Oh no, I thought quickly. That is definitely not me. I would never talk like that. It must be a music nightmare.
And it was, because I never heard those voices again, and those Screws in New York never bothered me again, once I got a chance to mix the big board for Mr. Bobby. Nobody fucked with me after that.
. . .
And that is why I secretly worship God, folks. He had the good judgment to leave me alone to write a few genuine black-on-white pages by myself, for a change. Only Anita is with me now, and that’s how I want it. . . . Mahalo. Res Ipsa Loquitur. Amor Vincit Omnia.
Okay, and it’s about it for now, people. It is 10:00 A.M. in Manhattan, and I can almost feel those bastards getting jittery in their cubicles.
Oh ye of little faith. We are, after all, professionals.
HST/wc/September 3, 2002
The Doctor speaks at a press conference on the steps of the Pitkin
County courthouse with Black Bill and lawyers Hal Haddon and
Gerry Goldstein, after all charges were dropped
(Nicholas Devore III)
Letter from Lawyer Goldstein
June 15, 2002
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, Colorado
Re: It’s Been an Interesting Ride
Dear Doc:
As I headed out to deep East Texas, I was marveling at your huevos for standing up to our hometown police when they ran amok through your roost at Owl Farm. Your willingness, then and now, to take a stand against intolerance, wherever it rears its ugly head, is a testament to your tenacity. Your reputation may be that of the poet laureate of our generation, but you teach us by more than just word. Your example of political and social activism speaks volumes about good citizenship. As you reminded me recently:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.”1
A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the intervening decade since we stood on the steps of the Pitkin County Courthouse, basking in the celebrative sunshine of that victorious moment, and most of it has seen the erosion of Constitutional guarantees set in place by our Founding Fathers as a bulwark to protect the governed from their government. For example, the United States Supreme Court has since ruled that the police can:
• Search your home based upon the consent of someone who has absolutely no authority to give same,2
• Stop your car based upon an “anonymous tip” completely lacking any indicia of reliability,3
• Subject a motorist to mandatory sobriety tests without any indication they have been drinking or that their driving is impaired,4 and
• Hold innocent citizens for up to two days without giving reason or recourse.
The tragic events of September 11, 2001, changed more than Manhattan’s skyline; it profoundly altered our political and legal landscape as well. Anyone who witnessed the desecration of those buildings and the heart-wrenching loss of life, who didn’t want to run out and rip someone a new asshole, doesn’t deserve the freedoms we still enjoy. However, anybody who thinks for one moment that giving up our freedoms is any way to preserve or protect those freedoms, is even more foolhardy.
Yet barely one month later, on October 26, 2001, Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA Patriot Act. It rolled through the Senate on a vote of 99 to 1, and the lone holdout, Wisconsin Senator Russ Finegold, said he didn’t really know whether he was opposed to the bill or not, he just wanted to read it before voting. There were only two copies of the 346-page document extant at the time, and the Senate had been run out of their building by the anthrax scare.
That single Congressional enactment authorizes the detention of non-citizens suspected of terrorist acts without filing of charges or resort to judicial authority, permits roving wiretaps, and extends to American citizens the secret proceedings, surveillance, and wiretaps of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which sits in a vault atop the Department of Justice Building, and allows only Deputy Attorneys General of the United States to appear. Imagine an adversary process that allows only one side’s advocate to appear. No wonder that in its 24-year history not a single request for surveillance was turned down. Not until last month, when the secret judge refused to apply these secret proceedings to citizens, cataloging 75 instances where the FBI had lied to them. The Just Us Department has appealed that secret decision to a secret appeals court, presumably at some other secret location.
At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons, by executive fiat, has authorized monitoring of attorney-client communications by direction of the Attorney General, without any judicial authorization. Almost one hundred and fifty years ago, the Supreme Court reminded those in power:
The Constitution of the United States is the law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the whit of man than that any of [the Constitution’s] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of Government.5
But this is not the first time civil liberties have been eroded in the face of national crises. Abraham Lincoln suspended the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, Woodrow Wilson had his Palmer raids, and Franklin Roosevelt interred Asian-American citizens for no reason, other than their national origin. All of this is enough to make even the most ardent civil libertarian throw up their hands. But not you, Doc, no, you have refused to remain silent or to go quietly into the night. Your tireless defense of others, faced with official oppression, stands in the best tradition of true patriots.
You championed the cause of a displaced young Innuit woman,6 who found herself in the grip of a draconian legal entanglement, calculated to imprison her for the crime of seeking the return of her purse from a thieving pack of rowdies. At your insistence, we gathered a team of legal eagles and launched a midday raid on the Leadville courthouse, nestled near the Continental Divide, in a King Air Beechraft, stuffed so full of partisan supporters that Brother Semmes Luckett was heard to exclaim: “King Farouk didn’t require an entourage this large.”
