Kingdom of Fear (8 page)

(Tom Corcoran)

I was halfway through training in the Air Force when I saw my first AF flying-team disaster. That was down in Florida, at Eglin AF Base, at a
practice
run for the annual “Firepower Demonstration.” Arthur Godfrey was there, as I recall, and it made him Sick. He didn’t do any more PR for the Air Force.

Help! Now I’m having flashbacks about when my best photographer went to cover the once-famous 24-Hour Formula One Grand Prix at Sebring & never came back to work. His name was George Thompson, a very talented boy. He was smashed into hamburger when he was trotting across an “Exit ramp” with his camera. Jesus! I had to write his Obituary for the Sports Section that night. . . . It happened about two weeks after that ungodly disaster at the Firepower Demonstration. I almost went crazy—drunk & AWOL for two (2) months, in Tallahassee & Mobile & New Orleans. I went from Top Gun to Psychiatric Observation Status in what seemed like the Speed of
Light.

Sad story, eh? Yeah, but I was Young then. I could bounce like a gum rubber ball. It was Fun. Girls loved me and queers gave me “speed” in New Orleans. I had a fast MG/A sports car that I would drive out on the beach in Destin & swim naked with Officers’ wives at midnight. Colonel Hugo’s beautiful daughter let me stay for two weeks at her slick condo in Mobile while the Air Police were looking for me. She had a swimming pool shaped like a football in her backyard, and the neighbors called the Police on us when we ran around naked & fucked like sea-weasels on the diving board. . . . Sally loved football players. She thought she could stay Young forever by sucking the juice of Eternal Life out of hard young bodies. She called it “The Milk of Paradise” and she rubbed it on her face every night.

Sally was 25 years old & she looked like one of those racy Brazilian girls who play volleyball on the beach in Rio on Sunday mornings. Her father was a bird-Colonel at the Air Force base, and her mother was a Southern Debutante. She had a very young son who laughed crazily when I would pick him up by his ankles and swing him around in fast circles like a pinwheel. . . . I forget his name now, but he liked me & he thought my name was Air-Man. His mother took me to dinner at fancy bars and Yacht Clubs in Mobile. She drove a sky-blue Cadillac,
and she loved to get naked & drive fast at night on the Pensacola Highway—in my car or hers, which was far too heavy to drive out on the beach & park between the sand dunes while we swam in the Gulf of Mexico on moonlit nights.

Sally had a day job somewhere in downtown Mobile, but she would always call in sick when I came to visit. She would say that she’d “hurt her back on the diving board” and she could hardly walk, for the pain. She would take off five or six days at a time when I was there, but she never worried about it. She said they could do without her for a few days, and they knew she had a Bad Back—which was true, but not because she was crippled.

No. It was because of that nasty sandpaper surface on the diving board at her pool. It rubbed her spine raw when we got drunk and screwed on it at night for two or three hours at a time. We would wake up in the morning with blood all over the sheets from bouncing around on that goddamn diving board all night. . . . The pain made her cry, and I could barely walk the next day because of the bleeding wounds on my knees and my elbows. I had bleeding scabs on my knees for most of that summer, and when I finally went back to work on the newspaper, I had trouble walking around the office. The other editors laughed at me, but my boss Colonel Evans was a serious Military Man and he hated the sight of a man with fresh blood on his pants limping around his office.

“Goddamnit, Hunter!” he would scream. “What in the name of Shit is wrong with you? There’s blood all over the floor in the bathroom! I slipped and almost
fell down
when I went in there to piss!”

I told him it was because I had to play football on the weekends, and the Base football field was in such bad shape that I sometimes fell down when I was running out for a pass from Zeke Bratkowski or Max McGee.

“O my God!” he would scream. “You’re a goddamn Fool, aren’t you! Why in Shit are you trying to play
football
at this time of year? Do you have
Shit
for brains? . . . This is goddamn
baseball season. . . .
Are you too stupid to know that it’s
baseball
season? . . . Are you some kind of Human JACKASS?”

