Although anxious about getting a job, Thompson was thrilled just to be in New York City, sharing a flat near Columbia University with Jerry Hawke.
December 27, 1957
110 Morningside Drive
New York, New York
Dear Susan,
Cheers … from the uptown west side of the melting pot. It is raining: raining like hell … and the wind carries the raindrops down Morningside Drive like a supersonic hailstorm, desolating the streets and giving all job-seekers an excuse to stay inside and drink. I am not drinking, however. I cannot afford to. My time is consumed in plotting a frontal assault on the beachhead of gainful employment.
I can hear the questions already; the rumbling mass of curiosity tumbling out of your head and lying in unanswered heaps behind your ruby lips. And I suppose I should try to explain just how I came to this pass, living temporarily in a 6 × 8 room in New York City, and scanning the help-wanted ads with that frenzied eagerness that only the threat of impending poverty can inject into a man.
Nay, I shall not explain, I can only suppose that I came to grips with the inevitable and all-too-happily “took a dive.” Not that there aren’t logical explanations, of course: but they’re all very complex and somewhat depressing. I shall make an attempt to explain … when I get a job. Until then, I can ill afford to fritter away my time on self-analysis. So you’ll merely have to bear with me, sharing my spasmodic interludes of optimism and sending condolences—and possibly a weekly check—during my periods of depression. So be it.
There remains, of course, the possibility that I may be unable to find a job. If there is a Jesus, he will then have one of his finest chances to gain a convert. I now have the sum total of $110. When that runs out, there will have to be a Jesus—or a job.
Unfortunately, I can’t seem to grasp the urgency of the situation. There are moments when I seem to have things well in hand … and then suddenly a bar or bookstore or a basketball game appears out of nowhere to trip me up. I just can’t seem to hang onto money. Today I bought two books and a ticket to the Temple-Pitt game at the Garden. God only knows what it’ll be tomorrow.
Next week will be zero week. If I don’t have a job by Saturday, I may call for divine help—or charity. I shall start with the Times and the Tribune, of course, and then run the gamut of the Telegram, the Journal, the Daily News, and the Mirror, in that order. If that turns out to be a dry run, I shall then hurtle blindly into the open job market, tossing preferences and experiences to the winds and depending on pure, unadulterated bluff to carry me through.
Even though I think in terms of alternatives—the Courier-Journal and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in particular—my old and faithful car seems to realize that we’ve come to the point of no return. He seems unwilling to do anything but sit peacefully on the street, a perfect target for parking tickets. Naturally, it will be impossible for me to go anywhere without him. I simply have too much baggage. So I think I’m here for the time being, anyway. As I said, I suppose it was inevitable.
On the lighter side—supposing that I do get a job—I intend to move out of my temporary quarters and into a grotto of my own. Then, of course, I will need a mistress. And even in your virginal state, I suppose you could qualify—providing that you promise to bring a record player and several clean sheets. At any rate, that is all in the future—and a very vague future it is.
But I’ll keep you informed: the immediate future will be anything but dull.
Until then, I remain, optimistically and lecherously yours,
Hunter
TO VIRGINIA THOMPSON:
December 28, 1957
110 Morningside Dr.
New York City
Dear Mom,
Having received no reply from my last effort, I thought it best to get off another short letter, just to assure you that I’m still very much alive and kicking. I have yet to get any mail at this address, and I’m beginning to wonder just what has happened to all my mail, packages, weekly checks, inheritances, and so forth. I shall check with both the postman and the building superintendent on Monday. All the mail going to Jersey Shore was supposed to have been re-routed to Louisville: so if things begin to pile up there, please send them on.
As for my situation here, it could best be described as “flexible.” At present, I am staying in Jerry Hawke’s apartment with two other Columbia law students. Jerry and his brother are staying at home—Rockville Centre, Long Island—during the holidays, and I’ll be here until at least the sixth of January when school starts again. By that time, I’ll either have a job or be fairly certain of not having one.
