‘Ah Ralph, you filthy little animal, filthy little beast, I have a job for you, a proud and noble job,  I know, don’t say it, this is just a job, another job . I am now writing on the fax ,  a rueful message, never mind,  I am now writing, sending a page. Fax on the woeful message required , I’m a little high, Ralph, writing many weird pages, on this article for Jann for this coming Friday, as my deadline, it’s scheduled for the issue of October 1 2004 to the best of my knowledge. It’s about voting and it’s about elections – it’s about vote or die -  Ralph, this is about kicking ass, Ralph, who else but you –who would I turn to when we want to kick ass – so, we will need some art on the US election, as it looks now,  the real grit question for you, is this, for some reason, Ralph. er- what is the physical nature of evil?  My real question for you that I’ve written down here. Things that I had on my mind earlier.  Yeh, then it occurred to me,  For some reason this is what I wrote on my note book.  Yeh,(a laugh)  then a political drawing might stand out – with this art business – Somewhere in this context – your drawing of me in the jeep – We won’t worry about the title or the caption yet (laugh)  in that one – I am thinking of re-writing that Time magazine masterpiece – it has become quite famous in the underworld of poof-poof journalism in politics – you know, the taco stand – yeh, all the time they’re asking about you – I can probably get you a fellowship out here – immediately, come to think of it – now I understand you are coming here- so that’s a different thing – of course you’re coming here – when?  Not soon enough to meet this deadline we have now in a week – for your take on my view on the eve of election – out view , Ralph, our view - yeh, fuck you, Ralph, oh and in the piece also which I sent you just – one lead, well I’ve sent you several leads, Ralph, call me on   US 970 xxx xxxx – I look forward to the orgy – and believe me we’re going to kick ass or get our asses kicked – before you get out of this country – if we do this art – er, we’re just going to use the Rolling Stone conduit through October – to have an effect – and it’s about the right time to do it – drop a bomb on the bastards – ah – so – do  you have it, Ralph, you must have it, call me on – I’ll sleep for a while after this message or maybe I’ll swim – or maybe I’ll go out and cruise the dark underbelly of Carbondale – who knows what I’ll do? – but you’re it. Thank you.

Tuesday September 7th at 1.05 pm

Ah Ralph, one more thing concerning the art – ah, I’m going to send you if I can find it – the absolutely classic political poster of Nixon – would you buy a used car from this man? – I am writing about it in this piece – I’m going to send it to you even on the fax or on the email – as soon as we find it – would you buy a used car from this man? – now showing Nixon, but Nixon was innocent compared to this man – alright, but also er – I have a photograph – I’ll send it to you, too – also er – of a stripper, it was an orgy Ralph and I was present – and if you’ve seen this photograph, the Nixon art and the photograph of Cheney nuzzling a half naked stripper – in Las Vegas – yeh, you’ll see it  Ralph, and thank you very much tonight.

 Thursday Sept 9th 12.52pm

Ah, Ralph, Ralph, let’s see, I’ve got your drawings, I’ve done about 15 pages – on the piece but I want to know er – hey, I don’t know, Ralph, hy er – something’s wrong with my head – I’m seeing golf balls and little green men in yellow raincoats  outside my door – and calling my name –  anyway, are you talking to Jann, have you done anything, er – the –er- would you buy a used car from this man? – drawings are all good – emphasise – back on board – you’ll be here soon enough – let’s try to coordinate ourselves here – get this fucking thing done in a big way -  make a serious splash of this – and I’m not sure the pig-fucking thing is the best way – I’m not sure myself – damn – I will be so will you – give me a ring and how it looks and stands from your point of view. There’s a certain amount of confusion between the deadline – the decision of what it is – dying – so , I left a message for  ………, goddamn I wish I could work with children and animals – it’s almost dawn here – And the first ray of the sun is coming up over the mountains,  I may be out killing things. Whatever I can find. Alright……

