Kingdom of Fear

by Hunter S. Thompson

  . . .

  There is no shortage of dangerous gibberish in the classrooms and courts of this nation. Weird myths and queer legends are coins of the realm in our culture, like passwords or keys to survival. Not even a monster with rabies would send his child off to school with a heart full of hate for Santa Claus or Jesus or the Tooth Fairy. That would not be fair to the child. He (or she) would be shunned & despised like a Leper by his classmates & even his teachers, and he will not come home with good report cards. He will soon turn to wearing black raincoats & making ominous jokes about Pipe Bombs.

  Weird behavior is natural in smart children, just as curiosity is to a kitten. I was no stranger to it myself, as a youth growing up in Kentucky. I had a keen appetite for adventure, which soon led me into a maze of complex behavioral experiments that my parents found hard to explain. I was a popular boy, with acceptable grades & a vaguely promising future, but I was cursed with a dark sense of humor that made many adults afraid of me, for reasons they couldn’t quite put their fingers on. . . .

  But I was a juvenile delinquent. I was Billy the Kid of Louisville. I was a “criminal”: I stole things, destroyed things, drank. That’s all you have to do if you’re a criminal. In the sixth grade I was voted head of the Safety Patrol—the kids who wear the badges and stop traffic during recesses and patrol. It was a very big position, and the principal hated that I was voted to it. She said, “This is horrible. We can’t have Hunter doing anything. He’s a Little Hitler.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I think it meant I had a natural sway over many students. And that I should probably be lobotomized for the good of the society.

  I always figured I would live on the margins of society, part of a very small Outlaw segment. I have never been approved by any majority. Most people assume it’s difficult to live this way, and they are right—they’re still trying to lock me up all the time. I’ve been very careful about urging people who cannot live outside the law to throw off the traces and run amok. Some are not made for the Outlaw life.

  The only things I’ve ever been arrested for, it turns out, are things I didn’t do. All the “crimes” I really committed were things that were usually an accident. Every time they got me, I happened to be in the wrong place and too enthusiastic. It was just the general feeling that I shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

  . . .

  It may be that every culture needs an Outlaw god of some kind, and maybe this time around I’m it. Who knows? I haven’t studied it, but the idea just came to me in a flash as I read Peter Whitmer’s article about me in the Jan/Feb 1984 Saturday Review.

  I think of Lono, Robin Hood & Bacchus & the Greeks with their fat young boys & the Irish with their frantic drunken worship of doomed heroes. . . . Jesus, I’ll bet that even the Swedes have some kind of Outlaw god.

  But there is no mention of good Outlaws in the Holy Bible, I think—mainly because of The Church & all its spin-offs that believe in total punishment for all sinners. The Bible makes no exceptions for good-hearted social outlaws. They are all cast into the Lake of Fire. Punishment. Fuck those people.

  (PAUSE FOR INTERRUPTION)

  Sorry, that was a call from Newsweek in New York, asking what I thought about the “shocking Mutombo-Van Horne trade” today, a major shift in the power balance of the NBA East that I was only vaguely aware of. It meant that the 76ers would be rid of that flashy albino pussy who always failed in the clutch. It made perfect sense to me, and that is why I picked up the telephone. . . . What the hell? I thought. People ask me these questions because they know I am a famous sportswriter.

  “The trade is meaningless,” I said. “It is like trading a used mattress for a $300 bill.”

  And that was that, apparently. The writer was suddenly called away from his desk and hung up on me. So what? I thought. I didn’t want to talk to him anyway. I had serious work to do, and Anita was getting hungry. It was time for another road trip.

  . . .

  There are eight or nine truly exotic towns to visit in the great American West, but Thomasville, Colorado, is not one of them. Richard Nixon doomed the town when he reluctantly signed the Clean Air Act of 1970—which soon led to the forcible closing of both the town’s gas stations because their 50-year-old underground storage tanks were rusted out and leaking rotten gasoline into the tumbling white waters of the Frying Pan River, a once-famous trout-fishing mecca.

