Hunter S. Thompsons' Tales of The Swine Family Hq

Sugarloaf key Tales of the swine family subtitle: *** these people There's not much time to tell this story. The sun will come up in two hours and I want to be gone by then but will not be easy. I have a whole roomful of weight to move out of this motel room by dawn and as always there's nobody around to help. One friend could make a big difference now but its four o'clock in the morning and all descent people are in bed. So much for friends I'm sitting in a motel room on the edge of a private marina in the florida keys It is room number 202 at Sugarloaf lodge to be exact and I'm looking across the canal at the tall red white and blue Pepsicola machine in front of the main marina building on the other side the Pepsicola machine is the brightest thing in my universe right now it lights at the gasoline dock and the big white ice lockers where the fishing guides will be leaving from in two or three hours. There are a dozen or so boats tied up around the canal mostly white Mako's twenty two and twenty five footers, pure fishing boats, center consoles, most with be white outboard engines- Johnson's and Evenrudes- hundred seventy five - two hundred horsepower, white shrouds in the consoles to keep saltwater fog off the dashboard equipment, bait boxes floating off the stern resting easy in the water on the wet black night. My own boat, a seventeen foot Mako with a big black Mercury engine on the back is tied up about twenty feet in front of my typewriter and I know the gas tank is full. I filled up last night around seven o'clock in the evening and when they asked me why I was gassing my boat up at the start of a bad moonless night I said,"I might want to go to Cuba." The fishhead woman laughed but I didn't. I went back to mixing the oil one quart to twelve gallons- be careful give the engine what it needs or whatever it wants for that matter cause when you're out on the ocean at night the engine is going to be your best friend. Cuba's only ninety miles away and I think I could get to Havana on a night like this a lot easier than I'm gonna get even ten miles away from a nightmare situation I've got myself into in this place. Sugarloaf Lodge as the fishing resort they say. Just another place to stay in the keys that if you want to bring your boat and get serious about the water. Which is true as far as it goes. This is a nice place- sprawling two hundred acre complex with its own airstrip a twenty four-hour liquor license sixty-five waterfront rooms of sixty five dollars a night- its own grocery store and gas station- a massive generator for electrical power- and even its own water tank. It is a completely self-contained community secure in every way from the storms of the outside world, and it is worth about twenty million dollars. The owner's Lloyd Good, a one time District Attorney from Philadelphia who bought the whole place on a whim about ten years ago and moved into a position of considerable power in the low end of the florida keys where there is basically no law at all that can't be broken or bought or at least casually ignored by the right people. I'm a paying guest at Lloyd Good's motel and from my desk I can see his apartment behind the general store about a hundred yards away from across the canal and I know is sleeping heavily on a king-sized bed over there with his wife Miriam a fine and friendly woman about fifty years old was always been my friend. She's been asleep since midnight and she will wake up early to supervise the breakfast shift at the restaurant. Lloyd will wake up later or at least you would on most days but on this one I suspect he will be an early riser. It could happen at any moment in fact and that is why I want to get the story down quick and get out of this place before dawn because ugly things are about to happen. There is a huge pigs head in Lloyd Good's toilet tonight. I put it there about three hours ago just before he walked home from the bar. The snout is poking straight-up and out of the family toilet and the pigs lips are glistening with ruby red lipstick and the eyes of propped open and the toilet bowl is filled with red commercial ketchup. The first time anybody in that house goes into the bathroom and turns the light on, I'm going to have to be very alert. We will have serious action, hysteria, wild rage. I've seen a lot of hideous things in my time but the sight of this eery white pigs head and the white toilet bowl with its mouth covered with lipstick is dead gray eyes looking straight up at me or at any one else comes near that toilet will live in my memory forever as one of the most generally hideous things that I have ever seen. The idea of waking up half drunk in the middle of the night and wandering into your own bathroom and *** distractedly into your own toilet and realizing after not many seconds that there's something basically wrong with the noise that normally happens when you *** into a bowl full of water in the middle of the night and feeling the splash of the warm urine on your knees because its bouncing off the lipstick smeared mouth of the dead pigs head that's clogging up your toilet is the bad thing to see when you're drunk- and Lloyd will see it soon. He should have seen it a long time ago in fact but tonight he broke his normal routine of relieving himself before falling into bed- and at that point the joke when out