Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Page 16
It occurs to me now that a man who could so ably explain the situation on November 8th should certainly be able to do so again. On that day, he sat (with his back facing the door) in the first office on the right … off the first hallway to the right … as one enters the Finance building through the door which faces the Food Service Squadron across the street. He sat immediately inside the door. Unfortunately, his name escapes me at the moment. But, at any rate, might I suggest that he be called upon to explain the situation once again … for something is very obviously amiss.
I regret that circumstances force me to write such an unpleasant letter; but after my relatively polite inquiry failed to obtain any results, I felt compelled to take stronger measures. And if this letter follows my last one into oblivion, I shall feel fully justified in taking the matter to higher authority.
I trust that we will be able to come to an understanding in the very near future. Until I hear from you, I remain,
most cordially,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO ARCH GERHART:
Gerhart taught English at Louisville Male High School and had been Thompson’s favorite instructor there. Although he considered Thompson “brilliant,” Gerhart vigorously disapproved of his “show-off, Marlon Brando swagger.”
January 29, 1958
110 Morningside Drive
Apt. 53
New York, New York
Mr. Arch Gerhart
Louisville Male High School
Louisville, Kentucky
Dear Mr. Gerhart,
Although I’ve been meaning to drop you a line for quite a while, my procrastination had gotten the better of me until I realized I could kill two birds with one stone. Specifically, I’d appreciate it if you’d ask Dean Kalmer to advise me as to the grades I got on the CB exams. I’m not too pessimistic about the English portion, but the Math section stopped me cold. And although I don’t expect to be very pleased with the test results, I’d like to know them so that I can make definite plans for next fall. Thanks in advance for your help: and you might also like to pass the enclosed clippings along to Mr. Milburn. I don’t think I need go into my reason for suggesting this.
As Davison probably told you, I stopped by to see you twice while I was in Louisville in early December. You were eating lunch on one occasion and “around somewhere” the second time. Since I had very little of importance to say, you missed nothing except a chance to see how “gaunt and emaciated” I’ve become. And since several people have told me that it’s depressing to see a “thin, serious Hunter,” you’re probably better off for having missed me. But nevertheless, if I get back home again any time soon, I’ll make another attempt to trade a few conversational gems with you near the old battleground.
As for my present condition, it is hectic and full of poverty. Fortunately, things have begun to shape up and I should get back into the sunlight sometime in the next two weeks. Barring the unforeseen, I’ll begin work for Time Inc. on Sunday and take up classroom duties sometime later in the week. The Time job is something of a “plum” which not only gives me a pretty good “in,” but which pays for half my tuition at Columbia as well. So from now until spring—and very possibly throughout the summer too—I’ll be unfortunately busy. And considering the evil which abounds in New York, it’s probably a pretty good thing. Prolonged idleness in this place could well be fatal for one of my ilk.
The Time job is one of the lowest on the editorial ladder—a copy-boy—but has infinite possibilities. The classes, “Literary Style & Structure” and “Short Story Writing,” should give me a boost along the road to becoming another D. H. Lawrence. And the minute salary attached to the job, coupled with the terrifying tuition at Columbia, will undoubtedly keep me mired in abject poverty for the duration of my stay in Manhattan.
Events of the past two years have virtually decreed that I shall wrestle with the literary muse for the rest of my days. And so, having tasted the poverty of one end of the scale, I have no choice but to direct my energies toward the acquisition of fame and fortune. Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me.
To be reduced to scrambling for a living in the wonderful world of “business & free enterprise” would seem to me to be the last word in degradation. Frankly—and this would be a terrible choice to have to make—I think I’d rather recline in comfortable poverty than scramble forever up the well-greased grey-flannel flagpole. Fortunately, I’m not looking forward to having to make that choice: but then Dylan Thomas probably didn’t either, when he was twenty.
Ah, but talk of poverty is depressing, and youth should avoid depression like the plague. Merely to read a New York paper is to wallow in a bog of filth and despair, disaster and rape, and neverending tales of human viciousness. Anyone who could live in this huge reclaimed tenement called Manhattan for more than a year, without losing all vestiges of respect for everything that walks on two legs, would have to be either in love, or possessed of an almost divine understanding. The sight of eight million people struggling silently but desperately to merely stay alive is anything but inspiring. For my money, at least eight million people would be much better off if all five boroughs of New York should suddenly sink into the sea.
But for all my revulsion, I’ll have to admit that living here can be interesting. And I imagine it would stay that way as long as one knew he could leave at any time: very much like visiting behind the iron curtain, I suppose … interesting if it’s temporary, and terrifying if it’s permanent.
I’m apparently straying from my chosen path here: I hadn’t intended to launch into a long denunciation of New York, so I’ll close before I go any further.
And incidentally, I got a letter from David [Porter] Bibb today, saying that he would in all probability seek a spot in the Time ranks this summer. All we need now is for good old Sam8 to arrive, and the party can begin. I don’t think that’s very likely, however, since the last word on Sam had it that he was beating around somewhere on the West Coast. And that too is probably for the best.