For the past few days, I’ve been making a detailed study of the sports-writing style employed by each of the New York papers. I intend to take a representative story from each one, re-write it to the best of my ability, and then make the rounds of the various papers with my portfolio of stories. If this yields nothing, I shall then investigate the possibility of working in some other field. Actually, there are numerous jobs advertised in the Times every day: no really desirable ones for a lad of my limited qualifications, of course, but at any rate, I probably won’t starve in the event I fail to crack the newspaper job market. I should have a pretty good line on all this by the end of next week.
If and when I do get a job, I naturally intend to move into some sort of lodging of my own. But that too will have to wait until things begin to take shape.
And, incidentally, I hate to bring up the question of money, but there is something I will have to know about in the almost immediate future. To be brief and to the point, I would like to know if there is any possibility of Memo donating to the “get Hunter into college fund.” You mentioned this, you remember, in connection with the almost dead certainty of Davison getting a “free ride.” The reason I have to know pretty soon is that I’ll have to apply within the next month or six weeks, if I intend to go anywhere other than U of L [University of Louisville]. And then too, the possibility of going to school next fall will have a definite influence on what I decide to do until then. So, if you can let me know a little something on this in your next letter, it will be a big help.
Just as soon as I get a job, I’ll send you a belated birthday present. But until I have an income, it would probably be much wiser to hold onto every cent I can. Up to this point, I’ve been doing exactly that. Fortunately, I’ve been able to see Don Giovanni at the Met Opera, and one session of the Holiday Basketball tournament since I’ve been here, without parting with any money for tickets. The boys I live with have several deals like that, and it’s been a big help knowing a few people. John Clancy—one of the boys living here—and I have “dates” of a sort tonight, with an eye toward getting me a companion for New Year’s Eve. But, in case you get the impression that I’m blowing my meager fortune on wine, women, and song … fear not. So far, I’ve managed my funds very well. New York is actually not at all expensive if you know what you’re doing. As a matter of fact, I’ve found that almost everything costs less here than it did in either Florida or Jersey Shore.
But this is the end of the paper, so I’ll close without further ado.
Hunter
1. Chip Johnson was a Louisville friend of Thompson’s who joined the Air Force.
2. Identifying details about Reed have been changed for publication.
3. A friend of Tyrrell’s who wanted to join the armed forces.
4. Bob Colgan was a high school friend of Thompson’s; Dave Ethridge was the son of Louisville Courier-Journal editor Mark Ethridge. They both visited Thompson in Fort Walton Beach.
5. Owl Creek was a country club in Anchorage, a Louisville suburb, where Thompson and Haselden used to “sneak swim” on sultry evenings.
6. Banks Shepherd was the base contracting officer.
7. Charlie was a Louisville man Haselden occasionally dated.
8. Mildred “Babe” Didrickson Zaharias, tennis champion.
9. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Campbell was Thompson’s mentor at Eg
lin Air Force Base in charge of the Office of Information Services. A former Boston Globe reporter, he was responsible for Thompson’s work at the Command Courier.
10. Memo was Thompson’s maternal grandmother, Lucille Ray. Jim was his youngest brother.
11. Patrick O’Dea was a Louisville dilettante and social figure who introduced Thompson to a number of women.
12. Thompson now used this nom de plume at Playground News, in addition to Thorne Stockton.
13. Robert Rosan was an ROTC from Syracuse Journalism School who was in charge of laying out the Command Courier. Thompson loathed him.
14. Pug was Colonel W. S. Evans’s nickname. As chief of the Office of Information Services, Evans was Thompson’s immediate superior officer at Eglin.
15. Renowned U.S. nuclear scientists.
16. Thompson used to berate Edenfield because he had reenlisted in the armed forces.
17. Thompson was greatly influenced by sociologist Mills’s groundbreaking theories about America’s power structure.
18. Thompson is referring to the famous merry-go-round at Louisville’s amusement park.
19. Thompson is referring to his date with the daughter of a Jersey Shore Herald writer, which is detailed in his January 2, 1958, letter to Fred Fulkerson.
