Kingdom of Fear (15 page)

“The one they pay me to enforce, goddamnit. The one that says you can’t go swimmin’ out here at night.”

“Well. . .” I said, taking off my watch and stuffing it into one of my crusty white basketball shoes. . . . “What happens if I just jump into the pool and swim, anyway?”

“You gonna do that?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m sorry to hassle you, but it’s necessary. My nerves are all twisted up, and the only way I can relax is by coming out here by myself and swimming laps.”

He shook his head sadly. “Okay, but you’re gonna be breakin’ the law.”

“I doubt it.”

“What?”

“The way I see it,” I said, “about twenty feet of this pool over there on the side near the ocean is on public property.”

He shrugged. “I’m not gonna argue with you about that. All I know is the law says you can’t swim out here at night.”

“Well, I’m going to,” I said. “What happens then?”

He turned away. “I’ll call the cops,” he said. “I’ll get fired if I don’t. And I’m sure as hell not comin’ in after you.”

“You could shoot me,” I said, walking over to the edge of the pool. “Blow me out of the water; claim you thought I was a shark.”

He smiled and turned away as I dove into the pool . . . and 15 or 20 laps later I looked up to see two city cops with flashlights pointing down at me. “Okay fella,” said one, “come on outta there. You’re under arrest.”

“What for?”

“You know,” said the other. “Let’s go.”

They took me up to the lobby to see the night manager, who declined to press charges when he realized I was a paying hotel guest.

My bill was running around $85 a day at that point and, besides that, I was registered as “press.” So the matter was dismissed without rancor when I agreed to go back to my room.

We went through the same motions 24 hours later, and also on the third & fourth night . . . but on the fifth night, for some reason, the pool guard said nothing at all when I appeared. I said “hello” and started taking off my clothes, expecting him to head for the house phone on that pole out in the middle of the patio that he’d used on the other nights . . . but he just stood there and watched me dive in. Then he spent the next 45 minutes pointedly ignoring me . . . and at one point, just as dawn was coming up, he chased a videotape crew away from the pool when they tried to film me swimming. When they asked why I could swim and they couldn’t even walk around on the patio, he just shook his head and pointed his billy club toward the exit door.

I never asked him why. When I finally felt tired enough to sleep, I climbed out of the pool and yelled “thanks” as I waved to him and went back inside. He waved back, then resumed his bored pacing around the patio. Moments later, up in my oceanfront room on the sixth floor, I looked down and saw him leaning on the railing and staring out to sea at the sunrise, his billy club dangling idly from his right wrist and his cop’s hat pushed back on his head. I wondered what he was thinking about: A young black “private” cop, maybe 25 or 30 years old, spending every night of the week, all night—8:00
P.M.
to 8:00
A.M
.—enforcing a bogus law that probably didn’t even say, if you read it carefully, that nobody could swim in a big empty pool built illegally on public property (his beachfront) by the wealthy white owners of a Miami Beach hotel. During one of my conversations with the night manager at the Doral, he had hinted that the “no swimming” rule had its origins more in the hotel’s insurance policy than in any municipal law.

I watched the cop for a while, wondering if George McGovern upstairs in the penthouse might also be looking down at him . . . but probably not, I thought: McGovern might be up there, but if he was, I figured he was probably looking out to sea, squinting through the glass sight of that big .358 Weatherby Magnum he liked to use on sharks. It was a strange vision: the Democratic nominee, braced at sunrise on the ledge of his penthouse in Miami, scanning the dawn surf for the cruising,
thin gray edge of a Hammerhead fin; his rifle cocked, with the strap curled around his left arm and a Bloody Mary on the table beside him, killing sharks to keep his mind loose on his morning of triumph.

Indeed. McGovern had become The Candidate, and as the senior correspondent in the McGovern press corps, I felt a certain obligation to know exactly what he was doing and thinking at that hour. What would he have said if I had called up there on the phone and said I was about to go on NBC-TV and say McGovern had spent his morning blasting sharks with a huge Weatherby Magnum from the patio of his penthouse on top of the Doral Beach Hotel?

I had been tempted to make the call, if only to jerk him around a bit and make him get Frank Mankiewicz out of bed to draft a denial for the press conference that would almost certainly have followed such an ugly revelation . . . but I decided against it; I needed some sleep, and if I had made a call like that, I knew sleep would be out of the question. It would have generated trouble, and I figured it would probably result in getting myself publicly denounced as a Dangerous Dope Addict, a man given over in extremes to multiple hallucinations and other forms of aggressive personal dementia. . . . Between Mankiewicz and South Dakota Lieutenant Governor and McGovern crony Bill Dougherty, they would have hashed up a story that would not only have caused me to be discredited, but probably would have gotten me locked up indefinitely at the expense of The State, forced to undergo the Hickory Cure and perhaps even Shock Treatments. . . .

WHAT? Don’t mention that word!

Shock treatments? Shark-shooting? Well. . . . I get a sudden sense that we’re pushing it a bit here, so why not change the subject?

July 1972

HST addressing a voter registration ralley in Aspen with Sheriff Bob Braudis (center) and Mayor John Bennett (Steve Skinner)

Hunter asks a lot of his friends, but he gives so much.

—Anonymous

One early winter morning, I looked out the window to see Hunter walking to my door. I’ve never seen Hunter before 10:00
A.M.,
except, maybe, in court. He had come to ask me if I’d accompany him to Louisville, where he’d be honored with a key to the city the following day. I immediately agreed.

