Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (74 page)

I am considering a retreat to reality. For the next year—at least until the '64 elections—every man with balls should be on the firing line. There will be more and more like your boys in Caracas who have only killed 24 this week in an effort to stop elections. If today's action defined the law in this world, then I am ready for it. And you should warn your friends that not all Americans are soft pot-bellies. The shits were surely killing us, and now they have killed the only hope on the American horizon, the only man who had half a chance of carrying the ball. Now, President Johnson. Jesus Mother. Fuck. Again, where do we go from here?

I would like to be able to define the meaning of this thing, but the further I think, the further the error extends. I see no end to it, and less hope. It will almost surely mean a Goldwater victory in '64, a wild reaction
against “The Reds.” The democratic (small d) camp will be totally disorganized for too long. Now it is a question of either your kind of fascism or the other kind administered by the men with the fish-bellies. If it were fashionable, I would weep for us all.

After the monstrous frustration of Aspen, the sight of so much giggling scum, I called Louisville, thinking that maybe I could communicate my sense of urgency. But there, of course, it was worse. Maybe like a bad accident on the Dixie Highway. I recall Davison telling me he had met Rutledge Lilly at the CC [
Command Courier
], and Rut had asked about me. Davison told him a few things, and then Rut asked, “Is he going back to school?”

How do you deal with a mentality like that? What can you say? Is he going back to school—How long, O Lord, how long?

But school is out, here. The '64 elections—beginning tomorrow—will be the most crucial vote in the history of man. Every fish-belly in the nation is out in the open tonight, but everybody is holding them low until after the funeral. Mine is out too, for that matter, and I don't figure on putting it away for quite some time. The dirty dealing has come to the surface; fair play was yesterday and maybe tomorrow. If you have any guts at all you will come back and put your back to the wall with the rest of us. You said in a letter to Peggy Clifford that my concept of America is outdated, divorced from reality and the rest of the world. Probably it is, but I fully intend to go down with it before I give in to either of the other shitty camps. It may be that the fascists will croak us, but not before getting their balls twisted. If only by me.

Your failure to answer my recent burst of letters indicates that you are too wound up in Club Business to consider anything else. You had better wake up; beginning tomorrow, it is no longer safe to bug the establishment. If any one thing is sure it is that the Christians are out, and the Shits are in. And if you think that's divorced from the rest of the world, just watch. The political clock has been turned back to early Eisenhower & McCarthy. This savage unbelievable killing, this monstrous stupidity, has guaranteed that my children and yours will be born in a shitrain.

I wish crying would solve it, because that would be easy. But there is no sense crying for lost hope and a dead effort that was only a foot in the door but at least the door was open as long as the foot was there. I recall that night when we climbed off the turnpike in Oregon and hiked into town to watch the first crack opened in the dike. The first debate was the turning point, and I am the first to admit that since then the gild has gone from the lily. But consider now that the lily is dead, replaced by a toadstool.

If you see any hope, send word. I am, at the moment, as low as I've ever been.

H

A few months earlier William Kennedy had left San Juan for upstate New York to work part-time for the
Albany Times-Union
while writing fiction. Thompson wrote him this letter the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas, using—for perhaps the first time—the phrase “fear and loathing,” to describe his horror at the tragedy
.

November 22, 1963
Woody Creek

I am tired enough to sleep here in this chair, but I have to be in town at 8:30 when Western Union opens, so what the hell. Besides, I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything—much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today's murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of talk. I have become like a psychotic sphinx—I want to kill because I can't talk.

I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the “real artists” in the “little magazines” are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think that what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the “little magazines” for the past 20 years. And the next 20, if we get that far.

We now enter the era of the shitrain, President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries. Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grasp what Gatsby was after. No more of that. You misunderstand it, of course, peeling back only the first and most obvious layer. Take your “realism” to the garbage dump. Or the “little magazines.” They are like a man who goes into a phone booth to pull his pod. Nada, nada.

The killing has put me in a state of shock. The rage is trebled. I was not prepared at this time for the death of hope, but here it is. Ignore it at your peril. I have written Semonin, that cheap book-store Marxist, that he had better tell his boys to buy bullets. And forget the dialectic. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time. I mean to come down from the hills and enter the fray. Tomorrow a cabled job request to
The Reporter
. Failing that, the
Observer
. Beyond that, god knows, but it will have to be something. From now until the 1964 elections every man with balls should be on the firing line. The vote will be the most critical in the history of man. No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. From now on it is dirty pool and judo in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. They can count me in—I feel ready for a dirty game.

Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short. What, O what, does Eudora Welty have to say? Fuck that crowd. The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand, while hanging onto sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag.

My concept of the new novel would have fit this situation, but now I see no hope for getting it done if, indeed, any publishing houses survive the Nazi scramble that is sure to come. How could we have known, or even guessed? I think we have come to the point.

Send word, if you still exist—

HST

Thompson had gotten McGarr a job as a bill collector in the Bronx
.

November 25, 1963
Woody Creek

Well McGarr, I'm happy I was able to get you a job, and now, of course, I await the customary one month's salary as representing agent's fee. At your earliest convenience. I need it NOW.