More recently, you sent out a clarion call to defend an incarcerated Colorado woman,7 condemned to suffer a lifetime for the misdeeds of another she had barely met. The idea that a citizen could spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime she did not intend, want, nor desire should be foreign to any sense of justice and fairness. In response you brought the weight and legal prowess of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Amicus Committee to her defense, and rallied a Colorado Governor’s wife, a Denver city councilperson, the Pitkin County Sheriff,8 a Presidential Historian, and yours truly to the steps of our State Capital, all to the strains of Warren Zevon bellowing “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”
In 1990 you founded the Fourth Amendment Foundation, a collection of legal titans willing to take a stand against our government’s increasingly pervasive intrusions into its citizen’s privacy. While our forefathers were concerned that King George’s Red Coats were breaking down their doors and rummaging through their underwear drawers, today we are faced with more sophisticated means of invading our privacy. The new technology is not physical. You cannot see it. You cannot feel it. But in a way, it is more sinister and dangerous because of that. Stealthlike, it steals your thoughts. It steals your conversations. It invades the crossroads between the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the First Amendment rights to free speech and association. It cuts to the quick the citizenries’ right to protest and complain about their government. The Fourth Amendment protection of a citizen’s privacy against his or her government’s intrusion is the linchpin upon which all other civil liberties rest. Freedom of speech and association, so essential to a free society, would mean little if the citizens’ activities and communications were not protected from government interference and interception. George Orwell created his sterile environment and
maintained control over the citizenry, not by imprisoning their bodies, but by exposing their thoughts and communications to government scrutiny.
With recent advances in electronic technology allowing Big Brother to spy upon the most intimate and confidential parts of our lives and communications, the citizen today is in need of greater, not lesser protection. Yet in the face of the dreaded drug scare and threat of international terrorism, courts continue to erode the citizens’ zone of privacy by paternalistically balancing these perceived dangers against the public’s willingness to acquiesce. While the majority does “rule” in our republican form of democracy, our Constitution was designed to protect certain rights and liberties from that majority, as well as for them. Recognizing that “[a]mong deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart . . . [as] uncontrolled search and seizure,”9 your Fourth Amendment Foundation vigilantly stands guard against further encroachments upon the citizens’ diminishing expectation of privacy.
Doc, you are a fast take, and your comprehension and analysis of legal issues and theory are quite remarkable. You tenaciously cling to high principle, and expect no less from those around you. All of which probably accounts for why you are such a pain in the ass to have for a client. It takes a lot of love to represent you, Brother.
But the reason I’d do it again in a heartbeat, is that your selfless and indignant stand against injustice has served as a catalyst and stimulus for others, including myself. As Michael Stepanian reminded me at a recent gathering, “Hunter is necessary, now more than ever, Hunter is necessary.”
Yours in the continuing fight,
(Signed) Gerald H. Goldstein
for Goldstein, Goldstein & Hilley
It Never Got Weird Enough for Me
How can grownups tell [the kids of America] drugs are bad when they see what they’ve done for Thompson, a man who glided through the 1960s thinking acid was a health food?
—Bernard Goldberg, Bias
Dear Dr. Thompson,
My name is Xania and I am very beautiful and my family is very rich. I am eight years old and I live in Turkey. We live by the sea, but I am bored here. They treat me like a child, but I am not. I am ready to escape. I want to leave. I want to get married and I want to marry you. That is why I write you today. I want you to suck my tits while I scream and dance in your lap and my mother watches. She is the one who says this. She loves you very much and so do I.
I am eight years old and my body is well advanced. My mother is twenty-six and, boy! You should see her. We are almost twins and so is my grandmother, who is only forty-two years old and looks the same as me. I think she is crazy like my mother. They are beautiful when they walk around naked, and so am I. We are always naked here. We are rich and the sea is so beautiful. If the sea had brains, I would suck them out of it. But I can’t. The sea has no penis.
Why is that, Doc? If you are so smart, answer that one! Fuck you. I knew you wouldn’t help us. Please send three plane tickets right now. I love you! We are not whores. Please help me. I know I will see you soon. We travel a lot. My father wants you to marry me. He is sixty-six years old and he owns the main banks of Turkey. All of them. We will have a beautiful, beautiful wedding when you show them us naked and I dance while you suck my tits and my father screams. O God I love you! Our dream is now. Yes.
