Kingdom of Fear Read online

  “Chemists have told us that the water from the ponds had a copper content that was a zillion times the lethal level for trout,” Sheriff Braudis reported at a Tavern meeting of the Woody Creek Caucus, an informal assembly of valley landowners and residents that includes both Watkins and Thompson. The sheriff’s investigation concluded that the ponds had been poisoned not by antisocial outsiders but “by accident,” by Watkins’s own son and his Mexican majordomo.

  “We have a difference of opinion here,” Watkins defiantly told his neighbors, to hoots of derisive laughter. Refusing to accept the sheriff’s verdict, he cited his own fish biologist, Dr. Harold Hagen, who insisted that the level of Cutrine Plus in the water could not have been enough to massacre the trout. More hoots. “My ranch is different from George Stranahan’s or yours, but it doesn’t make any difference,” Watkins finally blurted out. “Do you mean I don’t have the right to paint my house pink if I want to? And you have a right to paint your house blue?” Referring to one of Thompson’s accusations that only a “vampire or a werewolf” would want to live in his house, Watkins said, “Well, I’m neither a vampire nor a werewolf, but I can tell you one thing: I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in Hunter’s house. But I don’t care if he lives there.”

  Everyone cracked up, and in the spirit of goodwill that reigned until the end of the meeting, Thompson withdrew his original charge about the Watkins house. “I apologize for the vampire thing,” he said. “I was in a weird mood. But we are not talking about whether we like or dislike your house. No one is oppressing you. It is not about individual rights. We all live in this valley; this is a one-road community. We all have to live here, you included, and we are sliding into weird squabbles here. But the point is that we don’t want to see the life of this valley poisoned—that is as bad as poisoning fish.”

  . . . “The truth is that Woody Creek has become urbanized in the last twenty years,” Sheriff Braudis says rather sadly. “I’ve told Hunter that, and I’ve told him he can’t be out shooting on the road as he used to. His neighbors are complaining more and more about his peacocks screeching and the gunshots in the night. Today Woody Creek is different. What is happening now is that the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires.”

  Thompson knows this, of course, and says that perhaps if he could afford to move—and could find somewhere as interesting to move to—he would. But he can’t and he won’t. Sometimes, though, he gets tired. “Living out here like this doesn’t go with being pushed around and run over by yo-yos,” he says. “It isn’t that you can’t win against them—it is that you don’t want to fight them all the time. I don’t mind fucking with Floyd, but that is not my job. If both of us are going to continue to live in this valley, he is going to have to learn that he has to live with us more than we have to live with him.”

  As of this writing, Watkins has imported two Bengal tigers to inhabit the new caged run along his driveway. “Everyone is holding their breath while we wait to find out what’s going to be next,” says Guenin. “We have reached the ultimate in ridiculousness.” Hunter S. Thompson, meanwhile, is talking about getting some elephants.

  That is the famous story of Floyd and the Giant Porcupine, as told by my good friend Loren Jenkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post and currently Foreign News Editor for NPR. . . . Back then, in 1990, he was editor-owner of the venerable Aspen Times and I was a major stockholder in a slick new magazine he started in New York called SMART.

  In truth, I was probably a minor stockholder, but I had a keen personal interest in it—a profoundly vested interest, which I immediately put to good use when I was suddenly threatened with the possibility of going to Federal Prison on RICO charges of attempted/premeditated Murder with Intent to Kill, felony possession and public use at midnight of automatic weapons, and a fistful of other degrading charges ranging from Dangerous Drugs to Animal Cruelty and Gross Sexual Imposition.

  It was an extremely bad moment, on its face, and many people said I was done for. “He’s gone too far this time,” they said. “What kind of dangerous maniac would attack a man’s home with machine guns in the dead of night and then poison all of his fish the next day?”

  Well, shucks. Only a real vicious dope fiend, I guess, some white-trash shithead with nothing left to lose. The jails are full of those bastards. Kill them all at once, for all I care.

  It was not easy for me to retain a reputable attorney under those circumstances. Nobody wanted to touch it.