At 7:30 the next morning, Hunter was getting ready. We had an 8:30 flight. At eight he asked me what time I had. I said, “Eight.” He said, “Christ, I’ve got 7:30! That’s anti-airport time.” I knew what he meant.

We passed twenty cars in a row on a snow-packed mountain two-lane to make the plane. Hunter complimented my driving. I had a premonition that this road trip might involve some work.

It took all day to get to Louisville. Wayne Ewing had been on the ground, and the event seemed well organized. We checked into the hotel with pseudonyms: A. Lincoln. D. Boone. Hunter’s suite had a dining room and forty or fifty shrimp cocktails.

The next day the only obligation before the evening event was a “sound check” at the auditorium. Warren Zevon, Johnny Depp, Hunter’s son, Juan, many more of Hunter’s friends, and I were parts of the “show.”

Hunter was happy. He shot Zevon in the back with a huge fire extinguisher while Warren rehearsed at the piano. Scared the shit out of him.

We had a Sedan de Ville delivered to the auditorium so Hunter could “get away” at will. He wanted to buy a bullwhip to snap during the show. Two coeds from the university who had been assigned to assist guided us to a huge leather store.

Hunter didn’t like the action of any of the whips but bought the coeds shoes and jackets. We spent the afternoon cruising Basketball Alley, Cherokee Park, and memories from Hunter’s youth. No trouble, yet.

Shotgun art with Warren Zevon, Owl Farm, 1994 (Daniel E. Dibble)

Just before the big show, Hunter asked me to tell the organizer that he wouldn’t appear onstage until a brown paper bag, stuffed with cash, was delivered. Jesus. I started my request by saying: “I’m not used to this, but. . .” Two minutes before kickoff, I gave Hunter the bag. He asks a lot of his friends.

The ceremony was a high-quality love fest. A poetess read her ode to Hunter, and he became entranced. At 4:00
A.M.,
Hunter was behind the wheel, on the way to drop the woman off at her door.

Hunter threaded the pride of Detroit between granite retaining walls and huge elms with 1/32 of an inch to spare, driving on the goddamn sidewalk. I saw trouble everywhere.

“Hunter, get back on the street! Every yuppie in these antebellum mansions is dialing 911. What will you say to the cops?”

Hunter told me that I worry too much. We dropped the poetess off and went to the hotel. No trouble. No arrests.

On our last day in Louisville, Hunter visited Virginia, his mother, at her nursing home outside of the city. Juan and I and Bambi, a stripper, drove out with him. Bambi wanted Hunter to sign her ass so she could replicate it with a tattoo.

I dropped Juan and Hunter at the Episcopal Care Center and said I’d kill an hour in a bar with Bambi. I spent the hour looking for a bar in a
dry
county. Life is a gradual release from ignorance.

When we got back to the assisted living center, I escorted Bambi to the bathroom through the large day room. Her micro-skirt, high boots, and makeup caused a lot of old dudes to skid-stop their walkers.

Virginia had invited most of her relatives to visit with her and Hunter. He was ready to bolt from this “quality time” with Mom. We went back to the hotel, Bambi disappeared sans autograph, and Zevon and I had dinner. No trouble. No arrests.

The journey home started to get strange when, during climb-out, with the plane aimed at the sun at a forty-five-degree angle, Hunter clawed his way to the forward first-class head. Even though the cabin was full of United personnel, nobody said anything. Maybe it was because, just prior to this walk, Hunter let out a thirty-second, two-octave, head-splitting rebel yell. “Just what people like to hear during takeoff,” he said. After we got to flight level and the seat belt sign went
off, a line formed at the door to the restroom. The flight attendant came to me and asked, “Just what is your friend doing in there?”

Without hesitation, I lied. “He’s had bad diarrhea all day.”

“Oh, no problem,” she said, and herded the line, with whispers, aft.

A half hour later the door opened and Hunter sat down to my left. Just what were you doing in there?” I asked. “Oh, I took a little bath, shaved, changed clothes. Any problem?” No. No trouble, no arrest.

Hunter said that traveling with me was like traveling with Superman. Oliver always said that if Hunter got crazy at his own home, we could just leave. I couldn’t leave him in Louisville, I never would. It didn’t get that crazy.

Bob Braudis, Pitkin County Sheriff

(EDITOR’S NOTE)

Dr. Thompson was again arrested for political reasons in 1995 for leading a finely organized Voters Rebellion against the long-dominant Aspen Skiing Company, which was planning to enlarge and expand the local airport to accommodate huge new jetliners designed for “industrial tourism.” The SkiCo was allied with United Airlines and the local real-estate bund and corporate interests ranging from General Dynamics to Enron.

With these Goliaths of global industry behind them, the SkiCo anticipated no opposition at all to its November ballot initiative that would make the glorious new airport a legal, taxpayer-funded reality before the year 2000. . . . And there
was
no opposition, in fact, until the ever-contentious Woody Creek Caucus suddenly reversed itself and declared war on the new airport and everything it stood for—which included, by presumably universal agreement, giving the SkiCo and its corporate money changers the right to exploit the valley on a scale previously undreamed of in the ever-shrinking ski-resort business. Aspen is doomed, they warned, without drastic expansion, modernization, and a total commitment to a “new age commercialization.” It was a matter of life or death, economically.

Thompson’s epic eleventh-hour crusade
against
the airport expansion is a classic of Twentieth Century political organizing and catapulted the “No” vote from zero on October 1, to 50 percent on the night before the November 7 election—when the Doctor was arrested and jailed after addressing a rip-roaring Get Out the Vote rally in downtown Aspen that also featured the mayor, the sheriff, and a naked woman from Malibu who sold kisses.