Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (48 page)

First you'll have to acquire a woman and put her to work immediately, preferably in a high-paying job. This is mandatory, regardless of your solvency, because you will almost instantly go broke. Next, you'll have to find a dwelling for little or no rent. For example, I pay $15 a month for a three-room house on the California coast.

Once you've solved these two very basic problems you'll run into myriad smaller ones demanding constant attention. For instance, instead of cutting the grass—which would take quite a bit of time—I found a wounded deer, nursed it back to health, and now tether it on the lawn and let it eat its fill. Instead of buying meat, I simply walk back into the hills and shoot a deer or a wild boar. Instead of buying vegetables I force a woman to tend a garden and prepare all the meals. Instead of drinking whiskey I drink wine and charge it to the mailman. As for anything else I need, I simply invite people down from San Francisco for a weekend and give them a list of things I require to maintain my hospitality.

This should give you an idea of the sort of thing you'll be dealing with. In addition, there are two golden rules: First, never hesitate to use force, and, second, abuse your credit for all it's worth. If you remember these,
and if you can keep your wits about you, there's a chance you'll make it. Provided, of course, you can write like a champion.

That's about it, Mr. Shepherd. If I can be of any further assistance, just let me know.

Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson

After Lieutenant Colonel Frank Campbell wrote in March that Sterling Lord had taken him on as a client, Thompson decided to see if the “dean” of New York literary agents would be interested in his fiction as well. Unconventional writers of the time flocked to Lord because he had managed to sell Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
to Viking Press
.

June 15, 1961
Manor House
Big Sur, California

Sterling Lord
15 E. 48
^th
NYC

Dear Mr. Lord:

Enclosed are six stories and one article that you might be able to sell. For one reason or another—and I admit to the possibility that my fiction is simply unsalable—my present agent has not been able to place my work in the public eye.

Some of this stuff is currently circulating and you will not be free to sell it until I get my hands on the original copies—which I can and will do the moment I hear from you.

To be specific, the short Claude Fink
¹³
piece is now at
Contact
. They don't pay anything, so I don't suppose it interests you. The Big Sur article is at
Rogue
. If they want it, and if you want to deal with them, I'll be happy to give you the commission. “Hit Him Again, Jack” and “Whither Thou Goest” are in the hands of my agent. If either of them interests you I will get them.

Ignoring for a moment the possibility that my work is totally useless, I think it seems fitting that someone should buy it. Whenever I inquire of my present agent as to the whereabouts of my stories I find they have just been bounced by
The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Gentlemen's Quarterly
, or some other worthy journal that I would not even read, much less try to
write for. No doubt these are fine markets, but I have a feeling they are not avid for stories full of flogging, humping, goring and soul-rot.

But that is your field; I don't know a damn thing about markets and, aside for the fact that Rust Hills has told me never to submit anything to
Esquire
(under my own name), I have had little contact with them. This is fine, except that it has put me in a state of great need. As a matter of fact I am mired in a bog of poverty and am counting on these stories to pull me at least part of the way out. At the moment I'm working on a novel called “The Rum Diary,” which should be finished by late summer. If you would care to deal with it, by all means let me know. It will be a whomping thing and will undoubtedly draw poor comment from
Gentlemen's Quarterly, Pop, One, Ebony
and a good many others.

At any rate, please let me hear from you.

Thanks,
Hunter S. Thompson

Lord had declined to take Thompson on as a client
.

June 26, 1961
Manor House
Big Sur, California

Dear Mr. Lord:

Fortunately, the check for the Big Sur article took the sting out of your pompous and moronic rejection of my work.

Here's the 20 cents it cost you to send the damn things back. I don't want to feel that I owe you anything, because when I see you I intend to cave in your face and scatter your teeth all over Fifth Avenue.

I think we are coming to a day when agents of your sort will serve no useful function except as punching bags.

Cordially,
Hunter S. Thompson

At last Thompson placed a feature article in a national magazine:
Rogue,
a men's journal similar in appeal to
Playboy,
which paid him a handsome $350 for the following controversial exposé on the
real
Big Sur, with its famed “baths” the chic new meeting place for San Francisco homosexuals
.

“B
IG
S
UR
: T
HE
G
ARDEN OF
A
GONY
”

If half the stories about Big Sur were true this place would long since have toppled into the sea, drowning enough madmen and degenerates to make a pontoon bridge of bodies all the way to Honolulu. The vibration of all the orgies would have collapsed the entire Santa Lucia mountain range, making the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah seem like the work of a piker. The western edge of this nation simply could not support the weight of all the sex fiends and criminals reputed to be living here. The very earth itself would heave and retch in disgust–and down these long, rocky slopes would come a virtual cascade of nudists, queers, junkies, rapists, artists, fugitives, vagrants, thieves, lunatics, sadists, hermits and human chancres of every description.

They would all perish, one and all—and, if justice were done a whole army of tourists and curiosity-seekers would perish with them. All the people who come here “for a few kicks” would share the fate of the doomed residents, and anyone surviving the Great Slide would be done in by Killer Whales. The casualty list would be a terrifying document. In addition to the locals it would include voyeurs of all types, hundreds of free-lance pederasts, every sort of predatory jade, and a legion of would-be orgy-masters.

