Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (96 page)
Read Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman Online
Authors: Hunter S. Thompson
My suggestion, therefore, is that you supply me with a new and dependable Rambler that I won't have to curse about and apologize for at least once a day. I don't mean to suggest in any way that you
owe
me a new car, but I think it would be mutually beneficial for you to supply me with one. I have, after all, supported this erratic offspring of yours for nearly three years, with considerable mental anguish for both myself and my wife. But then we both understand that ours is a free market economy and the devil takes the hindmost. Mr. Barnum described it pretty well with his classic line about a sucker being born every minute.
But I also suggest that American Motors is in no position these days to follow Bamum's lead. I don't need a Standard & Poor sheet to tell me your share of the market is slipping. All I have to do is look around. And if your public relations people have any kind of imagination they can get a lot of press mileage by using this letter as a reason for putting me behind
the wheel of a new Rambler. As a gimmick it would cost you less than nothing in terms of your advertising budget, but if your people handled it with any élan it could easily be turned into an original and effective advertisement
Obviously, I'm not taking all this time and space with the idea of doing you a favor. The nut of my argument is that I'm driving around in something that Iâin your positionâwould go to great lengths to hide from the general public. If my fiscal position were such that I could obtain a loan to buy a newer and better car I would certainly take advantage of it and not bother you with this kind of correspondence. Honesty compels me, however, to say that if I had the funds to finance a new car I would not buy a Rambler. And I don't believe you would, either, if you had the kind of experiences that I've had with this one.
So that's about it, from here. I look forward to hearing from you in one way or another. I won't be holding my breath until somebody presents me with a gift certificate for a new Rambler, but as I said earlier I think you can do more with this letter than brush it aside as the ravings of a crank â¦Â which I may be, but I make my living writing for national magazines, so I leave you to ponder the meaning of it.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
.:
Thompson had received a bland, form-letter response from American Motors Corp
.
December 10, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Dear Mr. Abernathy:
I received the letter from your flunky and consider it a challenge to my imagination. With the help of several friends I am going to turn my car into an exhibit. It will move around the Bay Area, covered with various signs and slogans taken from Rambler advertisements. I am very proud to be aware of my pride. Today I arranged for a sign-painter to reproduce selected portions of our correspondence. It will take a week or two before the exhibit is complete. At that time I shall send you a few color photographs.
In closing, I remain, yours for more creative advertising.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
Â
Hell's Angels Terry the Tramp
(
left
),
Mountain Girl, and Sonny Barger at Ken Kesey's La Honda retreat
.
(P
HOTO BY
H
UNTKR
S. T
HOMPSON
;
COURTESY OF
HST C
OLLECTION
)
Thompson after his stomping by Hell's Angels
.
(C
OURTESY OF
HST C
OLLECTION
)
1
. Richard Elman was a liberal writer who would later review Thompson's
Hell's Angels
for
The New Republic
.
2
. Tad Minnish was a Louisville friend Thompson kept in touch with.
3
. California's Proposition 14, passed in November 1964, overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which had prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or national origin by property owners. Proposition 14 was declared unconstitutional two years after its passage.
4
. Harcourt Kemp, a Louisville friend.
5
. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, formed in 1960 to battle segregation through direct action.
6
. Fred Friendly, then executive producer of CBS News.
7
. Kuralt's wife.
8
. Draper and Jarvis both worked for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. Jarvisâwho appears as “Preetam Bobo” in
Hell's Angels
âintroduced Thompson to the biker gang.
9
. The Native American equal rights rally in Oregon Thompson had covered for the
National Observer
.
10
. Mario Savio was the spokesman for the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
11
. Clark Kerr was the president of the University of California at Berkeley.
12
. McWilliams wanted Thompson to write on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. As a result, Thompson wrote “The Non-Student Left” (
The Nation
, September 27, 1965).
13
. Bars Thompson used to frequent.
14
. The hobo Thompson wrote about for the
National Observer
on his Western trek.
15
. Burt Quint was a CBS correspondent in Latin America.
16
. Antonio Imbert Barreras, Dominican junta leader.
