a Triple Moon Child, and tonight was the Hunter’s Moon. I pulled the waitress closer to me and spoke soothingly. “You have nothing to fear, little one,” I told her. “No power on Earth can harm me tonight. I walk with the King.”

She smiled and kissed me gratefully on the wrist. Manuel stared balefully at us from his perch in the kitchen, saying nothing. “Rest easy,” I called out to him. “Nobody is going to kill you tonight.”

“Stop saying that!” Anita snapped, as Manuel sank further into himself. “Can’t you see he’s afraid?” Maria began crying again, but I jerked her to her feet. “Get a grip on yourself,” I said sharply. “We need more beer and some pork tacos to go. I have to drive the whole coast tonight.”

“That’s right,” said my companion. “We’re on a honeymoon trip. We’re in a hurry.” She laughed and reached for my wallet. “Come on, big boy,” she cooed. “Don’t try to cheat. Just give it to me.”

“Watch yourself,” I snarled, slapping her hand away from my pocket. “You’ve been acting weird ever since we left L.A. We’ll be in serious trouble if you go sideways on me again.”

She grinned and stretched her arms lazily above her head, poking her elegant little breasts up in the air at me like some memory from an old Marilyn Monroe calendar and rolling her palms in the air.

“Sideways?” she said. “What difference does it make? Let’s get out of here. we’re late.”

I paid the bill quickly and watched Maria disappear into the kitchen. Manuel was nowhere in sight. Just as I stepped into the street,
I noticed two police cars coming at us from different directions. Then another one slowed down right in front of the taco stand.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Anita. “They’re not looking for us.”

I seized her by the leg and rushed her into the Cadillac. There was a lot of yelling as we pulled away through the circling traffic and back out onto Highway 101.

My mind was very much on my work as we sped north along the coast to Big Sur. We were into open country now, running straight up the coast about a mile from the ocean on a two-lane blacktop road across the dunes with no clouds in the sky and a full moon blazing down on the Pacific. It was a perfect night to be driving a fast car on an empty road along the edge of the ocean with a half-mad beautiful woman asleep on the white leather seats and Lyle Lovett crooning doggerel about screwheads who go out to sea with shotguns and ponies in small rowboats just to get some kind of warped revenge on a white man with bad habits who was only trying to do them a favor in the first place.

. . .

I lost control of the Cadillac about halfway down the slope. The road was slick with pine needles, and the eucalyptus trees were getting closer together. The girl laughed as I tried to aim the car through the darkness with huge tree trunks looming up in the headlights and the bright white moon on the ocean out in front of us. It was like driving on ice, going straight toward the abyss.

We shot past a darkened house and past a parked Jeep, then crashed into a waterfall high above the sea. I got out of the car and sat down on a rock, then lit up the marijuana pipe. “Well,” I said to Anita, “this is it. We must have taken a wrong turn.”

She laughed and sucked on some moss. Then she sat down across from me on a log. “You’re funny,” she said. “You’re very strange—and you don’t know why, do you?”

I shook my head softly and drank some gin.

“No,” I said. “I’m stupid.”

“It’s because you have the soul of a teenage girl in the body of an elderly dope fiend,” she whispered. “That is why you have problems.” She patted me on the knee. “Yes. That is why people giggle with fear
every time you come into a room. That is why you rescued me from those dogs in Venice.”

I stared out to sea and said nothing for a while. But somehow I knew she was right. Yes sir, I said slowly to myself, I have the soul of a teenage girl in the body of an elderly dope fiend. No wonder they can’t understand me.

This is a hard dollar, on most days, and not many people can stand it.

Indeed. If the greatest mania of all is passion: and if I am a natural slave to passion: and if the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase—

Well, that explains a lot of things, doesn’t it? We need look no further. Yes sir, and people wonder why I seem to look at them strangely. Or why my personal etiquette often seems makeshift and contradictory, even clinically insane . . . Hell, I don’t miss those whispers, those soft groans of fear when I enter a civilized room. I know what they’re thinking, and I know exactly why. They are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that I am a teenage girl trapped in the body of a sixty-five-year-old career criminal who has already died sixteen times. Sixteen, all documented. I have been crushed and beaten and shocked and drowned and poisoned and stabbed and shot and smothered and set on fire by my own bombs. . . .

All these things have happened, and probably they will happen again. I have learned a few tricks along the way, a few random skills and simple avoidance techniques—but mainly it has been luck, I think, and a keen attention to karma, along with my natural girlish charm.

Oscar Acosta

Jeff Armstrong

Lisl Auman

Terri Bartelstein

Ed Bastian

Sean Bell-Thomson

Porter Bibb

Earl Biss

Patricia Blanchet

Bob Bone

Ed Bradley

Bob Braudis

Louisa Joe

Doug Brinkley

Judge Charles Buss

Sue Carolan

Jimmy Carter

Marilyn Chambers

Tim Charles

Bobby Colgan

John Clancey

Dalai Lama

Morris Dees

Benicio Del Toro

Kenny Demmick

Judge J. E. DeVilbiss

Robert Draper

Bob Dylan

Joe Edwards

Jeanette Etheridge

Colonel William S. Evans

Tim Ferris

Jennifer Geiger

Gerald Goldstein

William Greider

Stacey Hadash

Hal Haddon

David Halberstam

Paul Hornung

Abe Hutt

Walter Isaacson

Loren Jenkins

Juan, Jennifer, & Willy

Bill Kennedy

Ken Kesey

Maria Khan

Jerry Lefcourt

Lyle Lovett

Semmes Luckett

Jade Markus

David Matthews-Price

David McCumber

Terry McDonell

Gene McGarr

George McGovern

William McKeen

Michael Mesnick

Nicole Meyer

Jim Mitchell

Tim Mooney

Lou Ann Murphy

Laila Nabulsi

Lynn Nesbit

Jack Nicholson

Paul Oakenfold

Lionel Olay

Heidi Opheim

PJ. O’Rourke

Gail Palmer

Nicola Pecorini

Sean Penn

George Plimpton

Charlotte Rampling

Duke Rice

Keith Richards

Curtis Robinson

David Robinson

Terry Sabonis-Chafee

Shelby Sadler

Paul Semonin

Lauren Simonetti

Kevin Simonson

Madeleine Sloan

Harvey Sloane

Bill Smith

Michael Solheim

Ralph Steadman

Judy Stellings

Michael Stepanian

Geoffrey Stokes

George & Patti Stranahan

Richard Stratton

Jay Stuart

Davison Thompson

Sandy Thompson

Virginia & Jack Thompson

George Tobia

Oliver Treibick

Gerald “Ching” Tyrrell

John Walsh

Floyd Watkins

Curtis Wilkie

Andrew Wylie

Tony Yerkovich

Warren Zevon

The Too Much Fun Club

Jennifer Stroup, Marysue Rucci, Anita Bejmuk, Hunter S. Thompson,
Deborah Fuller, Wayne Ewing, Tara Parsons, David Rosenthal

H
UNTER
S. T
HOMPSON’S
books include
Fear and Loathing in America, Screwjack Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Proud Highway, Better Than Sex,
and
The Rum Diary
and
Kingdom of Fear.
A contributor to various national and international publications, including a weekly sports column for
espn.com
, Thompson lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colorado.

“There are only two adjectives writers
care about anymore—‘brilliant’ and
‘outrageous’—and Hunter Thompson has
a freehold on both of them.”
—Tom Wolfe

Fear
and Loathing in America
The Brutal Odyssey of an
Outlaw Journalist
0-684-87316-8
Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas;
twisting political reporting to new heights for
Rolling Stone;
and making sense of it all in the landmark
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.