Mysterious Fires

POLO IS MY LIFE (Part One)

Whooping It Up With the Horse People: Trapped in a World of Beasts... The Genius of Genghis Khan and the Beauty of Sweet Belinda... On Fire With the Polo Fever...

"Polo meant nothing to me when I was young. It was just another sport for the idle rich — golf on horseback — and on most days I had better things to do than hang around in a flimsy blue-striped tent on a soggy field far out on the River Road and drink gin with teen-age girls. But that was the old days, and I have learned a lot since then. I still like to drink gin with teen-age girls on a Sunday afternoon in horse country, and I have developed a natural, friendly feeling for the game.

Which is odd because I don’t play polo, and I hate horses. They are dangerously stupid beasts with brains the size of cue balls and hoofs that can crush your whole foot into bone splinters just by accidentally stepping on your toe. Some will do it on purpose. I have been on extremely mean and stupid horses that clearly wanted to hurt me. I have been run against trees by the bastards, I have been scraped against barbed-wire fences and bitten on the back of the head for no reason...

At the age of 5, I got trapped in a stall for 45 minutes with a huge horse named Buddy, who went suddenly crazy and kicked himself to death with terrible shrieking noises while I huddled in the urine-soaked straw right under his hoofs.

My uncle Lawless, a kindly dairy farmer, was flogging the brute across the eyes with a 2-by-4 and trying to get a strange rope around his neck, but the horse was too crazy to deal with. Finally, in desperation, he ran back to the house and got a double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun — which he jammed repeatedly against the horse’s lips and teeth until the beast angrily bit down on the weapon and caused both barrels to fire at once.

“So much for that one,” he said as he dragged me out from under the dead animal’s body. I was covered with blood and hot, steaming excrement. The brute had evacuated its bowels at the moment of death....

No one seemed to know why it happened. “It was a suicide,” the vet said later, but nobody believed him. Uncle Lawless loved animals, and he was never able to reconcile murdering that horse with his basic Christian beliefs. He sold his farm and went into the real-estate business in southern Indiana, and finally he went insane.

The main problem with horses is that they are too big to argue with when they’re angry — or even bitchy, for that matter, and highbred horses are notorious for their bitchiness, which might be cute for any smaller animal, but when a beast that weighs 1,200 pounds goes crazy with some kind of stupid pique or jealousy in a room not much bigger than the handicapped stall in the Denver airport men’s room, bad things will happen to anybody who tries to argue with it: fractured skulls, broken legs, split kidneys, spine damage and permanent paralysis. The kick of a horse at close range, a hoof flicked out in anger, is like being whacked in the shins with a baseball bat. It rips flesh and shatters human bones. You will go straight to some rural Emergency Room, and you will be in a cast by nightfall if you’re lucky. The unlucky will limp for the rest of their lives.

Another little-known fact about horses is that the shape of their eyeballs makes them see human beings as six times their actual size and two or three times closer than they actually are. The multiples vary from horse to horse due to gene differentials, age and eyeball size, but guaranteed pain awaits those who fail to grasp this bizarre truth of nature. Imagine how you would relate to your dog if you thought it was six times bigger than it actually is.

                             FIFTY YEARS LATER

On some days you find too much queerness in your life. It happens suddenly — or at least it seems that way. But in truth it is like a boil bursting — an eruption of foul juices that were there all along and then suddenly erupt for many eyes to see.

And so it happened in the summer of ’94 that I found myself happily wandering the back roads of the professional polo circuit, looking for weirdness and action. It was dumb, but so what? Dumb is a nice way to travel in some neighborhoods, and on some days, just looking for action is almost as good as finding it. “Be careful what you wish for,” a beautiful woman once told me, “because your wish just might come true.”

“Well, maybe so,” I thought. But some things are too important to give up in this life, and I was not about to quit wishing or dreaming or even hallucinating just because some high-strung calculating polo beauty said it might not be so good for my health. When I want advice like that, I will call the White House or the nearest police station.

I had other reasons for getting in the polo business — and if not all of them were sane, they were at least very interesting. Ho, ho. There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.”

In any case, I spent many scorching long afternoons last summer driving around the mountains in my old 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado convertible, looking for signs of people who might be engaged in some off-duty polo action — a practice drill in one place, an unscheduled game in another — back and forth in the sun along dusty narrow roads, across high-mountain pastures with humming electric fences and the occasional tin-roof animal shed every two or three miles, but on weekday afternoons there was rarely any sign of human life.

