There are some subtle details in this story that you have to appreciate to understand what happened. I wanted to watch the Georgetown game—I would have watched it anyway with just Cat; she was fun to watch sports with because she would bet—but then Tim or Semmes brought up the fact that the Grammys were coming on after the game; Jimmy Buffett was going to be on and they wanted to watch it. I didn’t want to watch the fucking Grammys and did not plan to.
Meanwhile, the amplifier was still in pieces on the floor. It was not going to get fixed until Tim figured out that there was an internal fuse, which was very deep in the middle. I knew that, Tim did not, and Semmes didn’t care. Semmes was drinking a lot of beer; he had been planning to go into town—he wanted to go dancing. Tim was eventually going home to dinner and his wife, Carol Ann.
The game was very good—a two-point game. Georgetown won. I was waiting for them to get the fuck out. I think we were smoking some weed. I was ready to let my hair down, but not with them around. Cat may have known what I was thinking—we hadn’t planned anything, but she probably understood it.
Tim was getting cranked up, fixated on the fucking machinery, and Semmes was getting sloppy drunk and starting to sink into the winged chair, slumped over. Semmes was not a fun drunk; he was constantly worried about his fucking probation. In my desperation, I looked up at the calendar (maybe I remembered her pending visit) and saw the note Deborah had written: “Gail Palmer. . .” It was just a quick scan—then, CLICK. I thought for a minute how Semmes had been complaining that the women in Aspen all eat shit—just a bunch of whores—nobody to go dancing with. He was a dancing fool.
It seemed like a solution, and before I thought it all the way through, I said, “Semmes, I got a solution to your fucking problem.” He had started to look like he might be discouraged over the fact that he couldn’t get a date. I was trying to push him out, edge him out, encourage him out.
He didn’t jump right on it, but I insisted. I’ve got a date for you! This is a really hot wild woman . . . I had the file. I showed him the press clippings. I was doing a real selling job on her—I said, “You just call her and she’ll be your date. She’ll whoop it up with you. I’ll even pay for the drinks.”
I convinced him to go in the other room and call the Witness. I could hear him talking, but I didn’t care to hear what he was saying. As far as I was concerned, he was leaving to go meet her. Suddenly he appeared at the kitchen door, leaving the phone in the living room, and said: “She wants to meet you. She wants to meet you before we go dancing.”
To resolve it took three different calls and three visits from Semmes to the kitchen. The Witness wanted to meet me, and I was really unhappy about that. On Semmes’s second trip to the kitchen, I finally said, “Oh fuck, all right Semmes, you tell her to get in a cab and come here but tell the cab to wait.”
She wouldn’t agree to the date without meeting me, and it pissed me off. When Semmes came back in the kitchen for the third time and said, “She wants to know if she can bring her husband,” I said, “Fuck no! Absolutely not. Not even for a drive-by.” It took half an hour more of dickering and fucking around before she accepted that.
I could see Semmes had a weird setup coming with a husband in the picture. She wanted an interview with me—she wanted to talk to me about the sex business. She thought of herself as the Ralph Nader of the sex business, and she wanted to form a partnership with me and put out a line of sex toys—perhaps a high-quality line of dildos. I wanted no part of that, of course; I had no need, no interest, and my experience with her up to that point made her nothing but a negative, dishonest face. I can see now, telling this story, that I lost control of it little by little.
. . .
About twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I had arranged with Semmes—out of laziness, I guess—that he could bring her into the kitchen and I would shake hands with her, and then he was taking her off dancing. I even gave him money . . . and that is where we lost it.
I stood up and said “Hello” to the Witness, and she began babbling with all sorts of questions she wanted to ask me: “What’s your sex life like? What do you think of fever-fresh nightgowns?” Gibberish and bullshit, which I wanted no part of. “Quiet. Quiet. Be QUIET!” I said. I stressed that to Semmes, too: “She has to be quiet here.” Semmes wanted to continue watching the Grammys, and somehow the Witness ended up sitting in the armchair—just to watch the Grammys.
