Screwjack - Hunter S. Thompson

Written by Hunter S. Thompson
Read by Scott Sowers
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Variable

Hunter S. Thompson’s notorious Screwjack is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since the private printing in 1991 of 300 fine collectors’ copies and 26 leather-bound presentation copies. Only the first of the three pieces included here - “Mescalito,” published in Thompson’s 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed - has been available to the public, making the audio edition of Screwjack a major publishing event. “We live in a jungle of pending disasters” Thompson warns in the chronicle of his first mescaline experience and what it sparked in him while he was alone in an L.A. hotel room in February 1969 - including a bout of paranoia that would have made most people just scream no, once and for all. But for Thompson, along with the downside came a burst of creativity too powerful to ignore. The result is a poetic, perceptive, and wildly funny stream-of-consciousness take on 1969 America as only Hunter S. Thompson could see it.

Screwjack just gets weirder with its second offering “Death of a Poet” as Thompson describes this trailer-park confrontation with the dark side of a deservingly doomed friend: “Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train.”

The heart of the collection lies in its final, title piece, an unnaturally poignant love story. What makes the romantic tale “Screwjack” so touching, for all its queerness, is the aching melancholy in its depiction of the modern man’s burden: that “we are doomed. Mama has gone off to Real Estate School…and after that maybe even to Law School. We will never see her again.”

November 20 2012
50 mins