Your baby,
Xania
(Billy Noonan)
Fear and Loathing in Elko
FEAR AND LOATHING IN ELKO: BAD CRAZINESS
IN SHEEP COUNTRY . . . SIDE ENTRANCE
ON QUEER STREET . . . O BLACK, O WILD, O
DARKNESS, ROLL OVER ME TONIGHT
MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK:
THE GHOST OF LONG DONG THOMAS AND
THE ROAD FULL OF FORKS
January 1992
Dear Jann,
Goddamn, I wish you were here to enjoy this beautiful weather with me. It is autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown, and the warmth going out of the sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and all the flowers die from freezing.
Oh, God! You should have been with me yesterday when I finished my ham and eggs and knocked back some whiskey and picked up my Weatherby Mark V .300 Magnum and a ball of black Opium for dessert and went outside with a fierce kind of joy in my heart because I was Proud to be an American on a day like this. It felt like a goddamn Football Game, Jann—it was like Paradise. . . . You remember that bliss you felt when we powered down to the farm and whipped Stanford? Well, it felt like That.
I digress. My fits of Joy are soiled by relentless flashbacks and ghosts too foul to name. . . . Oh no, don’t ask Why. You could have been president, Jann, but your road was full of forks, and I think of this when I see the forked horns of these wild animals who dash back and forth on the hillsides while rifles crack in the distance and fine swarthy young men with blood on their hands drive back and forth in the dusk and mournfully call our names. . . .
O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again.
Right. And so much for autumn. The trees are diseased and the Animals get in your way and the President is usually guilty and most days are too long, anyway. . . . So never mind my poem. It was wrong from the start. I plagiarized it from an early work of Coleridge and then tried to put my own crude stamp on it, but I failed.
So what? I didn’t want to talk about fucking autumn, anyway. I was just sitting here at dawn on a crisp Sunday morning, waiting for the football games to start and taking a goddamn very brief break from this blizzard of Character Actors and Personal Biographers and sickly Paparazzi that hovers around me these days (they are sleeping now, thank Christ—some even in my own bed). I was sitting here all alone, thinking, for good or ill, about the Good Old Days.
We were Poor, Jann. But we were Happy. Because we knew Tricks. We were Smart. Not Crazy, like they said. (No. They never called us late for dinner, eh?)
Ho, ho. Laughs don’t come cheap these days, do they? The only guy who seems to have any fun in public is Prince Cromwell, my shrewd and humorless neighbor—the one who steals sheep and beats up women, like Mike Tyson.
Who knows why, Jann. Some people are too weird to figure.
You have come a long way from the Bloodthirsty, Beady-eyed news Hawk that you were in days of yore. Maybe you should try reading something besides those goddamn motorcycle magazines—or one of these days you’ll find hair growing in your palms.
Take my word for it. You can only spend so much time “on the throttle,” as it were. . . . Then the Forces of Evil will take over. Beware. . . .
Ah, but that is a different question, for now. Who gives a fuck? We are, after all, Professionals. . . . But our Problem is not. No. It is the Problem of Everyman. It is Everywhere. The Question is our Wa; the Answer is our Fate . . . and the story I am about to tell you is horrible, Jann.
I came suddenly awake, weeping and jabbering and laughing like a loon at the ghost on my TV set. Judge Clarence Thomas . . . Yes, I knew him. But that was a long time ago. Many years, in fact, but I still remember it vividly. . . . Indeed, it has haunted me like a Golem, day and night, for many years.
It seemed normal enough, at the time, just another weird rainy night out there on the high desert. . . . What the Hell? We were younger, then. Me and the Judge. And all the others, for that matter. . . . It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days—without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot
. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko when you were lost in a midnight rainstorm—and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California.
There were Laws, but they were not feared. There were Rules, but they were not worshiped . . . like Laws and Rules and Cops and Informants are feared and worshiped today.
Like I said: It was a different time. And I know the Judge would tell you the same thing, tonight, if he wanted to tell you the Truth, like I do.
The first time I actually met the Judge was a long time ago, for strange reasons, on a dark and rainy night in Elko, Nevada, when we both ended up in the same sleazy roadside Motel, for no good reason at all. . . . Good God! What a night!
I almost forgot about it, until I saw him last week on TV . . . and then I saw it all over again. The horror! The horror! That night when the road washed out and we all got stuck out there—somewhere near Elko in a place just off the highway, called Endicott’s Motel—and we almost went really Crazy.
Yours,
HST
. . .
It was just after midnight when I first saw the sheep. I was running about eighty-eight or ninety miles an hour in a drenching, blinding rain on U.S. 40 between Winnemucca and Elko with one light out. I was soaking wet from the water that was pouring in through a hole in the front roof of the car, and my fingers were like rotten icicles on the steering wheel.
Kingdom of Fear Page 26
