details of Ezeakeal for Stanley Kubrik and post war wine bottles ITIN 99-05
My mother is planning a trip to Spain with her Hooker…now before you all get George W. on me, notice the fact that the Noun “hooker” is capitalized. Dude…That’s my mom’s new husband’s real name,… so get your head out of the gutter. That’s my mother you’re talking about, pilgrim (and so far she’s the only one whose left a comment on this blog….so who loves your humble narrator).
All the stories I’m telling you tonight are TRUE!
Except for one: the banana sticks!
So Spain got me on running with the bulls in Pamplona, the Existentialists, and poor Hemmingsteingaryspaldingonzoduke. Suicides. Sangria….the bull fight of life. Hamlet.
Fear and Loathing in ought five:
I’m not going to miss Hunter S. too much, but he was my hero. Atleast he was for a few months in college.
I have a pretty good story about another college roommate of mine from Brunotown. For our purposes, This guy’s name is now….I don’t know…..Raskolnikov (in honor of realizing that a clock work orange is basically a riff on Doestoyevsky and the whole Russian bunch…thanks to Ben). Raskolnikov was a priviledged son of a high powered New York lawyer. Some how Sir Duke became his highschool hero (Dalton? St. Anns?….who knows? …some prep school). At Brown, we’d all heard that he’d spent his entire freshman year dosed on LSD 25. He’d maced a girl for laughing too loud at a party… He was crazy… Or so the rumor had it. In some drug fueled state, he decided that Hunter S. Thompson needed to lecture at Brown University. It became a sort of wrong headed religeous obsession with Raskolnikov.
By a series of bad craziness choices by yours truly, I ended up sharing a house with this nut and his band of droogs just as the culmination of his antisocial dream came true.
It was the days when Hunter was touring campuses with G. Gordon Liddy…so it was doable. Raskolnikov simply had to raise the money to pay the honorarium and make travel/hotel arrangements. His newly tuned in mind set to work and achieved everything. He was on! Raskolnikov would meet his literary hero….and what’s more be his protegé and factotum for the weekend Hunter would spend on campus.
Word to the wise: Never have heroes unless they’re already dead. Heroes will let you down when you meet them. You will be their anti-hero. They will hate you…despise the earth you stand on…or atleast that’s how it worked out for Raskolnikov.
Raskolnikov had spent a year and a half drinking, fucking, and consuming vast quantities of drugs in an effort to be more like Hunter (and to be fair: Robert Towne, Jim Morrison, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Dylan, Hendrix….who else can you name?). The droogs had stored in a month’s supply of crystal meth (before it was popular mind you…leave it to Brown students to be ahead of the zeitgeist) and some pot and a case of whiskey, and I think Raskolnikov still had a sketch pad of blotter acid left in a drawer of important legal papers (trust fund perhaps?) in his desk.
Hunter arrived and immediately drank a liter of whiskey and snorted the entire ounce bag of Crank (“enought to kill a horse”, I was informed by the Southern Californian Water Polo turned proto-tweeker who’d scored the stuff…lord knows he’s probably a Senator today). Hunter then went to the fraternities and drank beer and became a sad Hemmingway like character. He became Doctor Gonzo…and wasn’t that what they were paying him to be?
By the time of the lecture/debate/slurr, he was a drunken, abusive, idiot and our poor Raskolnikov (with the sad duty of trying to coral a bull) recieved the lion’s share of the abuse. With a years worth of dedicated effort behind him, Raskolnikov felt obliged to honor the contracts (No matter how much acid this kid ate, he was the son of a lawyer after all).
Raskolnikov tempted the bull out of the boozy campus with a bottle of scotch in the back of the limo (and I think I heard some real cocaine). The catch for this was a reporter from the Brown Daily Hearald, or whatever…Hunter was contractually bound to do a post debate interview.
He was drunk. He didn’t want to. Raskolnikov insisted.
Hunter S. Thompson punched this kid so hard he nearly flew out of the limo. He started to bitch slap the kid, yelling
“I’m fucking Hunter S. Thompson…don’t tell me I have to do an Interview. SHe saw the debate….Fuck you, you pretentious…..blah blah…” You can imagine that Hunter S. could probably light into a sycophant like Raskolnikov with a razor wit of truth.
Raskolnikov’s heart was broken. His hero had not only rejected him, but torn him a new one.
The experience changed Raskolnikov…I would say for the good. He stopped doing drugs all together and went on to become a fairly respected idependent filmmaker. I like to think that Hunter S. saved this kids’ life. That’s why he was my hero….for a little while…
…but Spalding Gray really was for a long time. So was Hemmingway. And that didn’t do any of them any good in the end. So much for Heroes. It’s a pretty great album though and title of my first (never published) novel, whose characters live on in Arc Along the Watchtower and omEGG.