Only animals, filthy stupid animals. And the rotten blazing sun. The thirst, the anger, the crippling sense of helpless bovine dumbness when you pass the same deserted barn for the third time in 40 minutes and then suddenly run out of gas on a rutted uphill grade overlooking nothing... The nasty rush of fear when the 5,200-pound Cadillac loses its power brakes and steering as it rolls backward down the hill and almost off a cliff.

I was looking for my homeboys, the Aspen Polo team, which was rumored to be on its way to Long Island to compete in what some people said was the Super Bowl of polo, the high-goal U.S. Open. There was even talk of winning, prevailing, beating the best in the world on their own turf and galloping off with the prize.

I must have been bored last summer, because I became oddly fixated with the idea. A betting proposition, it was not as goofy as it sounded. Aspen Polo turned out to be a gang of big-time polo mercenaries who looked good enough on paper to beat anybody in the world. Doug Matthews, the mysterious aircraft-industry tycoon from Atlanta, had stunned the polo world by brazenly hiring both of the legendary Gracida brothers, Memo and Carlos, to play on the same team, along with a 23-year-old hot rod out of South Carolina named Tiger Kneece, whose lame six-goal rating was rumored to be suspiciously low.

The Gracida brothers from Mexico were both world-class 10 goalers. Yes. It was not a bad bet at all — and when I learned several weeks later that the tournament was already fixed, our bet looked even better.

It was exciting news, and when I heard it, I felt powerful. A surge of rabid home-team loyalty went through me, and I immediately called my old friend Ralph Steadman, the famous horse scholar, and told him to get here at once. “This is our kind of story,” I told him. “Naked women and fast horses, just like the Derby — yes, sir, Ralph, this is the one we’ve been waiting for.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “Not horses again. I won’t do it.”

“Yes, you will, Ralph. There is fun in this thing and huge money. We will make a killing. Yes, we are gamblers, and now is the time to gamble. I have a wonderful long shot that can’t miss, especially at 14-1 ... What? Yes, it’s a polo tournament. Polo! That’s horses, Ralph — people with sticks on horseback — very violent, very visual, but essentially cruel and strange...”

“Prince Charles is a polo person, so is Wilt Chamberlain, and so am I, Ralph, and so are you. We are polo people now, and soon we will be rich from our winnings. Trust me, old sport, this is it! We can bet our whole advance and multiply it by 14 times. Fourteen times!”

Ralph quickly agreed and got on the next plane to Woody Creek, where I plunged him day and night into the bowels of the polo world. It was a speedy, active time. Ralph learned quickly and soon made many new friends among the local sporting set. He was right at home with these hustlers, stroking and sketching and smiling like a lizard worm when women gushed and cooed about his “fabulous” British accent....

He lounged on the grass and drank malt whiskey out of plastic cowboy tumblers and casually dashed off cheap watercolor landscapes full of half-drawn polo ponies and tall blond girls wearing Levi’s and roping gloves and $1,200 polo boots from Lucchese.

Ralph was not so successful, however, when it came time to produce his artwork on our homeboys. I kept sending him out to the polo grounds, where all the action was, but day after day he came back drunk on wine and clutching a handful of soiled animal portraits, which he shamelessly tried to foist off for absurdly high prices at cocktail parties to people who found him repugnant.

I suspected that was the reason for his failure to find our people: the diamond-studded Aspen Polo team that we had shrewdly bonded with sight unseen and were now deeply committed to support all the way to the end. Which we did like senile converts to some joyous chicken-worshipping cult, and we put aside everything else in our lives-- our brains, our fortunes and even our scared honor -- to risk everything on this hair-brained scheme to follow my gambler's instincts and some long-shot pickup team of disloyal cowboys who got stoned one night and decided to make a move on the biggest prize in U.S. polo.

 GENGHIS KHAN PLAYED POLO, and in the end he became a slave to it. Genghis loved the game, and he followed the brutal circuit wherever it happened to take him. He discovered the sport while conquering Persia in A.D. 1219, when his army of fierce Mongol horsemen swept down on the golden kingdom of Mohammed Shah Khawarezm and raped the whole culture of Persia.

The Mongols were merciless brutes with no sense of humor. They rode powerful horses at top speed and trampled anything that got in their way. Nothing could stop them. In time they conquered the whole world, all the way from the Pacific coast of China to what is now called the English channel.

Nobody argued with the Khan in those days, but some of his generals were nervous enough to ask him for some technical tips. "Oh, great Khan," they said, "how the fuck do you expect us to conquer the entire world, which is full of savage, powerful, crazy, vicious tribes in every direction, without spending the rest of our lives on the job and never coming back except as skull mementos?”

