Kansas Crimson

Has been mentioned on here and was quoted by ousy last night.

An acquaintance of mine wrote a book. "The Big Book of Bad Decisions".
One of the many stories ("Bad Decisions") involved HST.

Summer of 87.
Aspen. Hotel Jerome.
HST at the hotel bar.

Scott's words.......
He always struck me as a poser. A bullshit artist. I respected his hustle. I loved his articles but only liked his books. I know this will piss some people off but that's ok.

Thompson was yucking it up with some frat boy dickheads.

Scott - "Would you shut the fuck up down there? You are so full of shit".
Everyone got quiet. Looking straight ahead, I took another sip and realized Thompson was standing right next to me. Smiling. Signature long billed baseball cap. Weird. Hawaiian type of shirt. Nut-hugger shorts.
HST - "Yeah, but don't tell those knuckleheads".
He was smiling and amused by my shit attitude. I looked him in the eyes. Just taking him in. He smelled like cigarettes, blended whiskey, and day old sweat.
HST - "Do you like guns"?
Scott - "No. (Long pause) I love them".
HST - "Do you play golf"?
Scott - "Yeah".
HST - "Let's get out of here".

I was four or 5 whiskeys in and wanted to see where this went.....
The bartender placed a silver Taittinger champagne bucket full of ice on the bar. Hunter carried it outside like it was a normal thing to do.
We walked to his car. An enormous land yacht.
The ice bucket was between us, and a bottle of Chivas Regal was unsheathed from a brown paper bag and jammed in the ice.....

We ended up at his house in Woody Creek.....

We chatted a while. It didn't take long but, I like the guy. He was funny. Much of our banter felt like well rehearsed time tested one liners.
One moment of note was our mutual love of English motorcycles. Him - BSA. Me - Norton.
Somewhere along the way he handed me a drink of some sort, a concoction that looked and tasted like bitter Hawaiian Punch. I figured it was Campari, or Pimm's or something. An old person aperitif.

Scott - You said something about guns. What have you got"?
He waved to follow him. We were outside. There was an old barn and a cliff.
He came out with an old shotgun. Nothing fancy. A working man's pump gun. A farm gun. An old Winchester with a corncob frond like the cops used to have mounted to their front seats.....
In his other hand he had he had a copper Ping 9 iron. I told him I was left handed and couldn't use it. He shook me off. I decided to swing lefty, toe down. It worked alright.
This game had a name, but the name escapes me. I wasn't feeling well at all. Dizzy and nauseous. I can't remember if I had anything to eat. Whatever the case, I powered through and we took turns hitting the ball and shooting it with a shot gun. One of the best games ever. Respect.
Now I really didn't feel well. I turned and threw up a few times in the scrub.
Scott - "Hey Hunter, I'm not feeling well. Can you run me back to the hotel? I drank too much and am really dizzy".
HST - (Muttering) "Eh, no big deal. Just a little Mescaline. No big deal".
Scott - "You dosed me with Mescaline"?
HST - "Uh yeah, you're welcome".
Scott - "Mother. Fucker. Fuck. You! No! I have an eight pm dinner with my parents".
HST - "Yeah, you're not going to make that or anything else for the next 8 to 12 hours".

He continued to hit balls off the cliff. There were no cell phones or pagers in those days and I thought it was best to call my parents before the sky caught fire.
Scott - "Hey, Mom. Listen, I ran in to a friend and I think I am going to stay here tonight".
Mom - (Furious, in her shrill, nasal, Chicago accent) "What the hell are you talking about? Get back here! We're only here for a couple of days".
Not knowing what to do, I hung up.
The rest of the evening was a bit hazy. People came and went. His girlfriend was kind. I stared at that owl on the shelf a lot. Someone gave me a ride back around sunrise.

There seem to be a number of good HST stories around, but I've never heard that one. He seems like one of those people you'd pay a high price to be around. My aversion for volatility would render me at least partially joyless, but it would be a hell of a ride.

And fuck him for spiking that guys drink. How dare he? They've only just met and he crosses a line like that? What a pos. An entertaining character, but a pos.

“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

I suspect someone here shares their affinity for British motorcycles.

