“This is Hunter Thompson. If you can get out here tomorrow, this job is yours. I’ll have my assistant buy you a ticket. You can pick it up at the airport. Tomorrow.”

In 1992, at 3am, Cheryl Della Pietra, now a copyeditor and mother, rolled out of bed in her postage stamp-sized Greenwich Village apartment to answer the ringng phone. Who could it be? In her Moment for SMITH Magazine, she writes:

I’m often up until 2, but almost never 3. And even though at this hour I’ve slept through hotel fire alarms, the phone jars me awake. The voice could be a prank, but it’s too random, and too much as I’ve imagined from what I’ve read. It’s a barky mumble, at once shy and demanding.

“Can you get out here tomorrow?”

“I’m sorry?” I say, sitting up.

“This is Hunter Thompson. If you can get out here tomorrow, this job is yours. I’ll have my assistant buy you a ticket. You can pick it up at the airport. Tomorrow.”

Read the rest of Cheryl’s Moment.

“There lives a voice there now, in the house of my memory, the ghost of the last thing my father said to me. This ghost is a comedian.”

Ask me how my father died and I’ll say, He fell and hit his head. I’ll say, It was a blood vessel that burst. I’ll say, It only took 30 seconds, because that’s what the coroner said. I’ll say, I don’t really know, because no one was there to see what happened, just my father, and he didn’t bother to leave a note, as I’m sure he would have written, Well I’ll be dipped in shit. He was always one to make these kinds of remarks at an inappropriate time—say, when you’re losing a lot of blood, when you’re crawling through broken bottles to find a place to die. (more…)

When we initially put out a call for “Moments” to see if the concept would work as well as we hoped, we contacted a few of our favorite illustrators (a selection of the Moments that will end up in The Moment book will be illustrations, comics, or photographs). One such artist, Adriano Moraes, immediately replied by explaning, “My Moment involved a punch in the face and a knife. Between choosing accepting one or using the latter. I choose to leave.” He went on to explain: (more…)