  It took us about five hours to climb the 30 steep miles up to Thomasville. I was driving my trusty Red Shark, a rebuilt 1973 454 Chevy Caprice with power windows and heated seats and a top speed of 135—although not on a winding uphill two-lane blacktop that rises 6,000 feet in 30 miles. That is serious climbing, from summer heat and peach trees up to chilly bleak timberline and then to the snowcapped peaks of the Continental Divide, where wild beasts roam and humans live in pain. This is the road that leads up to the dreaded Hagerman Pass.

  But not yet. No, we are getting ahead of our story, and only a jackass would do that. . .

  . . .

  We were almost to Thomasville when I noticed a cluster of flashing police lights and a cop of some kind standing in the middle of the road waving a red flag. “Oh Jesus,” I groaned. “What the fuck is this?” Anita was scrambling to get a half-gallon jug of Chivas Regal out of sight—which is not an easy thing to do in a huge red convertible with the top down and a beautiful half-naked girl leaning over the backseat. People will stare.

  In any case, we soon learned that “the new plan, just in from Washington” is to keep weirdos, foreigners, and other dangerous bad apples out of all National Forests in the nation, lest they set fires and spread anthrax or anything else that swarthy terrorists are wont to do. . . . They are Evil, they are savage, and they must be arrested before they set fire to the whole goddamn country.

  I have never had any special fear of Foreigners, myself, but I recognize a nationwide nervous breakdown when I see one. It is EMBARRASSING, for openers, AND IT SUCKS.

  . . .

  Most people are happy on Fridays, but not me—at least not yesterday, when I drove up the mountain to assess the fire-fighting & water-flow capacity of a bleak mountain community called Thomasville, on the map and right smack in the middle of a National Forest tinderbox that is already burning with monster firestorms that leap from hill to hill like summer lightning and kill everything they can reach.

  . . .

  Big Fire is a terrifying thing to deal with up close, and you never forget it—the panic, the heat, the deafening roar of the flames overhead. I feel queasy every time I think about it. . . . If freezing to death is the nicest way to die, then burning to death in a forest fire is no doubt the ugliest. Beware. Fire is like lightning; they will both kill you, but lightning doesn’t hurt as much. It is a monumental WHACK with no warning at all, and hopefully that is it—gone, no more, and minimal mortuary charges.

  Surviving a lightning strike is even worse than dying from it, according to people who have lived (returned from the dead, in fact) because 8,000,000,000 volts of electricity is an unacceptable trauma to tissue of the human body. It fries everything in its path and leaves every organ in the body, from blood vessels to brain cells and even the sexual system, charred like overcooked bacon for the rest of its delicate life.

  My friend Tex got hit by lightning one gloomy afternoon in the parking lot of the Woody Creek Tavern. “It kicked the mortal shit out of me,” he said later. “It blasted me fifty goddamn feet across the road and over a snow fence. I was out for forty minutes, and when I woke up I smelled like death.”

  I was there that day, and I thought a bomb had gone off right in front of me. I was unconscious for a while, but not for long. When I woke up I was being dragged toward a shiny sky-blue ambulance by two well-meaning medics from the Sheriff’s Office. . . . I twisted out of their grasp and backed against an ice machine. “Okay, boys,” I said calmly, “the Joke is over. Let’s not get crazy about this. Give me some air, gentlemen,” I croaked. “I feel a little jangled, but I
know it will pass. Get your hands off me, you pigfucker.”

  No doubt it sounded rude to casual onlookers, but in truth it was not. I was just kidding with them. They know me.

  . . .

  Friday afternoons are usually loose and happy in this valley, but today was different. I live in the mountains at an altitude of 8,000 feet, which is roughly a mile and a half high. That is “big air,” as they say in the zoom-zoom business. It makes for large lungs and thin blood, along with dangerously expensive real estate. Life has always been a little spooky up here, but now as this vicious new century swarms over us like a fester of kudzu vines, life in these mountains is becoming living relentless hell.

  The whole state of Colorado is on fire, according to The New York Times, and the nerdish Republican Governor is raving like a banshee about the death of Colorado as we know it before the summer is over.

