James Bond and the 40-foot rainbow colored pulsating vagina
Later, over drinks at the Boulderado Hotel lounge it was obvious there was a certain mutual respect, though I doubt real friendship — their huge egos left little space for that — as they recounted the famous Millbrook bust. Liddy says, “The good burghers of Duchess County were horrified of what was going on there. Remember that this was a county where the justice of the peace practiced with his machine gun in his off hours.” Liddy does not mention that he had serious ambitions toward becoming Deputy District Attorney of Duchess County, New York and that a better PR opportunity than nailing the Pope of Dope naked with some nubile teenager, or better yet, a young drugged boy, inside a hedonic compound would play very well with the voters. It is nearly impossible for informed young people today to grasp how the sexually repressed “Greatest Generation” saw the world we were rebelling against. There was no Jerry Springer Show, no internet porn to inform and titillate their little worlds of lights-out missionary sex and long post-war retreat into the ignorant traditional values of the prewar era. As my postwar bride mother-in-law says: “I didn’t even know what incest meant until I’d been married ten years!”
And so, Liddy, the ambitious Catholic prep school kid from Hoboken with a law degree and an instinct for the middle class conservative mind’s bottomless appetite for any source of outrage to give vent to their inner repressions — and naked painted bodies dancing on the lawn under strobe lights was about as outrageous as things got sat the time — he saw his ticket in Leary. He busted Leary twice on his way up the political ladder, ultimately catching the attention of Richard Nixon by running for the House of Representatives against Nixon’s man, millionaire Hamilton Fish. By some mysterious process, the widely popular Liddy suddenly quit campaigning against Fish in the critical last weeks of the race. Fish won and Liddy started working for Nixon. By 1971 he was on Nixon’s White House staff and willing to do anything to get to the next level. Which, in the Republican scheme of things of course, spells some sort of criminality.
Along the way though, Liddy succeeded in overturning many of the nation’s drug laws, one of which made LSD illegal, for which I must personally confess that I can never forgive the man. All I can say to readers under sixty is that it was a whole different world before LSD was made illegal in 1968. There was the freedom of consciousness exploration without any paranoia whatsoever — which is the only way it can be done. Finding yourself was your own business and no authority whatsoever had the power to intrude. Anyway, Liddy’s path to Watergate began with the bust at Millbrook.
“The Millbrook bust was certainly no textbook execution of a search warrant,” Liddy said. “The whole night was hellish and the trial was even worse. Tim dragged 32 Hindus into the courtroom.”
Leary, (laughing): “It was a Saturday night and we had already been tipped off by all the deputy sheriffs’ teenaged kids, who acted as informants for us. We had extraterrestrial company at the time, all sorts of Buddhists, yogis, scientists, light artists, psychedelic cannibals … The place was a launching pad for higher ideas. The light artists had it all set up to greet the cops with a 40-foot rainbow-colored pulsating vagina over the lawn. But the cops got hung up, and things dragged on, so we all called it a night and went into the bedrooms to smoke a strong hallucinogenic drug called DMT. After a few puffs the room was a glowing and hissing molecular time-space warp.
“Then BOOM! Here comes James Bond Liddy through the door with 24 armed and booted state troopers. Gordon was just beatific. His face was every color of the rainbow, his eyes shot out laser beams, and he had this powerful halo around him. And I cannot even describe what the 24 dinosaurs in trooper uniforms looked like! Whew! Meanwhile, the dope pipe laid there on the bed screaming ‘HERE I AM! HERE I AM!’ My wife immediately covered it with a blanket, then pointed across the room and yelled, “Don’t you dare touch my pot!” In typical knee-jerk storm trooper fashion, 24 cops and Gordon himself stomped across the room and seized a pound of peat moss, and off we all merrily went to jail.”
The saltpeter crystal meth acid test
Back to Thompson and the boys in Aspen: On the way to the benefit show, Thompson hands me three Snow Seal bindles of coke that admirers had given him that day. “What the f*ck?” I asked. “Poisoning,” he answers. “That stuff could be scraped off the acid on a battery cable for all I know. I never take free dope from strangers.” I could smell, as it were, the wisdom in that policy.