It was a mischievous kind of message with a hint of despair but I was up for it and I did give it a shot for I knew what he was referring to. The joke was indeed over and the fun had gone. It was a funny message too and it was tragic and George W. Bush will rot in hell. But I still erred on the side of fun and first did my image of a decent Republican. Thick with irony it was a stab at the worst and the most blatant, ‘horriblest’  creature that such an vision could invoke. We would be in Aspen again in October and we could talk things over and I could work from there. But first we would stay a couple of days, visit the Flying Dog Brewery and the Beer Festival in Denver where I would throw paint around on stage and over those who would stand there and be thrown at. I was driven out of a hangar backwards on a spiffy chopper motor bike by Eric Warner and I had to trust him with my life and my drawing arm to be able to ride the goddamn thing. We visited the brewery that had put my work all over their bottles. So that part of our trip would be fun and we got to stay at the Oxford Hotel again. Joe Petro would come into town a day later and so we met up.
Even at the last of the great independent Tattered Cover Bookstores in America, just around the corner, the staff had created a reading space for their anti-Bush protestations and made comparisons between the purchase patterns of Democrats versus Republicans. Very kindly the general manager, Matt Miller directed me to the site on the Internet. Though it wont be explicit or necessarily (apposite?) accurate, here are some interesting comparisons, if they had guessed right. Democrats chose books like Big Lies, Bushwhacked, Bush Women, Disarming Iraq, Downsize This!  Dude,Where’s My Country-a Michael Moore must- for they also chose Stupid White Men, Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Thieves In High Places, Weapons Of Mass Deception and Worse Than Watergate. One detects a democratic flavour to all those titles.

Whereas there is a certain dismal self-regarding attitude in the titles presumably chosen by Republicans, like A National Party No More, Arrogance, Betrayal, Bush Country, Deliver Us From Evil, Hating America, Hillary’s Scheme, Let Freedom Ring, Losing Bin Laden, Rumsfeld’s War, Shut Up And Sing, The Faith Of George W. Bush, The Enemy Within, The French Betrayal Of America, and Things Worth Fighting For, and The Right Man. (Guess who that is!!) They seem to ooze Republican smugness. This may be completely misleading and a crazy kind of guesswork, but somehow I don’t think so.

We spent time looking over the making of beer and did you know that the best beer is made in Micro breweries just like Flying Dog Brewery and they are one of the best and I would say that, wouldn’t I. But I am making a pitch for every little brewery and the little man in every endeavour that private enterprise is still the best way to go. They are the new pioneers. I applaud them and loathe the corporate ruthlessness of massive take-over conglomerates who don’t know what in hell they are producers of except greedy figures to be slobbered over by fat-arsed shareholders who are interested only in the bottom line and if good folks lose their jobs because these greed heads want to see more profits then damn their mindless mendacity and their total disregard for what should be of benefit to all in community. We see a more distraught nation every time we come to the United States and each time that little less United. Come out of your dump closets, you mean-assed Bushites who said before the last election ‘I won’t be voting for Bush again. Liars!!! Now look at the wretched state this world is in. Why in hell did you choose mean?? When I first came to America at the beginning of the ‘70’s, I was charmed by a certain naïve enthusiasm. I kept recordings from various radio stations as an exercise in capturing something of that naivete. Only 35 years later, some disease has rotted the very heart out of America and they don’t seem to want life and liberty now. America is ripe for lies and lethargy. The pure mountain air is going and gone. It is a huge burden and a sadness for us all.

Anyway, that’s better. I need a bit of a rant from time to time. Just remember, as Hunter said,’Good people drink good Beer’.

We watched the installation of a new fermentation tank and spent most of the day drinking the stuff and /or sampling their whole range and meeting the staff in their bar next door where a Japanese film crew were doing their best to capture the living essence of a burgeoning industry. We played around a bit there trying to hide behind tanks and jumping out on them from odd places saying ‘Boo!’.  It was accepted by them as common western beer drinking behaviour We still had a party to go to where the original founders of the brewery would meet up with us and celebrate the occasion- Eric Warner, George Stranahan, Richard MacIntyre, Steve Charambulous, an English man flexing his muscles American style had joined them…..As I say I had to take Hunter’s word for it that these were all good people. John Hickenlooper, the current Mayor of Denver was there, who was a founder member of the WynKoop Brewery in Lower Downtown Denver (LoDo, for short) near the Union Station, because it was the 10th Anniversary of Flying Dog too as well as the Beer Festival. So there were two events of some importance to good people who drink good beer. The Beer Festival took place in a massive hangar. I was brought on as I say, backwards on this bike and dismounted at the steps up to the stage decked out in screens displaying their new beer Wild Dog. I wore an apron and the helpers to be splashed wore polythene cloaks. It was all very civilised and I was allowed to throw red paint around like a child. Then the amusing thing was that I found myself surrounded by six ‘minders’ in white Tshirts with EVENT STAFF printed on their backs, who accompanied me to a signing table, then stood around me facing outwards like Caryatids with arms folded to control the crowd, while I signed books and posters for these good people who queued in a well-behaved manner. When that was done I got up and was immediately surrounded by my ‘minders’ again to make my exit, never having received such treatment before. Joe Petro, having taken all this in with some amusement whispered into his cupped hands like a CIA official on an intercom system ‘Elvis is now leaving the building! Elvis is now leaving the building!’ It was all a bit of a hoot but my minders took their job very seriously and I thank them for it for I may have never got out.

