Thompson loved guns almost as much as he loved drugs: handguns, shotguns, machine guns—any gun would do. It seems only natural that he sought out a job that would allow him to carry a gun. In 1969 he ran for sheriff of his adopted hometown, Aspen, Colorado, on the Freak Party Power Ticket. The self-proclaimed “freak” may never have had a real chance, but his campaign was more about spreading his countercultural message, he explained in Rolling Stone. His opponent, who feared an influx of hippies would destroy Aspen, pulled out all the stops to beat the drug-using, gun-toting writer. Thompson came closer to winning than his skeptics expected, but lost nonetheless. “I unfortunately proved what I set out to prove. It was more a political point than a local election. The American dream is really fucked,” he said to an assemblage of reporters.
Thompson’s high-profile stunts (running for sheriff, raucous appearances on college campuses) captured the attention of even nonreading Americans. “In today’s culture, the writer is not on a lot of people’s radars,” film critic Leonard Maltin said. “Thompson built a reputation so that people who didn’t necessarily read him knew about him.”
Thompson considered himself a throwback to an earlier era, a romance junkie addicted to love and adventure like Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge. “I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer,” he said toward the end of his life, referring to his place in the twentieth-century literary canon. “But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey. I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.”
His rabid fans made pilgrimages to Aspen to see him. Writer and artist Michael Cleverly recalled hanging out with Thompson at the Jerome bar in Aspen and being approached by two hippies, a boy and a girl. “The guy whipped out this vial of cocaine and said, ‘Do you want a bump?’ Hunter said sure, and he took the vial, unscrewed it, poured it out on the broad’s boobs, and shoved his face in there and started snorting,” he said. “He gave the vial back to the kid and then turned his back on them.”
“He’d come in the office, and there’d be a batch of mail from his fans,” Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner said. “Every tenth letter had a joint in it or some pills or something. Hunter would open them up and usually take the stuff.”
Thompson became increasingly reclusive over the years, holing himself up at his Owl Creek home in the mountains outside Aspen. He made time for the celebrity admirers, including Jack Nicholson, Bill Murray, Sean Penn, Jimmy Buffett, Johnny Depp, and John Belushi. He wasn’t acquainted with many other authors, instead preferring the company of actors and musicians. Thompson believed Allen Ginsberg was a horrible drunk and actively avoided him for years—even when the two of them were in the same bar. About the only contemporary writer Thompson could stand was Norman Mailer. “Thank Jesus for Norman,” Thompson once said.
Being at the center of the madness was too much for Thompson’s first wife, Sandy. She was much more than a supportive spouse: she was his secretary, his bookkeeper, his accountant, his everything. “I was living for Hunter and his work—for this great person, this great writer. And then when he couldn’t write anymore, what was I doing?” Sandy said. “It was sad to see. I was taking care of a drug addict—who loved me and who was also terrifying me.” She divorced Thompson in 1980 and took their son with her.
Thompson’s output steadily declined over the years. He blew deadlines on assigned stories and was estranged from his editor and friend Jann Wenner for many years as a result.
Musician Jimmy Buffett recalled one stretch of time during the 1970s when Thompson stayed at his Key West apartment to work on a movie script. Thompson never completed the script but turned Buffett’s apartment into “some kind of sex palace,” according to Buffet. Another time, Thompson flew to Hawaii to go deep-sea fishing in a quest to emulate his hero Hemingway. The resulting book from that trip, The Curse of Lono, was a mess that his editor Corey Seymour had to stitch together from fragments. There was no denying, though, that the drugs had finally taken over Thompson’s life to the point where his work was suffering.
“He enjoyed drugs, all kinds of them, day and night, really with no break for years on end,” Wenner said. “At a certain point I don’t think he enjoyed it anymore, but by that time he was hopelessly addicted. He had said to me often throughout his life, ‘I’m a dope addict. A classic, old-fashioned, opium-smoking-type dope addict. I admit that freely. That’s who I am.’ And he was also an alcoholic, and that slowly destroyed his talent and finally his life.”
Even without consistent, quality work, Thompson’s profile continued to grow in subsequent decades, thanks to the 1980 Bill Murray comedy Where the Buffalo Roam and a pair of film adaptations starring Johnny Depp, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary. The films are disjointed, patchwork approximations of Thompson’s writing and life—fitting, perhaps, but not exactly traditional cinematic experiences. The latter two movies were passion projects for actor Johnny Depp: he and Thompson were both from Kentucky and shared a passion for poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Thompson sent a letter to his friend Depp asking him to “prevent pitching this film as a drug movie about Hunter S. Thompson in the ads. Shit, airports are hard enough for me now!”
“Hunter S. Thompson” became a costume, one that Thompson could not escape from even if he had wanted to. “I’m really in the way as a person. The myth has taken over. It would be much better if I died,” he said in a video interview in the 1980s.
Somewhere underneath Thompson’s costume, a real heart beat on. His friend Shelby Sadler recalls walking to Fitzgerald’s grave in Rockville, Maryland, with Thompson one time. The last line of The Great Gatsby is inscribed on the headstone: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” “I will never forget Hunter gently laying the white rose down across the words and peering up and being absolutely silent the whole walk back,” Sadler said.