“Horses,” said the Khan. “We can do it in 30 days if we start now and take all our horses. Those bastards won’t fight for long. Some of you might even be back home for Christmas.”

The generals cheered, and the armies moved out — toward China, toward India, toward Turkey and Persia and Russia — and behind each army of mounted warriors trailed another vast army of horses, 2.5 million strong young ponies with oversized lungs and no fear of blood and twice as fast as anything bred in Arabia. Nobody walked in the Khan’s army.

The Khan had a sophisticated sense of direction but no sense of distance at all, and that is why he set off to conquer the world on horseback. But Persia was a lot farther away than he thought, and by the time they got to Samarkand, he was beginning to question his sense of time. It had been two years since they’d left Mongolia, and nobody had gone home for Christmas, not even the Khan.

He was desperate for new forms of amusement. The troops had to rest from time to time, and if they didn’t have organized entertainment, they might mutiny and bring shame on themselves. They were whores, of course, but they were killer whores with spears on millions of horses.

The Khan had been away for so long he had forgotten what home was like, and he had taken on several new slave brides in the course of his long and orgiastic journey. His sense of family values had collapsed, and he longed for something permanent, something pure, some higher and finer form of human expression that would lend meaning and nobility to his primitive, harebrained crusade that he had conceived in a moment of flaky hubris while ripped to the tits on opium.

That was when the first and greatest of all Khans discovered polo. He picked it up from the conquered Persian nobility. It was a natural game for his horsemen, and it kept them sharp for battle. The Khan was getting tired of hearing about all the atrocities that his men were committing just because they were bored, so he ordered his generals to form teams of their best warriors and work out their bloodthirsty frustrations in mock war games. His troops seemed to love it. It gave them something to do besides chopping off heads and pouring molten silver up people’s nostrils.

The Khan called it high-stakes polo: The winners went on to the next round of play while the losers were publicly humiliated, then decapitated so their heads could be used as balls in tomorrow’s game.

The deadwood was soon sorted out, and a certain hierarchy developed. Rich Persians were forced to compete, and if they lost, their entire families were sent back as slaves to Mongolia, which was, among other things, a very ugly 3,000-mile walk across jagged rocks and uphill through valleys of ice to the unimaginable horrors of the Mongol kingdom.

Many of Persia’s best and brightest died horribly on these slave caravans. The Mongols raked off so much of the Persian gene pool that the kingdom never recovered. Genghis loved the game and played it constantly, even risking his own head from time to time in major contests between armies. He never lost, of course, and he was usually a good sport about taking the losers’ heads. After all, he owned all the best ponies — the Khan owned everything in Mongolia and everywhere else. But he was a sensitive man, and he tried to be a gentleman about it. 

He was the first to understand that — in polo — the horse is what really matters. “The horse is 85 percent of the game,” he said once, and he was right then and now. Any fool can glue himself to a horse and swing a mallet at full gallop at some round thing bouncing along on the grass as long as he’s on a good horse, a finely trained polo pony that knows how to keep from killing its rider. Assuming the beast doesn’t want to kill that day — and the finest polo player in the world will be helpless on a bad horse. It would be like entering a motorcycle race on a 30-year-old Cushman.

Polo was the Khan’s passion. He cared for little else, and when his armies moved, he moved with them, because he couldn’t stand to be without the game. By the middle of the 13th century, his fast-advancing armies had spread polo to most of the world—from China in the East to Europe in the West and all the way south to India, where the British picked it up about 600 years later and then sent it across the ocean to their colonies of the New World. It caught on quickly in New York and Virginia, and in Argentina it became a national mania.

WHAT POLO PEOPLE call “gentleman’s polo” is a very different game from professional, or “high goal.” The gentleman’s version is an amateur horse sport, a kind of Rodeo for Rich Cowboys that is played all over the country by not many people at all—maybe .001 percent of the population, or even .0001 percent—and it is not a spectator sport. Less than .00001 percent of the U.S. population ever watches polo, and only 666 people have ever seen it on TV. Jai alai is a major sport compared with polo, and more people paid to watch the Calaveras County Frog Jumping Contest last summer than attended the prestigious month-long U.S. Polo Open on Long Island in September.

Polo is a sport for the filthy, aggressive rich and a handful of skilled professional horse athletes who roam the world and sell themselves to the highest bidder, often a different one each week and always for princely fees.

The people who pay these fees are called patrons, pronounced as in the Spanish: patrones. A patron hires his own players—or at least the other three—and he plays every minute of every chukker, no matter how useless he is. But make no mistake about it: Patrons are polo; they pay all the bills and buy all the horses and support the high-goal players in the extravagant style of the polo world, which is the only style they know.