  A mood of desperation settled over the Owl Farm. My girlfriend went off to Princeton, and I was left alone to barricade myself inside the compound and wait for the attack I knew was coming. I was receiving daily ultimatums from the ATF and the District Attorney. They wanted all my guns immediately or they would come out with a SWAT team and get them. The fat was in the fire.

  (Lalia Nabulsi)

  . . .

  My mood became dangerously confrontational in those weeks. I was angry and lonely and doing a lot of target shooting day and night. My friends worried that I was being pushed over the edge by this constant barrage of threats and sudden death by violence. I was always armed and sullen, living from moment to moment and ripped to the tits on my own adrenaline. I look at Deborah’s photos from that feverish time and think, Ye fucking gods. This man appears to be criminally insane. It looks like some horrible flashback from Reefer Madness and The Crays and Scarface and Boogie Nights all at once. The photos still give me the creeps.

  God damn it. I have bitten the front of my tongue again! Why? What have I eaten tonight that would cause me to draw blood from my own tongue? Where is the Percodan? Where is Anita? What is that noise in the bushes? Why am I so crazy all the time?

  There was a time when I was vaguely worried by questions like these, but no longer. There are some questions that you can only worry about for so long, until finally they become meaningless . . . and it is never healthy to start questioning your own sanity. Being free and happy on the street is evidence enough of sanity these days.

  Why is it that so many people have gone insane since the end of the American Century and the horrible Bush family was restored to power? Why is the teenage suicide rate going up? Is the President a clone? Is my car going to explode? Why does my sweetheart suddenly have all these lewd tattoos on her body?

  (EDITOR’S NOTE)

  Wait a minute. Time out! Why am I writing all these things on this primitive red electric typewriter when I can read them all in real time on the goddamn overloaded Internet with the flick of a mouse or a button? Am I a Fool? Have I been bogged down in Alzheimer’s all these years? What does it all mean, Homer? Okay. Back to business. The Giant Porcupine story did not go away. Finally, to avoid deadly violence and another five years in prison, I was compelled to sacrifice my precious Smyser Nazi machine gun—I chopped it up with a heavy industrial grinder and had it formally delivered to the forces of law and order in a large white bag filled with poison grease that would eat the flesh off of anyone who touched it.

  And that was that, as I recall. It was never mentioned again, and neither was the Porcupine. My new assistant arrived on Xmas—on loan from the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications—and I settled down, as it were, to finishing my long-overdue book, Songs of the Doomed, which was still only half written—another deadline agony. They are always painful. . . .

  . . .

  Christmas came and went in a frenzy of work. The big snow fell and the thermometer plunged to 10 or 15 below zero. The Democrats had lost another election and Bush was still the new President. But not much had changed since the 80s, when the looting of the Treasury was running in high gear and the U.S. Military was beginning to flex its newfound money-muscle. When, everywhere you looked, the flag-suckers were in charge.

  We invaded a bunch of tiny helpless countries like Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama, just for the practice, and it was about that time that I went to work as a columnist for the Hearst-owned Sa
n Francisco Examiner and discovered feminist pornography and moved to Sausalito with Maria.

  It was a wild and savage time, Bubba. All hell broke loose, in a phrase. . . . Moving down the mountain has always been dangerous for me, because of the Space problem, but San Francisco in the 1980s was a genuine Adult Dose.

  I was shocked. In 1981 I was 44 years old and I saw myself in the mirror as a grizzled veteran of many wars, untold violence, a respectable eight or nine jails all over the world. I had ridden the wild beast of Passion through so many jungles and nightmares and devastating personal disasters that I felt about 200 years old. My heart was strong, but my body was scarred and broken and warped from a life-time of dangerous confrontations. . . . I was old beyond my years, as they say, and I had developed a curious habit of survival. It was the only way I knew, and I was getting pretty good at it, on the evidence. . . .