Thompson, battling numerous but nonterminal health problems, killed himself with a handgun in 2005 at his home near Aspen. His wife was at the gym, while his adult son Juan was in the next room. “It was a sweet family moment,” Juan said without sarcasm. In Thompson’s suicide note, he wrote, “67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. . . . Relax—This won’t hurt.”
Bartender Michael Solheim recalled accompanying Thompson on a visit to the Ketchum, Idaho, house where Hemingway shot himself. “The door was open, and we could hear the caretaker snoring in the background. For Hunter it was all about going into the vestibule, the enclosed space where Hemingway had shot himself,” Solheim told Rolling Stone after Thompson had killed himself. “I hit the light switch and we stood there.”
22
The Workshop
“I never wrote so much as a line worth a nickel when I was under the influence of alcohol.”
—RAYMOND CARVER
Samuel Coleridge once warned would-be authors away from the profession of writing with the same zeal he reserved for warning readers about the dangers of opium. “With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience,” he wrote. “It will be short: never pursue literature as a trade.”
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop (officially the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa), founded in 1936, was the first graduate creative writing program in the United States. By the 1970s, creative writing was being taught on hundreds of college campuses in the United States. William S. Burroughs, who briefly tried his hand at lecturing students in Switzerland, said, “There’s a question in my mind as to whether writing can be taught. There are techniques of writing, but I don’t think any writer has ever lived long enough to really discover these, or codify them.”
Even if Burroughs is right, university creative writing programs have also doubled as safe harbors for young writers. “By the 1970s, the day
s when a writer could hunker down in a cold-water flat in Greenwich Village and survive by knocking out the occasional story for this or that weekly magazine while he worked on his Great American Novel were wistful memories,” Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer wrote in We Wanted to Be Writers. “Workshops like Iowa’s thus became a refuge for young, developing writers in the absence of more support from anywhere else.”
Graduate writing programs provide a two-year respite from the “real world,” two years that allow young authors the luxury of doing little besides writing and reading and drinking. When Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer showed up on the University of Iowa campus, “we were facing the delicious prospect of two years to do nothing but write—well, we intended to do nothing but write, until we discovered all of Iowa City’s swell bars.”
“We go to workshops for community, to meet like-minded people,” said Jane Smiley, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1970s. “Most writers don’t succeed if they’re just sitting in a room writing but not getting out. If you look back at the history of the novel, nearly everyone who succeeded was part of some sort of literary group. There is hardly anyone who thrives on being solitary.”
One thing universities have always struggled with is the fact that the most accomplished writers are sometimes unfit to be teachers. John Berryman, who taught at Iowa—and was, of course, fired—was infamous in his own time. In the 1970s, however, a pair of accomplished authors arrived at the University of Iowa to redefine the drunken professor for a new generation.
By the time John Cheever (1912–1982) arrived to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for the fall semester in 1973, a doctor had already advised him that his drinking was a death sentence. Months earlier, a pulmonary edema, caused by alcoholism, had nearly killed him.
“His family had essentially washed their hands of him,” student Allan Gurganus said. “It must have been very frustrating for them. And so there he was, living at that bleak university hotel, the Iowa House, drinking scotch out of the glasses they provided, the toothpaste glasses. He was issued two thin bath towels every week. I mean his room, where he held all his student conferences, was where a traveling salesman might go to commit suicide.”
Cheever had been desperately looking forward to spending time at the workshop because Iowa seemed a serene setting, but it’s difficult to tell if it was the restorative vacation he expected. “I had John Cheever my second year in the Workshop,” T. C. Boyle said. “Cheever was very drunk all the time.” The new professor had never taught on a college campus before and ran afoul of University of Iowa officials with his unorthodox style, as this excerpt from a school official’s letter shows:
A student in your course … has reported to this office that smoking is permitted in this course. A policy which precludes smoking in classes was recently adopted.… I’m certain the student in question and perhaps others in the course would appreciate your cooperation in the effort to provide a setting free from what some regard as the objectionable presence of cigarette and other smoke.
Although Cheever was separated physically and emotionally from his wife while he taught at the workshop, he was never lonely. He took strolls along the banks of the Iowa River that divided the campus and occasionally ran into other writers like William Styron (who had his own issues with alcohol and depression, detailed in Darkness Visible). Cheever also joined pickup games of touch football with students, though he was likely to be winded after fifteen minutes.
Writing for Travel and Leisure magazine, Cheever poetically described the serenity he found in a “bag of French fries being eaten by the lonely fat girl.” After going to a Saturday Big Ten football game at Kinnick Stadium, he wrote that “Iowa usually loses, but the amiable crowd, moving back into the city at dusk, has no losers, no drunks.” Though this description is at odds with the beer-fueled tailgating that actually takes place on Saturday afternoons in the fall on college campuses, when one is drunk (as Cheever most certainly was), one is less likely to recognize the drunken state of others.
