by Ben Corbett

So I'm laying zonked on the greasy futon and the phone rings and I roll over with a groan and check the clock—4:30 a.m.—and I'm thinking "Christ, it's HER again." Meaning the current EX. In this case a sashaying vixen neo bohemian (i.e., Reagan Baby with Doors records, French trim and a caboose of issues), probably coked out of her skull like always, shit-faced drunk and waxing nostalgic. My answering machine garbles out, "This is the office of Joe America leave a message." Beep.

"Office, eh?" a male voice cuts through the fog. "Moving up in the world. Office... That's pretty flub. Office... Hey Ben, it's Hunter..."

I hit the talk button, rub my eyes. "Heyyyyyyy, Hunter."

And after a pause, "Yeahhhhh," he drawls reflective. "Yeahhhhh, I just received this copy of your article. It was very, let's say, observant. But you chickenshit bastard," he throttles me, "the girl you brought up here was sacrificed. That poor thing. She's forgiven, and now it's all your fault. So take the blame. Yeah, be like Christ."

"There's certainly no shortage of Christs these days," I laugh. "But I'll take the blame."

"Good."

And that's how my last conversation with Hunter S. Thompson began. It ended on a note of Kate Hudson, celebrity worship and an invitation for a beer that I'll never get to drink. I'm still scratching my head on this suicide, and I still owe Hunter $20 on a bet. It's a hell of a feeling, that debt, but I'm learning to groove with it.

The "poor thing" whom he mentioned was "sacrificed" was not the current EX. Rather, it was this whole other person, a dirty girl with a bronze halo and a similar caboose of issues, but a friend, who accompanied me to Hunter's house when I drove up to get the interview for High Times, which was a pretty big deal. (It was reported that mine was the last feature-length interview with Thompson published in America. That may or may not be true, but I like the idea. Not that it matters...) So about a week before the interview, I called Hunter and during the course of the conversation he said, "Maybe you can help me out. I need an assistant—you know, some sweet young thing with nice breasts—to help me finish putting together my new book and a compilation of my unpublished work. Do you know anyone?"

"Yeah," I said, thinking about Bronze Halo Girl. So a week later I took her along and we ended up at the Woody Creek Tavern, getting lit and waiting for Hunter to call, all the while the staff giving us those sympathetic "Another loser waiting on Thompson" looks. Because this is the ritual. Hunter enjoys making younger journalists earn their supper. So you wait, and you're goddamn glad to have the opportunity to do so. Eventually I call up there and Hunter answers, "Where you been? Get the fuck up here." He'd been down in Aspen getting drunk, and we drive up and there's a roomful of friends and Hunter's jubilant, festive, and we start drinking and getting stoned and after a while Bronze Halo Girl disappears somewhere into the house, nobody knows where. Hunter starts getting paranoid, "Where's the girl? What happened to the girl?" And it turns out she's in a remote bathroom puking her guts out from slamming too much Chivas and smoking a truckload of weed. Then Hunter starts freaking almost apoplectic, "Get her the fuck out of my house. You should know better, Ben. This is unprofessional."

I'm sitting there stoned, trying to register this new information, and I say, "I didn't know she was a lightweight, Hunter. I've gotten drunk with her before and she was fine. Let's just tuck her in somewhere and get on with the interview."

It was sensational stuff. Suddenly Bronze Halo Girl morphs into Puking Girl, and no one (except for Anita, Thompson's Bodhisattva wife) knows quite how to handle this Puking Girl situation. Was she an agent provocateur? A thief? In any case, Thompson trusted me, which is some fairly tough armor to penetrate because he's been burned a few times. But he still wanted her out. "This is your responsibility, Ben. You need to think about your career. It's unprofessional."

"I know, Hunter. I know." Feeling shitty. And suddenly Hunter looks down between his legs from the Command Post, feeling shitty too, and his aura takes on this humiliated expression because he realizes he's making an issue out of what in other circumstances he might find amusing, and then quietly and solemnly he mumbles, "We're all professionals here."

It was very humbling. But I'd broken through The Gonzo Show and snatched a glimpse of Hunter's heart. Which was the actual—what we might call "cosmic"—mission. Some things simply happen the way they should, and really, who cares about the means of delivery. And it seems very fitting in Thompson's warped grid of reality that a puking girl would be a bridge to something greater. So it all worked out. A unique Gonzo prank with some reckless god at the wheel.

The reason this girl was "sacrificed," as Hunter later put it, is because I didn't write about her in the article. I refused to. It was a nightmare. And besides, it's not what the editors wanted. Thompson would have written about it. You couldn't invent a better story, and he would have considered the puking girl a splendorous detail. He would have filed past deadline, thereby forcing the editors to run the puking girl story. But not me. I figured I'd save that one for later, another strange and embarrassing adventure to romanticize about in the memoirs. So I'm writing about it now as a tribute, as bizarre as that sounds, knowing Hunter would like it.

Anyway, a few weeks later, I went back up to Owl Farm for another interview, and I left with many hours of tape, a nice beer buzz and a beak full of powder for the moonlit drive down the hill. Between these personal interviews and a bevy of phone conversations and interviews, I picked his brain on everything from the Hell's Angels to Nixon to Bush to drugs, whiskey and guns, women, peacocks, the '70s; about anything any journalist (human or otherwise) would want to ask. "A wide-ranging interview" is what he called it. And he picked my brain, too. He wanted to know what people thought, and it made you feel good. Inclusion. But while entertaining my questions, he was also trying to relate some ideas that you'd have to board his cryptic wavelength to understand, because if you approached him linear he'd respond, on purpose, in nonlinear ways, and you'd have to figure out weird ways to write about it. One had to be super sharp to keep up with him. But in short: "I fought the good fight. I never sold out. That's something to be proud of. Now it's your turn, and go tell everybody else."

Because somehow you got the sense that he wouldn't be around much longer. He looked a little emaciated, as if some terminal animal were chewing away at his insides. So he checked out early in what Timothy Leary would have called "Death as Performance Art." Hunter wasn't gonna get knocked down like Muhammad Ali. And by refusing to rot away on the pain gurney, he walked away undefeated, his eyes still burning with a young writer's hunger while radiating the wisdom of contentment. And of course, that boyish, mischievous, prankster smirk of his that you damn well know came across his lips the moment he sailed.

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