This rotten stupid shit-filled madness has caused uproar in my once-tidy life-plan. Tonight I heard where the Dallas police considered the case “closed” and would make public no evidence concerning the charges against Sir Oswald. It is nearly impossible here to keep up with what is going on, but that, I believe, is the first statement of any significance to emerge from this thing. If necessary, I will go to Dallas to view such evidence as exists, regardless of the opinions of the Dallas police. Judging from what has happened thus far I could probably walk into headquarters there and steal the whole file without anyone being the wiser. I only hope the news in New York makes more sense than it does here; it couldn't make any less. All we have here is CBS-TV, which in my judgment has fallen flat on its ass regarding coverage. The radio has been my lifeline, but newscasts are continually being blacked out by the speeches of Billy Graham and various song festivals that go on for hours. Even so, what little I have heard on the radio has been worth all the old film clips, meaningless pageantry and announcers reading the AP & UPI wires that I see on TV—and the interminable “discussions” directed by waterheads and with no apparent purpose but to give. TV exposure to third-string dignitaries who could not plague the public eye in any other manner. As isolated as I am,
TV brings me the rumblings of national idiocy and incompetence. My only hope now is that the Sunday
NY Times
will get here on Thursday.

I sent off a reaction piece to the
Observer
, but was probably too late for even a delayed press run. But I felt like I had to do something.

Now, surveying the remains, I am on the verge of postponing the good life for the duration of the crisis. I am even thinking of returning to New York if anyone will give me a writing job and the free hand I will of course require in order to make sense of the awful Nazi cockfight that is sure to come. I think the peace will last another 24 hours, then off with the gloves and fuck all. The soft thump of the last piece of sod going onto the grave will be the signal for the orgy to begin—and I don't know if I can stand being so completely removed from the arena as I am now. Under the circumstances, I might even run for president.

At any rate, if your influence at ABC is yet massive enough, you might point out that I am at the moment available as a roving seeker in the news area. I am not available for punk work, no matter what the salary, or even the title. My line is the seeking and assembling of facts into meaningful order. Nothing else.

But I don't really expect you to come up with an offer, considering the cheap medium you now represent, and I am naturally taking steps in other directions. First,
The Reporter
, which I doubt could afford to hire me even if they wanted to. At the moment they maintain five writers, and it may be a hard crew to crack.

My other alternative is the
Observer
, but I turned down one of their offers and hesitate to re-apply for the same reasons I had then. I don't know if I could stand the editing. This is no time for any man to be beholden in any way to ignorant rednecks. Even so, it would be an opening, and perhaps better than nothing.

I can only hope your understanding of this event causes YOU to realize that your current position in “The Saga of Western Man” is nearly as irrelevant as mine at the moment. And for that reason, I expect you to launch a penetration of some sort, rather than sit on your ass and your $200 rent—which, I must say, is an impressive figure. I trust it has, if nothing else, freed poor Eleanor from toil. Sandy requests, by the way, that Eleanor make some effort at communication.

I have sent several communications in the past few weeks, but none have been answered. Maybe they are not forwarding from your old address. Bone has confirmed your status, so don't worry. Cooke has failed to communicate in any way and I don't even know his address. Tell him to make contact.

And if, by chance, your new eminence brings you in contact with anyone who may need my services in the immediate future, by all means send
word. Needless to say, I do not seek a job, but rather a position or a connection. Nor do I particularly seek money, except in the form of having my expenses covered in what I undertake. Which would, of necessity, be nothing less than a massive job.

This thing has put us all in bad trouble. Your recent dealings in low financed
²⁶
—coupled with your sudden largesse—may have rendered you incapable of clear vision concerning anything more abstract than your wallet. If so, I trust the condition will pass. But if not, you had better refrain from having children, or you may find yourself having to explain in a few years just what you weren't doing when the chips went down for us all.

I leave you with that, and with, of course, my congratulations on your success with the Great Nipple [money]. Would that we might all get a grip on it soon. But right now I have other things in mind, and will do some eating, and clear my head before composing those letters by which I mean to seek my connection.

Hello to Eleanor, and congratulations to her for enduring you this long. Most people—women—would have had better sense.

I have just returned from town and the latest, frustrating bout with TV. My general feeling is a loss of hope in the largest sense, a pessimistic rage, and a disorganized compulsion to enter the fray at once.

Send word.

Hunter

A week after JFK's assassination, Thompson was still incensed. The uncertain political climate made him want to forgo fiction to work in journalism
.

December 1, 1963
Box 7
Woody Creek, Colorado

Dwight Martin
The Reporter
660 Madison Ave.
New York 21

Dear Mr. Martin:

Several hours before that rotten, stinking murder, one of Jehovah's Witnesses appeared at my door for the purpose of reading scripture. He also read from a book for which I eventually paid 75 cents—a passage foretelling
“the time of the end.” Which, according to his book, is right now.

By four o'clock that day, I was ready to go looking for the Witness and sign up. And now, with a hairy animal called Nixon looming once again on the horizon, I am ready to believe that we are indeed in “the time of the end.” There is no other explanation for the durability of that man. He is like a hyena that you shoot and gut, then see a few hours later, loping along in his stinking way, oblivious to the fact that he is not only dead, but gutted as well.

At any rate, events of last week caused me to seriously consider coming down from the hills to seek work in the arena. For several days I was convinced that my best hope for a meaningful contribution was to immediately drive to Dallas and croak the chief of police with a .44 Magnum, but I got over that, too. Then I wrote the
Observer
and told them I was reconsidering their offer of a staff job, which I avoided last spring. We are dealing, but I have just about got over that, too.