So this about wraps it up. Drop me a line if you have time, and please don’t forget to ask Dean Kalmer to send me my CB grades. I’d ask, in closing, that you take care to see that Davison develops something other than his biceps: but since I remember now that you haven’t had him for anything, I’ll table my request. It seems unfortunate that he should have gone through Male without having either you or Tague or Holtzman;9 but then I’m hardly in a position to criticize his judgment up to this point … so I’ll let the matter rest.
In closing, I remain, sincerely and respectfully yours,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO SUSAN HASELDEN:
Thompson took advantage of a chance to live by himself—albeit temporarily—in an apartment on West 113th Street. Ever restless, he daydreamed of fleeing New York for warmer climes.
February 17, 1958
562 W 113th Apt5E5
New York, New York
Dear Susan,
After a long illness … the rumhead of 113th Street returns with a few words of warning and woe: the West Side Parkway is still slippery in spots, my writing machine is in pawn, my car rests under a mountain of snow, and life goes on in the West Indies … as usual.
Many thanks for your efforts at communication. I shall try to steal this “Harvest” thing at the very first opportunity; although I harbor small hope that I shall ever write anything worthwhile. I may take up modern dance … or method acting … or something.
I have lost my taste for writing letters. Why? I have no idea. I think I’ve lost my taste for everything: it’s this goddamned ever-present poverty. At least there’s music.
Spent last evening at the White Horse with a young woman from the Urban League: became dangerously drunk and lost her somewhere near a subway hole: woke up dead sometime late today. When are you going to pay me a visit? My bed is pretty small, but nothing is hopeless … witness [novelist] James Jones. Lodi, New Jersey.<
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I don’t know if I’ve brought you up to date or not, so here it is: I am working for Time and going to Columbia, a high-sounding program, I suppose, but really a little sordid. Living in a rather cramped dungheap next to Columbia and using a rented typewriter … job title “copyboy” at Time, one of many indigent actors, writers, painters, etc. It seems to be Luce’s one and only concession to the creative mind: or maybe his way for showing his contempt by paying the CMs so little: one never knows, for God works in wondrous ways. […]
Can’t understand this deathly apathy. I think I need beaches and blackness and moonlit nakedness. New York is a huge tomb, full of writhing, hungry death. All this talk about San Francisco gives one pause: there is also talk of Italy, St. Thomas, Tahiti, and other refuges for the poor in spirit.
Witnessed a fight last night between one of Time’s senior editors and an equally drunk writer (hired). Free drinks every Sunday night from six to wee small hours, also feast, also entertainment: fights, sex, social-scrambling, politics, etc. All very interesting.
Unfortunate that you by-passed the snow for a trip to the sun. Trust you enjoyed it: you must, you know, you only have two weeks a year to live. The system says it: and who am I to quarrel with systems. Hold on to your virginity: it may be worth a great deal later on, especially if you’re out of a job. Time is money.
Well, cheerio. I have a box of cottage cheese.
Until then.…. Hunty
TO KAY MENYERS:
Menyers was studying literature at Goucher College in Baltimore. She was a diehard Jack Kerouac fan and had recommended that Thompson read On the Road and The Subterraneans.
March 17, 1958
562 West 113th
Apartment 5E5
New York, New York
Dear Kay,
Unfortunately, I must stick with conventional stationery … and where in hell did you get that “stuff” you sent me some time back? Maybe you’re too weird for even MY taste … and that’s going way, way out. Maybe you’re a white Mardou Fox,10 waiting in haste for me to perform erotic lecheries on your body. Weird.
I may sound a little black, but I’m really pretty well adjusted. Perhaps I talk a lot about being an “individualist,” but that’s just because I want to be popular and respected: a “cocktail intellectual,” if you will. I may not agree with the Daily News critic about Endgame, but then I would be thought “bourgeois” if I did: and in these days when everyone who matters is a “higher bohemian,” one must not appear to be bourgeois. One conforms with a cynical smile which says “I’m smart because I just APPEAR to be a conformist: I’m really a secret individualist.” The smile also says “I lack the courage of my convictions”: you have to be listening, though, to hear it say THAT. One gets tired of listening.
My job is somewhat insecure: at a cocktail party for new employees the other evening, I told the publisher of Time (and assorted others) that the business manager was a “fat lecher” … and then with a wild drunken laugh, I repeated it for the benefit of the business manager … FAT LECHER … and he looked a little startled. The publisher and his friends were also a little startled. It was a weird evening.
The highlight of last night was the hurling of a large garbage can down five flights of marble stairs here in the apartment. I also tried to kick down the door of a girl’s apartment, turned a fire extinguisher on the inhabitants of a room upstairs, and uttered a series of wild animal cries which frightened the Chinese woman next to me nearly to death. I appeared to her in my underwear this morning and she told me that a man upstairs told her that I was “crazy” and to “watch out for me when I was drunk.” I have few friends in the building.
But … when are you going to get to New York City? There’s not much room in my castle to dance, but I DO have a radio and a few books … and we can always go out and throw garbage cans around the marble halls: it makes a weird thundering sound. Or I could rape the Chinese woman and you could watch … fine?