Patrons are a strange breed with no common bond except hubris. There are fewer than 30 of them in the world at any given time, and they travel a feverish high-dollar circuit, one that stretches from Palm Springs and Santa Barbara in the West to Palm Beach and Greenwich in the East, and then from England to France and back across the Atlantic to the pampas of Argentina, the Mecca of high-goal polo all over the world and the sacred birthplace of Belinda, the mythical four-eyed horse goddess of polo and everything it stands for.

Belinda is lewd yet friendly; she is an all-knowing, dissolute slut horse, insanely rapacious yet very inviting and maternal at the same time. She dwells alone somewhere up in the Andes, and on moonlit nights she comes down and mingles regally with normal horses and sometimes even with the gauchos. They weep and shout at the sight of her, and a few even claim to have ridden her.

Patrons are no different. They worship Belinda for many reasons but mainly out of fear. It was Belinda who made Argentina the ruler of the polo world and the hatchery of high-goal champions. She is capricious, however, and is said to take bribes and wantonly peddle her influence from time to time.

She usually favors Argentines, but there were rumors this year that Doug Matthews got to her first. This news sent a wave of excitement through American polo circles and ignited an anti-Argie feeling among North American patrons. The cost of entering a team in this year’s U.S. Open rose to roughly a million dollars, and the prize was still a bent silver cup worth less than $200. But to them it made no difference.

Eleven hard-riding patrons bit that bullet without blinking, and one of them, a mysterious black sheik from Nigeria, went so far as to “sponsor” two teams, which raised eyebrows here and there but only among hard-core traditionalists. What the hell? There is nothing weird about a trainer entering two horses in the Kentucky Derby. It’s called an “entry” for betting purposes, and it’s done all the time.

The rules are different in horse sports, and brazen cheating is widely accepted as Normal. Hideous shenanigans that would get you barred from any other professional sport except dog racing are widely admired among horse people. Probably it is the legacy of Genghis Khan, who made his own rules and killed anybody who violated them.

There are many rules in polo—too many, in fact—but when it comes to the buying and selling of major championships, there are no rules at all. It is sleazier than pro wrestling and more expensive than a terminal cocaine habit, but the rich have warmly embraced it, and many have turned into addicts.

If there is any natural sport for the ’90s in America, it is polo. It is a dangerous game ruled entirely by money and utterly without any redeeming social value. Loyalty in any form is a weakness to be jeered at, and the only thing that prevents some half-bright millionaire horse thug from buying his way to victory in the U.S. Open is 10 other half-bright millionaire horse thugs who also crave to buy it and will fight to the death to prevent anyone else from winning.

A million dollars is nothing to Team Revlon or the billionaire patron Henryk de Kwiatkowski of Calumet Farm. These people fly their ponies around the world in custom-built DC-8s, luxurious airborne stables that can haul 40 or 50 finely tuned horses at a time, along with 15 or 20 grooms and usually a dozen criminal pimps on the run from Interpol or the Mafia. The polo crowd is eclectic and dangerously hagridden with narcissism and treachery, and that is the way they like it. Victory is all that matters.

The difference between a 10-goal champion and a wretched, unemployable three-goaler is essentially in the diet. The best and the brightest on the high-goal circuit eat only the hearts of wild animals, while the three-goalers live on horse meat. But none of them will talk about it.

And why should they? Many things are known in the sweaty gray world of the polo stables, but the truth is rarely spoken. The rigid code of Omertà is what holds the sport together."

TO BE CONTINUED…

~ Hunter S. Thompson 

Polo is My Life: 

Fear and Loathing in Horse Country

Rolling Stone 12/15/1994 

Art by Ralph Steadman 

("Oh God, not horses again")

POLO IS MY LIFE (Part 2)

The Long Island Experience...Savage Interlude in the Garden City Hotel… A Violent Meeting with Harriman… The Brutal Flogging of Hugo and the Man Who Swam With Rats…

Memo to Shelby Sadler

Senior Editor

Polo Magazine

From HST/Owl Farm

Sept. 15, ’94

Dear Shelby,

Thank God my homeboys are winning. I can’t wait to get there and cheer them on; my heart is swollen with pride… Hell, who could have thought it would happen—that a gang of my homeboys from right down the road would work themselves into a frenzy and then beat the whimpering shit out of everybody in the famous U.S. Open???