I kept her quiet for a while: If she started to talk, I was harsh with her—barking “Shut up.” During commercials, she would start babbling and pestering me. When she continued to ask me about my sex life, I made her read Screwjack out loud: “All right,” I said, “you’re curious? Here’s a story I just wrote.”
She never finished Screwjack; it really disturbed her. I said, “What’s wrong with you? Keep going. Can’t you read?” She read about half of it, and said, “Wow. What the shit is this? What kind of a pervert. . .” It got to her, directly, but I forced her to continue. I knew that book would tell her something, and I could tell she learned from the experience. She was not as loud afterward. Meanwhile, we were waiting for Buffett to come on, and I was getting very edgy.
It is true that the night may have been a little boring; it was boring to me. Up to that point all kinds of yo-yos and nymphomaniacs and fiends with plenty of dope to lay out had visited my home. I have had assholes of serious magnitude, including senators, in my house. I should make a list of the most horrible assholes ever to visit . . . but if I did, Gail would not be at the top of that list. I had sympathy for her when I realized that she was being run by this “husband,” who was probably a pimp for the Detroit Lions. She was a blemish, even on the sex trade.
We were stuck in the Grammys, and I was stuck with her. Semmes was irresponsible, and I was full of annoyance—as I would be with any loud stranger that somebody else brings into my kitchen. The Witness was hard to insult; she was dumb and also professionally inured from the sex business to caring what people really thought or felt. The triple-X brand will make you a little thick-skinned after a while, like an armadillo. Maybe I’m like that.
It is a mystery why it bothered me, but this woman also had no sense of humor. She was the unwanted stranger; that was her position in the room. I didn’t say more than ten words to her—including “Be quiet.” I was damn careful to keep people and things between us. I may have shaken her hand, but that was it. I remember telling the Aspen Times later that I could not even have imagined having her in the hot tub with me (as she alleged I tried to), because she would have displaced too much water.
The basketball game had been interesting. The Grammys were not. This irritant had been introduced into the social fabric, but I was as much of a Southern gentleman as I could be. I knew what I was eventually going to do that night, but it was not going to be with this woman. The only question was how soon I could get her out.
I kept trying to get her away from the phone in the office—she was constantly leaving the room to call her husband “in private.” I had appointed Semmes to watch her, but Semmes failed; I’m never going to forgive Semmes for this. It was an utter failure of a performance, as a friend and a protector. I don’t blame Tim, but he could see weird shit brewing. Tim read the situation and saw it was like a game of musical chairs.
. . .
My support system fell apart when those swine left me alone with the Witness. When Semmes got up, I said, “Goddamnit, this is your date, what are you doing? What do you mean you’re leaving?” but he just got up and left. He’d been on the nod for a long time. Tim, who had failed to fix the amplifier, was also planning to leave. I said, “Tim, you gotta take this woman somewhere. You gotta take her. . .” But he couldn’t; “No no no,” he said, “Carol Ann would kill me.” That was true, of course—I had meant for him to give her a ride to the Tavern. I couldn’t take her anywhere. She was very pushy, butting into other people’s conversations and assuming they were enjoying her gibberish—she was almost p
rofessional in that way. You might have thought she had done this kind of work before. She was a little bit like a cop.
Later, she described to the cops how she knew we were dope fiends because we were all asking her, “Are you sure you’re not a cop?” I didn’t really think she was a cop . . . that is how stupid I was. I thought she was just one more dingbat, one more groupie who was unusually determined.
. . .
I had been making cranberry and tequila, because the margarita mix had run out. I was in that kind of mood. Let’s all have a few margaritas. And she—that sot—she belted them down. We all did, no doubt; that’s what it was all about. Some margaritas to celebrate. . . . We were on about the third jug in the blender, or fourth jug, or fifth perhaps, when we switched to cranberry juice, and she had been getting louder and more randy. She was making open cracks to Cat, asking: “Who are you to Hunter?” She grabbed me and said, “Who’s this girl? Why is that other girl here? We don’t need her around.”
