Fear And Loathing At Jack Nicholson’s House … The Loneliest Place In The World
When Hunter S. Thompson set out to Jack Nicholson’s house near Aspen to mark his 60th birthday on 22 April 1997, he did not bother with wine, cigars, or anything that might pass for a civilised gift. Instead, he arrived at his friend’s door carrying a thawing elk’s heart—an offering somewhere between tribute, warning, and private joke.
Here we have Thompson at full tilt: loyal to his friends, allergic to convention, and operating in a universe where symbolism matters more than sanity. In his telling of this sordid tale, the act becomes less about the gift itself and more about the ritual—the strange, theatrical bond between two men who understood that when excess becomes normal, the only frontier left is to go gonzo. Hunter S. Thompson, in his own words, in this excerpt from his book Kingdom of Fear.
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Fear And Loathing At Jack Nicholson’s House … by Hunter S. Thompson
It was a dark and stormy night when I set out from my house to Jack Nicholson’s place far away in a valley on the other side of town. It was his birthday, and I had a huge raw elk heart for him. I have known Jack for many years, and we share a certain sense of humor among other things, and in truth there was nothing inherently strange in the notion of bringing a freshly taken elk heart out to his home on the night of his birthday.
It was lightly frozen and beginning to leak from the chambers, so I put it in a Ziploc bag and tossed it in the back of the Jeep. Hot damn, I thought, Jack’s children will love this. I knew they had just arrived that day from Los Angeles, and I wanted to have a surprise for them.
‘You won’t be late, will you?’ Jack had asked. ‘You know the kids go to bed early.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving in ten minutes.’
And it was just about then that the night began to go wrong. Time withered away. Some kind of episode occurred, and before I knew it I was running two hours late – two hours, keep that in mind because it will make a difference later on.
Okay. So I set out to see Jack and his children with all kinds of jokes and gimcracks in my car. In addition to the bleeding elk heart, there was a massive outdoor amplifier, a tape recording of a pig being eaten alive by bears, a 1,000,000-watt spotlight, and a 9-mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol with teakwood handles and a box of high-powered ammunition. There was also a 40-million-candlepower parachute flare that would light up the valley for 40 miles for 40 seconds that would seem to anyone lucky enough to be awake at the time like the first blinding flash of a midrange nuclear device that might signal the end of the world.
It was a handheld mortar, in fact, with a plastic lanyard on one end and the black snout of a firing tube on the other. I had found it on sale a few weeks earlier at West Marine Hardware in Sausalito for $115, down from $210. It was irresistible – even cheap, I felt, for such a spectacular display – and I was looking forward to using it. The directions were vague, and mainly in foreign languages, but the diagrams made it clear that The USER should wear suitable eye protection, hold projectile vertically as far from body as possible, then JERK FIRING RING STRAIGHT DOWN and DO NOT ALLOW PROJECTILE TO TILT.
Okay, I thought, I can do this. I know flares. I have fired those huge gray military things, where you pull off one end and put it on the other, then bash your palm against the bottom and feel both your arms go numb all the way up to your skull from an explosion equal to a 105-mm howitzer blast. So I wasn’t worried about this cheap red load from Sausalito. Once you get a feeling for handling nitroglycerine fuses, you never lose it.
I was thinking about these things as I wound my way up the long winding road to Jack’s house. It was ten miles of darkness, and by the time I got there I was feeling a little jumpy, so I pulled over and parked on a bluff overlooking the Nicholson home.
There were no other cars on the road. I unloaded the huge amplifier and mounted it firmly on top of the Jeep. The horn pointed out across the valley, then I placed the flare neatly beside it and leaned back against the hood to smoke a cigarette. Far down through the pines I could see the queer-looking lights of Jack’s house. The night was extremely quiet and the LED in my Jeep said it was nine degrees above zero and the time was no later than 2:30 A.M., or maybe 2:45. I remember hearing a gospel tune on the radio, then I plugged the horn into the amplifier and beamed up the pig-screaming tape to about 119 decibels.
The noise was intolerable, at first. I had to cover my head and crouch behind the Jeep to get away from it. I wanted to turn it off, but just then I saw headlights coming up the road and I had to get out of sight… The car never even slowed down as it passed me, despite the hideous screams of what sounded like a whole herd of pigs being slaughtered.
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My first thought, for some reason, was that it was not Bill Clinton, because he would have at least honked. Ho ho, good joke, eh? It’s odd how Bill Clinton jokes seem to pop up at unnatural moments like these – when you’re doing something that feels deeply right and normal and you feel in a high sense of humor as you set about your task, which then somehow goes wrong for reasons beyond your control and sows the seeds of tragedy.