“No,” I would say. “I’m the
Sports Editor.
” (Which was true.) The Colonel hated it, but his hands were tied. The Eglin Eagles were the
defending Champions of what was the U.S. Worldwide Military Command, in those days, and we expected to win it again. Football was
Big
at Eglin Air Force Base, very big. The football team was a perennial powerhouse, famous all over the world—at least everywhere in the world where the United States of America had a functioning military base, and that was just about Everywhere.

Playing for Eglin was like playing for the Green Bay Packers, and star players were no less pampered. ROTC was a mandatory course for all student/athletes at taxpayer-funded universities in the nation, back then—even for All-American football stars at schools like Alabama & Ohio State—and all ROTC student/athletes were required to serve for at least two (2) years of active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces. . . . They had No Choice—unless they qualified for a Draft Exemption for Moral or Medical reasons, which carried a life-long, career-crippling Stigma—so most of them did their 2 years “in uniform” & then got on with their lives in the Real World, like everybody else.

G
EORGE
P
LIMPTON:
Reading
The Proud Highway,
I got the impression you always wanted to be a writer.

H
UNTER
S. T
HOMPSON
: Well, wanting to and having to are two different things. Originally I hadn’t thought about writing as a solution to my problems. But I had a good grounding in literature in high school. We’d cut school and go down to a café on Bardstown Road where we would drink beer and read and discuss Plato’s parable of the cave. We had a literary society in town, the Athenaeum; we met in coat and tie on Saturday nights. I hadn’t adjusted too well to society—I was in jail for the night of my high school graduation—but I learned at the age of fifteen that to get by you had to find the one thing you can do better than anybody else . . . at least this was so in my case. I figured that out early. It was writing. It was the rock in my sock. Easier than algebra. It was always work, but it was worthwhile work. I was fascinated early on by seeing my byline in print. It was a rush. Still is.

When I got to the Air Force, writing got me out of trouble. I
was assigned to pilot training at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola in northwest Florida, but I was shifted to electronics . . . advanced, very intense, eight-month school with bright guys . . . I enjoyed it, but I didn’t want to end up on the DEW line—the “distant early warning” line—somewhere in the Arctic Circle. Besides, I’m afraid of electricity. So I went up to the base education office one day and signed up for some classes at Florida State. I got along well with a guy named Ed and I asked him about literary possibilities. He asked me if I knew anything about sports, and I told him I had been the editor of my high school paper. He said, “Well, we might be in luck.” It turned out that the sports editor, a staff sergeant, of the base newspaper, the
Command Courier,
had been arrested in Pensacola and put in jail for public drunkenness, pissing against the side of a building; it was the third time, and they wouldn’t let him out.

So I went to the base library and found three books on journalism. I stayed there reading until it closed. I learned about headlines, leads: who, when, what, where, that sort of thing. I barely slept that night. This was my ticket to ride, my ticket to get out of that damn place. So I started as an editor. I wrote long Grantland Rice—type stories. The sports editor of my hometown
Louisville Courier-Journal
always had a column, left-hand side of the page—so I started a column.

By the second week I had the whole thing down. I could work at night. I wore civilian clothes, worked off base, had no hours, but I worked constantly. I wrote not only for the base paper but also the local paper,
The Playground News.
I’d put things in the local paper that I couldn’t put in the base paper. Really inflammatory shit. I wrote for a professional wrestling newsletter. The Air Force got very angry about it. I was constantly doing things that violated regulations. I wrote a critical column about how Arthur Godfrey, who’d been invited to the base to be the master of ceremonies at a firepower demonstration, had been busted for shooting animals from the air in Alaska. The base commander told me: “Goddamnit, son, why did you have to write about Arthur Godfrey that way?”

When I left the Air Force I knew I could get by as a journalist.
So I went to apply for a job at
Sports Illustrated.
I had my clippings, my bylines, and I thought that was magic—my passport. The personnel director just laughed at me. I said, “Wait a minute. I’ve been sports editor for
two
papers.” He told me that their writers were judged not by the work they’d done, but where they’d done it. He said, “Our writers are all Pulitzer Prize winners from
The New York Times.
This is a helluva place for you to
start.
Go out into the boondocks and improve yourself.”