None of this is likely to happen, however, because almost everything you hear about Big Sur is rumor, legend or an outright lie. This place is a myth-maker's paradise, so vast and so varied that the imagination is tempted to run wild at the sight of it.

In reality, Big Sur is very like Valhalla—a place that a lot of people have heard of, and that very few can tell you anything about. In New York you might hear it's an art colony, in San Francisco they'll tell you it's a nudist colony, and when you finally roll into Big Sur with your eyes peeled for naked artists you are likely to be very disappointed. Every weekend Dick Hartford, owner of the local village store, is plagued by people looking for “sex orgies,” “wild
drinking brawls,” or “the road to Henry Miller's house”—as if once they found Miller everything else would be taken care of. Some of them will stay as long as a week, just wandering around, asking questions, forever popping up where you least expect them—and finally they wander off, back to wherever they came from, often complaining bitterly that Big Sur is “nothing but a damn wilderness.”

Well, most of it is, and the geographical boundaries of Big Sur are so vague that Lillian B. Ross, one of the first writers to live here, once described it as “not a place at all, but a state of mind.” If that sounds a bit mystic, consider that the Big Sur country—which is what you mean when you say Big Sur—is roughly eighty miles long and twenty wide, with a population of some three hundred souls spread out across the hills and along the coast. The “town” itself is nothing but a post office, village store, gas station, garage and restaurant, located a hundred and fifty miles south of San Francisco on Highway One.

Prior to World War Two this place was as lonely and isolated a spot as any in America. But no longer. Inevitably, Big Sur has been “discovered.”
Life
magazine called it a “Rugged, Romantic World Apart,” and presented nine pages of pictures to prove it. After that there was no hope. Not that Henry Luce has anything against solitude—he just wants to tell his five million readers about it. And on some weekends it seems like all five million of them are right here, bubbling over with questions:

“Where's the art colony, man? I've come all the way from Tennessee to join it.”

“Say, fella, where do I find this nudist colony?”

“Hello there. My wife and I want to rent a cheap ten-room house for weekends. Could you tell me where to look?”

“How're ya doin', ace? Where's this marijuana farm I been hearin' about?”

“Good morning, old sport. Hope I'm not disturbing you. I … ah … well, you see I understand you people have some jim-dandy parties down here and I was
wondering if a few bottles of booze would get me an invitation.”

Or the one that drove Miller half-crazy: “Ah ha! So you're Henry Miller! Well, my name is Claude Fink and I've come to join the cult of sex and anarchy.”

Most of the people who've heard of Big Sur know nothing about it except that Miller lives here—and, for most of them, that's enough. There is no doubt in their minds that anyplace Miller lives is bound to be some sort of sexual mecca. The mere suspicion brought dozens of people to Big Sur, but when somebody wrote an article about the Cult of Sex and Anarchy he was organizing here, they came from all over the world to join it. That was close to ten years ago, and they've been coming ever since.

Ironically enough, Miller came here looking for peace and solitude. When he arrived in 1946 he was a relative unknown. His major works (
Tropics of Cancer & Capricorn, The Rosy Crucifixion, Black Spring,
etc.) were banned in this country (and still are). In Europe, where he had lived since the early Thirties, he had a reputation as one of the few honest and uncompromising American writers. But when the Nazis over-ran Paris his income was cut off at the source and he was forced back to the United States.

His contempt for this country was manifest in everything he wrote, and his vision of America's future was a hairy thing, at best. In
The World of Sex
, a banned and little-known book he wrote in 1940, he put it like this:

These are the words that came back to haunt him when he moved to Big Sur. No sooner had he settled here, hoping to separate himself from what he called “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,” than thousands of people sought him out to shake his hand, to ask his advice, and to bombard him with their own visions and predictions. Day after day, year after year, when all Miller wanted was a little privacy, they struggled up the steep dirt road to his house on Partington Ridge; if there was a fornication carnival going on up there, they were damn well going to be in on it. At times it seemed like half the population of Greenwich Village was camping on his lawn. Girls wearing nothing but raincoats showed up at his door in the dead of night, wild turks hitchhiked out from New York with duffel-bags full of everything they owned, drifters arrived from every corner of the nation with sacks of food and whiskey, and destitute Frenchmen came all the way from Paris.

Miller did his best to stem the tide, but it was no use. As his fame spread, his volume of visitors mounted steadily. Many of them had not even read his books. They weren't interested in literature, they wanted orgies. And they were shocked to find him a quiet, fastidious and very moral man—instead of the raving sexual beast they'd heard stories about. When no orgies materialized, the disappointed cultists drifted on to Los Angeles or San Francisco, or stayed in Big Sur, trying to drum up orgies of their own. Some
of them lived in hollow trees, others found abandoned shacks, and a few simply roamed the hills with sleeping bags, living on nuts, berries and wild mustard greens. The ones who didn't stay went off to spread the word, and with each retelling the stories got wilder and wilder. More people arrived, driving Miller to the brink of despair. He posted a large, insulting sign at the head of his driveway, cultivated a rude manner to make visitors ill at ease, and devised elaborate schemes to keep them from discovering where he lived. But nothing worked. They finally overwhelmed him, and in the process they put Big Sur squarely on the map of national curiosities. Today they are still coming, even though Miller has packed his bags and fled to Europe for what may be a permanent vacation.