Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Sincerely,

  Hunter S. Thompson

  TO CAREY MCWILLIAMS, THE NATION:

  Tired of writing for the National Observer and The Reporter, Thompson began cultivating a working relationship with The Nation.

  January 29, 1965

  318 Parnassus

  San Francisco

  Dear Mr. McWilliams:

  After a long and rambling illness I am back in the tomb. Kentucky was a Wolfean nightmare and New York was a goatdance. I got there after you left for California, and left just before you got back. Which is probably just as well; after ten days in fifth gear I was not in any shape to seek assignments. Rather than hang around and see you, I fled, sparing you what surely would have been a shock. The only way I can handle New York is to live there; it is a disastrous place to visit.

  And so much for that. I have a few ideas out here, none of which strike the sort of sparks I need right now, but I’m not sure whether that’s the fault of the ideas or my money situation. I am long past the point of simple poverty, and well into a state of hysterical destitution. The wolves have eaten my door.

  On the basis of my recent journey, the most obvious piece I see right now is a thing I’d call “Go East, Young Man, Go East.” The final collapse of the myth of San Francisco. I’ve been toying with this for a few months, but this week’s uproar over the threatened collapse of the Actor’s Workshop has put the thing in a quick little package that I think would make a good piece. I’m sure you know about Irving and Blau going to the Lincoln Center. This would have been shocking enough by itself, but a lad named Jeremy Ets-Hokin (the old man of the San Francisco Arts Commission) has seized the occasion to mount another attack on the city’s stagnant cultural scene, his second blast in as many months. None of what he’s saying is new, but the odd thing about the affair is that even people like Herb Caen are finally admitting that San Francisco is losing its cultural guts.

  My contention is that it never had any—not since 1945 at any rate, or maybe 1950, when New York finally established itself as the capital of the world. Since then, San Francisco’s personality has gone from neurotic to paranoid to what now looks like the first stages of a catatonic fit. The simple fact of New York has brought San Francisco to its knees. There was also the shock of LA’s new music center, which, coupled with the Lincoln Center raid, had the effect of lowering the boom on even the local mythmongers. They had learned to live with the fact of New York, but the idea of a cultural challenge from LA was beyond the pale. Now Ets-Hokin says San Francisco is “on par with Salinas,” which is not so bad a joke as it seems at a glance.

  Anyway, all that merely gives me a peg to roll off on my own feelings about New York: the fact that it is no longer just the axis of American culture, but is rapidly becoming a refuge and even a culture of its own. The only consistent line of advice I got in New York concerned the necessity of my moving there at once. “No free-lance writer can make a living outside of New York,” they said, and in some perverse way I was glad to hear it, because it seemed to explain the condition of poverty that I’ve cultivated for a year and a half in the boondocks, first in Colorado and then here.

  The bulk of the piece would have to be based on my own experiences both here and in New York, with perhaps a slice of LA tossed in on the side. The finished product would promote a lively dialogue. I’m thinking it out as I go along, so the idea might seem a bit ragged in embryo, but I imagine the subject has crossed your mind more than once during your travels out here. Dick Elman1 tells me you’re an old California hand anyway, so I think you know pretty well what I’m after here. In a nut, I plan to finish a novel in San Francisco, then move back to New York, and I think my reasons might be interesting—not so much because they’re mine, but for all the general wisdom they might contain.

  I think, in fact, that I’ll query to Playboy—for the money that might be in it—and see if they might want a piece along these lines. If so, I could do one for you, then use it as a guide for a longer, hairier piece for the college market. Just thinking here; bear with me.

  Another possibility right now is [Governor] Pat Brown’s new budget proposals, entailing stiff increases in just about every kind of state tax. Another tax plan, proposed by an Assemblyman named Petris, would bring about such vast reductions in property taxes—while boosting sales and other regressive-type levies—that it might be construed as another sign of California’s drift toward the Right. But, as usual, there are enough inconsistencies in the thing to make any quick generalities impossible. For the moment, at least; the Petris plan was just announced this morning. Lumping them both together, however, the one generality that does emerge concerns the apparently widespread realization that California is coming to a new era, that the Boom is nearly over, and now the bills are coming in. The American Nightmare, as it were, the after-effects of free enterprise.

  But that’s a pretty damn big piece and I’d rather wait a while on it, at least until the lines are drawn on some tangible issues. If it interests you in the future, let me know.

  Another idea, less than ten minutes old; my wife just got back from her first night as a telephone solicitor for a famous dance studio. Her job is to find prospects for the lessons, but not negroes. She has her sales pitch, word for word on the wall in front of her, but the moment she suspects she’s contacted a negro she has to back off, squelch the pitch and ad lib out of the contact. There are 12 women calling, four hours a night, and they each start with 100 names & phone numbers, but no idea of who’s on the other end. No different from any other phone pitch, but here we have this racial thing to queer the routine and inject high social drama. Sally Snodgrass, fired from Kelly Girls for not wearing proper deodorant, drifts into part-time work as a dance studio solicitor. She has her instructions: SELL, but not to coons. She makes her first 30 calls, and no dice. By the 55th call she is desperate, fearing a night of failure, perhaps dismissal. Then, on the 61st call, a voice responds: “Yeah baby, tell me more.…” Her eyes light up, and she rambles into the spiel; her job is saved, she can sell. The man agrees to come down to the studio for an interview, but just then Sally tenses. A nigger in the woodpile, this man is a coon … or is he? How does a young girl know, how can she be sure? Will Sally make the sale and chance the ultimate disaster—a coon showing up at the studio—or will she somehow ascertain the pigment, then do her duty and queer her only sale?

