Woody Creek, CO. April 4, 2026.
We just flew in from Phoenix, where I'd spent the day interviewing a whistleblower from inside ICE. Someone with firsthand knowledge of everything that went sideways during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. A drag, really… the night before, I'd been in Colorado playing to a sold-out crowd at the Paramount Theater in Denver. I honestly would have preferred a couple days to cool off without having to hear or think of the word ‘journalism.’ Maybe get a motel room in Durango and record more Spanish-language raps. Or drive up to the Dakotas and check in on my old cellmate Chris, who's apparently doing well and running a sober living up in Rapid City. This may come as a shock to some of you, but I'm getting tired of creating documentaries. Well, to be clear, producing impactful journalism is my primary passion and sole purpose in life. Yet the arduous process of research, chaos of last-minute travel, physical leg-work of conducting the interviews themselves and endless hours spent on Adobe Premiere during post-production are things I could live without. The only parts I enjoy are the initial idea and final release. One of my greatest inspirations, the late-and-great late Hunter S. Thompson, expressed a similar relationship to his own work:
“Writing is the flip side of sex—it's good only when it's over,” he wrote. “I've always viewed it as a sort of a left-handed thing, sort of a ticket to ride. Journalism has always been my way of going to a place to see if I wanted to see what was going on. Once I've gotten the story in my mind, the rest is just pain. And to cure the pain, we put it together between covers.”
He couldn't have put it better! Every step between the sudden arrival of an exciting idea and the eventual publication of a piece is pain, full of unforeseen creative obstacles and logistical roadblocks. Yet it's a labor of love, so we keep pushing.
On the flight over the Rockies I kept trying to figure out what the next move for Channel 5 was going to be. I've been deep in a run of celebrity interviews lately. Spanning from Afroman to Clavicular, the Hawk Tuah girl all the way to Shia “chill with these questions, Andrew” LaBeouf… there’s been a theme here: portraits of the ways different folks handle the scrutiny of the internet's gaze. Yet I feel that maybe it’s time to get back to my roots, interviewing disaffected Americans and fringe experts with a sprinkling of pedestrians rapping.
I also had to compose a decent Field Note, which I’ve been writing on a weekly basis to train my brain’s word-muscle after years of nearly doomscrolling myself into illiteracy.
To be clear though, these written dispatches aren't just a means to advance my reading level. I just closed a book deal with Simon & Schuster yesterday. S&S is one of the biggest publishing houses in the country and they’ve tasked me with creating a memoir about my journey from teenage hitchhiker to apparent 'Gen Z Gonzo extraordinaire.' This opportunity will give me the chance to tell my story in a whole new way and provide a dignified medium to clear the air on some extremely fucking important things — one thing in particular, that should've been put to bed ages ago.
So these field notes are helping me develop my own written flow, learn how to best express myself, and ultimately turn in an intelligible first draft to S&S by the end of summer. I wish I’d been writing these things consistently throughout my entire career, but hindsight is 20/20.
I initially thought I’d write a piece about Clavicular, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I'd rather drip ghost pepper hot sauce into my eyeballs like Visine. The dude was pretty what-you-see-is-what-you-get and I didn't think my internal observations would bring anything new to the table. This left me deep in the grips of a dreaded writer's block.
Back to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson. I was hoping the opportunity to kick it at his Colorado compound would spark something.
***
I brought my landlord from Lake Periphery along for the journey. As it turns out, you can actually be friends with your landlord if they charge you under $500/month and don’t complain about noise. When I first moved to Lake Periphery, I never expected to assemble a full film crew out of the ragtag desert-dwellers who live on my street. Yet I’d pulled it off in a matter of months and now my landlord flies with me everywhere we go. His name is Damon, an ex-pornographer who would look more at home in the movie Easy Rider. Not that he cosplays a vintage biker like a large contingent of listless millennials in Southern California. No, his look is more subdued and casual, functional and comfortable. Black jeans and a dark t-shirt with a full sweater of tattoos.
