Life is different for me now. I go to all the tournaments. I do my shopping at Lodsworth, I am seen with Deborah Couples, and I fly to Argentina in the winter—me and the weird Dukakis sisters. Last month it was Palm Beach; now it’s the U.S. Open, and then down to Buenos Aires. We live in our own world, we live our lives like dolphins.
I am a polo person now, and I know the Polo Attitude. I smoke the finest opium, and I drive a Ducati 916. Birds sing where I walk, and my home is a magnet for children.
I have come a long way from Uncle Lawless’ barn. I have my own ponies now. I whack polo balls around my yard with a thirty-inch foot mallet from Gray’s, and I was named to the board of trustees at the recent Polo Ball. My neighbor De Lise is a two goaler, and we spend five hours a day in the practice cage, hitting balls against the backstop at one hundred miles per hour and trying to hook each other. It is wrong, but we do it anyway. That is the Polo Attitude—and if polo is wrong, so am I.
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Memo from the National Affairs Desk. To: Dollar Bill Greider
August 24, 1995
DATE: July 6, 1995
TO: Dollar Bill Greider
FROM: Hunter S. Thompson
CC: P. J. O’Rourke
SUBJECT: Dragging Me into Your Rude Political Debate with P.J. (rs 712-713)
You screwhead pig! Look what you’ve done now. You have blasted to smithereens the once-proud Hubristic notion (look it up) that we of the highest rank & proudest voice of the Rock & Roll persuasion are Smart. You both made public fools of yourselves—and then you had the cheap, cowardly, skunklike sleaziness to blame yr. dumbness on some kind of pills that you claim I “sent you in the mail.”
Ah, you dilettante bastards are all the same, aren’t you? First the gibberish, then the Treachery . . . And then you blame it on me.
You remind me of Hubert Humphrey after he lost his nerve. In the end he was like a desperate old carrion bird. He hovered over the lives of decent people like a vulture over a barnyard—cackling & whining & drooling as vultures will—and then finally swooping and diving and then feeding crudely in public on the dreams of the Doomed down below.
Hubert never saw it that way, of course, and I’m sure you won’t either . . . Ah, Billy, we are so lonely for heroes these days, aren’t we? It is like living on the Moors, waving lanterns & screeching frantically at each other in the fog that hangs over the peat moss, always weak & afraid of being suddenly attacked from behind by a huge killer hound from hell—some beast with a separate agenda like you or even P.J. . . .
But he didn’t blame his dilettante gibberish on me or my “pills” like you did . . . Shame on you, Bubba. I think you owe me an apology. I have a lot of Pills, but I have nothing that will make a smart man act like Hubert Humphrey—and I wouldn’t send it to you if I did.
Most people recognize a devious pig when they see one. But we are not pigs, and it brings us low when we act that way. It makes me uncomfortable to think that my best friends & allies in journalism are dumb boys. It is lonely Enough out here without that.
OK. Thanx in advance for yr. cooperation.
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Timothy Leary and William S. Burroughs, R.I.P.
Though neither Timothy Leary nor William S. Burroughs was among Hunter’s inner circle, he’d met and corresponded with both; several years earlier he’d driven to Lawrence, Kansas, to visit and shoot with Burroughs, and in the last weeks and months of Leary’s life, he and Hunter had extended late-night telephone conversations. A proper RS send-off for both seemed only appropriate.
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Memo from the National Affairs Desk. To: Jann S. Wenner
August 8, 1996
DATE: June 9, 1996
TO: Jann S. Wenner
FROM: Hunter S. Thompson
SUBJECT: Mistah Leary, He Dead
I will miss Tim Leary—not for his wisdom or his beauty or his warped lust for combat or because of his wealth or his power or his drugs, but mainly because I won’t hear his laughing voice on my midnight telephone anymore. Tim usually called around 2. It was his habit—one of many that we shared, and he knew I would be awake.
Tim and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “after midnight, all things are possible.”
Just last week he called me on the phone at two thirty in the morning and said he was moving to a ranch in Nicaragua in a few days and would fax me the telephone number. Which he did. And I think he also faxed it to Dr. Kesey.
Indeed. There are many rooms in the mansion. And Tim was familiar with most of them. We will never know the range of his fiendish vision, or the many lives he was sucked into by his savage and unnatural passions.
We sometimes disagreed, but in the end we made our peace. Tim was a Chieftain. He Stomped on the Terra, and he left his elegant hoof prints on all our lives.