  Indeed. Tomorrow night my wife will find out exactly how she’s supposed to know when a coon is on the line. Maybe they have some fool-proof test, like GI sentries during the war (Nazis can’t say W, coons can’t say G, or is it R?). A good solicitor can ferret out the pigment in 10 seconds, they say, but the trouble is that any good solicitor won’t be doing part-time work for that dance studio. What happens when a coon shows up? How do they handle him? Has it ever happened? Why not, for that matter, set it up? I could have my wife set up interviews for me and a negro together, then we’d get the action first-hand. How much would you pay for a thing like this? I like the idea. But you’ll have to be quick because my wife won’t last very long in this slot, probably not more than a week or so—let’s say February 5. So be quick with the word if you think we should deal with this thing.

  That’s about it for now. This is a hell of a long letter. I started off to do a few paragraphs, but this is the first time in a while that I’ve done any queries for anyone but the Observer and I’m not used to being interested. Anyway, send word, and, again, sorry to have missed you in New York.

  Sincerely,

  Hunter S. Thompson

  TO BILL GILES, NATIONAL OBSERVER:

  This is the last letter-article Thompson wrote for the National Observer. It was not published.

  February 4, 1965

  318 Parnassus

  San Francisco

  Bill:

  Here’s the train job. See what you think and let me know. I’m not sure I understand why the other was “thin,” or what could have been done to make it fat, but at any rate tha
nks for the quick reply.

  Oh yeah, I have a nice scenic-type photo of the City of San Francisco. Let me know if you want it. Since my last letter I’ve found that it’s possible for me to take incoming calls; the problem is that I can’t make any. It’s an interesting set-up, but I’d be happier if it were the other way around.

  HST

  “DR. SLOW; OR, HOW I LEARNED TO SAVE MONEY, LOSE WEIGHT, AND LOVE THE AIRPLANE …”

  Chicago, Ill.

  This is as good a place as any to start the story, because this is where it started in my mind. Or maybe it was Scott Fitzgerald’s mind. Or maybe Thomas Wolfe’s. At any rate I arrived in Chicago on the verge of collapse, a victim of the railroad myth. I had seen America the hard way: 51 sleepless hours on the San Francisco Chief, pride of the Santa Fe Railroad. Two days and two nights in a speeding iron box, all for $67.39, plus another $30 or so for meals, drinks, magazines, tips, and pillow rental. By air, the price would have been $110.72, including a free meal. And a saving of 47 hours.

  The longest flight I’ve ever endured was 12 hours, from Lima, Peru to New York City. But 12 hours on a train is nothing at all. I boarded in San Francisco at noon, and at midnight we were just getting out of California—with Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois still to cross.

  Only then did it dawn on me: Two days … and two nights … on this train. I adjusted the reclining seat, then realized I was nearly in the lap of the woman behind me. She whispered something to her husband and I quickly straightened up.

  By midnight I had read an entire novel and two magazines, spent half the afternoon in the club car, sat in the crowded vistas dome and tried to write, lingered over a $3.50 fish dinner that would have cost $1.10 in any roadside hash house, and now, as the barren desert flashed past outside my dark window, there was nothing to do but stare and pray for sleep.

  We left California at a little town called Needles, an arid outpost in the Mojave Desert that enjoys a certain fame each summer for consistently being the hottest place in the continental United States. But Needles is reasonably cool in the winter, and from a train window it looks half pleasant. Behind the white adobe railroad station is a garish city hall that looks like leftover scenery from a Tennessee Williams play. I would not have been surprised to hear the few people on the platform speaking Spanish, instead of English.

  Beyond Needles the night was more empty and the train seemed to pick up speed. The lights were turned off in the coach cars and some people slept. In the seat to my left a very old man kept sliding over until his head touched my shoulder, then he would come awake with a jerk and slide the other way. Perhaps a midget could sleep comfortably in a railroad seat, but for anyone over six feet it is sheer misery. By two in the morning most people had dropped off from exhaustion, but all round me in the heated darkness of the car I could hear the shifting and grumbling of the reluctant nightwatch.

  Now and then would come the rasp of a match, a sudden glow on the metal roof, then darkness again and the long hiss of smoke being exhaled by some cramped traveler who’d simply given up and decided to get through the night on cigarettes. The club car had long since closed, and anyone who might have dozed off with the help of a nightcap was out of luck.

  Somewhere around 3 a.m. a torrent of coughing cries erupted from a baby near the front of the car, shattering the silence like breaking glass. First came the crying, then the mother’s angry hissing. You could almost hear the tension as more and more people came awake.