1958
DOWN AND OUT IN MANHATTAN … NO ROOM AT THE YMCA … LIFE AT THE INTERRACIAL HOTEL … MIDNIGHT SINS OF HST … FEEDING OFF HENRY LUCE … WHOSE MOVIE IS THIS?…
New Year’s Eve in Manhattan. A freezing rain blows through the dark street. Above the city, far up in the misted rain, long beams of yellow light sweep in great circles through the black air. They are anchored to the Empire State Building–that great phallic symbol, a monument to the proud dream of potency that is the spirit of New York. And below, in the damp neon labyrinth of the city itself, people hurry: somewhere … everywhere … nowhere …
—Hunter S. Thompson, “Prince Jellyfish” (unpublished novel)
TO FRED FULKERSON:
Although jobless, Thompson was having fun in Manhattan, reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and searching for gainful employment. The city looked all the better after Jersey Shore. Meanwhile, at Eglin, Fulkerson had taken over Thompson’s job as sports editor of the Command Courier.
January 2, 1958
110 Morningside Drive
New York, New York
Dear Fred,
Well, I suppose I’d better warn you to get a grip—because I have a bitch of a tale to tell: a tale of terror and agony, shame and grief, poverty and perversion.…
On Christmas Eve, I voluntarily and under the influence of drink confessed to four heinously cruel homosexual offenses in a Chicago suburb, and was subsequently sentenced on New Year’s Day to 73 years in Joliet prison. Upon hearing the sentence, I mercilessly slew a juror and three guards and fled into the night. I am now working as a pimp on New York’s Upper West Side, in the heart of the Puerto Rican section. In the short space of three weeks, I’ve become addicted to morphine, cheddar cheese extract, and three more forms of sexual perversion. I need moral aid—send money and a Gideon Bible to Emanuel Hunteros Nama, no Morningside Drive, Apt. 53, New York, New York. […]
Seriously, things have come to a horrible pass. I’ve been crazy drunk for 10 straight days, my money disappears at a rapid rate, the police put at least one ticket on my car every day, and it’s beginning to look like I’m actually going to have to work for a living. The outlook is grizzly indeed.
I got here on Christmas Eve: needless to say, I couldn’t stand that goddamn place in Pennsylvania—and I’ve been drinking almost continuously ever since. My departure from Pennsylvania was hastened a bit, after a wild debauch with the young daughter of one of the staff writers. She left for Chicago on the same day I left for New York. On the Friday night before Christmas, we stayed out all night, drove her fathers car into a mud bog on a deserted road, tore the front bumper off trying to drag the car onto the road with a tractor, and both became raving drunk on Ram’s Head Ale. Naturally, the scandal caused a little hard feeling here and there, and made it necessary for me to flee town immediately in order to avoid being tarred and feathered by a puritanical mob.1 I had already enraged a goodly portion of the populace by several sarcastic articles on the sorry state of Pennsylvania high school basketball, and this romp with the young woman would have been all the excuse the Quaker bastards needed to emasculate me. […]
It’s pretty difficult to begin one’s sportswriting career in the employment of The New York Times, though, and I imagine I’ll be forced to find work elsewhere for the time being, I’m going to have to save some money between now and next September, and if I can’t find a suitable and rewarding job in Manhattan, I’m thinking seriously of trying to get a position laboring on some ship. Right now, though, I’m concentrating on enjoying all the sinful pleasures of the metropolis. I have enough money for about two more weeks of degeneracy, and then I’ll have to get serious about some sort of work.
By the way, do me a favor and ask Col. Campbell if he got that letter to Vanderbilt. I got a letter from them the other day, saying that they’d only received one letter of recommendation (Wayne Bell’s).2 If Campbell doesn’t get his in immediately, it won’t do any good. Tell John Edenfield hello for me and ask him if he can direct me to some source of gainful employment in his native environs. I’m going to need three fortunes to pay all these parking tickets.
At the moment, I’m concentrating on a young woman who may agree to share an apartment with me. Except for money, the future is bright indeed. But the paper seems to be running out: so I’ll wrap it up and say cheerio …
Hunter
TO LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANK CAMPBELL:
Campbell was Thompson’s most enthusiastic “fan”; in fact, he predicted that Thompson would someday be a “major league” writer, the “Hemingway of your generation.”
