Dear Maurice:

Hello. Have a nice day. Yes Mahalo. Stand back. I have finally returned from the Wilderness, where I was chased & tormented by huge radioactive Bob-cats for almost 22 weeks. When i finally escaped they put me in a Decompression Chamber with some people I couldn't recognize, so I went all to pieces & now I can't even remember anything or Anybody or even who i was, all that time---which was exactly since Groundhog Day, when it started.

Anyway, that's why I fell behind in my correspondence for a while. I could not be reached except by the Animals, and they hated me. I never knew Why. There was no explanation for it.

So what? Who needs reasons for a thing like that?
Escape is all that matters---except for the horrible scars, but that is a different question. Today we must deal with The Book, which requires my total attention now.

A brainless whore would not say this, Maurice. The Truth is not in them. But I am not a brainless whore---and if I was, I don't remember it. Who cares? Shit happens. On somedays I don't miss my memory at all....Most days, in fact. It is like knowing that you were a Jackbastard in yr. Previous Life, then somebody tells you to be careful not to scream in yr. sleep anymore. You start to feel afraid....But not me, Maurice.

As for the ORDER, I think Screwjack should be last & Mescalito first---so the dramatic tension (& also the true chronological weirdness) can build like Bolero to a faster & wilder climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, & then drop him off a cliff....That is the Desired Effect, and if we start with Screwjack it won't happen. The book will peter out.

Okay. That's about it, for now. We can wrap this thing up very quickly, I think....Indeed and so much for all that. I have to go out in the yard to murder a skunk---and if I fail, he will murder me.
Some things never change.

In closing, I remain---yr. calm & gentle friend,
Hunter.

Among the many documents, manuscripts, personal papers and artworks that miraculously survived Great Firestorm that swept the Duke Estate in the winter of '88 was this one---a profoundly disturbing love letter that he wrote to his wife only sixteen days before his disapearance.
The first few lines contain no warning of the madness and fear and lust that came more and more to plague him and dominate his life, as he felt the crimes coming back to haunt him.
- THE EDITORS

I was just joined by the rich and famous Mr. Screwjack, who ate the last tuna fish and gave me one of those head jobs under the chin, and then tried to coax me outside with him, but i refused... so he shrugged and went out by himself, into the cold and sunless dawn.

He would rather have stayed inside with me---the two of us curled up on the couch together, watching Oprah Winfrey on TV...I could see it in his cold yellow eyes, a wistful kind of yearning for love that would have to wait, or perhaps could never be....

His whining drove me crazy as I carried him in my arms to the front door and just before I hurled his wretched black ass out onto the thin crust of snow that had settled on my porch since midnight, I lifted him up to my face and kissed him deeply on the lips. I forced my tongue between his fangs and rolled it around the ridges on the top of his mouth. I gripped him around his strong young shoulders and pulled him closer to me. His purring was so loud and strong that is made us both tremble.

"Ah, sweet Screwjack," I whispered." We are doomed. Mama has gone off to Real Estate School and then the El Centro, and after that maybe even to Law School. We will never see her again."

He stared at me, but said nothing. Then he twisted out of my grip and dropped to the floor.
....And then he was gone, with no noise, like some ghost from other world ... and I knew in my heart, as his dirty black shape leaped away from me across the woodpile and through that shadowy hole between the blue spruce tree and the cold silver grille of the Volvo, that I would never see him again.

At least not for six years, and probably not then; and the next time we met he would weigh 200 pounds and flip me over on my stomach and fuck me from behind like a panther.

Like my beast and my dolphin, my perfect dream lover, like that ghost that i must forget...
and my beautiful little tattoo that will cost me $1500 to get burned off my shoulder with a laser needle.

Forgive me Lord, for loving this beast like I do, and for wanting him so deep inside me that I will finally him coming on the soft red skin of my own heart... and for wanting to lay down beside him and sleep like a baby with our bodies wrapped into each other and the same wild dreams in our heads.

I am guilty, Lord, But I am also a lover---and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you.... So leave me alone, goddamnit, and send Mr. Screwjack back to me; and if the others have any questions or snide comments about it, tell them to eat shit and die.

Who among them is pure enough to cast the first stone? Or to look on me with those rheumy courtroom eyes and say that I was wrong for loving a huge black tomcat.

Never mind that, Lord. I can handle it. Just keep the lawyers off my back, and the pious... and leave us alone to make babies.
- R.D.

At the depths of my social leperism I remember Duke's strange letter....And I am horrified to realize that I am fondling the cat....We were smoking marijuana a moment ago, maybe for one or two minutes, and now he is acting wild. He is rolling his nuts at me for real this time, on his back in my lap and suddenly curling up to put his fangs on me. He uttered a low kind of whimpering sound, then he opened his mouth and grabbed the ball-muscle of my right thumb with all four of those goddamn white fangs (I was stroking his navel, at the time)...and for one very high tenth of a second I thought the crazy black bastard was going to do it.

I was typing, but once The Boy put his fangs on me, things changed. I stared down at him very intently from a distance of five or six inches (compounded by a factor of 1.25 by the specs)....So I felt pretty close to the beast when he suddenly curled up in my lap and began sinking his teeth into me.

That's how it felt. It was a very interesting sensation, because I believed it was really happening. This monster was actually going to puncture me, draw blood, and change our lives forever.

Goddamnit! I thought. You fool! I trusted you, but I was wrong. You're no better than the punk Mailer fell for...and now I must cut your head off....And then the beast said "nevermore."

It was a very long moment, no more than a second---andthen he suddenly relaxed and rolled his head back, releasing his bite on my thumb-musce, as if it had never happened....He pushed his wiry little neck back against the palm of my left hand and gazed up at me.

I closed my fingers around his neck and got a firm grip on his shoulders. He began to purr and the pupils in his eyes closed down to bilssful little black slits as he wantonly ground his sharp, ugly little hipbones down into the palm of my right hand, the one he almost bit.

The phone rang. It was Pat Caddell, calling from Santa Barbara with a whole raft of ugly political news. "I can't talk now," I said. "I have to deal with this animal. Call me back when you calm down."

Then I hung up the phone and looked down, once again, at Screwjack. "You're lucky," I told him. "That was Mr. Caddell, the political man. He sends you his best regards."

Then I clamped my fingers very suddenly around his neck in a vise-like grip that cut his wind off, while at the time dragging his head backward and straight down, over my leg, causing his front claws to flap crazily in the air as he struggled....

With my right hand i seized the whole lower end of his body, between the front side of his groin and the back where the tail connects to the spine, and I squeezed him like a grape.

There was no noise. He was bent and stretched out so far that he couldn't even hiss....
But not for long; it was a matter of split seconds before he was up in the air like a fruit bat, and then down into a trembling four-point stance about ten feet across the room. His eyes were huge and his white fangs were out of his mouth.

"What's wrong?" I asked him. "Why are you staring at me like that?" He shuddered and sat down heavily on the floor, near the icebox saying nothing.

------

Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books include Hell's Angels, Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, The Curse of Lono, Songs of the Doomed, Better Than Sex, The Proud Highway, and The Rum Diary. He is a regular contributor to various nation and international publications. He now lives in Colorado.