Around the middle of the afternoon, as the psychedelic high was wearing off, the phone rang and an accusatory male voice said, “This is the Malibu Sheriff. We have reason to suspect there may be dangerous drugs in your house.” Hunter Thompson. He said he was in LA on a writing assignment and I invited him to join the party. He said he'd be there shortly. The commune and I dropped another hit of LSD that afternoon.
        Hunter didn't arrive till 3 AM, after the acid proselytizers had hit the road and I was sound asleep in bed with J'Nelle and baby Bryant. I came awoke with Hunter tugging my arm, insisting I get up and party. He and a group of seven or eight came into our bedroom, turned on the lights.
        I could not hold my eyes open. I said, “Let's do it tomorrow night.” Hunter was not happy with this response, as he had plans to party through dawn. He let loose some deprecating comments before departing with his entourage, and we got together the following night at a motel. J'Nelle and I had finally moved out and over-nighted in this motel a few miles up Pacific Coast Highway. We planned to move slowly and stop often with the baby.
        Hunter and Oscar Acosta, his famous Gonzo lawyer buddy, and I sat around the motel's swimming pool drinking beer from cans, smoking joints, “solving the world's problems.” At some point in our chatter, Oscar gifted me with a tin of pills, telling me what each was: “These are roaring uppers, and those other white ones are acid; this red mothah is a heavy downer and so are these others, although some of them, I think, are maybe uppers.”
        The next day, we stopped to take the Hearst Castle tour and, feeling the need for an energy booster, I took a white pill I thought was an upper but which turned out to be LSD. I was going into psychedelia as the tour began. In this altered state, I caught the tour guide's subtle double entendres, delivered as punch lines, and laughed at them. The other tourists didn't get these lines, as the guide was really amusing himself to cut the boredom, not trying for laughs. But, since I was reading him, he made eye contact with me just before he delivered the next, and the next, and so on through the tour. The LDS ended the traveling we did that day, and I was very cautious thereafter when I opened Oscar's gift box.
        Poorboy, by this time, 1969, had been published and I'd been informed that it didn't sell. That's when I learned that Michael Korda had first cancelled publication and sent out notice to reviewers to kill their reviews, then a few months later changed cancelled to postponed and eventually cut the first printing to 5,000 copies—and brought it out to no reviews.
        I was later told that three additional editions of 5,000 copies of the hardbacks were sold, for a total of around 20,000, which meant the book really did pretty well by word-of-mouth advertising, considering Korda's sabotage. But it didn't get a sniff of the Times bestseller list, so it was declared “a huge failure.” Seems Michael Korda had disappeared my editor and destroyed my novel, and I was left to wonder why he'd dumped the expected big profit the book had been on track to make.

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