January 6, 1958
110 Morningside Drive
Apt. 53
New York, New York
General …
As you can see by my present address, Jerry Hawke’s address got to me in the very nick of time: as a matter of fact, it arrived only hours before I left that wretched hole on the Susquehanna. At present, I am entrenched in a 6 × 10 room, paying a nominal rent, enjoying life immensely, and gaining an intimate insight as to the workings of the employment agency racket. I arrived here on Christmas Eve with the sum total of $110. I now have somewhere in the neighborhood of $35. The prospect of a job is vague and ominous. Naturally, I will eventually have to work … I suppose it’s inevitable.
On the shelf to my left—every part of this room is within an arm’s reach of the desk—lies a rough draft of a Thompson original which will, when complete, expose the employment agency racket much in the same manner as a razor blade cuts into a syphilis chancre. Needless to say, I have decided to write under the alias: Aldous Miller-Mencken.3 With that name, how could I fail to burst like a Vanguard rocket on the American literary scene? You are, of course, familiar with the bursting habits of Vanguard rockets … vivid, but a trifle unpredictable. And I think that sums it up.
But let us hope that joy still reigns in Mudville … untempered as yet by the revelation that all literary effort is not honest, that all editors are not literary, and that the price of perception is unemployment. Let us remember that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” that education is a social garnishing rather than a tool fashioned by the intellect, and that “quality” is best measured by those who “use” a product, rather than by those who make it.
I speak, of course, of the world of journalism … as depicted at its lowest ebb by the Jersey Shore Herald and at it’s highest by The New York Times. The scientific definition of sound tells us that a tree may fall in a forest and that no “sound,” as such, will be produced until the noise of its fall penetrates some living ear. Do you know the scientific definition of the term: “journalistic quality”? I don’t … but there lingers in my mind
the notion that the more pragmatically inclined newsmen of our day are well versed in the scientific definitions of such words as “sound,” “appreciation,” “functional,” and “profit.” And I wonder where such a term as “honest literary effort” fits into the one-dimensional picture we could paint with those four words.
I wonder if I could long work in a field where the demand for quality is determined by the taste and education of a mass not noted for any outstanding qualities save intellectual myopia and monetary greed. And then I wonder what field is not affected one way or another by the mass taste. And I also wonder if I’m trying to rationalize something I don’t quite understand.
But fie on these unanswered queries and fie on those who pose them. There are stories to be written, drinks to be drunk, women to be ravished, and … alas, money to be made. We shall ride with the bouncing ball and fight gamely to avoid being on the bottom when it bounces … that is all ye know and all ye need to know. Amen.
By this time, I can only suppose that Fred [Fulkerson] has filled you in on my “adventures” in the noble burg of Jersey Shore. Most notably, they included a wild and somewhat unfortunate fling with the vivacious young daughter of one of the staff writers, several near-fistfights with both the editor and the shop foreman over “who was going to lay out the sports pages,” and finally, a sudden and unexpected disenchantment with the everyday world of journalism.
This disenchantment is greatly restrained, of course, by the knowledge of a possible—although very unlikely—free ride through the portals of Vandy. I take the College Board tests this Saturday at Columbia. Those results will in all probability—if I’m still in the running—decide whether I get the thing or not. And, speaking of “the thing,” I’d be interested to know just what the Vandy people had to say in that letter you got. If you still can’t find it, then by all means fill me in on its contents.
I suppose it’s a little silly to ask if you have any intimate contacts on any of the New York papers. Although, as I said, I’m not rabid to revel evermore in the world of newsprint, I could certainly use a job where I could put my limited experience to work. Right now, the only job I can wax enthusiastic about is one as a jack-of-all-trades in an art gallery on Madison Avenue. The pay is miserable, of course, but the work might be interesting. At any rate, I’m going to make another stab at it tomorrow. I shall keep you informed as to my work status.
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