Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (88 page)

Don't take this as an apologia because for the past week I've spent enough time with these guys to know how bad and ugly they can be, and have been. In addition, my original contact on the story is a former Hell's Angel who is now a
Chronicle
police reporter. In about three hours we are going sailing with him on the bay; he lives on a boat in Sausalito. I say this only to show you the scope, depth, and irregularity of my sources on this thing. Without this guy I would never have come close to actually talking with these people.

Anyway, I'm doing a piece for
The Nation
. I don't know if you figure them to be competition in the realm of circulation, but I thought it would be worth a query—especially since I've been working on this stuff in lieu of the Wino piece for the past week. If any angle on this story interests you, send a quick line before I lose interest and re-focus to something else. It's
a good story, with three or four possible pegs and approaches. No photos, however; my camera is hocked.

Send word, ASAP.

Sincerely,
HST

The article Thompson sent with this note would become the centerpiece of his first book
, Hell's Angels.

April 9, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Dear Mr. McWilliams:

Your gram arrived this afternoon and spared me the awful toil of another rewrite. This thing is pretty well out of control as it is, and doing more work would probably have caused me to destroy the manuscript altogether and cease communicating with you.

As it stands, I can only hope it makes sense. It is probably too long, but my main feeling is that too much has been left out. A one hundred page piece would have been much easier. This one is pocked with a number of footnotes, FYI as much as for publication.

As for sources for my seemingly authoritative but frequently unsupported remarks, I depended almost entirely for general (true) background on one Birney Jarvis, a charter member of the Frisco Hell's Angels and now a police reporter on the
Chronicle
. It was his briefing that enabled me to fend off bullshit from the Angels on one hand, and the police on the other. As far as I know, I am the only journalist besides Jarvis whom the Angels have ever dealt with on a friendly social basis. Jarvis wasn't with me when I went to the meeting and subsequently had five of the wildest ones over to the apartment for a drink-out. He did, in fact, advise me against putting myself in such vulnerable positions with people he knew to be mean drinkers, sunday-punchers and chain-whippers.

I say all this only to emphasize my efforts to find out what this thing really is, and to support any statements of mine that might seem wild or presumptuous. I trust, of course, that what I've written is as clear to you as it is to me after several weeks of hashing and re-hashing. If nothing else, I enjoyed dealing with it.

Let me know ASAP how this strikes you.

Thanks,
Hunter S. Thompson

After a long sojourn overseas, Semonin was planning to return to New York to study Marxist theory at Columbia University
.

April 18, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Dear Ph.D.:

I think you'd better stick with the foundation boys and take that Columbia offer; the other action is getting real ugly. Get a degree of some respectable kind and dip into teaching somewhere; that is what everybody else is doing—that, or writing Hip & Camp books for fun and profit. Or pop art.

I envy your illusions but not what you face when you come back here and start dealing with the machine. Along these lines I've been watching the slow, day by day action over at Berkeley. About all I can see finally coming off it is the drafting of Mario Savio
¹⁰
; he missed court the other day to take his physical, and supposedly passed with flying colors. The reason the whole thing came to a publicity head in the first place was a giant Establishment fuckup by a Chancellor named Strong, who has since resigned under pressure—not for doing what he did, but for doing it so blatantly … like the difference between Goldwater and Johnson. But the end result has been the same: constant pressure, penalties & restrictions. If you get arrested once, for instance, a sympathetic friend or liberal benefactor might be happy to make bail. The second time, maybe—depending on what kind of publicity is involved. But then on the third try when the reporters are tired of the story & besides it has since been brought out that you have two convictions for lice-carrying, then bail is a hell of a lot harder to make and you wind up paying a bondsman, which is non-refundable. And then it starts hurting, especially if you don't have the money or have to piss people off to get it. That's what's happening now—not just the bail business, but other small & ugly harassments, like being drafted. You think Savio's name popped out of a hat?