Nobody needs this – but some people seem to want it, and on that giddy winter night in the Rockies, I was one of them. No power of reason or nature could have persuaded me that the small, friendly, and finely organized chain of events already in motion would not be received by the family down below with anything but joy, surprise, and gratitude.
I kept the amplifier going with the pig screams every twenty or thirty seconds, bracketed around bursts of rapid gunfire – and then I put the million-watt strobe down on the house, dragging it back and forth across the deck and the living room windows.
I did this for ten minutes or so, but nothing happened. The only response from below was a silent spasm of lights being turned off, as if they were all going to bed.
Well, I thought, that is a rude way to act when guests come with presents, even if they are a bit late. So what? There is no excuse for rudeness.
My next move was potentially fatal. I attempted to launch the rocket, but the firing ring broke and the thing started hissing, so I quickly hurled it away and heard it tumbling down the hill toward the house. O God, I thought, those are magnum phosphorous flares, and this place is going to be like the bridge in Apocalypse Now when that goddamn thing explodes.
I hastily packed the amp into the Jeep and picked up as many of my empty brass cartridges as I could find in the snow – and it was then, as I fled, that I remembered my birthday gift, which had somehow popped out of its bag and was bleeding all over the backseat.
I was beginning to have mixed feelings about this visit. There was something out of whack, and I figured the best thing to do was get out of this valley immediately. There was only one road out. (If some worrywart had called 911 to report an outburst of screaming and shooting at the Nicholson place, that could pose a problem, given that I was far down at the end of a dead-end canyon with no other way to escape but the river, and that was not an option.)
But why? I thought. Why am I drifting into negativity? Never mind this talk about ‘escape’. I am here on a mission of joy. And there are no neighbors, anyway. It was a dark and peaceful place – yet extremely desolate in many ways, and not a good place to be trapped in.
I dismissed these negative thoughts as I hooked a hard left into Jack’s driveway, intent on delivering my birthday present. The iron jackals on the gateposts no longer disturbed me, and I knew I could do this thing quickly.
I drove the Jeep all the way up to the front door and left the motor running as I fetched the bleeding elk heart out of the backseat and carried it up to the house. I rang the doorbell a few times before I gave up and left the heart – about ten inches tall and seven inches wide – propped against the door in a way that would cause it to tumble into the house whenever the door was opened. It seemed like the right thing to do, in light of the rudeness I’d experienced, and panic was setting in.
On my way back to the truck I made sure the gun was clear by cranking off the rest of the clip straight up in the air and flinging my bloody hands distractedly toward the house because I was sure I’d seen somebody watching me from inside the darkened kitchen window, which angered me even further, because I felt I was being snubbed.
But I left quickly, with no other noise or weirdness except the shooting, which sounded unnaturally loud and caused pain in both of my eardrums. I jerked the Jeep into low and whiplashed out to the road. It was time to go home and sleep heavily – and there were no signs of police or any other disturbance as I drove carefully down the icy road. I locked in on Venus, the Morning Star, and pulled safely into my garage before sunrise.
The rest of the morning was spent in a work frenzy. My fax machine beeped constantly. There were the usual messages from the White House, two dangerously bogus offers from Hollywood, and a 60-page, single-spaced transcript of General Douglas MacArthur’s final address to The Long Gray Line of steely-eyed cadets on The Plain at West Point in the spring of 1962, and another 39 pages of his ‘Old Soldiers Never Die’ speech to Congress after he’d been fired.
These things spew into my house day after day, and I do my best to analyze them. Different people want different things in this world, and you have to be careful about taking risks. Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts. A thing that seemed strange and wrong yesterday can seem perfectly reasonable tomorrow, or vice versa.
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It did not seem strange, for instance, to learn that Bill Clinton’s main concern these days is with his place in history, his legacy, his permanent image in high-school textbooks 100 years from now. He has done his work, he feels, and now is the time to secure his place on a pedestal in the pantheon of Great American Presidents, along with Lincoln and Coolidge and Kennedy.