As you may guess, given the hotel room planning session, the gig was totally fucked. The only bright spot was a BBC documentary of his legendary Aspen sheriff’s race a few years before, when he ran on an anarchist dope freak power ticket and damn near won. Next in the show came a very strange Buffet-Frey duet on a song called “Hunter Thompson Weekend”, which came off about as entertaining as watching laundry dry on heroin. Most of the evening consisted of Hunter hanging up there exposed like a side of raw beef before a sea of fossilized rich-liberal horseshit, taking questions such as “What can we do as citizens to blah, blah, blah …” And so Thompson, whose speaking gigs were usually a stammering incoherent bore anyway, had managed to pull off one perhaps worse than usual. Sitting in the Jerome Bar afterward, he said, “I like them more aggressive than that. I like to go up there ready to kill, get the adrenaline flowing, throw chairs. After all, I’ve already been paid to do the job, so I’ll go down into the crowd and grapple with the bastards hand to hand if necessary.” Which was of course pure bull, as anyone who ever paid to see him speak can attest. In all fairness though, the Mr. Gonzo was difficult enough to create as a literary figure, and absolutely impossible to deliver live and on demand. And nobody wanted to listen to a discussion of the man as a writer.
Hunter then insisted that I, my wife and small son who had come along with me (Oh my god! I’d stone forgotten they had been waiting an hour now for me to come get them!) go with him to some upscale restaurant for escargot — which I hadn’t the slightest notion of what it was at the time — with Buffett, Frey and a bunch of glitzy personalities. I kept declining and making excuses, but the truth was that I and my humble little hippie family couldn’t even afford a room for the night, and had planned to drive from Aspen the 210 miles home to Boulder, however late it turned out to be. Finally, and with a trace of real kindness, Hunter said, “You won’t be paying for anything.”
But first, of course, a little more toot. “Howz come you used to call this stuff a p*ssy drug, dope for fruits?” I asked. “Your nose runs with the best of ‘em.”
“It’s still a fruit drug. You just can’t find anyone who’ll eat hard drugs with you these days. Coke is a pathetically safe ritual. Pass it around at parties and all that sh*t. I guess I just happen to like it. I can maintain on it in some vague way. What I’m going to start doing is carrying around huge quantities of acid, crystal meth and saltpeter mixed together. Take it to parties and say, ‘Here, have a snort.’ Watch’em go into cardiac nervous convulsions.”
For a moment then, he became evasive, pensive. After a while he said, “Writing politics is not like it used to be. Even covering a war has no kick. It’s like writers are being ordered back to cover the farm teams. Some new kind of rot is creeping into the scene. Something more dangerous than Nixon ever was.”
“Well, maybe you’ve reached the limit. How can you out-gonzo yourself after you’ve already out-gonzoed yourself? Maybe it’s like Kesey said of writing a classic, that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place.” No reply. He looked grim. But at the restaurant feast Hunter was good ebullient, and hilarious in his antics to convince my son Timothy to eat a snail.
Even then, 25 years ago, in it was clear he was doomed to remain the savage Raoul Duke. And that he preferred it that way — out in front of the adoring counterculture’s eyes, brilliantly mixing the gonzo myth and fact and pure bullshit into the most wonderfully toxic, astute image of American politics that had ever come down the pike. And honestly speaking, it was the self destructive persona his liberal readers loved most. So what further excess would it take to satisfy them? Thompson blasting an ounce of coke up his nose with a high powered paint gun at the Hollywood Bowl?
Meanwhile, there is that bottle here by the keyboard: Old Granddad, your lined face, profoundly wise, compromised, yet the eyes with a glint of mischief and hope. Your scarified, archetypal countenance tells us every thing we need or even want to know.
“I have been here a hell of a long time, son. I ain’t going to compromise, I don’t need to. I’m perpetually drunk, and you know as well as I that these are the values that make America great.”
Granddad, your picture makes me thirsty.
The python and the mafia
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