Life is crazy, eh? I’m leaving for New York in a few hours, straight like a bullet to the Garden City Hotel, on Long Island… We go against the terrible savage Redlegs on Sunday, and I’m so pumped up that I almost can’t stand it.

AND WHAT ABOUT OUR SEATING ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE BALL ON FRIDAY???

I think we must sit with my teammates. Anything else would be unnatural. I won’t come all this way for nothing.

In closing, let me make you aware of a horrible rumor that is floating around—that my homeboys can’t lose, if you know what I mean. Yes, there are whispers about a fix, of people going into the tank, and that many palms have been greased.

It gives me the creeps, frankly, and I pray it’s not true. But it worries me nonetheless.

So long for now. Yrs.

HUNTER

The magazine sent me an assistant, a tall, jittery young man named Tobias, who picked me up at the airport. “Welcome to New York,” he said. “I have a present for you.” He handed me a large gift-wrapped box containing a hideous blow-up doll named Teri, according to the information on the box -- which also said she had a "real-life vibrating vagina" and a "luscious-lipped deep open mouth." There were other special features and a stern warning not to exceed her 275-pound weight limit, or she might explode and dissappear.

“You should see her tits,” Tobias said. “They are bigger than Ginger Baker’s head.” He grinned idiotically and made a spastic jack-off motion, then loaded Teri onto the cart with all my other luggage. She was going to be part of our lives now. I knew she would be with us for a while, for good or ill. “Our car is right out in front,” said Tobias. “I’ll have it brought up. The hotel is not far, and I am a very skilled driver. I like to drive fast.”

Everything he said turned out to be a lie, but I was not surprised. I sensed there was something deeply wrong with him. He had no idea where the car was, and I sat on the curb for an hour and a half while he searched for the Lincoln, roaming alone through the bowels of the huge parking garage.

It was another two hours before we got back to the hotel, and we managed to check in without incident. 

“You will never drive again,” I said to him. “There is something wrong with you. Don’t ever touch this wheel again. From now on, I’m driving.”

I was introduced to the manager as Dr. Franklin, the famous author and world-renowned polo zealot. I asked him at once for a $2,000 cash advance. “My man Tobias will handle the details,” I said. “Let me know when it’s done. I’ll be over there in the bar.”

“No problem, Doctor,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything.” He nodded across the lobby at the elevated bar. “You just go over there and make yourself at home. I’ll call Hugo and tell him you’re coming.”

He seemed to be snickering at me, but I ignored it. “You’ll like Hugo,” he added. “He’s one of our local characters. He’s Swiss.”

It was another lie. One look at the ugly brute of a bartender told me that he was something far worse than a Swiss. He looked like a violent hunchback from the mountains of Transylvania.

I greeted him warmly nonetheless; I tried to pretend he was normal. “Welcome home,” he said quietly. “I knew you were coming; now we’ll get to know each other.”

I laughed nervously, assuming he was joking, and avoided his sinister gaze.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind.” I picked up my satchel and left quickly. His eyes followed me all the way to the elevator. I felt a twinge of fear.

When I got to the suite, I found Tobias struggling to blow up the sex doll. I quickly slapped it away from him and gave the thing to the bellboy. “This is a Four-Star hotel,” I told him. “Get this bitch inflated and bring her back immediately.” I smiled and gave him a hundred-dollar bill. “Remember me,” I said with a fine smile. “I will need many things.”

I looked forward to spending time at the Garden City Hotel watching football and meeting surreptitiously with emissaries from the Jimmy Carter for president committee. They would come and go quietly, mingling with the pimps and dancers and the hard-core polo crowd.

The Garden City Hotel had a shady reputation in the old days, but now it’s like a morgue. Frank Sinatra used to hang out here, and so did W. Averell Harriman. The place is full of ghosts, many of them burned alive in a series of disastrous fires that have plagued this hotel since it was built in 1874.

Yet the game went on; they all played polo: William Vanderbilt, Pierpont Morgan, Lillian Russell, Billy Rose. Garden City was the Aspen of the ’20s, a pastoral outpost of greed, wealth, rudeness and women who refused to wear panties. Scott Fitzgerald no doubt brooded in this bar just as I am today. The place has always reeked of death, from Equine Fever in the 1920s to human brain death in the ’90s…Even today there are wild boys in the elevators, cradling rubber blow-up dolls in their arms, chatting amiably with the night porters. It’s a wonderful place to stay if you’re dead… I had the time of my life. The Garden City Hotel is a fiery tomb of magic, mystery and myth. You want fun, Bubba? This is the place to be.

