Hunter S. Thompson's Work-In-Process: "The Silk Road"
History will remember Hunter S. Thompson as the man who, in a single blast of supercharged acceleration, blew the doors off the literary establishment, rendered the definitive portrait of Vegas, and defined the outer limits of derangement in his novelistic tour de force “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.”
I remember HST most particularly for introducing the concept of “bad craziness.” It was a force I'd known existed, and had even brushed up against, but Hunter had named it, and when I read the words, it was like our eyes met, and we both knew what he was talking about. Bad crazy. Hunter showed us blood-drinking lizards dining on each other in a Vegas lounge, his Samoan lawyer thrashing in the paroxysms of something between death and orgasm, and many other examples of bad craziness. It's like candy laced with heroin. Bad crazy. Loved by his fans for the breakneck pace of his diction, his ability to pen one single-sentence paragraph after another, and string them together into narratives that were brilliant and breathtaking, Hunter operated a solitary outpost of humanity in the jungle of suburbo-corporate America. We miss him, and I so wish I could have said RIP Bush Gang before I had to say RIP HST, so he could have been here to see the crashing and burning of this regime that he so despised. I will drink to its demise for you, Hunter, and for my son Josh, two warriors who didn't get to see the end of the battle.
The piece posted below is from an uncompleted novel Hunter titled “The Silk Road.” and introduces us to the main character, Gene Skinner, “a professional adventurer who worked in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot for a CIA-owned property called Air America and who now lives with his beautiful half-Cuban fiancee in a trailer park on Marathon Key ... which is nine worlds away from Long Island in every way except that it sits upon the edge of the sea and fits Skinner's idea of The American Dream in the same way that West Egg fit Gatsby's.” I like playing with character names and one thing I'll say is a name like “Gene Skinner” sounds tailor-made for somebody good at getting into people's pants. Enjoy the read — this piece is a gut-buster.
Bad Crazy is a Charles Carreon website. Copyright 2007.
Hunter S. Thompson's Work-In-Process: "The Silk Road"
FISHHEAD BOYSBy Hunter S. Thompson
From The Silk Road: Fast Boats on The Ocean At Night
We were calling a cab in the Key West airport when I saw these two Fishhead boys grab my bags off the carousel. The skinny one was halfway to the parking lot with the big red, white, and blue seabag full of diving gear before I realized what was happening ....
No, I thought. No, this can't be true. Not right here in front of my eyes, in the blue-lit glare of the breezeway in this friendly little airport, with palm trees all around and Mother Ocean rolling up on the beach just a few hundred yards to the south.
It must be a setup, I thought; some nark in the pay of the White
House' that evil bastard Hamilton has been trying to bust me ever since I set him on fire in Orlando ... and this was, after all, another election year.
In the good old days I might have thought it was Gordon Liddy, just running one of his capers. But Gordon doesn't work for the White House anymore, and Hamilton has other problems-like trying to reelect what Dick Goodwin calls “the only truly Republican president since Herbert Hoover” on the Democratic ticket.
So, for the White House and even the DEA ... and on a “need to be busted” basis, I figured my name was not even on the list for 1980. I was not even covering the campaign.
I still had the phone in my hand when I saw the fat one. He came shuffling out of the darkness, where he'd obviously been standing lookout for his buddy; he glanced around to see that nobody was watching, then reached down and picked up my triple-locked
leather satchel.
Whoops, I thought, let's have a word with these boys. They were locals — punks, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, and they did it so casually that I knew they had been here before. Semipro 'luggage thieves, the lowest and cruelest kind of scum. I felt the phone pulling out of the wall as I suddenly moved toward the action.
Cut the thumbs off these vultures, I thought. Carve on them.
Then I remembered that my bone knife was in the red, white, and blue diving bag. All I had for leverage was this baby blue telephone receiver that I'd just ripped off the wall by the Travelers' Aid counter. It was trailing about six feet of coiled blue rubber wire
as I ran.
”Goddamn you rotten bastards I'll kill you goddamn brainless-“
This savage screaming confused me for a moment. Then I realized it was me. Was I moving faster than my own sounds?
Maybe not. But pure rage is a serious fuel, and now I was moving at least like Dick Butkus on speed toward this poor doomed screwhead who had already staggered and fallen to one knee under the weight of my leather satchel. I was still about 100 feet away when he heard my screams and saw me coming. I knew I had the angle on him, even before he staggered ... he was out in the open now and his face was stupid with terror. .
“Eat shit and die!”
It was a thundering brutal scream, and for a moment I thought it was me again, still moving faster than sound .... ~
But this time the scream was really behind me. It was Skinner:
He'd been raving, drooling drunk all the way from Aruba, but the sudden screech of battle had jerked him awake from his stupor and now he was right behind me, screaming as he ran. I pointed left toward the parking lot, at the skinny geek with my diving bag. I smelled the whiskey pumping up from Skinner's lungs as he passed me and angled left to where I'd pointed .
CLICK HERE to read the rest of The Fishhead Boys in the ABOL library!