That's not funny, that's fucked up.

Yes.
But if you're hanging out with Hunter Thompson ESPECIALLY going to his house, not unexpected.

my uncle met Hunter in Colorado, said the dude carried around baby bottles filled with coke and drank unbelievable amounts of Chivas.

Drug associates who dose you without asking are assholes. Famous or not, that's a piece of shit move. Amazing what people will tolerate to be around famous people.

RainbowsandUnicorns wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2024 7:01 am Has been mentioned on here and was quoted by ousy last night.

An acquaintance of mine wrote a book. "The Big Book of Bad Decisions".
One of the many stories ("Bad Decisions") involved HST.

You should bring Scott to Solstice. I will take the two of you down to Antonito and you can meet Cano Espinoza. It's a short drive from there to the Lafayette Head compound, you could meet the demon that lives in the place.

twocoach wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2024 8:38 am Drug associates who dose you without asking are assholes. Famous or not, that's a piece of shit move. Amazing what people will tolerate to be around famous people.

I've never been a HST fan. Entertaining stories occasionally, but just not my thing.

On one hand, I value consent, and do think it’s sketch to offer a mescaline-laced cocktail without disclosing that much.

On the other hand, you wanna party with Hunter Thompson, WTF did you expect? Most of us mortals can only wish to have been dosed by that dood.

these have been shared before on the boreds over the years, but for this thread, let's just go ahead and share again.

on the pols bored:

"...a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare--any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it.The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year; his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him...butwhen the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.
The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timbers like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.
A career politician finally smelling the White House is not Much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally, he will hire out--or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because so few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician.
The presidency is as far as he can go. There is no more. The currency of politics is power, and once you've been the Most Powerful Man in the World for four years, everything else is downhill--except four more years on the same trip."



on breakfast:

“...the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.”

I guess I just don't "get it" when it comes to HST.

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.“

- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72

it does not surprise me that hunter s Thompson is your hero

Having grown up in an era where HST was in his prime, I consider him my favorite author.

Was he weird? Of course.
Was he out of control most of the time? Definitely.
Was he an a-hole? Seems so.

But, he also pointed out things that needed to be brought from the shadows.
He identified the unsavory, although in an unsavory way.

Overlander wrote: ↑Tue Mar 05, 2024 12:22 pm He identified the unsavory, although in an unsavory way.

That's a good way to describe it.

Overlander wrote: ↑Tue Mar 05, 2024 12:22 pm Having grown up in an era where HST was in his prime, I consider him my favorite author.

Was he weird? Of course.
Was he out of control most of the time? Definitely.
Was he an a-hole? Seems so.

But, he also pointed out things that needed to be brought from the shadows.
He identified the unsavory, although in an unsavory way.

^^^

His POV was from an angle few others appeared to see.

Shirley wrote: ↑Tue Mar 05, 2024 3:49 pm

Overlander wrote: ↑Tue Mar 05, 2024 12:22 pm Having grown up in an era where HST was in his prime, I consider him my favorite author.

Was he weird? Of course.
Was he out of control most of the time? Definitely.
Was he an a-hole? Seems so.

But, he also pointed out things that needed to be brought from the shadows.
He identified the unsavory, although in an unsavory way.

^^^

His POV was from an angle few others appeared to see.

And he had a razor sharp way of describing what he saw and felt.

His 9/11 article for ESPN is one of the best articles I have ever read.

Imagine if HST was alive during the Trump political drama......

Overlander wrote: ↑Tue Mar 05, 2024 3:59 pm Imagine if HST was alive during the Trump political drama......

HST, George Carlin, and Molly Ivins left us in our time of need.

The whole idea of “Gonzo journalism” is pretty rad - that he didn’t wanna write about something unless he immersed himself in it.

He spent like a year as a pledge for the Hell’s Angels, riding with them, partying with them, until they found out he was doing it just to write about them, at which point they kicked his ass. I think I’m telling that story right.

His writing style is so powerful I often read it as if I hear his voice saying it. Or is that Johnny Depp’s voice? Either way.

Also remember Hunter S. Thompson the poster?!