We walked through the door of the Woody Creek Tavern, Hunter S. Thompson’s former watering hole. It was packed wall-to-wall with the 21st century's very own generation of swine. You know the type, best described by two words: Patagonia Fleeces. I should have anticipated this from the luxury SUVs and e-bikes populating the parking lot. Aspen tourists making the pilgrimage to see the favorite dive bar of the dude who wrote the book to the movie that was a poster on their stoner friend's dorm room wall. On one wall there was a portrait of HST done in the style of Shepard Fairey's Obama 'Hope' poster, except instead of HOPE it said GONZO underneath. The place was a gift shop first, and a bar second. And as a first-class connoisseur of dive bars around the world, the juxtaposition was jarring. All manner of Gonzo idolatry and merchandise — and I couldn't really blame them, it probably made Woody Creek Tavern a buttload of money, but that didn't mean it didn't make me a little sad. It kinda reminded me of one of those '90s family restaurants with a bunch of crap on the wall. Like in that movie Office Space, except all the pieces of flair were all Hunter-related. Last call was 9 PM, which seemed pretty out of character for a bar once frequented by a man whose penchant for cocaine was no secret.
The one cool thing was a napkin behind glass near the front of the bar. Hunter's handwriting. It says: Never call 911. Yes, that means you. HST.
My friend RJ — another Lake Periphery associate — said something once that popped into my mind just then: everything you love will be commodified and sold to the people you hate the most.
I was standing in the putrid proof of that observation.
The aging bartender recognized me — and not just in a casual oh shit, you're the All Gas No Brakes dude way. He leaned over the bar and said, "How was the show in Denver?"
"Sold it out," I told him. "Got a Blucifer tattooed on my leg live on stage to commemorate it."
He winced. "Looks pretty rough?"
"Yeah," I said. "Pretty rough. The dude was under a lot of pressure with the live crowd and shit. I'm gonna get it touched up next time I'm in Albuquerque.” I like to support a shop called Red Light Tattoo in Albuquerque.
The bartender said he started working there in 2010, five years after Hunter's death. Sixteen years is a long time to work anywhere, especially in the service industry. He looked at me and said, "You want to see the real shit?"
I thought he'd never ask. "Yes, of course, dude."
He motioned me to a back room, to a roped-off section of the original bar, perfectly preserved. Nobody's allowed back there anymore. It looked like a working man's wallet had been blown to smithereens by an M80 sometime in the latter half of the 20th century and plastered the walls with dollar bills. They were yellowed and signed with names. An absolutely beautiful sight.
But I'd seen a place like this before. It reminded me of my own watering hole back in Lake Periphery. To a T. Before I could mention it to my new bartender, he gestured back toward the main bar, at a cluster of old-timers grumbling over their drinks, lamenting the billionaire Aspenites who’ve sucked the soul out of town.
Then he pointed to a framed newspaper clipping on the wall. The headline said: A Haven for Locals, describing Woody Creek Tavern as the polar opposite of what it was today.
"At least a few of those old crocodiles are still around. That's the Breakfast Crew — they were all drinking buddies with Hunter."
"So the guys in Patagonia vests aren't locals?" I smirked.
He laughed, then looked around and said, "Hunter would absolutely flip his shit if he saw this place now. Maybe even burn this place to the ground."
"When Hunter was alive," I asked him, "was any of this stuff here? The portraits, the napkins under glass, Shepherd Fairey poster, all of it?"
"No. Hunter never would have allowed it. This was the only place where he felt seen by his people. He’d be embarrassed to see the walls decked in all this commemorative shit. Wouldn’t you?”
In my mind's eye, I used to picture Hunter riding a Harley bike down here with a crossbow and busting through the door to meet Johnny Depp for the first time. Standing there in this shrine to capitalism masquerading as a homage to an American titan of words, I couldn't picture it at all. The cops would've been called before he got to the door.
As I chowed down on a semi-decent veggie burger, I thought about Hunter when he first came to Woody Creek. He'd just published Hell's Angels. He was a hotshot bestselling author — he could have gone to Hollywood or New York. But he wasn't a greedhead, he was a well-grounded Southern gentleman that needed something real. So he set his sights on the Rockies and built a compound at the end of a dirt road and got himself some peacocks and an arsenal of high-powered firearms.
The Woody Creek Tavern used to be where real Americans went to drink. It was where Hunter went to let his hair down — although he didn't have much hair. Just a place where he could chill with the freaks, weirdos, and outcasts that saw him for him, and not the drug-addicted, amoral trickster know as 'Uncle Duke' in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, which ran in the weekly papers for decades. According to early interviews, Trudeau's cartoon was the depiction Hunter that hated most.
"Some people grow up and want to be firemen, and some want to be president; nobody wants to grow up and be a cartoon character," Hunter said, largely crediting the loss of his anonymity as a journalist and privacy as a citizen to Trudeau. "If I ever meet him, I might set the little bastard on fire."