In the 1970s, “the teachers tended to be men of a certain age, with the idea that competition was somehow the key—the Norman Mailer period,” Jane Smiley said. Cheever was joined on campus by short story writer Raymond Carver (1938–1988).
By the time Carver arrived in Iowa City, he had given up writing and was, for all practical purposes, a full-time drinker. Both Cheever and Carver taught for just one semester, standard for visiting professors at the workshop.
Cheever left Iowa to teach at Boston University in 1975, where he was arrested on the streets of Boston drinking hooch with vagrants. “My name is John Cheever!” he screamed at the arresting officers. “Are you out of your mind?” He entered Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center on Manhattan’s East 93rd Street and emerged sober four weeks later. “It’s the most terrible, glum place you can conceivably imagine. It’s really, really, really grim,” he told Truman Capote. “But I did come out of there sober.”
Following a series of hospitalizations, Carver also finally got sober on June 2, 1977. He didn’t write anything for a year. “I can’t convince myself it’s worth doing,” he said. Instead of writing, he played bingo and ate donuts. He remarried and eventually wrote some of his best work, including the Pulitzer-nominated short story collection Cathedral. He chronicled the experience in his poem “Gravy,” which is inscribed on his tombstone.
Cheever died of cancer in the summer of 1981 without reconciling with his wife. Carver, meanwhile, divorced his wife and married poet Tess Gallagher in 1988. Six weeks after his wedding, he passed away from complications of lung cancer at the age of fifty.
Literary rogues of past generations had tried to quit using substances, but most failed without support groups that understood the nature of their problems. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 to help addicts fight their drinking problems, but it took many years for the “rehab” movement to gain a foothold in the popular consciousness. It wasn’t until 1956 that alcoholism was officially recognized as a disease by the medical community.
However, it’s wishful thinking to try to imagine the output of Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Baudelaire if they had access to substance abuse treatment—AA and other rehab programs have not proved to be the panacea for society’s substance abuse problems. Drug and alcohol use has continued unabated, and, as we’ll see in the next several chapters, writers continue to struggle with these age-old demons in the modern era.
23
The Toxic Twins
“We both got processed by the hype machine.”
—JAY MCINERNEY
Following the drug-addled youth movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the United States stepped up its antidrug campaign. Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, the first step in an offensive dubbed “the War on Drugs” by President Nixon. A new federal agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, was created in 1973 to oversee the administration’s open-ended war. Other government agencies, including the CIA, soon entered into the fray.
The crackdown failed to clean up urban environments like New York City. The middle class had been fleeing big cities for the suburbs since at least the 1950s, and by the 1970s poverty-related crime and drug abuse reached epidemic proportions. According to Jay McInerney (b. 1955), getting mugged was a rite of passage for New Yorkers in the 1970s. His first two apartments were both broken into, and his 1966 Volkswagen was stolen—not once, but twice.
Things seemed to change with the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, the former television actor with the megawatt smile. “In 1980, it became clear that New York had pulled up its socks and reversed the fiscal, physical, and psychic dilapidation of the seventies,” McInerney wrote. “The stock market began a steady ascent, which created new jobs on Wall Street. At some point, the influx of ambitious young strivers [‘yuppies’] started to exceed the exodus.”
While New York City appeared to be on the rebound in 1980, McInerney was at his lowest point. The
twenty-five-year-old had been fired from his job as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, and his wife had left him. About all he had left was his aspiration to be a novelist like his idol, Raymond Carver. When McInerney met Carver following a reading at Columbia University in New York, the meeting had to have exceeded the struggling writer’s wildest dreams: Carver “enthusiastically tried cocaine with McInerney” and persuaded the younger writer to put in more time studying fiction upstate, with Carver, at Syracuse University’s MFA program. McInerney’s sabbatical at Syracuse led to the first draft of his novel, Bright Lights, Big City, which Carver blurbed upon its release in September 1984.
Since, like McInerney, the protagonist of Bright Lights worked as a fact checker for a New York magazine, it was generally assumed that the story was largely autobiographical. Even if it wasn’t, it was still a tour de force that transformed the literary landscape of the 1980s in fewer than two hundred pages. “Certainly Bright Lights was just a bull’s-eye into yuppie consciousness,” novelist Douglas Unger, a Syracuse classmate of McInerney’s, said. “I remember one time I was walking around the Upper West Side of New York City and just about every other person—in the coffee shops, on the street—had a copy of Jay’s book.” Despite the narrator’s decidedly unglamorous job, Playboy called it “Catcher in the Rye for the MBA set.” In a 1985 People story, McInerney was described as being “dusted with cocaine, disco glitter and the faint promise of a literary future.”
Every generation is defined, to some extent, by the drugs it does or doesn’t use. To extend the life cycle of the tell-all drug memoir, it was necessary to invent new drugs—or at least rediscover old ones: Benzedrine and heroin in the 1950s; LSD and mescaline in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the new drug was an old one. “It was as if I suddenly invented cocaine,” McInerney said about the public reception of Bright Lights.
Literary Rogues Page 17
