“I have seen the face freedom and eaten it.” – Eldridge Cleaver after schtupping Pat Nixon.

My nephew gave me some sausage he had left over from a boar he shot a few weeks ago. I wanted to do right by it.

This morning I cooked up a variation of my biscuits and gravy recipe. I didn’t have any butter so I used duck fat instead. I also added a little bit of thyme to the batter to make them more savory.

I don’t know if it was the duck fat or if I fucked up my measurements and put more than 8 tablespoons in, but these were the lightest biscuits I’ve ever made. Amazing stuff really. I also had larger chunks of the duck fat than I normally have with the butter so that’s something to think about for the future. I also added a pinch of sugar to the biscuits, something I haven’t done before but seemed like a reasonable idea.

The boar sausage is leaner than pork so I added about a half tablespoon of lard to my cast iron skillet before adding cornstarch to make the gravy. I also added 1 diced shallot, some chives, thyme and just a tiny pinch of cardamon.

I like putting cardamon in just about anything I can, I think it brings a really nice spicy earthiness to stuff. Be careful not to over do it though, this stuff can get away from you real fast.

I laid off on the cream/milk mixture this time, adding just enough liquid to capture the thickened fats. This was a good idea.

I topped it all off with some diced tomatoes and some more chives for color.

I could topple empires with this monstrosity.

Don’t worry, we’ll work it out next year.

This is a little off-topic for us here, but who cares, it’s an exciting release and I designed the packaging for the project so I can talk about it here all I want.

Wayne Ewing has released a wonderful sequel to his 2003 work “Breakfast with Hunter”. “Animals, Whores & Dialogue: Breakfast with Hunter Volume 2″ uses a late night writing session in the younger part of this odd century as the core of the narrative. Wayne follows Hunter’s shotgun attention span through it’s circuitous tangents by way of parties, memorials, nights with friends and also some great footage of Hunter riding his Harley through the Roaring Fork Valley. Watching Hunter pass through a continuous sea-change of clearly familiar procrastination techniques before finally settling himself down to task is a treat no Thompson fan should deprive themselves of.

One of the things that really separates Wayne’s work with Hunter from other filmmakers is the very real understanding he managed of this literary titan and human conundrum, not to mention a certain zen-like tolerance for the searing, blue light of Thompson’s very special brand of psychosis. Where other filmmaker’s seem to get lost in the fuzzy, unfilmable morass of lazy admiration, Wayne manages to descend into the murkier depths, translating the complexities of his own relationship with the subject into a portrait this is both more exciting and more sweet and intimate than anything you’re going to find anywhere else about one of the great and true recluses of late 20th century letters.

Go to Wayne’s site now, catch up on his hilarious stories about Thompson on his video blog and pick up a copy of “Animals, Whores & Dialogue”, I promise that you will love it.

Wayne Ewing was friend, Road Manager, and biographer to the late Hunter S. Thompson and is, in my opinion, the only documentarian to ever successfully pierce the thick, well-considered wall that Thompson kept between himself and the rest of the world. If you haven’t yet seen it, stop what you are doing right now and buy “Breakfast with Hunter” it’s a must-see for any Thompson fan.

Wayne took time out from editing “Breakfast with Hunter 2: The Kitchen Tapes” to put together a piece about his old friend specially for us here at Outsider’s Almanac. You can read other great memories of Hunter by Wayne on his bi-weeklyish vodcast at HunterThompsonFilms.com. We know you’ll enjoy this.

The Aspen Times has a picture of a bobcat on the front page this snowy January day after “Blue Monday” – the third Monday in January, considered the most depressing Monday of the year by the media. The bobcat in today’s news was crouching in the snow in a field not far from my unfortified compound somewhere near Carbondale and he appeared quite cuddly, unlike the evil-looking example below.

Bobcats remind me of another Blue Monday. The evil version above is like the one I met more than a decade ago, back in the nineties at Owl Farm with my friend Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. And that memory suddenly answered the question that I have been pondering about Hunter for more than a month.

“What did Hunter like to do outside?” asked another comrade, Brian Buckman – the force behind great web sites like the Outsiders Almanac and my own HunterThompsonFilms.com.

Since Hunter spent most of the last twenty years of his life glued to a high chair between the stove and counter in his kitchen, I did not have a ready answer. But today it came to me after seeing the bobcat.

Hunter loved to go outside and shoot, especially to kill something that he felt threatened him.

“People, they know that I will shoot,” the Beast would declare late at night with pride. And it was certainly true, as I knew from having to deal with an innocent victim of his trigger finger. (see my vlog “Never Call 911”).

The bobcat was certainly a victim, but whether innocent or not you will have to judge.

Outside on the porch of Owl Farm that January Blue Monday it was cold, so cold even a starving, yet still cagey bobcat might be forced to take a chance.

My brother Andrew and I were at Owl Farm that night, along with Deborah Fuller – Hunter’s secretary since the early eighties – and a journalist and photographer from London. The Brits were there to talk about the release in England of Hunter’s long lost novel The Rum Diary, now finally to be released as a film starring Johnny Depp in 2010.