In the same interview, Hunter explains that he himself never wanted to be become famous, preferring a fly-on-the-wall approach to his job. Yet the myth he'd built through his character in Fear & Loathing forced him into the shoes of a cultural icon. A frontman of the very freak-show he'd sought to document.
I thought of what the area looked like in 1969, and the place looked in my mind's eye a lot like somewhere I know. A place with cheap rent, weird neighbors, no one cares if you're famous, nobody asks what you do for a living. A place where you're allowed to just be a person for a while. I know that place. I live there currently.
The difference between Woody Creek then and Woody Creek now is that a famous writer put a gun in his mouth, and the people who never understood him while he was alive showed up afterward to buy his ghost. It was horrifying.
I want to be careful about comparing myself to Hunter S. Thompson — enough people do that already and I don't think I'm anywhere near able to fill his shoes at this stage in my life. But I'll say this: he published Hell's Angels, his first book, at 28. I’ve just signed my first deal at 28. He moved to Woody Creek at the exact age I am right now. At the same age I moved to Lake Periphery. And I am not here as a tourist, nor do I own or have ever owned a Patagonia fleece.
I was also invited here by Thompson's widow, Anita.
***
We arrived at Owl Farm around 2 AM. At 9 AM, I woke up to Sympathy for the Devil blasting at full volume from somewhere on the property. It had been running all night.
The farm is a lot smaller than I had expected, much in the same way as when you meet a movie star and they are a lot shorter than you imagined. I thought about the first time I'd seen Danny Trejo in the flesh — an LA rite of passage — I was shocked at how short he was. I'd always pictured him as a towering giant. He was 5'6. Not that he wasn't still intimidating. Owl Farm is like that. It's a modest two-bedroom house, a side cabin, a shed in the back. 42.5 acres of Colorado mountain property, which sounds enormous until you factor in that most of it is just open land rolling out behind the house toward the valley.
Out front, Hunter's famed red Barracuda sits under a tarp. Near the entry post there's a bronze sculpture of a peacock, and then there are the actual peacocks. Dozens of them, roaming the property with an air of superiority that makes you certain they are of the belief that they, not the humans, are the ones in charge. And they weren't wrong. Hunter had gotten the first ones with a head full of mescaline, the story goes. That tracks.
Near the main house there's a sign that says: Nobody gets in to see the wizard. Not nobody. Not nohow. And another one: It never got weird enough for me.
I asked Anita why the music was running all night.
"If we don't play music," she said, "the owls attack the peacocks."
That was my first inkling that the whole place was organized around the birds. Hunter Thompson — one of the great men of letters in recent American memory — had constructed an elaborate nocturnal sound system to protect his peacocks from owls. Which is somewhat ironic given that the place is called Owl Farm, not Peacock Farm. It reminded me of the feral cat colony that Disneyland maintains to control the rodent population after hours. Disneyland is an elaborate shrine to a mouse if you catch my drift. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. Hopefully it does.
Anita had met me at the tavern the night before and I'd vibed with her immediately. She was in her fifties but didn't look it, she obviously took care of herself. Warm, in the way people get when they've been through enough that putting up a front isn't worth the effort anymore. The kind of thing that only comes with age. There's a sadness to her face when discussing Hunter, and I don't think she'd be insulted if she knew people noticed. She’d essentially been a professional widow for 20 years, living in the house where he lived and died.
My original plan was to film a 5CAST with her. Almost immediately, I lost total interest in doing so out of respect for what felt like a religious experience. Filming would've been extractive in a way I wasn't comfortable with. I'd been invited into her home, the stuff of journalistic dreams, into her grief and unfinished business, and it felt like the wrong time to put her on record. We just talked, like normal humans, without lavalier mics and a camera. She opened up to me like she had been waiting to say these things to someone specific, and had decided, for whatever reason, that I was that person.
The first thing she said, almost before we sat down, was: "Now that he's gone, it is your turn."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything.
She took me down to the War Room. That's what Hunter called it. It's in the basement of the main house, where he spent up to sixteen hours a day writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and everything else that mattered. Perfectly preserved. His typewriter still on the desk. The wall above it covered in Polaroids, press passes and letters. His credential from the 1971 Democratic primary, when he was embedded with McGovern against Nixon. Photos of him with Muhammad Ali. Shelves packed with books he'd dog-eared and annotated. I hadn't known he called it the War Room. We have a War Room back at the Channel 5 office in Los Angeles. I'd named it that without knowing. Same idea, different era: trying to make sense of the whole American experiment as it rages around you.
