Hunter Thompson 1958 job application

[billcoe]

LOL

 

On Oct. 1, 1958 — 52 years ago Friday — self-professed to be in a "frenzy of drink," Thompson penned a letter of application to the Vancouver Sun. He had heard about the paper through an article in Time magazine — where he worked briefly as a copy boy for $50 U.S. a week — that praised the paper's new editorial direction under Jack Scott.

 

Scott, whom Thompson had addressed his letter to, was a Sun columnist who was appointed editorial director in September 1958.

 

According to Time, the "tart-tongued" Scott "unleashed all of his formidable flair for spectacular stunts" in his new role, which included sending the football editor to Formosa (now Taiwan) to interview Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Republic of China, and the women's page editor to Cuba to cover the aftermath of the revolution.

 

He was promptly demoted in March 1959, summing up his brief stint with, "It was a ball while it lasted," according to Time.

 

Thompson's letter is among hundreds — to friends, family, lovers, editors and debt collectors — published in The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (Ballantine, 1997).

 

Vancouver Sun

 

TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN

 

October 1, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City

 

Sir,

 

I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I'd also like to offer my services.

 

Since I haven't seen a copy of the "new" Sun yet, I'll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn't know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I'm not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.

 

By the time you get this letter, I'll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I'll let my offer stand. And don't think that my arrogance is unintentional: it's just that I'd rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

 

I didn't make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he'd tell you that I'm "not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person." (That's a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

 

Nothing beats having good references.

 

Of course if you asked some of the other people I've worked for, you'd get a different set of answers.

 

If you're interested enough to answer this letter, I'll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.

 

The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It's a year old, however, and I've changed a bit since it was written. I've taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.

 

As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you're trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I'd like to work for you.

 

Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.

 

I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don't give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.

 

I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.

 

It's a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I'd enjoy the trip.

 

If you think you can use me, drop me a line.

 

If not, good luck anyway.

 

Sincerely, Hunter S. Thompson

© Copyright © The Vancouver Sun

 

 

Read more: http://www.timescolonist.com/Hunter+Thompson+brutally+honest+Canadian+request/3606508/story.html#ixzz11GTzhFwq

[Doug]

Good one. I'm currently reading Gonzo and realize I have a high admiration for the good Dr. and the principles he lived by.

[ivan]

that letter's in "the proud highway" which you'd dig on too then bill - hunter apparently was a nutso for making carbon-copies of his correspondence - think he released 3 volumns in all? only made it through the 1st though...

[num1mc]

Good one. I'm currently reading Gonzo and realize I have a high admiration for the good Dr. and the principles he lived by.

 

Which did, according to more than one biography include spousal abuse

[ScottP]

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

 

That he went out on his own terms speaks volumes about the man...

[ivan]

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax This won't hurt."

 

That he went out on his own terms speaks volumes about the man...

killing yerself while on the phone w/ yer son IS too fucked up for even me to defend though...

[Doug]

Well, yeah, that one is very wrong. But he was his own man, thats for sure.

[JayB]

Don't have anything in particular against the guy but never understood the adulation. To each his own...

[Hugh Conway]

perhaps because you don't like his politics?

 

"Ronald Reagan, a smiling whore who will someday be president" HST mid60s.

 

Ayn Rand was an extremely despicable person even before you look at her politics.

[JayB]

I don't like Diego Maradona's poltics, but it's clear that the man could play soccer. I can understand why people paid attention to him at the time, way back when, but I think his appeal is mostly sentimental at this point and his readership dwindle at roughly the same pace as his original readership dies off.

 

Ditto for Ginsberg, et al. "I'm with you Carl, on the clearance rack at Half-Price books..."

[Hugh Conway]

If you want to ignore current sales of his books, sure, you can say that.

 

Hunter wrote perhaps the best vehicle review, ever.

 

http://www.latexnet.org/~csmith/sausage.html

 

Song of the Sausage Creature

by Hunter S. Thompson

 

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

 

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

 

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."

 

"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."

 

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.

 

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

 

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.

 

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

 

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

 

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

 

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

 

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.

 

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

 

Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....

 

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.

 

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....

 

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it... For that we need Fine Machinery.

 

Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.

 

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

 

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find... I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

 

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.

 

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

 

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

 

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....

 

And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

 

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

 

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

 

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....

 

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

 

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....

 

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

 

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

 

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

 

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

 

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

 

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

 

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."

[JayB]

Could be wrong. Never got the whole Dylan thing either, and there's still evidently plenty of people listening to his music.

 

I think most of his audience will be gone, via death by aging, in 20 years but who knows...

[ivan]

 

I think most of his audience will be gone, via death by aging, in 20 years but who knows...

so....your prediction is drugs and madness will be out of style soon?

[JayB]

 

I think most of his audience will be gone, via death by aging, in 20 years but who knows...

so....your prediction is drugs and madness will be out of style soon?

 

No - but hopefully droning, nasal, atonal pseudo-folk will be long dead and subject to a trillion nested fatwas condemning anyone who resurrects it to a thousand eternities of everlasting torment at the hands of Slayer bootlegs played on a gajillion-Watt stage amp....

[LostCamKenny]

Could be wrong. Never got the whole Dylan thing either, and there's still evidently plenty of people listening to his music.

you poor, poor soul... you must follow leaders and ignore marking meters.

 

I think most of his audience will be gone, via death by aging, in 20 years but who knows...

yeah, i'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that. the hardcore following is pretty strong and those who really love his works will read and re-read them. thompson had a special way of communicating to his readers through the gonzo lens and it is quite amazing that he was able to see that we (as a country) are experiencing much the same in this time as was being experienced 40 years ago. he was spot on with his analysis of the 9/11 thing and how the war that followed was going to yield no winner but many, many casualties. hopefully i still have more than 20 years... i'd hate to miss what happens next