  It was dawn when the train rolled into Flagstaff and I must have slept, because the next sound I heard was the howl of the “news agent,” an all-purpose merchant who hawks his wares in every corner of the train, 18 hours a day. He is a human vending machine: selling coffee and donuts for breakfast, canned “Cokes” and candy bars for lunch, and dry ham or bologna sandwiches for dinner. When I woke up he was pushing “special, high-quality Santa Fe playing cards,” which he held aloft as he moved down the aisle.

  “Souvenirs for you and your family too,” he shouted. I fled to the dining car for breakfast, wondering if my nerves would hold up until we got to Chicago—33 more hours.

  Before leaving San Francisco I had re-read The Great Gatsby, so I knew what to expect at the other end of the line. Fitzgerald had his narrator, Nick Carraway, describe it like this:

  “One of my most vivid memories is coming back from the West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went further than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock on a cold December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up in their own holiday gaieties, to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matching of invitations: ‘Are you going to the Ordways? or Schultzes?’ and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. At last, the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad, looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.”

  Well, gentlemen, it’s not like that anymore. Fitzgerald’s people are all at the airport these days, and the bulk of the crowd at any railroad station will be made up of senior citizens, children, negroes, and servicemen. Not many jet set types; not much expensive luggage, either.

  Yet the difference is not all monetary. A one-way coach ticket between San Francisco and Chicago is relatively cheap, but a bedroom in a Pullman car for the same trip costs $131.46 on the Santa Fe, and roughly the same on any line. Meals and other extras will bring that up to $150, minimum, which is quite a bit more than air fare. And, not surprisingly, most of the people who can afford the time and money it takes to travel by Pullman are well along in years. Train travel, in the main, is the province of the aged and the indigent, but there are a handful of exceptions. One of these is the City of San Francisco, which runs between Chicago and the Coast across the Continental Divide by way of Denver. The City, as it’s called in the Rockies, is one of the few trains that occasionally lives up to Wolfe’s and Fitzgerald’s romantic but long out-dated railroad myth. This is especially true in the winter, when the train is full of young skiers, bound for resorts like Vail and Aspen in Colorado, Alta in Utah, and Sun Valley in Idaho, which are hard to reach by air. The City is my favorite train, and some of the evenings I’ve spent on it would have pleased Jay Gatsby himself.

  But the City is a rare exception in the run-down, worn-out world of space age railroading, and despite its various advantages it’s still a train. No doubt there are several good reasons for crossing the country by rail, instead of by plane, but once you’ve done it a few times, that’s it, you’ve done it, and the next step is to admit that airplanes have as many basic advantages over trains as television has over radio. For good or ill, the space age is very much with us, and if Wolfe and Fitzgerald were alive today they’d surely be traveling by jet.

  The America you see from a train window is an older, greyer, junkier land than the one you see from planes or superhighways. There was a time when land beside the railroad tracks was very valuable; railroad depots were centers of travel and many a town grew up around them. But the automobile changed that pattern; since World War II most towns have done their growing around major highways and intersections, while areas around railroad depots filled up with slums, warehouses, heavy industry, honky-tonk bars, and sleazy hotels. The cumulative effect of all this, after 51 hours at a train window, is a feeling of age and depression.

  The man who flies sees new airports, sleek jets, fashionably dressed passengers and late-model “renta-cars” or taxi cabs. The man who drives turnpikes and freeways sees a bright, colorful and prosperous-looking America; a land of glass, leather, Formica, and pre-stressed concrete, where even hamburger stands are chic and modern.

  The man who rides trains sees a part of America that has out-lived its usefulness; abandoned homes, automobile junkyards, and quonset huts housing marginal “in
dustries” like Frank’s Welding Shop, somewhere beside the tracks near Fresno in California’s green Central Valley. America seen from a train window might be fascinating to a sociologist, but to the normal run of passengers it is not real inspiring.

  To Wolfe a train meant excitement, distance and escape. To Fitzgerald it was more a melancholy thing, a glamour tinged with sadness—like Jay Gatsby, standing on the platform of a train leaving Louisville and the shattered hopes of his love for Daisy: “He stretched out his hand desperately, as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.”

  You could do that sort of thing in 1925, but if Gatsby left Louisville by train today, and went out to “snatch a wisp of air,” he’d be jolted out of his reverie by the snarl of a porter or a prowling conductor: “Hey you! Get back inside! That’s against the rules.”

  Once you get on a train today you are not only on it but in it. The windows don’t open, there are no outside platforms to stand on, and anybody brazen enough to open the top half of the Dutch doors between cars is likely to be put off at the next stop.

  Train crews are not to be trifled with, especially conductors. I recall an evening in Texas on this last trip when a gentleman of quick temper took exception—and rightfully so, I thought—to the way he’d been snapped at by a crotchety conductor. It was somewhere around midnight when he moved to demand an apology, and not long afterward I looked out the window and saw him standing on the platform as the train pulled out of a dark little hamlet called White Deer. I still have his sunglasses, which he left on the club car table.