September 2019 Auction Ends Thursday, September 26th, 5pm Pacific
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/26/2019
Hunter S. Thompson typed letter signed, written from the U.S. Consulate in Bogota, Columbia on 6 June 1962. In this dense, darkly comic letter, Thompson writes his friend Paul Semonin about this life as a freelance journalist photographer in South America. Letter reads in part, ''I am in Bogota...now writing in coat & tie. Like Thomas Mann...I have been accused, in fact, of submitting articles that read 'like letters and essays,' which of course they were. Needless to say, they have not seen print. And I have not seen money...My mail has gone to the dogs, my photos are going nowhere, my bowells [sic] are racked with dysentery, my contacts speak no English, my countrymen want me deported, and my overall situation is a black X on a black wall...The people at the Embassy & the USIS are so full of shit that the stench flooats [sic] down to the street and disrupts traffic. I think all the good Americans died in a riot somewhere that I have not yet heard about because there is no news here. For all I know the world is burning or Germany has started another war...Sex is the main bug, of course, not the actual lack of humping so much as the lack of any possibility, a sexual deadness in the air that makes me feel I might be locked up for looking at women on the street. Even in San Juan there was a fine, lusty tension in the air, a meeting and griping of eyes at every corner. Aruba had a bit of the same thing, and so did the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Ah, but not here -- here we wear coats & ties at all times. This morning I was asked to leave the dining room for not dressing for breakfast. I refused, of course, and ate in a black, sullen silence which will undoubtedly be reported somehow to [William] Kennedy & my passport will be revoked...In all the cafes, on every street, even the beggars dress...And then there are the social workers, vastly dedicated people who make a man feel degenerate if he can't avoid a feeling that they are all phonies...Everybody is working terribly hard on some Worthwhile Project, and for some queer reason it is depressing. They are hauling the indians out of mud huts and putting them in huts made of concrete blocks -- then hiring $100 a day photographers to take pictures of the progress. They have imported ping-pong and the twist to combat the Red Menace, and an unsalaried cynic with no coat or tie might just as well slink off to some bistro & masturbate in a back booth...Sandy reports that the agent still has not read the novel [''Rum Diary''] after six weeks. It will take him six minutes, I think to skim 15 pages & toss it aside as the work of a crank. I think the Mad Bomber had a point & I am beginning to understand my mystic attachment to my guns. If I had one now I would feel a lot better. Either I am going mad or there is a definite conspiracy afoot in the world, a conspiracy of fatness and blindness, backed up by a sinister mindless kind of reasoning that is only necessary to justify what is already a fact and what will always be a fact...The students held a protest meeting on the steps of the presidential palace tonight & it looked like all those shouting photos of Castro, and probably sounded about the same too...they are a gutsy lot at times, as a good many newspictures here will illustrate. The cops are what give me the creeps; to look at them in their jackboots is bad enough, but to see photos of them firing wildly into mobs of students is a bit unreal. Running them into corners & piling up bodies three deep -- this has happened often enough to make me feel nervous even standing near a demonstration. Most of it, of course, took place several years back, and Colombia is supposed to be coming to its senses again. But yesterday in Barranquilla the army tackled a student protest march with clubs and gas, and it was only because the students fled that nobody was shot.
I am going to miss the Peruvian elections due to poverty, & undoubtedly there will be enough killing & violence there to make me a rich man in mob-photo circles. But I will have to read about it with my fucking dictionary, then hump around the streets waiting for Time to tell me what happened. The only way to grasp these things is to settle in somewhere and find out what is going on before the noise starts, so that you at least know which way to run...[signed] H''. Thompson adds an autograph note at top, ''The food here is too bad to believe - I am beginning to thing McGarr has a point'', referring to their mutual friend Eugene McGarr. Two page letter on a single sheet of yellow paper measures 8.5'' x 11''. Folds and toning at margins, overall very good plus condition.
Hunter S. Thompson Letter Signed, and Autograph Note -- ''...Sex is the main bug, of course, not the actual lack of humping so much as the lack of any possibility, a sexual deadness in the air...''
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