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"Go and Come Back"
Story of the WeekBuffalo Gores a Visitor; To: The Editor. Subject: Ideas for my new column. My friend skinner was trapped and mauled by a rogue buffalo while traveling it Wyoming to visit his ex-wife on Labor Day. Nobody knows what happened. On the front seat of this 300 h.p., aluminum-body Land Rover, found three days later in a roadside rest area near the Montanan state line, authorities found a yellow printed “WARNING” notice from the U.S. Dept. of the Interior saying: “ Nearly a dozen visitors have been gored by buffalo this summer. Bison can weight 2,000 pounds and can sprint 30 mph, three times faster than you can run. All the animals in the park are wild unpredictable and dangerous. Stay in or near your car.” Skinner ignored these warnings, and he paid a terrible price. According to the hoofprints taken at the scene, the beast chased him for 2,000 yards across muddy pastures and razor-sharp mesquite bushes and finally ran him down and crushed hem like a dumb animal against a rusty hurricane fence. He still is in critical condition in a cowboy hospital on the outskirts of Cody, and when I drove up there and talked to him recently he said he remembered nothing. His ex-wife, however, currently working as a lap dancer in Gillette, said Skinner had come to Wyoming on a fact-finding mission regarding the Aryan Nations Church, a relentlessly violent white supremacist sect with linked to the Ku Klux Klan, and Moral Majority and the Shiite Terrorist underground-with headquarters in Idaho not far from the Wyoming border. Skinner’s previous history of contract employment with the CIA in Egypt and Indochina did not go unnoticed by the local police, who confiscated his vehicle and all its contents, for reasons they refuse to explain. This is only one of the many unsettling stories I think we should have a look at, now that we’ve officially opened the can and let the first wave of snakes out. I have many more that I want to deal with when we get the equipment in place and the research staff assembled. We will want to pay these people well-or at least as well as the Aryan Nations Church pays its own operatives, which is said to be upwards of $20,000 a year. Please forward all applications for these positions to me, c/o associated, Maria Khan, who will compile the final list. Regarding the electronics, I understand the earth station will be in place out here at the Owl Farm before I get socked in by the Colorado snow and that your people will arrive to install a modem, printer and other hardware by the first Tuesday in October. Thank you very much for the elegant weekend at the Mark Hopkins Hotel and the perfect beauty of our $50,000 picnic at the Presidio pistol range. I always enjoy the use and handling of the weapons, and the Mexican lunch was exquisite. Please convey my condolences to the staff and the film crew. I am genuinely sorry about having to chop the arm off that poor woman’s Alaskan parka that you made me wear, but I was only doing my job. We are, after all, professionals. Due to the erratic behavior of the production crew, however, I’m sure it’s as clear to you as it is to me that we will be forced to make another, more creditable TV commercial advertising my new job as “media critic” of the new and revitalized Examiner. But never mind the ugliness. I am more concerned now with getting my schedule in order, at least until Groundhog Day. I am, after all, a farmer and my crop has just come in-a brace of snow peacocks, born at 8,000 feet, and the third generation of a huge and virile breed I established some 10 years ago, in the throes of a profound psychoto-mimetic hubris. In any case, I will be in Colorado for most of the football season, ram-feeding the strange little buggers for the winter season and exorcising the predators with a 10-gauge Savage goose gun. The breeding of peacocks is an extremely rare occurrence at this altitude, and I feel that it is one of my special accomplishments. They are tropical birds, jungle beasts. I bred and strain so strong and weatherproof that I recently sold a pair to a golf course I Nome for $5,500 each. Which is interesting, but not real close to the bone in the context of hard news and media analysis. So let’s ponder some column ideas. I will, of course, have to go to Washington and speak at length with my old friend Patrick Buchanan, who was recently hired on as director of communications at the White House. We will want to get a leg up on the winter book for the 1988 elections and also ask why the president appears to be 129 years old. There is also the phenomenon of “gold fever” in Key West, which I want to check on A.S.A.P. if only because Boog Powell is about to sell my boat for overdue dock fees and I left a suitcase full of Spanish doubloons form the wreck of the galleon Atocha in the bat tower of Sugar Loaf Key. That will fit nicely with a visit to the set of “Miami Vice,” where my friend Don Johnson has arranged for me to test-fire and evaluate the whole spectrum of weaponry in the arsenal of the South Florida Strike Force… and also to the Super Bowl in New Orleans in January. In March I am scheduled to run the Elephant Rapids on the Zambezi River for 12 days, and after that to South Africa with Vanessa Williams to do a Saturday night in Johannesburg story that we discussed last week at the Waterfront restaurant in San Francisco. What is Charles Ng telling the Mounties? Will Richard Nixon be the next president? Why did agents of the French intelligence services bomb the Greenpeace boat in New Zealand? GOP sex clubs in Georgetown and East St. Louis. And this: A woman from Pacifica wrote recently to complain that her fiancé, a Venezuelan nation, had been confined for two years by federal marshals in a huge underground salt cavern in Louisiana. Indeed, there is no end to the madness, and the yahoos never sleep. But this is the Year of the Ox, and the Roundheads are pushing their luck. Halley’s Comet will signal the end for THE TIME OF THE WHTE TRASH. Trust me. I understand these things. September 23, 1985 Hunter S. Thompson
Contact InformationDon't bother we're at the beach If you want to buy the .com e-mail or call me
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