  That would be about 90 days, on most calendars—or right about September 11, 2002, only one horrible year after those stupid bastards blew up the WTC . . . We will actually be at war by then, and anybody who doesn’t like it will be locked up in a military holding pen.

  . . .

  Weird things happen when you get whacked by serious lightning. Many years ago, nineteen (19) members of the Strange family in North Carolina were struck at the same instant when they all leaned against a chain-link fence at a July 4 fireworks display. They all survived, but none prospered. It was like some horrible merciless coincidence out of the Old Testament—or extremely bad karma, to millions of non-Christians, among whom I definitely count myself. I have abandoned all forms & sects of the practicing Christian Church.

  I have seen thousands of priests and bishops and even the Pope himself transmogrified in front of our eyes into a worldwide network of thieves and perverts and sodomites who relentlessly penetrate children of all genders and call it holy penance for being born guilty in the eyes of the Church.

  I have seen the Jews run amok in Palestine like bloodthirsty beasts with no shame, and six million brainless Baptists demanding the death penalty without any trial at all for pagans and foreigners and people like me who won’t pray with them in those filthy little shacks they call churches. They are like a swarm of rats fleeing a swoop fire, and I want no part of them. Indeed, I have my own faith and my own gods to worship, and I have been doing it with a certain amount of distinction for ten thousand years, like some fine atomic clock with ever-lasting batteries.

  Whoops! I have wandered off on some kind of vengeful tangent, here, and we don’t really need it now, do we? So let us save that wisdom for later.

  Anita reading Kingdom of Fear manuscript. Res Ipsa Loquitur. Owl Farm, 2002 (Jennifer Alise Stroup)

  . . .

  I was talking about driving up the mountain with Anita to survey the downside of a firestorm that seems certain to destroy about half of us before the summer is over. . . . The whole state of Colorado is officially on fire, according to the Governor and a few grifters in Washington who gave him 25 million dollars for Disaster Relief and Emergency Fire-fighting Equipment for an endless war against Fire.

  It was Friday morning when the sheriff asked me to run up the hill and investigate. “You must go to Thomasville,” he told me. “How are we going to evacuate them when the fires come? Go all the way up to the top and see how the river is running. Also check the Reservoir and tell me how deep it is. I fear we are running out of water in this valley.”

  Why not? I thought. We can take the red convertible and load up on gin at the Rainbow. Anything worth doing is worth doing Right.

  . . .

  It had been a few days since I first heard the weird story about “gangs of armed Jews roaming the neighborhood and beating the shit out of anybody who looked like an A-rab.”

  “Good god,” I muttered. “Jews can’t live at this altitude. There is something wrong with this story.”

  That is why we decided to go up to Thomasville in the first place. I wanted to check it out, and so did Anita . . . and so did the sheriff, as it turned out. The sheriff didn’t need to deputize me, because I have been a certified Deputy Coroner of this county for twenty (20) years. . . . And, in Colorado, the County Coroner is the only public official with the legal power to arrest the sheriff.

  That is the key to my oft-uttered wisdom in re: Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Indeed. Never forget it, or you will become a Victim of your environment. Rich nerds and lawyers will stomp all over you worse than any A-rab, and you will be like the eight ball on some country-club billiards table near Atlanta—whack, over and out. No more humor.

  And so much for that, eh? Jews don’t play pool anyway, and neither do A-rabs. They are tribal people, which means they are primitive thinkers. They feel a genetic imperative to kill each other, and it tends to get in their way. . . . Or maybe that brutal compulsion comes from the Holy Bible, which is definitely true. The Bible is unforgiving. There is not a scintilla of mercy or humor in the Holy Bible. None.

  Think on it, Bubba. Point me to some laughs, or even a goddamn chuckle in that book.

  People frequently ask me if I believe in God, as if it were some kind of final judgment or naked indicator of my pro or con value in this world. Ho ho. That is too stupid to even think about—like a WHITES ONLY sign on the pearly gates of Heaven.