Then we had the 10th Anniversary party. We had a drink and then another one, the party wore on and suddenly I was in the middle of a room full of drunks. Thankfully they were good, decent near-upstanding drunks and everybody had a good time and we provoked the gods by smoking heavily until dawn. It was the only decent thing to do. I look forward to the 20th Anniversary. Smoking will be back in fashion and respiratory side effects will be a thing of the past. The smoke will no longer contain benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde or hydrogen cyanide that may be a good thing or a bad thing. Who’s to really know? Cars will be gone anyway and rickshaws will be our preferred mode of transport. China will be in charge and America will be its main satellite country. Clean living and bottled water will be outlawed as part of an anti-plastic pollutant and political correctness will be shoved into the long grass along with Raccoon shit.

In Woody Creek we, that is Anna, Joe Petro and Robert Chalmers, and me were loaned a cabin by George and Patti Stranahan. Our only warning being to watch out for bears. OK. I remember the last time I had heard about the bears. First they were not a figment of the imagination and secondly they are now beginning to forage inside houses as well as outside as they figure out how to open unlocked doors. On one night about three years earlier, Hunter had heard one snuffling about outside his front door, had grabbed his shot gun and gone outside to investigate. Even on a moonless night in the snow, a big hulking shape is not an easy thing to miss. He had never wanted to hurt it but simply scare it away. He saw it and chose to aim at the ground around its feet and give it a jolt. Before he pulled the trigger he warned Deborah, who occupied the cabin next to Owl Farm, to stay inside- ‘there’s a bear out here’ he mumbled- even when shouting Hunter mumbled- and this alerted Deborah who came out to see what all the commotion was. That was the moment when Hunter pulled the trigger and sent a scotch mist of ricocheted lead flying all around the place. The bear bolted and disappeared but Deborah caught several of the pellets to her person and she was hospitalised. For someone who always claimed to know about guns and how to treat them with respect, Hunter has a hell of a record of accidents to his credit. One could almost say that he was a benevolent mass murderer who wished no harm to anyone- but you never knew for sure in his world so you had to stay clear of Hunter and guns- or get involved and trust to luck. I did a drawing of the event showing a baby bear tugging at father bear asking what did he do? What did he do?? Father bear who looks a little like Hunter replies,’The little bastard shot me right in the ass for doing absolutely nothing- and that’s about as good as it gets, son!!’

It was great to drive down to the Woody Creek Tavern again and talk to living people again even though they couldn’t really afford to live there anymore.  Here is a list of all those familiar people who go to make up the real character of the most mythical bar on the planet. They are to be avoided at all costs or they will hit you for another drink. There’s Michael Cleverly, artist and randy photographer; Gaylord Guenin. who has produced the best book about Aspen anywhere called The Early Years; Curtis ???, who seems to be involved in everything friendly and covert, masquerading as the father of Finnegan and husband of????; Cheryl Frymire, bar maid and friendly dispenser of the best service you could hope for; and Cilla Hyams, an English rose who, for years, worked for Leon Uris, the writer. The massive, gargantuan giant amongst giants of a Sheriff, Bob Braudis who believes that the law is to be used not as a weapon but a natural regulator of high spirits. Firm restraint is not a euphemism for clenching your buttocks so you can hardly breathe. Bob is the champion of the underclass and if he thought the occupants of a 4×4 Trouper Trucker were drunk and stupid, rich and out of control, he is capable of turning the damn thing on its side and consider that a suitable punishment for crass dumbness and far more tutorial than a year in the slammer.  DeeDee, Bob’s girlfriend, reminds me of Mary Tyler Moore on speed. She insisted that I did tattoos on her boobs which, so I was told took weeks to wash off and I was never arrested which proves what a reasonable man Sheriff Bob can be. Gerry and Chris Goldstein, the San Antonio Lawyer and his wife, are dispensers of hospitality that begins and carries on; Jay??? Writer and ….. ;Ed Bradley, journalist and regular friend of Hunter; There are more here and we should include a Roll of Honour……..