On the whole, the main reason I've been silent for so long is that I'm going into a kind of mad-dog funk after too many days with the
Chronicle
and the
Examiner
. And television, and radio—and random conversations. I have gone into a kind of karate tenseness; the super contraction of all muscles so it won't hurt when you're hit. One technique I haven't mastered as yet is the puffing up of the jaws to create an air pocket around the
teeth. Which is a thing I think we all need. The trouble with writing you about what my mind is up to is that this goddamn machine—and the other one too—is too damn slow. We need a sort of give and take, instead of this rotten formal presentation. By the time I've finished a sentence I usually see three or four ways to refute it or at least improve on it—but by that time I'm already thinking about something else.

What I'll do right now is skim over your letter and lash at the main points, then, if possible, go back and try to clarify.

I'm not sure how well you know the value of the word you used (“infrastructure”) in relation to the projected difficulties of publishing that magazine. But that is a word you want to keep in mind. It covers a lot of ground and too many situations to name. You are fortunate enough now to be dealing outside the infrastructure—but not really, I almost forgot about Mr. Ford. Even so, I think you're mentally outside it, and apparently most of the people you deal with are out there too.

A few weeks ago when the “nausea gas” story broke I happened to have the TV set on for all the network dinnertime newscasts. I got into NBC a bit late and only got a snatch of the story because it was right up front. Then, on CBS, it was the lead story and I was with it for all details, Capitol Hill reaction, etc. Then came ABC, and like the others their man [Peter Jennings] comes on with a quick capsule for the day's news in headline form, then they switch off for a commercial. The headline technique is called a “teaser.” Anyway, the gas bit was number one for the day, then came a commercial. Then—for about five seconds—Jennings came back on for about ten words' worth of the gas story: “Capitol Hill was buzzing tonight after official etc.…” and then another commercial, obviously spliced in, and ending some 30 seconds before the story itself came to an end, so a viewer also got the tail end of the gas action, but nobody who hadn't heard it before could have known what Jennings was talking about. I did, but since I have no phone I had to walk three blocks to call the station and ask why the gas story had been censored. I was told there was nobody in the newsroom qualified to answer my question. I then wrote Carey McWilliams, editor of
The Nation
—for whom I just did a piece on outlaw motorcyclists—and told him about it, asking if he thought it was worth pursuing. The next day I went down to the station, introducing myself to the news director as a correspondent for the
National Observer
, and asked him why the gas item had been deleted from his newscast. His nervous answer—and he was obviously stunned by my query—was that the network shows are edited in L.A. and he was “just as surprised” as I was to see such a thing. He then gave me two ABC vice-presidents to query in L.A.—and McWilliams wrote back to say that they might use the item in a “paragraph” form, which form also pays $25 at most and sometimes $10. Which
left me with a big, ugly story possibility on my hands and no money to pay the rent, the same situation I'm in now.

In other words, “who can afford to give a fuck?” I'm all right Jack, etc. (I just had to get Sandy up to change the margin on this rotten bastard and now the house is full of hell—this marriage thing is not a killer in itself but in the small routines and trivial obligations that come with it.) Besides that, I seem to be doing everything humanly possible to finish myself with booze and general physical abuse, pills, no sleep, etc.

The truth of it all is that I'm in a nearly perpetual rotten mood and rubbed raw each day by new lashings of bullshit. This Vietnam thing has driven me to the point of a continuing froth. I wrote Johnson, telling him to fuck himself and count me out under any circumstances—and although I already have one letter on file (to the AF) saying I would never again put on a uniform, that I wanted to reiterate this feeling and especially to withdraw my application for the governorship of American Samoa since I felt I could under no circumstances serve this administration either at home or abroad. It was a serious letter, in all, bearing down heavily on my prior Dow-Jones affiliation so they couldn't write me off as a cloistered kook, and saying all any citizen would have to say in these times to get on all the wrong lists. When I go to vote, they'll probably X me out, and the next time Johnson comes to San Francisco I expect to be interred for the duration of the visit. What I want to do in the meantime is a story of some kind on the FBI.