Shortly after Tim left, I reached for the phone and told the Witness, “Let’s call a goddamn taxi for you.” As I dialed the “T”—in 925-TAXI—she rushed over, knocking the phone down, and cut me off. It was a quick, startling movement. She leaped, surprisingly fast for a rhino, from five or six feet away.
“Oh no, don’t let it end like this,” she pleaded. “You were always my hero.” I was curt with her; she had no business here. I had not encouraged her in any way.
I tried to call for the taxi a second time. She immediately reached over, a long reach, with her hairy tentacle of an arm to hang up the phone, and I was shocked that anybody would dare to do that. I screamed at her: “Get the fuck away!” and I think Cat actually restrained her. That was the second rush; she made three rushes on the phone. On this second one, the cabbie heard a bit of the ruckus. Later, we had to get him to testify, and it was very tricky—to establish that I did call and that she had cut it off.
She was warned twice, and then she had a pretty clear shot at me on the third attempt. I was trying desperately to get through to the taxi company. I could see her coming as I began to call again; this time I had just started to stand up. As she came rushing at me, her hip crashed into the cutting board and the cranberry juice fell onto the tile floor. The juice bottle went bouncing around and interfered with her rush. I was cursing her: “You goddamn idiot, what the fuck are you doing?” I was trying to get up, and she came at me then, angry, very angry now—she had hurt herself, hitting the cutting board.
I remembered the “prefrontal lift,” which is my most dependable way of ending an argument, particularly when somebody is coming at you. In this move you hit them in both shoulders with the heels of your hands, using a lifting motion. She was coming at me with speed, so I applied a little force. . . . Considerable motion was employed. Usually the attacker helps you a lot, because you can’t do a prefrontal lift on anybody who’s not coming at you. It doesn’t work and looks like a fag punch.
The prefrontal lift stopped her, although her feet were still moving, and she went back on her large butt with a kind of THUMP and ended up sitting on the floor against the refrigerator. I was satisfied. I had been cursing her for an hour. Everything she did was rotten; her questions were stupid. “I want you out of here,” I said. There was never any pretense about this. She had a hideous penchant for coming in my area, hassling me, and she was very stupid. Big, stupid, and I was never entirely sure whether she had her own police agenda or not.
. . .
It was five days later at about ten o’clock in the morning when my neighbor appeared outside, right below the kitchen window. He was very agitated, and he looked like he had come in a hurry. I walked out and said, “Hi, come on it. Have a beer.” He said, “No, I can’t do that now.” He had left his car running. He seemed agitated and afraid of me. He was parked far away from where he usually did, with his car almost backed into the bushes.
“They’re going to come and search your house,” he said. I walked down the driveway, to get closer to him, and he mumbled, “Those bastards are . . . they’re coming out here . . . they’re gonna come get you with a search warrant.” I couldn’t put it together, so I asked, “What crime? What for? What are you talking about?”
The Night Manager, 1985 (Michael Nichols / Magnum Photos)
Seize the Night
The night does not belong to Michelob; the night belongs to Hunter Stockton Thompson.
—Curtis Wilkie, The Boston Globe
The Night Manager
The noonday flight out of Denver is running late today, another brainless jam-up on the runways at Stapleton International—but no matter. The passengers are mainly commercial people—harried-looking middle-aged businessmen wearing blue shirts with white collars and studying Xerox copies of quarterly sales reports.
Across the aisle from me is a rumpled-looking potbellied wretch who looks like Willy Loman, slumped in his seat like two bags of rock salt and drinking Diet Coke. He is reading the money section of USA Today.
In front of me are two giddy young boys wearing matching Walkman machines with built-in mikes that allow them to talk to each other through the headphones. They have removed the armrest between them and are now necking shamelessly and bitching occasionally at the stewardess about the lateness of our arrival. . . . The San Francisco airport is closed by violent weather and we are into a long holding pattern, which will cause them to miss an important business appointment. . . .