Never mind the immediate rich high flying neighbours like `Don Johnson and Melanie Griffiths, Henry and Jessica Catto; Sam Walto, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell; Michael Eisner, Robert McNamara,; Michael Douglas and Zeta wotsit Jones; Jack Nicholson; George Hamilton; Donald and Ivana Trump; Jimmy Buffett; Barbra Streisand; Robert Wagner; Jill St. John; Mohammed Hadid; Rupert Murdoch, for christ’s sake! Prince Bandar; Sally Field; Martina Navratilova; is there no end to it and are they sending out a messagethat the rest just don’t belong here? The air is too thin for an average mortal. And the billionaires have been pushing out the millionaires for more than a decade now and people like Floyd Watkins, who loved to hunt Elk on the run from a helicopter. Hunter warned him he was fucking with the natural rhythm of the valley, then warned him off with a shotgun over his head, but people like that don’t really listen because they have impenetrable layers of bunkers made of stashed money and battalions of paid lawyers who will fight to the death for their own personal Cornucopia as though we still lived in the Middle Ages and the Billionaires they work for are lawless barons. Then there are the surfs- the Hispanic workers who, unless they are live-in domestics have to live outside the town on itinerant caravan lots with no toilets.

So much for that. It only embitters the spirit to dwell on others good luck, even if they deserve it.

When we arrived at Owl Farm Hunter was already up and the wretched Sports channels were spewing out games nation wide and from every butch crevice that football can ooze from. This was Hunter’s hideous obsession. The monster machine was never off. It glowed from the corner like a malevolent automaton. I tried to rationalise it…… Unless it spits blood, it ain’t sport. Unless it gathers together the biggest bunch of blood crazed bone breakers inside a stadium fit for a Roman Empire to watch gladiators mangle each other into the dust, then it ain’t sport.
The American psyche possesses an entrenched streak, forged in its national soul from the holy time when the Pilgrim Fathers left England in 1620 to worship in their own way. They came to a strange land and prayed with a passion that could not be sustained by a god that they could not see, or may have left behind.
Over three centuries that fervour has been transformed into worship for another kind of god. A god of action- a superhero, or to be specific, teams of them. An American is born again in a football stadium. The psyche’s gods move fast and castigate the imagined enemies with a force and power sufficient to live up to, represent and evoke the force and power of the country itself.
American sport is an outward expression of the country’s life blood, the bursting of a dam, the outpourings of their reservoir  of as yet untapped energy. The driving force lies deep in America’s psyche. Americans live with the certain knowledge that the real source of their greatness has not yet been released. The intensity of their worship drives the gods in the arena beyond mortal goals and beyond mortal brute force, so much so that these gods are enshrined in superstructures to ward off evil spirits and the unthinkable possibility that their gods can be injured, albeit by another god from another place. I can think of no other explanation for the hideous carnage that Americans demand from their sporting activities or the costumes that they fashion so ingeniously with which to adorn their gods. The peacock display of sporting haute couture defines their brashness and their ingenuity. Coupled with their talent for exploitation and big business, such a potent combination is not only irresistible to the American way, but to the rest of the world as well. Iraq has been one hell of a sporting event, but unfortunately there has been no end to it and even conservatives are beginning to quote Shakespeare and say, ‘Enough! No more!! ‘tis not so sweet now as it was before…’.
It is as much as I can say about sport. It is a generous view, and one that, I am sure, has never occurred to an American before. It is a view that will not dim their enthusiasm nor dim the fact that sport drew some pretty juicy pictures out of me.