Well, we are not getting real far in this letter, eh? I now have freedom to run to the right edge of the paper and I feel better for it, but not much. Sandy says this is a worthless electric typewriter, an ancient and discredited model. So much for the natural integrity of my friendly typewriter merchant. This is a royal example of the shit that is driving me wild, of the horrible predatory rot that pervades the whole system. Once you become conscious of it, actually formulate it in your mind, then all manner of once-innocent and natural-seeming things begin falling into a pattern of imperialist savagery. But nowhere like on the TV screen. There is the furthest expression of the American dream.

Anyway, I've come all the way around, to agreeing with most of what you say—not because you've convinced me, but out of total despair of finding anything here to refute your arguments. Nor, however, do I see much on your side of the fence to give me any hope that even the most far-reaching Marxist takeover would get the stench off the decks. I read all these magazines out of New York, Harlem, etc., but one of the basic things about them is that their writers are worthless in the sense that they can't put words together to mean what they're trying to say. Something like this
letter; I'm so pissed off in general and so out of tune with this rotten machine that I can't say what I mean to say, and therefore waste all manner of time and paper nagging at something I should be able to outline and explain in a page and a half.

One interesting item for the future may be this anti-OAS [Organization of American States] proposal that the Chilean boys are preparing for the Rio Conference in May, or June. It is supposedly a bombshell, aiming at booting the U.S. out of Latin planning, and replacing us with Cuba. If this gets a majority vote it will be interesting. But it probably won't and even if it does I can't see much coming of it in the long run. Like the Selma march, a TV spectacular—next summer we'll have the Harlem Riots, presented by Monsanto Chemicals. I may be sick and a bit daffy, but something in me rebels at the idea of 500 or 5000 negroes kneeling on the streets of Selma, singing “I Love State Troopers in My Heart.” I think this whole non-violent thing was planned from the start by Cardinal Spellman. There is apparently a big underground split between SNCC and CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] but since SNCC can't buy any exposure I think they're out in the cold.

John Macauley's idea of “talking to key people” in those various fields you mentioned is wholly preposterous and even depressing. Again, the infrastructure. The other end of the problem is, of course, how do you publish, pay for and distribute a readable magazine without it? You could put out a mimeographed newsletter, but before you go that route you'd better talk to some of the other people who've tried it and quit. If you are really serious about this magazine thing I think you'd be better off setting up in England or Spain or Chile or anywhere except this capital of high costs, hard-nose risk capital and 100 million fatbellies. There is plenty of money in this country, but only for the “right” things. The more I learn about how the machinery works the more depressed I become. The
Observer
and I have long since parted company on any but an occasional, off-beat story or book review basis, and I'm waiting now to see how
The Nation
handles the piece I just finished.
The Reporter
is another pass, since they bounced my editor. All their articles these days are by retired Generals.

I see here on the last page of your tome you say the “humanist conservatives will have to be separated from the swingers.” Well, good luck—but when you finish this separation you're likely to find yourself in camp with some very funny people. Like Hubert Humphrey, Joan Baez and [steel tycoon] Henry Kaiser. What you can't seem to get through your head is the fact that the Establishment over here is swinging like mad and they pay well to be cleverly harassed. This is part of the game. Your mean judgments
on the
National Observer
LatAm newsbook and the
Herald Tribune
stuff is wholly wasted. None of the hipsters read that shit, not even me. But they don't read Fanon either. (Actually I'm probably wrong here; what I should say is that none of the hipsters will
admit
to reading that shit, which is a different thing, eh?) And don't tell me you meant Swingers instead of hipsters, because here it's all the same. In a nut, it is hip to be a swinger and Camp is in. And I'm out—further so, I suspect, than you because you still seem to think you can talk reason to a man with profits on the line. Even after all this time and all these mental gymnastics I have to go back to Mailer for a good nut: “The shits are killing us” and god help you if you still think you can take them for $5000 a year without coming up with anything in return. They are slow at times, but they can afford the machinery to be very thorough in the long run. And a lot of well-intentioned people, like Clark Kerr,
¹¹
are sitting in that machinery, making it go, because the people who own it still don't wholly understand how it works or what it really means. I think Sartre does, and his answer recently was simply to refuse to come to this country and talk about it. I admire that kind of brazen honesty, but I think it bodes ill for your apparent hopes of a dialogue and a reformation of some kind.