  But not really. Don’t get me wrong, fellas. That is only a whooped-up “figure of speech,” or maybe a failed metaphor. It is a term of Art, not a term of Law. If the freak who wrote the Book of Revelation had been busted and jailed for the horrible threats he made against the whole human race, he would have been executed on the spot by a Military Tribunal. So long, Johnny, we never really liked you anyway. Mahalo.

  The Witness

  Not everybody understands the real meaning of being “brought within The System.” It is legal language, the kind of talk you hear in the hallways at professional police conventions or pretrial hearings in musty urban courtrooms. As in, “The time has come, Judge, to drop the net on this loathsome criminal deviate and reel him into The System.”

  We are talking about The Criminal Justice System, here, and once you get brought into it, there will be a part of your brain that thinks about nothing else for the rest of your life. It will be as if a leech had attached itself to the small of your back forever. . . . Just ask Bill Clinton.

  Some people call it Rehabilitation, but. . .

  A cop killing is always big news—except when Police kill one of their own, in which case the death notice is rarely if ever made public. The Law Enforcement Fraternity is very tight when it comes to media embarrassment. There is a basic operating rule among Criminal Defense Lawyers that says: “Above all, the lawyer must not go to jail.” It is not always an easy rule to observe, given that the lawyer is also an ordained Officer of the Court.

  Be keenly aware of this fact when you get accused (on paper/formal charges are filed) of anything at all—anything from shoplifting to felony murder—that could/might/will result in your being Convicted and formally Punished in any way for any violation of any part of any Criminal Code. The law is not on your side when you become a defendant in a criminal courtroom. They are out to get you, and they will if you are not alert.

  “He who goes to law takes a wolf by the ears.” Robert Burton said that, and I am citing it as a very dangerous Reality in this war-torn world that we live in. This is 2002. The American Century was over in January of 2001. They were Punctual, as the Fascist mentality cannot survive without brute Punctuality. Never be late, for fear of being guilty of Deviant Behavior, and brought within The System. BANG! SLAM! BEND OVER. . . . Seig heil! Who is God? The Boss is God—and you’re not. . . . Hey rube, you are Nothing! You are Guilty! You are lower than the shit of some filthy animal.

  Yassuh, Boss. I’ll do anything, just don’t put me in Jail. I am guilty. I will do whatever you say.

  Marilyn Chambers at 17 (HST archives)

  . . .

  It was a cold winter night when the Witness firs
t came to my house. She was a very large woman, about 35 years old—dark hair, long legs, and tastefully enlarged breasts—who once worked in Southern California as a director of sex films. That is not a bad job to have in L.A., especially if you have a natural talent for it, and this woman did. I recognized it immediately.

  I know the Sex Business. I was the Night Manager of the famous O’Farrell Theatre, in San Francisco, for two years, and I still have a keen eye for working girls. There is a certain lewd radiance about them that comes only from dancing naked in public for 2,000 nights. . . . Sex business people recognize one another immediately. They have ridden for the XXX brand, and the brand has ridden them.

  It is not an unfriendly brand, nothing like a scar on the cheek, or a crude tattoo on top of a butt that says PROPERTY OF HELL’S ANGELS. That would not be appropriate for a stylish lap-dancing venue in Nashville or Toledo. The customers would be offended. Big tippers tend to be wary of a woman who has pulled the Hell’s Angels train. The mark of the XXX business is an attitude more than a brand or a nasty tattoo.

  The O’Farrell was once celebrated as “the Carnegie Hall of Public Sex in America.” It was a nice place to work in those money-mad years of the Reagan Revolution. We had about 100 girls on the payroll, and many more on the waiting list. Naked women were a hot commodity in those days. It was the “Golden Era of pornography,” according to chroniclers of that ilk, when sex movies were still shot with bright lights and reels of celluloid film.

  Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were still packing huge multisexual crowds into respectable theaters all over the country, Oral Sex was mainstream, and lush entertainment expenses were tax-deductible. Huge expense money was the oil that kept the national economy going, and sex was everywhere, 24 hours a day. Powder cocaine was the recreational drug of choice, but LSD-25 was still fashionable in upscale communes and coastal brokerage firms.