Frozen Elk Heart and The Long Gray Line
Hi. Thanks for the emails!
Today’s wisdom comes from a story Hunter wrote about how he left an elk heart on his friend Jack Nicholson’s door step. Actually, he leaned it up against the door after a series of bizarre acrobatics in Jack’s driveway at midnight sometime in the early 90s that terrified the entire family to the point that they had barricaded themselves in the basement with only a fireplace poker as a weapon. Hunter had no idea that he had scared them, in fact he thought he was being snubbed because they wouldn’t answer the door.
So he went home and continued with the usual business of the day. Some of which included receiving random faxes like “the usual messages from the White House, two dangerously bogus offers from Hollywood, and a 60-page, single-spaced transcript of General Douglas MacArthur’s final address to The Long Gray Line of steely-eyed cadets on The Plain at West Point in the spring of 1962, and another 39 pages of his ‘Old Soldiers Never Die’ speech to Congress after he’d been fired.”These things spew into my house day after day, and I do my best to analyze them. Different people want different things in this world, and you have to be careful about taking risks. Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts. A thing that seemed strange and wrong yesterday can seem perfectly reasonable tomorrow, or visa versa.
–Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear.
Now, that’s good wisdom.
Until Next time, your friend (still buried in books),
Anita Thompson
P.S. Everything worked out for the Nicholsons in the end. The next day, when the police were investigating the elk heart, Jack remembered that Hunter had previously shown him a fozen elk heart from his freezer. Jack told the officers to end the manhunt; he knew who the culprit was. This past year, I spent X-mas dinner with Jack & his beautiful family and I did give them the last Elk Heart — still frozen and wrapped in a gonzo bag. He looked at it and gave me a bright and shining grin.
