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22 February 2005
My Dinner With Hunter
About 10 years ago, I was working as an assistant to Bill Murray on the movie "Larger Than Life". The Denver production office was closing down and giving everyone a couple of days to relocate to our next location, Moab, Utah, so Bill, Richie Copenhaver (Bill's friend and stunt double), and I decided to take a leisurely road trip in a brand new Malibu truck to get there.
As far as I know we hadn't been planning to stop in Aspen, but a few hours after we'd departed, while eating an especially tough and chewy sandwich, I swallowed part of a rear tooth that I'd been neglecting all summer. I'd been thinking I'd just wait and go to my dentist when we got back home to L.A. I had no idea the cavity was so advanced.
Bill said he knew of a guy in Aspen who could cap the tooth and so a couple of hours later we pull up in a driveway outside of a small, almost white-trash looking house, on the outskirts of town. Bill jumped out of the Malibu and said, "Hang here for a minute. I'll be right back."
So I'm sitting there thinking, "I sure hope this isn't the dentist's office" when Richie says, "Hey Kerry, check it out. We're at Hunter S. Thompson's. It's the Red Shark," and I followed his finger to see the red convertible parked next to us in the driveway. I knew that Bill had portrayed Hunter in a movie I hadn't seen called "Where the Buffalo Roam" so I figured that's how they must've known each other.
A few minutes later Bill bounded out the front door and jumped off the porch to give us a scrap of paper with an address scrawled on it, sending us off and saying he'd meet up with us later. We headed into town and Richie dropped me at the dentist's where I went inside to get my mouth poked with a jabby, metal stick for an hour or so. Eventually I heard Bill come in the front door to pick me up and he made his way back to the exam room I was being throttled in and began to generally -but jokingly- harass the doctor and his assistant who, I should add, were doing us a favor by staying after-hours.
Bill paid the tab and we walked outside where I discovered that he had borrowed Hunter's car, so we climbed in to drive over to our hotel in the middle of town where Richie had already checked us in. It was amusing riding through the streets of Aspen in this unmistakable car, where locals were throwing waves and expecting to see Hunter, but instead got the visage of Bill Murray and some young schmuck. "Hunter's gonna meet us for dinner tonight," Bill said almost offhandedly.
That night Bill and Richie and I met in our hotel lobby and had a cab drop us off at Poppies Bar & Restaurant where Hunter was already seated in a big wooden corner booth along with a very attractive and youngish blonde woman who was keeping him company (she may have been his wife or his assistant -- I never quite figured it out) but as the evening progressed, she would come and go intermittantly and without disruption.
Bill and Hunter wasted no time starting to rehash fun memories and mostly, that's what the evening was comprised of, with Richie and I content just to listen and try to follow the flow of the narrative. I say "try" because, for me anyways, keeping up with Hunter was a bit of a chore. I've often compared it to the first few minutes of watching a Shakespeare play. You know, when the actors on stage start speaking their lines and it takes you a few minutes to get into the rhythm of the thing to comprehend what's going on, but once you do, BANG... you got it and you understand the gist of what they're saying even though they're using words that are utterly meaningless to most of us nowadays. That "BANG" moment never happened for me that night with Hunter. I felt lucky when I could work out something he'd said 3 sentences before but most of the time I just felt like I was always 3 sentences behind.
Every 10 or 15 minutes I'd hear this almost mechanical wet slurping hydrolic sort of sound emanate from under the table where Hunter sat. I thought to myself, "Hmmn. He was sitting when we got here. Maybe he's hooked up to an artifical bladder or something."I was sure Richie heard it too when we shared a confused shrug after hearing it once or twice but we never learned what the source of the noise was (and frankly, the more it happened, the less curious I became.)
After our first couple rounds of drinks - but before our food had arrived - was THE MOMENT. Hunter -- in the middle of a story about these desert squid who'd hijacked Queen Elizabeth's coach to use it for a daring bank robbery (or something like that.... like I said, I was never very sure) -- pulled out a glass pipe and began packing it with some brownish/yellowish pulpy substance and then slid it and a lighter over the table top. "There you go," he said to me and then continued with his squid story.
Time stood still as I tried to figure out the ways this situation could play out. I didn't know what he'd packed that bowl with but one side of my brain was reminding me of things like the stories I'd heard about people on angel dust running naked through the streets and biting other people's noses off, or those ranting 60's burn-outs wearing tin-foil hats I'd seen outside of Golden Gate Park. The other side of my brain was telling me, "This is Hunter S. Thompson offering you drugs. What would you do if B.B. King offered to give you a guitar lesson ... or if Willy Wonka invited you to take a peek inside his chocolate factory??? Don't be an idiot!!!"
I lit the pipe and inhaled, conscious of the fact that we're sitting at a not-entirely-secluded table in this restaurant but trying not to appear too conscious of that fact, and then I passed it to Richie who inhaled without hesitation. We never found out what he'd given us, but I'm almost positively sure that this next bit happened.
Hunter's female friend/assistant was away from the table when an opportunistic 30-something busty blonde from the bar decided to make her move. During the middle of Hunter's story about a Brazilian tribe who's entire monetary system was based on the bartering of frog semen, she suddenly placed herself between Bill and Hunter's chairs and announced, "Oh My God! You have no idea how excited I am to see you guys here!!!" I was not yet entirely gay at this point in my life, but I was gay enough to not be vexed by her curves and I immediately saw through her plan to work her way into our company. Thankfully, I wasn't alone in my insight.
While she was droning on and on and on to Bill and Richie about something or another, I saw Hunter (to my right) carefully palm a fork and take it under the table. Just when it seemed like nothing was ever going to shut this harpy up, Hunter raised his open hand up behind her rear end and I could see that he'd wrapped the stem of the fork around his middle finger and had bent the tines straight out from his palm. "Get outta here!" he said as he walloped the girl on the ass as though she was a horse and she let out a shriek and stuck around just long enough to mutter "God Damn you!" to Hunter and then glare at the rest of us who couldn't help but smirk. "Little trick I picked up," Hunter said as he pulled the fork off of his finger and tossed it to the middle of the table then continued, "As I was saying...."
I don't remember much of the evening after that. There are small flashes, like when I saw Richie pocket the bent fork as a souvenier, or when dinner was over and we left Hunter behind, sitting (but never standing) alone at the table, and lastly that long and meandering walk through the dark residential streets of Aspen back to the hotel during which Bill tried to give me coherant Cliff's notes versions of some of Hunter's stories I never quite followed. This rehash would jar both Richie's and my memories and we'd interject with a "Yeah, and then he said..." or "No, he said THIS before he said THAT!" and we'd laugh a little too loudly in the quiet, crisp Aspen air.
A couple of months after we'd wrapped "Larger Than Life" I was home in Los Angeles and my phone rang. I picked it up and it was Bill. "Hey, I watched 'Where the Buffalo Roam' the other night," I said. "Yeah?" Bill asked, "What did you think of it?" "Man, you nailed Hunter," I answered. "Yeah," he agreed, "and it scared the shit out of him."
R.I.P. H.S.T.
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