And why not? George Bush had that problem, and so did Richard Nixon. Nobody needs to go down in history like that. Only a criminal freak would want to be remembered as a Crook or a Dupe or a Creature of some treacherous monster like J. Edgar Hoover… But those risks come with the territory when you finally move into the White House. You bet. They will write something – many things, in fact: books, movies, legends, and maybe even filthy jokes about backstabbing and sodomy that will follow you all the way to the grave. Look at Nixon, look at Reagan, or even JFK. History has never been gentle in its judgments on bedrock degenerates – but it is also true that some degenerates are treated more gently than others, and that is what worries Bill Clinton. He is liked, but not well liked, and that is a very fragile base to maintain for another two and a half years. Voters like him now because they believe he has made them richer – and they will probably vote for Al Gore in 2000. (Jesus. That has an eerie ring to it, eh? Vote Gore in 2000. Prepare yourself for that. It will happen. Beware.)
I was brooding on these things on that bright winter morning when the phone machine rang and I heard a female voice screeching hysterically: ‘Watch out, the police are coming’ and ‘Blood Everywhere’ and ‘Terrible tragedy at Jack’s house last night.’
Ye gods, I thought. What is she talking about? What tragedy? Hell, I was there at about three and the place looked peaceful to me. What could have happened?
The answer was not long in coming. Both phones rang at once, but I suddenly felt queasy and couldn’t answer. Then I heard the voice of the sheriff on one phone and some angry raving on the other from Paul Pascarella, the famous artist, who said he was on his way to Jack’s house at top speed with a shotgun and a .44 Magnum. The house was under siege, he said. Cops were everywhere. Some maniac stalker tried to kill Jack and the kids last night, but he got away and the cops think he’s still loose in the woods. He’s a killer, just got out of prison, I think Jack’s okay, O God this is horrible. Then he went into the canyon and lost contact.
The sheriff’s message told much the same tale. ‘This is going to be a very big story,’ he said. ‘I’m already setting up a command post to deal with the national media. They’re calling it an assassination attempt. We’ve closed off the road and sent a posse with dogs to search the area. It’s a manhunt. We’ll be on CNN by noon – and, by the way, do you happen to know anything about this? If you do, please call me before it’s too late.’
‘Too late?’ I thought. Nonsense. Too late for what? Are we dealing with lunatics here? Why would I want to kill Jack? It was madness.
Indeed, and it was just about then that it hit me. Of course. That’s me that they’re chasing with dogs out there in the woods. I am the crazed bushy-haired assassin who tried to get into the house last night and murder the whole family. What the hell? It was only a joke.
A joke? Ho ho. Nobody else was laughing. They had already found an unexploded rocket bomb in the trees above the house… Every cop in the county was cranked up and working double-overtime to capture this monster before he could butcher the whole Nicholson family and bring eternal shame on Aspen’s already sleazy name. Hideous scandals involving rich perverts, depraved children, and degenerate Hollywood whores looking for publicity are so common here as to be politically tolerable and even stylish… Indeed, that is why this shit-rain of ‘second-home pimps’ has invaded this valley like a plague of rich lice in recent years… And we are not talking about small-time lice here, not at all.
Ah, but I digress. We were talking about my failed attempt to deliver some birthday presents to my old friend Jack and his kids on a frozen snowy night in the winter of 1997.
The real problem on that night turned out to be something that did not occur to me, at the time – if only because it was so queer and unlikely as to beam new light on words like incredible, bizarre, and impossible…
But it happened, for good or ill – and now that I mention it, 4,000-1 tragedies like this one are the main reason I decided to renounce conventional crime as a way of life so many, many years ago – and turn to the writing life.
Jack had been menaced in public by a murderous certified stalker who had made several previous attempts on his life in Los Angeles – and the reason he had come to the Rockies was to be completely anonymous and solitary with Raymond and Lorraine, safe from the perils of Hollywood. He was, in a word, on the lam – just another jittery parent whose children had arrived to join him at his utterly isolated cabin home in the Rockies.
Who could have known, for instance, that all telephone service to Jack’s bleak valley would be cut off by the blizzard that night… ‘Yeah, it was right about then that the phones went dead,’ the sheriff told me. ‘They tried to call 911, but the phone lines had apparently been cut. That’s when he flipped out and barricaded the family in the basement behind a heap of antique furniture with nothing at all for a weapon except a common fireplace poker.’ He chuckled. ‘The fool didn’t even have a gun in the house. Thank God for that, eh? He could have killed the children by accident.’
Which was true. As a rule it is better not to keep loaded weapons lying around the house when children are visiting. Even with a criminally insane stalker creeping around outside with a chainsaw. It is a far far better thing to have good locks and screechers on the doors, and a fulltime phone to the police station… This turned out to be no comfort at all to Jack and his family that night. The freak outside had a grudge, and he had come a long way to settle it. The setting was made to order (just like in The Shining).