So What? We are all businessmen these days. Ray Stevens said it twenty years ago—“Take care of business, Mr. Businessman.”
. . .
The bell rang for me last night—about 13 hours ago, in fact, and now I am slumped and jittery like some kind of lost polar bear across two first-class seats on UAL #70, from Denver to San Francisco, and my business on this trip is definitely not the kind of all-American nuts-and-bolts hokum that I feel like sharing with my fellow businessmen across the aisle.
There is not a bull market for raw sex, amyl nitrites, and double-ended Greek dildos in the friendly skies of United.
Some people sell U-joints and others are in the meat service and human commodity business. But I have nothing in common with these people.
I am in the sex racket, which is worth about $10 billion a year on anybody’s computer—and I am flying to San Francisco to take on the whole city government; the mayor, the D.A., and the police chief.
(And now into SF again—the sleek green hills and the wretched white salt flats beyond the Berkeley Hills, etc.)
The Mitchell Brothers—Jim and Artie—will be waiting for me at the gate, along with my personal road manager, Jeff Armstrong, who is also executive vice president for The Mitchell Brothers Film Group.
These people drive big Mercedes-Benz sedans, the kind of cars favored by Josef Mengele and Ed Meese.
This is the fast lane, folks . . . and some of us like it here.
. . .
Whoops. We are out of gas now, dropping into Fresno like a falling rock—full flaps, reverse engines, then into full glide.
The pilot comes on the intercom and blames “crosswinds at SF International.” Bullshit. This is just another routine air-traffic control emergency. Free enterprise—a quick little taste of what’s coming in the next four years.
The passengers whine and moan, but nobody except me gets off in Fresno to make a phone call—even though the ramp sergeant makes a special effort to open a door.
Like sheep—and when I come back on the plane with a Chronicle, they turn their eyes away, shunning me. . . .
Finally the salesman sitting next to me asks if he can borrow the business section.
Why not? We are all businessmen these days. I am on my way to SF to market a rare porno film, and I am three hours late for a crucial screening with the Mitchell Brothers at their embattled headquarters on O’Farrell Street. The driver is waiting for me at the airport with an armored car and two fat young sluts from Korea.
. . .
We were som
ewhere on a main street in San Francisco, headed for the waterfront, when a woman walked directly in front of the car on her way across the street. I felt myself seizing up, unable to speak—until Maria poked my leg and whispered urgently: “Oh my god, Hunter, look at that beautiful spine!”
I was looking. We were halted for a red light, and the woman was walking briskly, also toward the waterfront, and now we were both watching her with unblinking eyes, not moving the car until some bastard honked and called me a shithead. . . . I honked my own horn and signaled as if I were stalled, waving him to come around me in the other lane, because I was helpless.
Just then the girl with the beautiful spine paused to examine what appeared to be a menu in the window of Vanessi’s, or perhaps the glass tank filled with seawater and large unhappy lobsters. Wonderful, I thought. I knew Vanessi’s well—and if this spine of a princess was going in there for dinner, so were we. I honked again, just to crank up the traffic confusion, and waved three more cars around me.
“You dirty motherfucker!” a well-dressed man screamed at me as he passed. “Eat shit and die!” He zoomed his huge SUV into low and roared away down the hill. But the other traffic had quickly adjusted to the problem and now ignored me, as if I were some kind of goofy construction project, leaving me in peace to keep an eye on this woman. It was good karma at the right moment, and I told Maria to make a note of it. I was feeling warm all over. “You asshole,” she said. “Get this car started! She is moving again. She is crossing Broadway and picking up speed, almost running. God, look at that spine.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her, reaching across the seat to grasp her thigh. “Hot damn, sweetie, what do you want to do with her?”
“Nothing yet,” she hissed. “I just want to look at her.”
Indeed. It was just before dusk on Wednesday. The sun was still bright, the Bay was mildly choppy, and we were mercifully unburdened with appointments or professional responsibilities at the time. The day was a brand-new canvas. Carpe diem.
Kingdom of Fear Page 14