The polo tournament had been running every other day for two weeks on Long Island and also at the Greenwich Polo Club in Connecticut—only 10 miles away by water across the ominous gray currents of the Sound. I thought of Jay Gatsby standing on his lawn and staring across the water at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock… But the Garden City Hotel is a long way from Gatsby country, and Daisy doesn’t hang out here anymore. Long Island has changed drastically since Gatsby’s time. Garden City was a rural hamlet back then, and when it was originally built, the hotel was so hard to reach by horse carriage from Manhattan that it seemed as far away as Cuba.

By the turn of the century, it had become a fashionable spa for the rich and famous. Teddy Roosevelt lived nearby in Oyster Bay and was often seen in the hotel bar, haranguing the local gentry to come on up to his place for a quick game of polo. But Teddy would not recognize the place now. It has burned to the ground three times and is now in its fourth incarnation. There is a disco instead of a carriage house, and Joey Buttafuoco has replaced Gatsby as the resident celebrity manqué.

By the time I got there, a rash of shocking upsets had thrown the championship up for grabs. Most of the foreigners had been humbled, and my homeboys had emerged as one of the strongest challengers. Four teams were still unbeaten going into the final week, and Aspen was one of them. They were whores, of course, and only one of them had ever set foot in the Aspen area—and that was the wily patron Doug Matthews. But that is the way of polo, and I was the only one who seemed disturbed by it.

But not for long. I was beginning to learn that there was no need to be bothered by certain things. It is a different world, and the only way to accept it is to accept it completely… I was shocked at first to learn that the official headquarters of the tournament, the legendary Meadowbrook Polo Club no longer existed except as an eerie shell of its former self. The grounds were still beautiful, and the deserted clubhouse was still elegant, but there were no polo fields, no polo ponies, no caviar brunches, no smirking bankrupt aristocrats strutting around the terrace with half-naked Spanish courtesans on their arms.

 “It’s a parking lot now,” said club president Al Bianco Sr. when I inquired, “but we still call it the Polo Field.”

It didn’t faze me. “Of course,” I said. “Good show. Now let us retire to the bar and have a mint julep.”

“There is no bar,” he said. “But I know a nice Italian place over in Levittown. You must come and be my guest.”

“You’re too kind,” I said, “but I’ll have to take a rain check. I have a film crew waiting back at the hotel. I have to run.”

“What a pity,” he said. “We’ll see you tomorrow at the game?”

“You bet,” I said. “We will kick ass. Those goddamn Argies are about to get what they came for. My homeboys can’t lose!”

He blanched and looked away, then he pulled a plastic hip flask out of his coat and drank deeply. “What do you mean by that?” he finally asked, fixing me with a nervous smile.

“You know what I mean,” I said. “I didn’t come here to lose, Buster. You want to put your money where your mouth is?”

He stared down at his hands for a long moment, then shook his head. “I didn’t hear that,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the game. Thanks for stopping by.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” I replied. “We are champions.”

I WALKED ACROSS THE lobby to the darkness of the Polo Lounge, which appeared to be empty. I sat down at the bar and picked up a crumpled copy of The Sporting News, which was open to the Dog Pages. Across the room was a big-screen Sony TV, which was tuned to the dog-racing channel. I slapped my hand on the bar and called for whiskey. I hate dog racing, and the sight of it made my mood foul. I reached into the pocket of my silk shooting jacket and pulled out a small ball of hashish, which I quickly ate.

I heard a noise behind me, and then a hand touched my shoulder. “Pardon me,” said a man’s voice, “are you here for the polo games?”

“You bet,” I replied. “This is the big one. It’s now or never.”

“Who are you with?” he asked.

“Aspen Polo,” I said. “My homeboys. We are undefeated. Nobody can stop us.”

He nodded thoughtfully but said nothing. He was still standing slightly behind me, so shrouded in darkness that I could barely see his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. It made me nervous. For all I knew, he was a cop or maybe a professional pickpocket. But when he sat down on the stool next to me, I saw a finely dressed gray-haired man who looked like he might own a few polo ponies himself. He was wearing what appeared to be a black cashmere tuxedo jacket and patent leather boots. He was an elderly gent with deep-set eyes and a suave patrician presence — as if he’d just come back from a garden party at the old Gatsby place. I was impressed. We shook hands, and he introduced himself as Averell Harriman.

I recognized the name and felt edgy for a moment because I knew he was lying. The real Averell Harriman had been dead for quite a few years — but I smiled and shook his hand anyway. “Why not?” I thought. We all use borrowed names from time to time.

