Naf Naf Leather Biker Jacket
2 years ago
ARS SCIENTIAE ET MAGICAE
Hopper’s photographs may be around today only because they were snatched from his house in Taos by Walter Hopps. “We had a wonderful day together, and at night I had a paranoid episode upstairs,” he recalls matter-of-factly. “I started firing my machinegun. Then I passed out. Walter came crawling up the stairs and hid all my guns under his bed. When he left in the morning he took all my negatives for safekeeping.”
During the last five years of his 25-year-long binge, Hopper was drinking half a gallon of rum and 30 beers a day. The three grams of cocaine he was also ingesting were just so he could keep “moving around”. He had become so delusional that he thought such consumption was okay because “I wasn’t crawling around on the floor”.
In the mid-1980s he was forced into sobriety, imprisoned in Mexico when he was found wandering naked in the jungle, then hospitalised for months in LA after he tried to clamber onto the wing of a moving plane. The antipsychotic drugs they gave him in rehab caused temporary Parkinson’s disease. That terrified him even more than his cocaine psychoses. “God really gave me a big sledgehammer, dropped me to my knees.”