Hunter used to write letters without hesitation, so many letters. In them he’d share random thoughts then, facetiously dare acquaintances to rebut his insults and accusations. These days, I often think of his ranting letters to Jack Nicholson. In them he’d dare Jack to prove he was the real thing not just a wildly styled film illusion. Jack, wisely sensing he could only ever disappoint him, never dared respond in kind. One night, after threatening to drop by on Jack in Aspen, Hunter set out into the night on his motorcycle, speeding through the mountains in a state of starlit delirium. Nicholson found a fresh bleeding elk’s heart on his doorstep that night. It’s the most overt star-struck “man crush” Hunter ever expressed publicly. There was such passion (and disappointment) in its symbolism. What nugget of truth survives at the core of this story? Most readers only ever read the caricatured wildness in Hunter’s carefully selected words but, between the lines, there was the roar of his deepening need for requited connection.
* Of course Hunter S.Thompson, who else?