There was a ruler on the desk with his handwriting on it. It said: character is action.
Before I left she unclasped an original Gonzo necklace from around her neck, the logo cast in metal, and handed it to me. "I want you to have this," she said. "It's from Hunter."
I didn't know what to say to that either, so I didn’t say anything.
***
The investigation into Hunter's death had been reopened last fall and ended up on the front page of the New York Times. People's first instinct was predictable. Younger woman – Anita – married an old famous man two years before he died, you know the deal. The narrative wrote itself and the narrative was wrong.
She told me she didn't push for it. Hunter had a lot of women in his life, ex-girlfriends, women who had been around for years, and some of them were actually in the room when it happened. After twenty years of silence they started talking. That's what triggered the investigation, not Anita.
She wasn't even there. They'd been fighting. Hunter had been talking suicidally on the phone, talking about ‘what's the point, civilization is collapsing, there's nothing worth sticking around for.’ The kind of talk that had become a pattern and that she could never fully get used to no matter how many times she heard it. He called her at the gym and asked her to come home so they could work on his ESPN column together, which was his way of pulling back from the ledge. She thought they were okay. They were still on the phone when she heard the click. She thought it was the typewriter. That was their thing, that was how she always knew a fight was over, as soon as she heard him start typing she knew whatever spiral he was on had run its course. The click of a gun being cocked and the click of a typewriter loading sound a lot alike apparently. She was sitting there at the gym waiting for him to come back on the line. He didn't. His son Juan found the body.
She believes it was a suicide. She just wasn't sure she'd been told the whole story of how it went down. There's a difference. What she'd heard was that the women who were in the room that night were saying he was still yelling, still writing, still going right up to the last minute. The allegation was that it was an assisted suicide and that Juan had sanctioned it. She took what she knew to the sheriff and named names. The CBI investigated for four months and closed the case in January, finding nothing that contradicted the original ruling.
She hadn't gone public with any of it, which had kind of backfired on her. By refusing to go on record with the Times she'd made herself look like she had something to hide. Like the grieving widow trying to keep the lid on things. I've had my own negative experiences with that paper and I couldn't blame her for not wanting to talk to them. It's the same reason the other Hunter had talked to me. I don't have an agenda.
One thing about suicide that people don't talk about enough is the anger. You love someone completely, you grieve them completely, and underneath all of it there's this fury that you can never fully justify and never fully let go of, because frankly it's a selfish thing to do. Maybe the most selfish. That is why I didn’t kill myself in the January or February of 2023. Because I am my mom’s only child and I knew what it would do to her. Otherwise, I was completely ready to go, and still sort of feel like I'm living on borrowed time. Anita and Hunter were planning to have kids together. That was a big part of why she agreed to marry him. She adjusted her whole life around that possibility, got the courthouse wedding, all of it. And even now his genetic material is sitting frozen in a lab somewhere in Colorado. But she never used it. She couldn't imagine raising his child without him.
At Owl Farm, Anita isn’t running a museum and she'll be the first to tell you that. She never asked to be the keeper of his legacy. But she is, and she takes it seriously, and part of why she'd first gotten in touch with me after hearing me talking about Hunter on Lex Fridman, was to set the record set.
This is what she wanted me to know and what she wanted people to know:
Most of Hunter's great work, everything that actually mattered including Fear and Loathing, was written completely sober. Not sober-ish. Sober. Caffeinated, yes. Cigarettes, yes. But never on drugs. Maybe some alcohol. Now Hell's Angels, his first book, that one he wrote on drugs. But by the time he sat down to write it he'd already put in ten thousand hours. The craft was there, it was in his muscle memory from years of grinding, the drugs weren't doing the writing. Everything after that, the serious work, was done clean and serene.
She hates the Gonzo-drug association more than almost anything and has a specific person to blame for it. Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone. When Wenner moved the magazine from San Francisco to New York and turned it from a counterculture outlet into a cheap socialite rag, Hunter walked.. contributing only in sporadic bursts while offering his services to a number of competitors. Her read was that after he left, there was a concentrated effort in publishing to typecast him, including the calculated promotion of Doonesbury. In order for Rolling Stone to succeed, Wenner had to advance the narrative that Hunter walked due to his own drug abuse, not because the magazine sold out. What ensued was multiple decades of shoddy biographical coverage that depicted Hunter as an unreliable druggy, a brilliant disaster you couldn't trust. The very myth that had 'made' him into a cultural icon became a weapon used against him.
