Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman Read Online Free PDF

Yesterday was
interesting,
in the Chinese sense, but today has taken a definite turn for the worse. There are rumors of a fire and a riot at the end of my lecture at the Memorial Auditorium last night. Teenage thugs ran amok and torched my dressing room, just moments after my mother had been whisked away in a limousine.
    The event was a huge success, they said, but it left scars and odd hoof-prints on many people.… There is a crude Mongolian adage that says, “For every moment of triumph, for every instant of beauty, many souls must be trampled.”
    I am no stranger to the Brown Hotel. I am well known here and I have been for forty years. When I was five years old my grandfather brought me into the dining room on Easter morning and we watched a Korean watress stab an ice pick into the groin of the governor of Kentucky. I have never forgotten it.
    Such episodes are not pleasant, but our pasts are permanent. Which brings me, as much as anything might, to this forced march through my personal history. I don’t think many people could sit calmly while boxes of intimate—and in some cases no doubt incriminating—correspondence were dredged up from sealed basement vaults. But I did, Bubba, but always from afar, from the greatest possible distance, trying not to cause trouble—and because I wanted to stay in the shadows and act like I was dead, and others tried to act the same way.
Mistah Thompson, he dead
.… We all understood that their work and their lives and their long-range professional Fate would be a lot easier if I went out on a slick Ducati motorcycle one night and never came back.
    But that would be a different road, and this is, after all, what we’ve decided to call
The Proud Highway
.
    When I glance at this eerie collection and remember all the datelines and all the people I met in that moveable feast of violence and passion and constant revolution that lived at the core of the Sixties, there are two things I wonder about.
    1) Where are all the people who did the same things. I did and wrote the same kinds of frenzied berserk letters that I did sometimes even from the same weird towns and with the same desperate feelings that I had and knew and genuinely suffered with because I was young and dumb and arrogant and utterly unemployable, except at great distance?… Which is true, as these letters make utterly clear. It was no accident that I was fired from every job I had in those days, and was evicted from every place I tried to live.
    And 2) where are those people who helped me and hid me and took the same risks. I did on that high-speed underground railroad that ran almost anywhere you wanted to go, in those days? I think about all of their stories and tales and eloquent, terrifying letters that never appeared anywhere, and won’t, except in family albums.
    Some of those people are named in these letters, others remain in the shadows for good reasons or for no decent reason at all. Sitting here in this grand old hotel, knowing that dawn is certain to bring anger and inquiries about that fire and about that other rumor about a teenager’s body in the parking garage, it seems those people are still Out There, braced for the inevitable third woe, which indeed cometh quickly.
    Louisville, Kentucky
December 13, 1996

Virginia Thompson with her sons Davison (left) and Hunter.
(P HOTO BY W ALTER F ISKE; COURTESY OF HST C OLLECTION )

1955
    LOUISVILLE IN THE FIFTIES … SLOE GIN, SLEAZY DEBUTANTES, AND THE GOOD LIFE IN CHEROKEE PARK … FROM ATHENAEUM HILL TO THE JEFFERSON COUNTY JAIL … WELCOME TO THE PROUD HIGHWAY …
    So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
    â€”Hunter S. Thompson, age seventeen
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    THIRD PRIZE ESSAY—NETTLEROTH CONTEST
“OPEN LETTER TO THE YOUTH OF OUR