Finally, after many phone calls and as many trips downstairs to the bar, Hunter plops down on the hotel room bed with a grim look of resignation. “It’s no use,” he says. “We’ll never find it. The horse murder is off. Too bad. We could have yanked their nerve ends right out through their pores, put out their eyes in one grisly flash of the truth. The truth is so much heavier than fiction …” I would guess that the flick probably never existed, and was merely this evening’s installment of an ongoing manufactured fiction that maintained his persona, one so exquisitely extravagant as to illuminate the brutally real truth.
Glen Frey strolls into the room
“Is this the office of Hunter Thompson Productions?”
“Yeah. You want to murder a horse tonight?”
“Huh?”
“You and Buffet.”
“Oh sh*t, you weren’t going to show that horse thing you talked about … I mean, man, well … I’d never follow that on stage anyway.” Looking relieved, Frey asks, “So what else is happening down there tonight?”
“Whatever you and Jimmy end up doing. I’m just showing up to take the blame. It might be strange tonight.”
“It was bound to be,” Frey sighs.
Pogo and the G-Man
Now for the moment, let us jump forward a bit to my other assignment of the week, Tim Leary’s arrival in Boulder, Colorado. After picking Leary up at the Denver airport, we are plowing through the bright Colorado sun in a rented car. Leary is giving me his “mind mutant assessment” of the surroundings: “Late terrestrial species architecture, mostly silica fusion and inorganic slab construction, erected by the musculotoic legions of the late Twentieth Century industrial feudal dynasties.” From his pocket he extracts “a packet of aromatic hydrocarbon sticks,” bringing one to his lips and lighting it, drawing in the smoke deeply, obviously savoring the tingle nicotine is sending through his bloodstream. Timothy Leary has arrived in Boulder, Colorado.
Not the same Boulder as everyone else’s, to be sure. But what could you expect from a self-appointed national director of chemical consciousness, “visionary outlaw philosopher scientist bard,” and “unrepentant dope fiend out to mutate every mind I can lay my hands on toward higher intelligence — their own.”
This 61-year old bright eyed ex-Harvard psychologist bouncing around in white Nikes and a pinstriped shirt did not strike me as burned out at all. I’d covered Fleetwood Mac a bit earlier, and believe me, compared to Stevie Nix, Leary was not even slightly crispy around the edges. Of course at the time he was raving about the “smart drugs,” and by that he was not referring to ginkgo biloba either, but drugs such as hydergine. So who really knows? One thing for sure though: Ken Kesey was right when he said when Leary had short haircuts he looked like Pogo.
Strangely enough, Timothy Francis Leary was in Boulder, the town at the foot the North American hippy Himalayas, to meet with the improbable personage of George Gordon Liddy, boogey-demon of Watergate plumbing job and hand over the flame fame. Mr. Sheer Will. At the moment though, Liddy was checking into an undisclosed room across town at the Hilton. Twenty-four hours from now he’d be debating Leary in what was being touted as “the heavyweight philosophical bout of the year.” The topic was “Personal Freedom vs. Authority,” which Leary declared was the nation’s primary struggle and would be so in the future.
I won’t go into the evening’s show, “Debate for the Soul of America,” but will just say that, despite its canned performance, it was marvelously funny, yet spot on the vital subject it addressed — freedom vs. authority — in a way today’s managed debates can never be. In fact, media debates today never even touch the subject because participants have too much to lose, given that they are among the chosen ones issuing the “one voice to the many.” Today’s equivalent would probably be Noam Chomsky vs. Dick Cheney, which we are never going to see, and which surely wouldn’t be as entertaining, given Cheney’s embalmed cheerlessness. Chomsky is no Richard Pryor either, but Chomsky wields perhaps the heaviest hammer of political and historical truth in America, so there might be some entertainment value in watching it come down on that old Gila monster. Or maybe Gore Vidal vs. Tucker Carlson … sigh … like that’s ever gonna happen.
As Liddy put it at the time: “Tim and I can say anything we damned well want to. We’re both ex-cons and have done hard time and not the country club kind either, for what we believe, and have no credibility whatsoever to preserve.” Even given that Leary and Liddy both were relentless self-promoters, they nevertheless spoke openly and loudly of important things we never hear expressed meaningfully any place today but on the most leftward frontiers of the Internet. Not semi-abstract electronic database privacy rights, which, serious as they are, most Americans could give a sh*t about until it results in some brutal act of oppression, such as raising their car insurance rate 50 bucks. These two talked — and in absolute seriousness — about such things as the right to live as a naked lotus eater in the public park if you chose to because it was your park, your body and your planet. Or the right to shoot down any armed police or government authority that came through your door unannounced (an opinion that got Liddy into some hot water years later.) They were enthusiastic about the debate, not the least of reasons for which was that they both still owed millions in legal fees and this was a paying gig. But they were not too desperately sweating it. As Leary said, “the first people to visit you in your cell after being arrested in The Outlaw Game are the media agent and his lawyer. In the meantime Leary still had royalties from numerous books and Liddy was negotiating the deal for a television docudrama based upon his own book, Will.
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