The phones kept ringing and the news kept getting worse. Some people begged me to confess and others urged me to hurry out to Jack’s with a 12-gauge riot gun and join the search party. Everybody who called seemed genuinely alarmed and afraid. Even Heidi was acting weird. She knew I had gone out to Jack’s the previous night, and for all I knew she thought I’d tried to kill him for some reason. Why not? I might have had a seizure and flipped out. Who knows what a dope fiend might do? Especially with children around. I might not even remember it.
The phone rang again, and this time it was Jack. He had just got the phone working again. Oh God, I thought. What am I going to say? Get a grip on yourself. Omerta.
“Uh, Doc, how you doing?” he said calmly. It may have been a Saturday, because he said something like “Who’s playing this afternoon?”
“Never mind those fucking football games,” I said. “What’s this nightmare about the police out there at your house? I’m hearing weird things about it.”
There was a silence, a pause. I could hear him taking a breath. He said, “Well, yeah, let me ask you a thing or two.” He paused. “You know, that elk heart…”
That’s what really freaked him out, all that blood. He said, “When I looked at it—we were looking at it for clues”—I guessed he was talking about the cops—“when I took a close look at it, I saw that there were icicles in the middle of the heart, the part that still hadn’t thawed. I didn’t say anything to the cops, of course, but it seems like I remember you keeping a frozen elk heart in your refrigerator. Didn’t you show me something like that, along with a bird and a ferret? Don’t I remember you throwing a frozen elk heart at me last winter?”
That fucker, I thought. The creepy little bastard. That was good, putting that together—just a sliver inside, frozen. All the rest had turned to mush and blood—it’s actually pretty good to eat, elk heart… this one wasn’t going to be eaten anytime soon; it looked like a gizzard of some human being. Bigger than a human heart.
“Yeah, maybe…” I said.
“I thought so, I thought it was you, when I saw that ice,” he said. “I haven’t told them yet; you know, they’re still out here, the police task force, digging for new evidence, people sleeping in the woods… Goddamn, Doc, I’m glad you told me. We have had a hell of a night here. It’s been horrible.”
The joke was over. I was never formally accused of it; Jack told the sheriff it was just a false alarm. “I know this guy,” he said, “and he is not the killer.”
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Epilogue
That is what I mean about personal security in this town. You can buy a lot of protection, if you are filthy rich, and it obviously makes those people feel better about themselves—surrounded at all times by hundreds of greedy freelance cops with a license to kill anytime, anywhere, for any reason blessed by God. They are volatile people, at best, and always dangerous.
We get more black-truck security caravans in this valley than anyplace in the world that comes quickly to mind except Washington, DC, and Vatican City. There is a lot of available cash in these places, a lot of quasi-secret money changing hands… of governments being toppled on the other side of the world, of kingdoms being undermined, and whole families of US presidents and movie stars like Julia Roberts and Harry Dean Stanton being bought and sold and coddled like concubines, by criminal scum like Neil Bush, convicted crook and brother of our sitting president George W…. Not to mention the current Secretary of the (US) Army and gilded clutch of criminally fugitive executives from ENRON, including the monstrous chairman Kenneth Lay… These people roam free and unmolested in Aspen, cloistered by off-duty cops and Hollywood yo-yos and bimbos and suckfish… I know these people. They are more and more my neighbors in these first horrible years of our new Century…
There is never any shortage of applicants for paid-police jobs in the Roaring Fork Valley. All ambitious young cops want to be hired in places like Palm Beach and Sausalito and Aspen. They crave their 15 minutes of fame, and their police research has told them that Aspen is the most likely place to get it…
Which is normal enough in this town. It has long been a haven for sybaritic outlaws and other social criminals as long as they had a good story and didn’t hurt the neighbors—not quite a sanctuary, but at least a sort of retro-legal gray area, where real-life words like Crime and Guilt mean different things to different people, even in the same household.
~ by Hunter S. Thompson
An excerpt from Kingdom of Fear – a wild run of episodes from Hunter S. Thompson’s life—dispatches from his days as a foreign correspondent in Rio, his stint as night manager of San Francisco’s infamous O’Farrell Theatre, his audacious Freak Power campaign for sheriff of Aspen, and the courtroom theatre that ended with his full acquittal in the so-called 99 Days trial. Across it all, Thompson writes at full throttle, turning memory into something louder, sharper, and far more dangerous than fact alone.
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