GP:
You eventually ended up in San Francisco. With the publication in 1967 of
Hell’s Angels,
your life must have taken an upward spin.

HST: All of a sudden I had a book out. At the time I was twenty-nine years old and I couldn’t even get a job driving a cab in San Francisco, much less writing. Sure, I had written important articles for
The Nation
and
The Observer,
but only a few good journalists really knew my byline. The book enabled me to buy a brand-new BSA G50 Lightning—it validated everything I had been working toward. If
Hell’s Angels
hadn’t happened, I never would have been able to write
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
or anything else. To be able to earn a living as a freelance writer in this country is damned hard; there are very few people who can do that.
Hell’s Angels
all of a sudden proved to me that, Holy Jesus, maybe I can do this. I knew I was a good journalist. I knew I was a good writer, but I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing.

GP:
The San Francisco scene brought together many unlikely pairs—you and Allen Ginsberg, for instance. How did you come to know Allen during this period?

HST: I met Allen in San Francisco when I went to see a marijuana dealer who sold by the lid. I remember it was ten dollars when I started going to that apartment and then it was up to fifteen. I ended up going there pretty often, and Ginsberg—this was in Haight-Ashbury—was always there looking for weed too. I went over and introduced myself and we ended up talking a lot. I told him about the book I was writing and asked if he would help with it. He helped me with it for several months; that’s how he got to know the Hell’s Angels. We would also go down to Ken Kesey’s in La Honda together.

One Saturday, I drove down the coast highway from San Francisco to La Honda and I took Juan, my two-year-old son, with me. There was this magnificent crossbreeding of people there. Allen was there, the Hell’s Angels—and the cops were there too, to prevent a Hell’s Angels riot. Seven or eight cop cars. Kesey’s house was across the creek from the road, sort of a two-lane blacktop country compound, which was a weird place. For one thing, huge speakers were mounted everywhere in all the trees, and some were mounted across the road on wires, so to be on the road was to be in this horrible vortex of sound, this pounding, you could barely hear yourself think—rock ‘n’ roll at the highest amps. That day, even before the Angels got there, the cops began arresting anyone who left the compound. I was by the house; Juan was sleeping peacefully in the backseat of the car. It got to be outrageous: The cops were popping people. You could see them about a hundred yards away, but then they would bust somebody very flagrantly, so Allen said, “You know, we’ve got to do something about this.” I agreed, so with Allen in the passenger’s seat, Juan in the back sleeping, and me driving, we took off after the cops that had just busted another person we knew, who was leaving just to go up to the restaurant on the corner. Then the cops got after
us.
Allen at the very sight of the cops went into his hum, his
om,
trying to hum them off. I was talking to them like a journalist would: “What’s going on here, Officer?” Allen’s humming was supposed to be a Buddhist barrier against the bad vibes the cops were producing, and he was doing it very loudly, refusing to speak to them, just
“Om! Om! Om!”
I had to explain to the cops who he was and why he was doing this. The cops looked into the backseat and said, “What is that back there? A child?” and I said, “Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s my son.” With Allen still going,
“Om,
” we were let go. He was a reasonable cop, I guess—checking out a poet, a journalist, and a child. Never did figure Ginsberg out, though. It was like the humming of a bee. It was one of the weirdest scenes I’ve ever been through, but almost every scene with Allen was weird in some way or another.

GP:
Did any other Beat Generation authors influence your writing?

HST: Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer . . . in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend. Kerouac taught me that you could get away with writing about drugs and get published. It was
possible,
and in a symbolic way I expected Kerouac to turn up in Haight-Ashbury for the cause. Ginsberg was there, so it was kind of natural to expect that Kerouac would show up too. But, no—that’s when Kerouac went back to his mother and voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. That’s when my break with him happened. I wasn’t trying to write like him, but I could see that I could get published like him and break through the Eastern establishment ice. That’s the same way I felt about Hemingway when I first learned about him and his writing. I thought, Jesus, some people can
do
this. Of course Lawrence Ferlinghetti influenced me—both his wonderful poetry and the earnestness of his City Lights bookstore in North Beach.