of control I thought, "What have I done. What if his wife wakes up first- which she almost certainly will or maybe John the thirteen-year-old son will be the first to visit the bathroom." I wasn't counting on this. My plan is turned weird on me and I have to flee. The things so ugly that I almost got sick while I was putting the lipstick on it. Now we all enjoy good humor but this is very far over the line. We're not talking about jokes here we're talking about Crazy Ugly-... Real malice- Terrible Shock and weeping for a 50 year-old lady or a 13 year-old child. People screaming out of control at a sight to vial to see. Innocent people crawling out of the bathroom on their knees and calling wildly for help from the father- and that evil drunken *** is going to be *** out of his sleep very soon by the terrified screams of his loved ones and when that happens he's going to turn crazy and want to kill somebody or maybe send others to do it and they'll come to number 202. My room is the only one with lights on tonight I'm still up and I will be on the road very soon. I have a friend up the road on Ramrod key who will take me and hide me for a while and my partner in the Gonzo salvage company will get my boat out of the marina. If we do it early enough We'll hide it up there on the trailer court on similar Jesus! I just looked to my left and I saw the curtains moving. My sliding glass door is wide open and he could jump me at any moment. That's why I have this big gray flashlight sitting next to me on the desk. It's a fully charged taser. A savage little tool capable of delivering a fifty thousand volt wack on anybody who comes within eighteen feet and I got the *** primed. Wappo! Fifty-thousand volts flopping around like a fish- eyes rolled back in his head screeching helplessly and then taking another shock. The taser will deliver five separate distinctly massive jolts once the barbs are fired into the victim. You can keep the buggers jumping around on the end of a little wire line for almost an hour if the machine is fully charged. I don't want to have to do it The taser is a felony crime in some states and I'm not sure what it is now in Florida but I know that anybody who comes to my door at this hour of the night will not have good news for me and they'll have to be shot was something. I'm not a violent person but I know there's a time and place for everything and this is unfortunately one of those times. I sawed off the head of the pig around midnight. Lloyd had it stored in the meat locker at the lodge planning to marinate for a big barbecue for his friends on Sunday with the head is main piece of art. I chopped it off with a meat saw in 45 seconds and it took about forty five more to put the lipstick on. The tube broke so I have to do it by hand rubbing a lump of red lipstick around the dead things gums like I was waxing some kind of dummy. And then the head wouldn't sit right in the bowl so I have to jeck it up by the ears and jam it back into proper position. I also had to prop the eyes open so that it'd be looking straight up at him. All this talk about ninety more seconds, sneaking into his home in putting a pig's head in his toilet. Okay. The jokes over now. I have to flee. It's six twenty-five on a wet Thursday morning and I know that somebody over there will be using the bathroom very soon. The time has come. I don't want to be around when it happens despite a pressing deadline that will cost me a lot of money to miss. And that *** will not take this thing lightly. Besides I owe him three-thousand dollars for my food and beverage bill for the past three months and he is worried about getting the money. Indeed I'm preparing to flee even now. I told him that pig was going to be very expensive. He and his boys put it in my bed the other night tied up in drugged and half hidden under the covers so that I sat down on the bed right next to the beast and began talking seriously on the telephone to my account was not amused when the thing suddenly began moving and I said,"I'm sorry. I'll have to call you back. There's a pig in my bed. Which was true. I calmed the beast down with a billy club and then hauled it up to the restaurant and set it loose in the dining room at the peek at the dining hour. People screamed and cursed me and ran around like rats while I was chopping the pig loose. Two the fishing guides cornered it and dragged it out to a van and then they slit its throat the next day and hung it up to bleed and then they put the meat locker to a cool off. Now the moral of the story is never let strangers get their hands on the key to your meat locker and also get out while you can. Which I will have to do now. Immediately The fat is in the fire. salah The epilogue to the story is the boy found it when he woke up to go to school. His mother heard him screaming on his way out of the house and then she saw it. "Egod" she thought, "what has he thrown up now?" "I ate 3 or 4 ***" she said,"and then I called Ernie to take the thing away. It was three-and-a-half hours before we can use the toilet. Lloyd didn't wake up until noon and by the time we went to the bathroom the head was lying in the bathtub." And I was gone. But I'm back now standing around the bar at night and people are a lot nicer to me. I buy drinks for woman put liters of Chivas Regal on my tab and I may be here for a while. March eighteenth nineteen eighty-three