Hunter was quite crafty about having his picture taken. From the beginning, he had an instinctual sense that branding himself properly was a key to success and fame. Thus, the Gonzo symbol, the cigarette holder, the Tillie Hat, etc. were all elements of his well known image that had to be arranged properly before any photograph could be taken. Deborah and I were charged with making sure he looked just right, and he constantly threatened terrible retribution if we failed.

“If my glasses are crooked, I’m going to hurt you,“ he would always promise.

Thus, I took the presence of a professional photographer with three cameras hanging from his neck as essentially a threat that night in the Owl Farm kitchen. If the picture in the London Observer or the The Sun wasn’t just right, I would pay.

Suddenly, there was a loud commotion on the front porch where the peacocks were huddled in their walk-in cage under a heat lamp. A huge THUMP was followed by the peacocks screeching wildly. I figured that a slab of snow must have slid off the roof and startled the birds. Deborah immediately went to investigate, and I was close behind.

On the front porch, the peacocks were going crazy inside their cage. The door to the cage was open, as usual so they could come and go, but there was something else inside with them now. A mangy bobcat was leaping from the floor of the cage, trying to grab one of the screaming peacocks whirling on their perches above.

“You asshole! Get the fuck out of here,” screamed Deborah as she charged at the bobcat.

You could see how this fearless woman could protect Hunter all those years, and even take a bullet for or from him (see once again my story “Never Call 911”). But, the bobcat seemed to have no fear whatsoever. Instead of running away, the cat charged Deborah, coming after her quickly and driving us both back into the living room. The Cat was either rabid or simply crazed by hunger and the cold.

“It’s a bobcat,” screamed Deborah to Hunter. “Get the shotgun!”

I slipped back onto the porch, thinking I could drive the bobcat off before Hunter got the gun and ended up pictured on the front page of London newspapers turning a cat into pink mist and alienating every animal lover in the United Kingdom. The peacocks were still screaming, but the bobcat wasn’t in their cage or on the porch. Then I saw him peeking around the side of the woodpile just off the front of the porch.

At that moment, I heard the unnerving sound of the pump action on the 12 gauge Marine Defender behind me as Hunter came out the front door screaming, “Where is he? Where is the son-of-a-bitch?”

Unfortunately, I hesitated just long enough for him to know I was lying when I replied lamely, “I don’t know.”

His voice took on a tone of threat I had never heard before as he swung the chrome plated barrel in my direction and screamed, “Tell me where he is, or I’LL SHOOT YOU!”

“He’s right there. Behind the wood pile,” I shouted, instantly, giving up the bobcat whose head disappeared behind the woodpile just as it exploded in a torrent of wood chips from the double O shot of the Marine Defender. That was one quick cat. He ducked the shot and simply disappeared.

Hunter was livid.

“Protecting a ‘poor pussycat.’ You sentimental fool. It was a bobcat that killed my beloved Screwjack,” he declared with angst. Giving me a look of disgust, he pumped the Marine Defender once to clear the weapon and went inside.

Screwjack was both the name of his black house cat, and a satirical short story about his love affair (literally) with a black cat (Here’s a supplement from my “Breakfast with Hunter” DVD in which the writer P.J. O’Rourke and the actor Don Johnson take turns reading Screwjack).

He was a gorgeous cat as you can see from this post card picture that Deborah took and then sent to a few friends on his death. The theory of his demise was that vermin from bobcats with whom he tangled infected him with a deadly disease.

Unfortunately, Screwjack was pretty elusive, and in all my years of filming Hunter I took few, if any shots of his black cat. However, Screwjack does have a cameo appearance in “Breakfast with Hunter.” You can hear him distinctly whining in the background as Alex Cox and Todd Davies flee the kitchen after their infamous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas script conference that led to Terry Gilliam directing the movie.

Back on the porch, I thought about the error of my ways and figured perhaps I could redeem myself by shooting the bobcat. Taking another shot gun from the arsenal, I stalked the property in the cold, hoping to see the varmit and blast him away. After an hour or so, feeling like a bad imitation of Bill Murray in Caddyshack , I quit for the night. At least I didn’t blow up the 500 gallon propane tank with an errant shot.

The next afternoon I got a call from Deborah.

“He shot the bobcat,” she proudly declared.

“How did he do it?”

“I was walking over to the main house and saw the bobcat sitting in the bushes above the firing range,” she said. “ So I went into Hunter’s bedroom. He’d only been down for a few hours. But still I whispered in his ear: ‘If you get up now you can shoot the bobcat.’ And, Damn if he didn’t pop right out of bed, grab a rifle, and kill that bobcat with one shot from the front porch. Then he went right back to bed and fell asleep.”

Usually, it took Hunter hours to get going in the morning – an ugly ritual documented by more than one observer. But, given a score to settle with a bobcat, anything was possible, including getting Hunter into the great outside.

Copyright 2010 by Wayne Ewing
Screwjack’s picture courtesy of Deborah Fuller