A minor problem arose when I accidentally signed Doug Matthews’ name to a receipt for the thousand-dollar tip I’d given to the three hotel porters. The manager brought it to me in the bar, where I was enjoying a professional conversation with my new friend. “Why are you bothering me?” I said as I scrawled my initials on the check. “We’re all on the same team anyway. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

HARRIMAN WAS SOMETHING OF a historian, also a political buff. We knew some of the same people — but not many. He knew my friend George McGovern, for instance, and also Richard Nixon, but he didn’t know Keith Richards or James Carville, my partners in the blood business. “So what?” I thought. I like this man. He knows things. Never mind that he looks 100 years old. He is whiskey gentle, he is one of us.

Hugo the Swiss bartender appeared, and I asked him to get that goddamn dog racing off the TV. “Punch up the news,” said Harriman. “Let’s see what’s developed in Haiti. I own a home there.”

“Good luck,” said the bartender. “You’ll never see it again.”

Harriman lashed out and hit him with a polo whip that had been concealed in his boot. “Shut up, Hugo! Get back where you belong.” He waved the weapon at him again, and Hugo cringed. Harriman hit him again, popping the whip sharply across his back.

I took it away from him. “That’s enough,” I said. “He got what he deserved.”

“Not yet,” he muttered, sitting back down on the stool. “Hugo is a cheater. He’s been cheating me for years.”

I helped Hugo to his feet, but he jerked away and spit at me. “You polo bastards!” he snarled. “Your time is coming!"

I whipped him on the face with a fanlike motion that left welts all over his head, then I shoved him away toward the kitchen.

“Good show,” said Harriman. “That’s more like it. That was very fast work.” He smiled and reached out to shake my hand. It was a graceful gesture, almost formal, as if to salute us both for doing the right thing. I understood and grasped his hand strongly in mine. I felt good about things. We were off to a good start, and I felt a new kind of attitude stirring in me — a Polo Attitude — and I knew we would soon find some action.

It came sooner than I thought. The minute Bill Clinton’s face came on TV, Harriman went wild. “Oh, god,” he moaned. “Not again! . . . I can’t stand the sight of this skunk. He reminds me of Mussolini.”

The president was somewhere in the White House, speaking nervously into the cameras at a live press conference. He was explaining his position on Haiti, which again caused an outburst from Harriman.

“BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!” he shouted. “You vulgar little bastard!” He shook his fist at the screen and moaned loudly.

I was shocked. There was an angry screech in his voice, and I was glad I hadn’t given his weapon back to him. “Get a grip on yourself,” I said sharply. “Be quiet! What the fuck is wrong with you?” It was the most violent reaction I’d ever seen a living politician. Fortunately it happened in front of a TV set in an empty lounge far from Washington. If it happened in a personal situation, the Secret Service would have grabbed him and locked him up. CLANG! Welcome to St. Elizabeth’s Federal Sanitarium for the rest of your life . . .

Harriman quickly regained his composure, but I was leery of him. I have had my own savage reactions to President Clinton — and usually for good reason — but never anywhere near the way Harriman acted. It was like he’d been stung by a wasp. I quickly put my arm around him and sat him down. He was trembling with anger, and I wasn’t sure he recognized me. I had told him earlier that my name was “Ben. Ben Franklin.” But that was only after he’d introduced himself as Averell Harriman.

“What the hell?” I thought. Fair is fair, especially here in the lobby of this goddamn creepy hotel full of high-strung polo pimps from Palm Beach and Argentina. The U.S. Open is the event of the year in the world of polo, and special rules applied. Half the crowd was traveling on false passports, but nobody cared. Even the horses were brought in illegally and put in false quarantine. It was safe to assume that anybody you met in this macho zirconium atmosphere was working at least one scam. Many were sleazy — this was, after all, a convention of horse-traders — but a few were quite stylish.

I considered myself lucky to have stumbled on something no more dangerous than a skillful Averell Harriman impersonator instead of something much worse. Many people come to the Open and get cheated out of their life savings in the blink of an eye. Everything you see in this place is for sale, from fast horses and beautiful women to cheap whiskey and fat young boys.

My man Harriman was a real find in this crowd. He was good company, and he was obviously plugged in to the right people. It didn’t matter to me that he was an impersonator. He was brazenly weird, and I admired him for it. He was good at his work. It takes a magic kind of gall to aggressively impersonate a dead man on his own turf, especially a former governor of New York state eight years after his death. It was heavy.

My only problem with Harriman was his temper. I was still shaken by his behavior at the sight of the president on TV, and I felt I should speak with him about it. I was afraid he would get us busted.