17
.
Spider
, a Berkeley-based magazine, was the voice of the Free Speech Movement.
18
. Christopher Lasch,
The New Radicalism in America
(New York, 1965).
19
.
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
(New York, 1965).
20
. Steve DeCanio was a twenty-two-year-old Berkeley radical and editor of
Spider
.
21
. The trial ended with a hung jury and eventual reduction of the charge to assault with a deadly weapon, to which Barger pleaded guilty and served six months in jail.
22
. Director of
The Wild One
.
23
. Jim Silberman, who was senior editor at “little” Random Mouse (the eponymous flagship division of the corporation that owned Pantheon and Ballantine), had seen early chapters of
Hell's Angels
and insisted that his division should bring it out in hardcover before Ballantine published the paperback. The contract Silberman and Thompson signed effectively took “The Rum Diary” away from Pantheon, though Random Mouse never published it.
24
. Theron Raines was Thompson's agent for
Hell's Angels
. Thompson dismissed him shortly after this letter.
25
. The Matrix was the seminal nightclub for the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and other “acid rock” bands.
318 PARNASSUS â¦Â ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE â¦Â SAVED BY CHARLES KURALT â¦Â FALLING IN LOVE WITH A 650 LIGHTNING â¦Â ARMED AND DRUNK ON HIGHWAY 101 â¦Â STOMPED BY GREEDY ANGELS â¦Â FAMOUS WRITER FLEES RONALD REAGAN â¦Â FROM THE SHIT HOUSE TO RANDOM HOUSE â¦
Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked by their existence. The generation represented by the editors of
Time
has lived so long in a world full of celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world â¦Â and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is a generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood.
âHunter S. Thompson,
Hell's Angels
(published 1966)
Â
Â
:
Thompson had met Baez in 1960 while living in Big Sur. The folk singer was starting a “school for nonviolence” in the Carmel Valley
.
January 19, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Dear Joanieâ
After nearly a year writing a book about the Hell's Angels I am tired of violence and am seriously considering a try at your school. Could you send me a bulletin, brochure, etc.? On the matter of tuition I think we can probably work something out: in exchange for some peace at your place I'll put you onto the Angels. They represent a massive potential for many things. Ginsberg has softened them up a bit, but I think you'd fare a lot better. In the meantime, please send me all pertinent information and a valid application blank. Sandy is asleep, but if she were awake she'd say hello, so consider it said.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
:
January 26, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Lyndon Johnson
White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. Johnson:
Now that somebody outside the Administration has finally come up with a workable “middle-way” solution to the Vietnam disaster, I feel it is only reasonable for me to withdraw my former advocacy of total withdrawal
and urge you to go along with the “holding strategy” proposals by Gen. Gavin
1
and Walter Lippmann. This would at least give us a chance to pull in our horns and get the feel of things.
If, however, you are still goaded by your advisors to an all-or-nothing choice, I would have to stick with total withdrawal. I say this to emphasize that I have not in any way come around to your own point of view; but as a reasonably intelligent human being I think I have the sense to see that a controlled compromise is better than a total loss. I am not at all confident that you feel the same way, but the least I can do is write a five-cent letter and hope it will have some effect.
You can probably disregard all these lettersâincluding any from Gavin, Ridgway
2
and Lippmanâwithout endangering your position for 1968. But you will have hell on your hands keeping the door open for Humphrey in 1972, and by then every one of today's draftees will be voting.
I suppose this comes under the heading of a “dissenting letter,” and I understand you turn all of these over to the FBI. But if wanting to avoid an Asian war makes me a subversive, then you have my address and you can put me in the file with Eisenhower and MacArthur.
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
:
Semonin was now a regular contributor to
The Nation.
February 9, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Paulâ
Midnight again. No time to think about human contacts. Thanks immensely for the draft on Chase Manhattan Bank. How does it feel to be a running dog of capitalism? I refuse to believe you have any grip on reality until you stop chasing nymphets from Louisville. [ â¦Â ] Get yourself a sturdy wench who is dedicated to class struggle.