Other times I witnessed his atavistic side. Despite the rumors that followed me home when I left, he never held a gun to my head or laid a finger on me, but that’s not to say he didn’t throw a tantrum or two. Paranoid, he would lock everyone out of his cabin for hours at a time, intermittently setting off his alarm and firing guns into the air. One time I watched him beat his car because his cigarettes were locked inside, and another time he threw me out of the house for refusing to watch a snuff film. And he was hell on his new kitten, Hugo, especially when he felt I was paying it too much attention. He would snatch Hugo up, smudge his pink nose in cocaine, and send him darting across the kitchen floor. If I would get up from our work to shut the front door to keep the cat from fleeing outside, he would berate me with a round of screaming, furiously yelling at the top of his lungs that would have addled me if not for my own experience in a fit-throwing family.
http://www.pw.org/content/memory_hunter_s_thompson_postcard_louisville_kentucky