Another Dawn at the Seal Rock Inn
writing from the Hunter S. Thompson room at Point Lobos in San Francisco
Dear Wanderers,
I am writing to you from the Hunter S. Thompson room at the Seal Rock Inn in San Francisco. Immediately to the left is Sutro Park, and directly in front of me Land’s End and Point Lobos. The ocean is a few hundred yards from here, but I can’t see it. From this vantage point, all the world is a cool white blanket of fog.
Room 305 of the Seal Rock Inn is called the Hunter S. Thompson room because it is the room where Thomspon infamously holed up for three weeks in January of 1973 to write Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail 1972. The room had been rented for Thompson by Rolling Stone magazine in the hopes of getting him to write the book they’d been bankrolling for a year. Fear and Loathing famously begins like this:
Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 a.m. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn…out here at the far end of Geary Street: this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of ‘Seal Rock’ looming out of the ocean in the gray morning light. About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound…
I am writing this in July of 2024. It was the early morning buses that woke me this morning, and they’re now lined up in a row along La Playa, the 38R sign glowing in the fog.
It is all so familiar, this being my old neighborhood, the neighborhood in which I feel most at home in the world. I used to walk here, alone or with our son, covering the same blocks again and again on foot.
On foot I went again this morning, through Sutro Park, down Anza, right on 47th Avenue, then right again on Balboa down to where it meets La Playa, past the Safeway where we used to shop, behind which my husband’s paternal grandmother, affectionately known as Gay Pat, lived all the years of my husband’s childhood, through the battered condo plaza to Andytown Coffee Roasters, perched there over my beloved Ocean Beach.
I got my coffee and then walked back up to Seal Rock Inn, taking the steep staircase through the brush and eucalyptus, behind the salt-battered houses. In the years I lived here I never took those stairs. Now here I sit, at the same window where Thompson banged out “thirteen chapters—the bloody product of fifty-five consecutive hours of sleepless, foodless, high-speed editing.”
And though the buses still park here all day and late into the night, they’re electric now, and there are no barking seals.
The area is called Point Lobos after the appellation given it by Spanish explorers in the eighteenth century: Punta de los Lobos Marinas, point of the sea wolves. According to old accounts, the cacophonous barking of the seals helped ship captains avert disastrous run-ins with the rocky coast in the impenetrable fog.
I am here because of Hunter S. Thompson, sort of.
When I arrived in San Francisco to put this book together, they had a work-hole set up for me downtown at the Rolling Stone office…but I have a powerful aversion to working in offices, and when I didn’t show up for three or four days they decided to do the only logical thing: move the office out here to Seal Rock Inn.
One afternoon about three days ago they showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about forty pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls.
I have no Alan Rinzler (Thompson’s long-suffering editor) to ply me with speed and goad me on. God knows I have no grapefruit: who writes with grapefruit, anyway? I do have a bottle of Rose, five single-serving containers of Chobani Greek yogurt (Monterey Strawberry), a package of ground coffee I just bought at Andytown, and a giant bar of Ghirardelli dark chocolate with salted caramel. There’s instant oatmeal too, and a package of chocolate mint cookies my husband insisted on providing—not so much for me as for himself, when he comes by tonight to check on my progress. Which is to say it’s an altogether more civilized affair—a bit dull, perhaps, compared to Thompson, but that’s the way I roll.
Some things, though, we have in common. Both of us are here to write. Both of us are having a tricky time of it.
There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders, in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal communication. We came to this point sometime around the thirty-third hour, when I developed an insoluble writer’s block and began dictating big chunks of the book straight into the mircrophone…
Whereas Thompson had three weeks in room 305, I have two days. I’ve not hit writer’s block yet, but that’s because I haven’t started writing. When I do begin, it won’t be a book of searing reportage. I’m not here to write about politics. I’m here to write about love. Or something like it.