“You can’t do that anymore,” I told him. “We’re both on thin ice here. You can’t be threatening the president in public. We can’t get away with it.”

He nodded stiffly. “It’s none of your goddamn business,” he said. “He’s been fucking my wife for many years.”

“What?” I said. “Goddamn you! Stop saying that weird shit. People are watching us.”

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Calm down, son,” he said. “You’re a little jumpy today.” He put an arm around me. “Don’t worry, old sport,” he said. “I own this place. These people work for me.”

I nodded wisely as if I'd known it all along and didn’t want to embarrass him. But in truth he was beginning to make me uneasy. He had too many irons in the fire. I had known from the start that he was a very suave hustler, but I had no problem with that… He was a decent sort, not without the odd moral blind spot, and I liked his morbid sense of humor. I was not entirely comfortable with his hair-trigger temper or his frequent jealous rages against the president for fucking his wife, but in my line of work, these things go with the territory. I have worked with the criminally insane all my life. These are my people, but I usually try to keep them at arm’s length. It is better that way.

Harriman, on the other hand, was a very valuable source of information no matter how crazy he was. He was my man on the Island.

“Hugo is criminally insane,” said Harriman. “I’ve known his family for many years—very close, wonderful people, very high standards,” he continued, “but they lost millions when Hugo came along; they couldn’t keep it secret. He was a rape child, a certified imbecile… The mother never recovered. The attacker got away, no trace; he just raped her and fled down the tracks. It was ghastly.” He crossed himself awkwardly, then swallowed his double martini and called for two more.

I started to speak, but Harriman cut me off. “Not now,” he whispered. “Here he comes.” I went stiff and pretended to watch TV. Eerie noises were coming from the kitchen, and suddenly, Hugo appeared in the doorway with a meat hammer in his fist, wearing a cropped floral tank top and nothing else. His eyes were glazed and swollen; croaking sounds came from his throat.

I stood up quickly and grabbed a tall black pepper mill off the bar, but Hugo was on top of me before I could bash him. He was unnaturally fast, but Harriman was faster. He spun off his bar stool and dropped Hugo instantly with a finely controlled drop kick to the nuts. The brute fell to his knees and uttered a pitiful screeching sound. Then he doubled over and writhed helplessly on the floor.

“Get up, you pig!” Harriman barked at him. “Get out of my sight! You’re finished!”

“I can’t,” Hugo moaned. “I’m bleeding.”

Harriman looked down at him and laughed. “Screw back and die, you dirty little mutant,” he hissed. “You’re going to hell now. Soon you will sleep with the worms.”

I was impressed. My man Harriman had style. I could trust him, and I felt he trusted me.

He enjoyed his reputation as an aggressively eccentric personality, and he told bizarre stories about what the hotel was like in the good old days—when mysterious fires would engulf the lobby from time to time, and prominent social figures were beaten to death in the hallways with polo mallets or found at the bottom of wells with their heads cut off. “I remember one Sunday we played a whole chukker with a small human skull that Tommy Hitchcock found in the bushes behind his stables. We had a good laugh until somebody said it might be the Lindbergh baby,” he said wistfully. “But they were never able to identify it because we had bashed all its teeth out.”

“That’s rich,” I said, but neither one of us laughed.

Harriman called for more whiskey and changed the subject. “You know, I got this hotel for almost nothing,” he said. “The previous owner, Mr. Hines, died horribly. The family sold out and moved to Hawaii because somebody told them there were no rats there.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Hawaii is overrun with rats.” I noticed the bartender staring at us, but Harriman continued.

“That was how he died,” he said. “The papers called it a drowning, but I knew better.” He paused and nodded darkly. “He was murdered—murdered by rats, huge pack rats, the kind with those long hairy arms and claws like a cat.”

“Oh, my god,” I said. “How did it happen?”

“Rats lived in the rafters above the swimming pool,” he said. “Mr. Hines liked to swim laps at night for exercise.” He paused again, and I saw that his hands were shaking.

“The poor son of a bitch,” he said. “He never had a chance. A swarm of those filthy, hairy things fell out of the rafters and landed right on top of him in the water—he was covered with half-dead rats when they found him. They were clinging to every part of his body they could get their claws or their teeth into, just trying to stay alive.”

“Jesus!” I said. “No wonder you torched the hotel.”

He nodded, then stood up, and we parted. I went upstairs and took a long hot shower.

TO BE CONTINUED…

~ Hunter S. Thompson 

Polo is My Life: 

Fear and Loathing in Horse Country

Rolling Stone 12/15/1994 

Art by Ralph Steadman 

("Oh God, not horses again")