Free Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson

I had a book out. At the time I was twenty-nine years old and I couldn’t even get a job driving a cab in San Francisco, much less writing. Sure, I had written important articles for
The Nation
and
The Observer,
but only a few good journalists really knew my byline. The book enabled me to buy a brand-new BSA G50 Lightning—it validated everything I had been working toward. If
Hell’s Angels
hadn’t happened, I never would have been able to write
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
or anything else. To be able to earn a living as a freelance writer in this country is damned hard; there are very few people who can do that.
Hell’s Angels
all of a sudden proved to me that, Holy Jesus, maybe I can do this. I knew I was a good journalist. I knew I was a good writer, but I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing.
    GP:
The San Francisco scene brought together many unlikely pairs—you and Allen Ginsberg, for instance. How did you come to know Allen during this period?
    HST: I met Allen in San Francisco when I went to see a marijuana dealer who sold by the lid. I remember it was ten dollars when I started going to that apartment and then it was up to fifteen. I ended up going there pretty often, and Ginsberg—this was in Haight-Ashbury—was always there looking for weed too. I went over and introduced myself and we ended up talking a lot. I told him about the book I was writing and asked if he would help with it. He helped me with it for several months; that’s how he got to know the Hell’s Angels. We would also go down to Ken Kesey’s in La Honda together.
    One Saturday, I drove down the coast highway from San Francisco to La Honda and I took Juan, my two-year-old son, with me. There was this magnificent crossbreeding of people there. Allen was there, the Hell’s Angels—and the cops were there too, to prevent a Hell’s Angels riot. Seven or eight cop cars. Kesey’s house was across the creek from the road, sort of a two-lane blacktop country compound, which was a weird place. For one thing, huge speakers were mounted everywhere in all the trees, and some were mounted across the road on wires, so to be on the road was to be in this horrible vortex of sound, this pounding, you could barely hear yourself think—rock ‘n’ roll at the highest amps. That day, even before the Angels got there, the cops began arresting anyone who left the compound. I was by the house; Juan was sleeping peacefully in the backseat of the car. It got to be outrageous: The cops were popping people. You could see them about a hundred yards away, but then they would bust somebody very flagrantly, so Allen said, “You know, we’ve got to do something about this.” I agreed, so with Allen in the passenger’s seat, Juan in the back sleeping, and me driving, we took off after the cops that had just busted another person we knew, who was leaving just to go up to the restaurant on the corner. Then the cops got after
us.
Allen at the very sight of the cops went into his hum, his
om,
trying to hum them off. I was talking to them like a journalist would: “What’s going on here, Officer?” Allen’s humming was supposed to be a Buddhist barrier against the bad vibes the cops were producing, and he was doing it very loudly, refusing to speak to them, just
“Om! Om! Om!”
I had to explain to the cops who he was and why he was doing this. The cops looked into the backseat and said, “What is that back there? A child?” and I said, “Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s my son.” With Allen still going,
“Om,
” we were let go. He was a reasonable cop, I guess—checking out a poet, a journalist, and a child. Never did figure Ginsberg out, though. It was like the humming of a bee. It was one of the weirdest scenes I’ve ever been through, but almost every scene with Allen was weird in some way or another.
    GP:
Did any other Beat Generation authors influence your writing?
    HST: Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer . . . in the Arab