The cocaine was abuse real though, Anita said. The nineties were brutal. At its worst, Woody Creek Road was bumper to bumper with people coming to party, closing out the tavern and moving the whole thing back to Owl Farm. Free cocaine, all night, every night. Cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes were his Holy Trinity, his ritual, his way of getting comfortable and his way of coming down, it was baked into everything. But it caught up with him.
The coke made him functionally unable to write. His nose was so destroyed by the mid-nineties that snorting it no longer worked and he had to resort to freebasing. The myth he'd built, the gonzo outlaw, the man who ran on excess, had turned him into a magnet for exactly the kind of people and energy that were killing him. Every parasite who wanted to party with Hunter Thompson would either find him at the Woody Creek Tavern or show up at his door with cocaine, and he’d let them in. He was on the spectrum she said, just desperate to connect with people, and the legend he'd built around himself had become his armor, the thing that made him feel less exposed. He'd already blown up his first marriage back in 1980. Things had long since soured with his son, Juan. He became, by his own admission, an egomaniac.
Anita needed me to understand that he knew this. That by the time she came around he had seen the errors of his ways and was genuinely trying to turn the ship around. He was waking up at 9 AM, going on walks, largely clean if you didn't count drinks at the tavern. He was trying to write again. He wanted to put it all behind him. And then he put a gun in his mouth. Why?
I understood it more than I wanted to. For a long time I was running the same operating system. Cocaine and alcohol, the age old artist's self deception that it was "part of the process." I was the free spirit, the rambling man. The Hemingway mythos of a writer who drank from Key West to Paris and back again. It's like how drug dealers get super into Scarface but totally miss the point that Tony Montana dies in the end. Hemingway and Thompson put shotguns in their mouths, I'd never put three and five together on that and gotten eight. I thought it was the lifestyle, the rare mutant that was "too weird to live and too rare to die." Really though, I was just too fucked up to work.
Sometimes, the homies would tell me I was overdoing it and my mom was catching onto the fact that I was going off-the-rails. Still, I wasn't trying to hear it back then. I'd have periods of sobriety, but it coke-and-booze would keep creeping back into my life. I used to love it because it made me feel invincible, wittier and prettier. But as I’ve gotten older, I hate the a person bender makes me. After a while, I get quiet in a way that isn't peaceful while simultaneously having so much to say, that I end up barking it out at inappropriate and random intervals through clenched teeth, frequently promising things to people I’ll never see again. And then two-to-three days of the serotonin blues in which I'm incapable of producing anything of journalistic value.
I'm happy to say that I've put that part of my life behind me. I'm not totally sober, nor do I think I need to be. Yet there's always part of me that wants to withdraw ten grand, score an eight ball, learn to drive a motorcycle, surf Instagram DM's for a willing companion, change my name, get a face tattoo of a demon, move to Las Vegas and howl at the moon til' my liver fails.
But standing there in Hunter's War Room and wearing his necklace, I felt something I can only describe as an ominous warning from the other side.
I had to heed it. I have too much to lose.
***
It was 11 AM. I was walking through the backyard where Johnny Depp shot Hunter's ashes out of a cannon, past the spot that's now a registered NRA gun range, the legal workaround that let him fire weapons back there all those years. Some part of me had been sitting with anger all afternoon and out here in the dark it was easier to feel it clearly. Not at the situation. At him.
At Hunter, specifically. For what he left Anita holding. For the position he put her in. For deciding, at 67, that the tape was done.
Ralph Steadman is still alive. He's got a show in Fort Collins in two weeks. Hunter’s friends are still out here, still kicking. Hunter should be too. The world needed him then and it needs him now more than ever. Yet he decided that the myth mattered more than the work that was left to do. Anita had to hear a gunshot and think it was a typewriter. She is still in that house with his frozen genetic material in a lab and his ashes scattered around the property and his Barracuda under a tarp and dozens of peacocks that she has to play the Rolling Stones for all night so the owls don't get them.
And he isn’t there.
Anita asks if I’d like to write the foreword to my upcoming memoir on his War Room typewriter and also, if I want a grapefruit. I say yes to both.
She seems a bit happier today, and so am I.
AC