Seriously, I do think it’s about time our paths crossed. My “weekend,” Time style, falls on Monday and Tuesday … not a very good time for hopping down to Goucher College. So it seems that you must get up here … anytime will be fine: just let me know in advance.
The prospect of the thing excites me and I see no further sense in writing. The Chinese woman is tapping lustily on the wall and I must answer the call of the flesh. So until then, I remain,
… undisciplined,
Hunter
TO SUSAN HASELDEN:
Kerouac’s confessional prose made quite an impact on Thompson’s philosophy for living, if not on his writing style.
March 18, 1958
562 West 113th
Apartment 5E5
New York City
Dear Susan,
At 11:01 PM, on the night of March 18th, 1958, a great truth blundered out of the sky and imbedded itself in my skull. With a great thunderous clatter, a million jangled pieces of a long-scrambled puzzle fell miraculously into place. The Thompson inner eye has finally acquired the long-lost third dimension.
IN THE COURSE OF A RAMBLING, NERVOUS DISCOURSE ON SOME ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT SUBJECT, I EXPOSED MYSELF … to myself … AS A SEVERE NEUROTIC, a virtual headless chicken, totally incapable of making value judgments, and running on a rum-soaked treadmill towards a schizophrenic rainbow in a two-dimensional sky.
I don’t know how or why, but this suddenly dawned on me like a flash of black lightning. I was feverishly talking about a million plans at once when it came on me: not all at once, to be sure—for the pieces have been slowly falling into place for the past two months—but suddenly enough to make me stop and think, and then to stop talking and leave the room and think some more. It was like walking nervously into a dark room and finding myself in front of a mirror when the light suddenly flashed on.
In brief, I find that I’ve never channeled my energy long enough to send it in any one direction. I’m all but completely devoid of a sense of values: psychologically unable to base my actions on any firm beliefs, because I find that I have no firm beliefs. I seem to be unable to act consistently or effectively, because I have no values on which to base my decisions. As I look back, I find that I’ve been taught to believe in nothing. I have no god and I find it impossible to believe in man. On every side of me, I see thousands engaged in the worship of money, security, prestige symbols, and even snakes. I’m beginning to see what Kerouac means when he says, “I want God to show me his face”: it is not the statement, but what the statement implies: “I want to believe in something.” The man is more of a “spokesman” than most people think … and he speaks for more than thieves, hopheads, and whores.
Pondering.…
Hunter
TO KRAIG JUENGER:
Six months after it began, Thompson and Juenger’s passionate love affair had faded into a long-distance friendship.
March 18, 1958
562 West 113th
Apartment 5E5
New York City
Dear Kraig,
After all these weeks of long silence, I can only assume that you’ve given me up for this Irv person. I say you’ve apparently “given me up,” when perhaps I should have said “forgotten me”: for now as I look back, I can see that ours was such a brief and unfortunately platonic relationship, that neither of us was really in a position to be “given up.” As a matter of fact, I’m a little surprised that I feel such a sharp sense of loss at losing something that was never really mine. It’s amazing, I think, that an “affair” which ran the course of only two days and nights could have had such a lasting aftereffect … and I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had you stayed in Florida for another two weeks. Perhaps though—and I say this without much conviction—it’s better that you left when you did.
I find also, as I look back over the past few hectic months, that I had several chances to fan the sparks of that brief flame that flickered so intensely back in the fall. But I bypassed them all—always telling my ir
rational heart that a trip to St. Louis would be “crazy”—and now I find that I’ve let the weeks stretch out into months, sitting in the grim chaos of New York and dreaming of a long white beach, writing half-hearted letters to newspaper editors in St. Louis, re-reading the beautiful letters you wrote me in Fort Walton and Jersey Shore, and killing the thing all the while by a process of slow starvation … a symbolic experience, I think, when you realize that most people’s lives are virtual monuments to cowardly indecision. Ah, that we lack the courage of our romantic convictions; and thereby miss the wine of life, forgoing the very thing that makes living worthwhile.
I find some pleasure, though, in looking back and realizing that we had a perfect setting for love; so perfect, perhaps, that it made the outcome inevitable. What ambitious TV writer could come up with such a dramatic repertoire of components for a tale of tropic romance … a beautiful young girl trapped in a bad marriage, the sympathetic shoulder of a young writer-beachcomber, a warm Florida moon and the added stimulus of black waves pounding a lonely beach at night: seriously, what more could you ask?
In the final analysis, I think it is better that we left the ashes of the flame to settle on the white sands of the lonely Gulf Coast beach, where the wind can carry them over the dunes at night and back over the moonlit lowlands and the still waters of the bayous. That way, we are spared the agony of having to fan the flame in the teeming cities of the loud American north, where the mere act of life is so hurried and difficult that no one really has time for love. At least we have a memory unscarred by the horrors of democratic realities. Certainly it is not the typical vacation memory, where you have to forget nine-tenths of everything that happened, in order to enjoy the other tenth. No, it was actually a two-day love, with all the pungent emotion and atmosphere of the timeless ideal. Its ashes still float in the night over the lonely little hamlets of Choctawhatchee Bay. We were foolish to try to take it out of its setting.