  I had even survived my time as Night Manager of the depraved O’Farrell Theatre, along with being arrested seven times in six weeks for crimes that you can’t avoid committing when the Police are admittedly tracking you 24 hours a day and routinely busting you for things like Open Container and running yellow lights and being naked at night in Golden Gate Park for no apparent reason.

  Ho ho. Of course there were reasons. There are always reasons. Even the blood-thirsty Manson family had reasons. They were stupid murdering swine, for one, and they also had way too much Time on their hands.

  My own situation was exactly the opposite. I had too much Action on my hands. I was a notorious best-selling author of weird and brutal books and also a widely feared newspaper columnist with many separate agendas and many powerful friends in government, law enforcement, and sociopolitical circles.

  I was also drunk, crazy, and heavily armed at all times. People trembled and cursed when I came into a public room and started screaming in German. It was embarrassing. . . . Maria and I spent more and more time hiding out in obscure places like Stinson Beach or Harding Park in the fog belt and even the Crime-ridden San Bruno Municipal Parking Garage.

  It was a sweet time, all in all. In some ways it was a depraved and terrifying adventure in the darkest side of life, and at least half the time it was like being shot out of a beautiful cannon in some kind of X-rated Peter Pan movie. I would definitely do it again. . . .

  Hi folks, my name is Marvin and I’m here to sell you this amazing beautiful old typewriter, which is guaranteed to do for you exactly what it has done for me. This one is a monster, folks. Writing a book with this thing is like sitting in a pool of LSD-25 and suddenly feeling yr. nuts on fire. . . . Yes sir, that is a lifetime guarantee. Think about it. . . .

  So let me ask you a fat little question, friends, and I want you to think about this real carefully before you spit out yr. answer—this one is BIG. This is the one query you are going to have to answer when you come face to face with GOD ALMIGHTY!

  He will ask: “What can I do for you, boy? What is the one thing you could ask me to do for you right now??? What is it? WHAT? Speak up! NOW! Or I will send you straight to Hell. . . .

  What will you say, brother? What is the one true answer you will give to Almighty God when you get your final chance? And remember—he will Judge you by yr. answer. He will JUDGE you! And if you say the wrong thing, you will suffer for it. You will eat shit and die.

  (Long pause filled with weeping and babbling and noise of chairs being pushed around. . . .)

  OKAY! OKAY, brother—Relax and feel happy. Fear not, for I am with you and I will tell you the answer! Hallelujah Mahalo. You are saved!

  THE ANSWER YOU WILL GIVE TO GOD ALMIGHTY WHEN HE COMES TO JUDGE YOUR FATE IS Yes Yes Yes, yr. honor. I thought you’d never ask. What I want, of course, is a BRAND-NEW WILD AND SUPERCOOL MODEL 22 IBM SELF-CORRECTING FIRE-ENGINE RED MAGNUM SELECTRIC TYPEWRITER exactly like this one! JUST LIKE MINE. . . . That is what you will say in yr. magic moment of judgment.

  Help me, Lord, for I am watching Gail Palmer’s movies again. It is a desperate habit that I formed many years ago when I was preparing to go to Trial. That is always an awkward moment in a smart man’s life. I was looking down the barrel of the end of the world, as I knew it. And I understood that I was coming to a major Fork in my road of life—to live free like an otter, or to die like a stupid young bee in the web of the federal law-enforcement system. There was no middle way. I had no choice. The deal was going down.

  I have known a few magic moments like these—red dots on a sea-green map—and I treasure them. They are the high points of my life, my moments of total Function, when I felt like a snow leopard fighting for life on its own turf.

  Whoops. Let’s not get maudlin, Doc. Don’t embarrass the breed with some drunken hillbilly hubris. The joke is over. They are coming after your heart this time, so behave accordingly. At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.

  . . .

  Right, and now let’s get back to the Witness who came into my house that night and almost put me in prison.

  She was clearly a refugee from the sex film industry—a business I had covered as a journalist regrettably arousing her interest.