‘Oh, Hi! You look tired.. Make yourself at home.(Hunter never said that ever. Hunter allowed people to fit into his world in the Owl Farm kitchen as bit part players in a grander scheme of his own design, so you made up your own lines).  You want whiskey or something else-uh?’ I had just walked into the kitchen and Hunter was balefully watching the greatest passion of his life- American Football. But this time on his stomach on a physio-therapy table where he was receiving treatment to relieve spinal pain from hip replacement, and the painful spinal stenosis(where the bands of tissue that support the spine get thick and hard; his joints and bones enlarge and may already have bulged into bone spurs) and in a big man like Hunter would have increased the already substantial pain that like the clinical arthritis I had noticed in his hands quite early on in our friendship most certainly contributed to his condition.   The daft bugger had also broken his left leg twice in the past two years, one of those accidents that happened when he was in Hawaii. Hunters strange body movements often put him off balance and reaching for ice in the fridge sounds like a peculiar but understandable body movement to cause a broken ankle. He was flown home by Sean Penn in a private jet. He claimed that he had learned to walk again twice in a year. He had obviously been picking at the desecrated remains of something that might have been breakfast but now looked more like a dustpan of floor squalor ready for the trash can. He was looking a little paler than usual. The operations and leg breaking habit was draining his usually vibrant constitution. After the physio-therapy, several times weekly, he staggered painfully back to his perch in front of his typewriter just as Anita got back with some Oysters for him and various foodstuffs for the house and the bit part players who consumed his day. Then other friends arrived, a local reporter called Troy and an older man in Real Estate called Tim Mooney. Talk was very much on the imminent Bush/Kerry election and people would drop in from time to time as though they were consulting the Oracle, which I suppose in a way they were. We were all handed Kerry buttons and info about the state of play. If you were a Bush supporter, then yu just weren’t there. Hunter was still mucking with his food, picking something up and putting it down again, then looking at the TV game. Hunter had also installed an oxygen machine and we all had a dose of that. God, it makes a difference at high altitudes. When Robert Chalmers turned up for political interview for the Sunday Independent called Day of Reckoning, (though at the time I didn’t know it was) we were complete. During our stay, I went into the chemist store in Aspen and treated myself to an oxygen canister and mask which I shared with Robert, reckoning that he needed it more than me. The TV game was a good focus for the evening because I put $40 to win on the underdogs, Kansas City, out of sheer perversity.  I don’t remember who they beat but Hunter wouldn’t pay up my winnings or even the $40 up-front bet I had made because he was wrong and I realised he has been doing that to me for 35 years! I let it slip and forgot about it- but I never forgot about it. We watched the great debate between Kerry and Bush on video tape and stared in horror at this feeble-minded twit try to take on John Kerry. I don’t know how anyone could vote for such a man and many said they wouldn’t but as I have said before many were lying. Later that night I read some pages out loud from Hunter’s latest and as it turned out his last book called Fire In The Nuts, a hand bound chapbook that I published with Joe Petro and Walt Bartholomew. But getting him to sign it was not any easier than any other times.
We had another party the next night at the home of Gerry and Chris Goldstein. friends of the great circle of Hunter big friends, admirers, acolytes and magical people who we seem to have known all our lives. It was as though God had cut a lump out of the earth and set it down in Aspen and everybody just knew each other. It was never a problem to know people. It was as though Hunter, through the years, had cast a unifying spell over all who passed through Aspen, and Hunter’s life, on their way to somewhere else. Bob Braudis the Sheriff bear hugged everyone who looked human and Deedee his ladylove, gathered up the lost and made them secure in her nest until the next time. The feast is always fit for kings and bums alike, all are welcome and Chris, Gerry’s wife is the personification of haute cuisine for everyone. The gods leave their spaces in the heavens and float down to earth to join the throng of Aspen inhabitants who believe that what happens in Aspen is normal and everyone else must get in step. Being autumn time and the first time we had been in Aspen when the leaves had turned, the ambience was spectacular. The Aspen tress were the most intense yellow I had ever seen and in certain lights they glowed with an iridescent magic- nature’s own theatre.