  In 1985 I ventured to San Francisco to do an article for Playboy on “feminist pornography.” Nobody knew what it was, but I was telling Playboy what it was and that was why they gave me the assignment. Feminist porn was really just couples’ films—sex films made for couples to which you could take a date.

  It was a new genre, and I had happened to run into some of the women who appeared in these films when I was in San Francisco for the Democratic Convention in ’84. They kind of adopted me. Most of the girls were at least bisexual, and they were fun. A lot of them were the stars of this new style of films. Juliet Anderson, later famous as Aunt Peg, was a big one. Veronica Hart was another—she is still making films and is pretty good at her trade.

  . . .

  Now we arrive at the complicated part of the story.

  I understand situations like the one I am about to tell you, and I know how strange they can get. I have spent more time in the belly of that beast than I can ever admit, and certainly not in print. I have never felt tempted to tell these stories in public—or even in private, for that matter, except on some moonless nights when I start feeling lonely and sentimental and strung out on combat or pussy or fear, like our old friend from Arkansas.

  But tonight might be that kind of night, so what the hell?

  . . .

  I had never heard of Gail Palmer. I didn’t need to hear about her, but I got a letter one day telling me that I was off, that I didn’t really get it. I had written that the new feminist pornography was going to take over; she wrote arguing that I didn’t understand the sex business, and she said she wanted to explain it to me. I didn’t give a fuck.

  I got several more letters from her, leading up to the infamous Hallmark card (which my defense attorneys later presented in court) that was full of lewd, tiny, very dense handwriting. The front of it said, “Sex is a dirty business.” When you opened it up, it read: “But somebody has to do it.” She took up every white surface inside the card with her little tense handwriting, telling me all the fun we could have—more fun than a barrel of monkeys in heat—and that she could really straighten me out about what I knew and thought about the sex business.

  Meanwhile, she had also sent me a thick sheaf of press clippings and two films. In one, she is wearing a bodysuit and skipping rope in a high office building, looking out on what appears to be Long Beach Harbor. While she is skipping rope, she is singing to her own little song, repeating the stanzas once or twice:

  Porno queen, porno queen

  It’s not a seamy scene

  Porno queen, porno queen

  You think that sounds funny?

  Then why am I

  Making so much money?

  It was sickening. She thought it was a very sexy come-on and that she was irresistible, but she was wrong.

  I got another letter not long afterward, telling me she would be in town in
February and would be staying at the Stonebridge Inn in Snowmass, and that she wanted to get together with me. Her presumption was as telling as the rest of it. I had a lot of sex-film girls coming on to me during that period. A lot of people had noticed what I had done for girls like Bambi and Jo Ann at the O’Farrell. I was a favorite there—I was the people’s Night Manager.

  I didn’t think much about Gail Palmer’s upcoming visit. But Deborah, my majordomo, put it on the calendar, just in pencil—I guess she thought I wasn’t having enough fun. Which could have been true, but Gail Palmer didn’t fit the bill; I had no interest in her—a big, hefty hustler—or in her side of the story.

  . . .

  On the night of Georgetown vs. Syracuse—a big basketball game—Tim Charles, an old friend and a Georgetown fan, came over to watch the game and to fix my Macintosh amplifier. There were two exterior fuses on the back of the amp, and I somehow knew, or sensed, that there was a third interior fuse, which Tim did not believe. He refused to give up the idea that he knew better, so he took the amp apart on the kitchen floor, like a watch all in pieces. Semmes Luckett, the grandson of the great Confederate Admiral Rafael Semmes, was also here—he was here all the time.

  I was in a work frenzy, still trying to finish Songs of the Doomed, which had recently been interrupted by Floyd Watkins and the giant porcupine. Cat, my assistant from the University of Florida, was here as well. We had the whole book spread out on the living room table. Cat was in charge of keeping the three manuscript copies identical—they changed every day, and the changes had to be transferred to the other two. I was not plotting to seize her, but I was thinking that later we could go in the hot tub together and have some fun. I had just finished an article for some women’s magazine, like Elle—it was sort of a celebratory moment. I wanted to clear the house and unwind for a night.