Getting Hunter to sign was the big problem. He had signed too many times to be convinced that this was any different to any other time, or that it was in his interest. Even I was a suspect- a sleazy no-hoper, who was in his kitchen to suck from his leg end- and I mean his leg end- because everybody- even his friends had sucked off him just one time too many. There was only one thing left to do- offer him money. Hunter loved money and if someone was prepared to part with the real boodle, in his hand, right then and there and make an Indian deal, he would go with that as an honourable contract. Instinctively, I knew that the only way he would sign anything then was to give him the money, so I made him out a dollar cheque. I remember him not quite believing it, even from me, but he agreed to sign the two hundred copies that were waiting for him at our cabin- and I had already signed, so I was giving him exactly what we would make if we sold them all. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse and he recognized a decent deal.
But can you imagine, at this moment, dear reader, even if you are not there, that I am now confident that all I am doing is coming into the home stretch, laying things to rest or sighing with relief that the bastard has laid himself down and gone to sleep. Nothing was ever further from the truth than this diatribe that proves the point I may have been at pains to stress. That I am writing about a serious writer like he was some kind of ordinary person. No! He was and can now be and unto eternity, a rabid, downright, wretched. cheating, low down sonofabitch ,  but that does not mean that he was wrong in his attitude to people or the fact that he wrote like an angel. We can no longer ask him to change a word, a phrase, a way of expressing a sentence, What he wrote has now been enshrined in death’s immutable lexicon of useful things to be said at the right time, in the right place and credit the bastard for saying it first.
I waited for him that night, sort of bushy tailed, willing for him to turn up like he said he would and of course he did, but not on our time clock. He chose to turn up with a raft of excuses from only half a mile from where we were staying.  He had suffered a flat tire, he was lost, attacked by rabid livestock, driven silly with rage because he had a flat tire-again- given a bad time by what he had heard on CNN and what we all knew to be his unnecessary postulation that he had fucked up and he was sorry that he could only make it at four o’clock in the morning. His bullshit was a wonderful aurora borealis of
trepidation, failure, unnecessary hesitation and, something that no one but me knows, because he confessed it to me in one of those moments when all defences are down, to do what was expected of him, officially, professionally and at a precise moment. This sent him into paroxysms of fear such as he was only able to express in point blank denials of ever being involved in something in the first place. It was his perfect and most indelible foil. I always forgave him for anything, admired his ability to play any system that could be manipulated.  I deeply appreciated the pleasant charm that allowed him to saw through the bone of all the ‘give me’ hands that he sawed off at the Interosseous membrane or ligament of the forearm- the Ulna, take what it was offering and walk off into the sunset, slapping both hands together and shrieking ‘Hot Damn!!’. The last note he wrote to me said:

He came like a thief in the night. Hunter S. Thompson did not want to sign anything. ‘People are always asking’, he said. ‘I’ll think about it. I’ll come by later’, he added. We left it at that and we went back to our loaned cabin along the Woody Creek Road, a kind gesture compliments of Hunter’s neighbor and friend, George Stranahan. There was no sign of Hunter by 3:30 a.m. We decided to go to bed. But I knew Hunter would show up, so I left the pages to be signed on the kitchen table, with a pen. There was commotion and horn honking at about 4 a.m. I knew I was right. Later Hunter explained, “There was a bear in the road”. I turned over and went back to sleep. I rose at about 7.30 a.m. and walked sleepily through to the kitchen. On the table was a Polo bag. Inside wasa bottle of Chivas Regal, half drunk, four boxes of cigars, a Gonzo thong, a gold krugerand and a magnum of a precious red wine, a fine and dignified Cabernet Sauvignon, nothing cheap! which we later shared with Hunter’s Lawyer, the Sheriff and friends that very next night. There were a couple of scribbled notes in his distinctive handwriting near by. On one note he had written, ‘Dear Ralph- Sorry I got lost in the night- I got a flat tire. Please help me to evaluate this profoundly rare wine. Love H’. On a second sheet he had written a list. ‘Ralph- lettered sheets. numbered sheets . What else do you need? Ah yes- books signed, etc. - thank you. Hunter S Thompson’. Bless him! he was going to do it!! He had clipped a smaller yellow piece of paper to the others on which he had scrawled, ‘You’re welcome- the Fruit Fairy’….. because he had stolen our cantaloupe melon. So the pages had been gathered up and spirited away into the night like a guilty secret. My ole buddy Hunter would deliver, perversely, but he always delivered. A far more interesting signing than your average run-of-the-mill. Thought you would like to know that; it’s a double first for a limited edition.

Ralph Steadman, November 2nd 2004