Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  Then he walks happily through the midday sun of Papeete to a small house where two handsome children eagerly await his weekly visit. As soon as they see him they start to shout, “Papa! Papa!” and then drag into the flowering yard a beautiful woman with long black hair at whose home Leeteg boards his children. She bows to him and he greets her warmly.

  Leeteg draws the children around him and listens to their stories of the week’s triumphs. “I had a pretty good week, too,” he says, throwing a fistful of francs on the table.

  “That’s too much, Edgar,” the lovely woman says.

  “Children always need money,” he laughs. “Anyway, you know me, I’ll booze it away tonight.”

  Everyone laughs at this and the daughter, a beautiful thing about to burst into womanhood, says, “You were very bad in Papeete last week, Father. You almost wrecked the party at James Norman Hall’s.”

  “This week no booze,” her father promises. He then kisses his children, says good-by to the beautiful woman who takes care of them, and steps forth into the golden tropical sunlight. “You kids listen to her,” he admonishes. “She knows what’s best for you.”

  From the garden the children wave good-by to the chunky American with the little feet as he walks, with increasingly quick steps, toward the water-front bars.

  Leeteg has performed his business and family duties for the day. He has mailed his paintings, dispatched his two dozen letters, evened things out at the bank and seen his Tahiti family. He is ready for some fun, and as he turns a corner onto the main street of Papeete—that wild, poetic street that faces the quay and resembles no other in the world, for yachts tie up stern to, right in the middle of town—he sees that a new white craft has docked and now rests with its after parts jutting into the street not far from the Chinese store where he buys his canned goods. On its stern appears, in fine lettering, Philante.

  “Yeeeeiiii!” he explodes in a shattering cry of sheer joy. “Philante, watch out!”

  With dancing little steps, for his short legs will permit no other, he dashes across the street, over the grass and up the gangplank, allowing his momentum to carry him onto the deck, where he grabs a marlinspike and begins hammering on everything he can reach. “Get up, you goddam sonsabitches,” he screams. “Get up! Get me a girl!”

  From the interior of the yacht a young American sailor appears and the painter leaps at him like a bear and carries him to the deck. “Case!” he bellows. “Where’s a girl?”

  Spectators have now gathered along the shore and are watching the brawl. The two Americans tumble noisily about the yacht and the artist keeps shouting for girls. Finally, from the crowd on shore a native girl from the island of Raïatéa identifies the troublemaker and shouts, “Leeteg! Leeteg!”

  The brawling painter stops, looks down into the crowd and spots the girl, a playmate of former riots. Quickly he runs down the gangplank, grabs her by the hand and hauls her onto the deck. Other members of the crew, awakened from their midday naps, appear and a soft-spoken Englishman pleads, “Edgar! Not again this week!”

  “I’m not gonna drink a drop!” he promises.

  “Seriously, we have a meeting here this afternoon. Don’t tear the ship apart again today.”

  There is a moment of hesitation and then the girl jerks Leeteg’s hand. “Come along,” she whispers. “We go Quinn’s.”

  “Hey, that’s a good idea! We’ll all go Quinn’s.”

  He leads a motley gang toward Tahiti’s famous bar, and hangers-on, who have been dozing in the sun, suddenly become alert when word goes round that Leeteg has some money. The party now has about a dozen able members and soon bangs its way into Quinn’s Tahitian Hut, where Leeteg commandeers three split-bamboo alcoves and starts setting up drinks for the house. He pours his down in huge gulps and by late afternoon is almost blind drunk.

  In a stupor he rolls from Quinn’s to Col Bleu and then by taxi out to Les Tropiques for dinner, after which he hires two cabs and takes the entire gang out to the Lido, east of town. Everywhere he buys liquor for the crowd, not one of whom he can recognize by now, but toward midnight he steers himself uncertainly back to the Philante, dragging three island girls along with him. Trying to find the gangplank, he falls into Papeete Bay, from which the Philante crew drag him shivering and apparently dead.

  But for Leeteg the night is just beginning. Stripping off all but his underpants, he runs through the streets yelling for girls, and finally one of his old mistresses, fatter and with fewer teeth, catches him and hauls him into a dingy hotel, where she hides him before the police can arrest him. Another long-time girl friend has meanwhile assembled his wet clothes at the quay and now takes them to the hotel, where the first native woman interprets this as trespass on her man of the night. Accordingly she belts the newcomer over the head with a shoe.

  A majestic brawl ensues in which the two water-front girls try to gouge out each other’s eyes, whereupon Leeteg, though in a stupor that prevents him from ever understanding who the two girls are, tries to make love to each. Suddenly they turn on him and scream in French, “We’ll kick his balls off!”

  Their rage now has a common target and they begin to assault him. With bottles, shoe heels and a little knife they try to smash him and carve him up, outraged by their memories of old offenses against their love and their youthful dignity.

  “We’re going to kill him!” they scream.

  The landlady hears the crashing of the furniture and forces her way into the room. She finds the American sprawled on the floor, bleeding heavily from several wounds. At first she thinks him dead and adds her screams to the night; but the corpse rises, looks at himself shakily in a dirty mirror, and starts to rub the blood away from his face. He smears it further. Then, pushing aside the three shouting women, he lurches naked into the darkened street.

  A big policeman, speaking a patient patois of French, Tahitian and English, ambles slowly over, puts a fat, protecting arm around the chubby artist, and says, “Another big night, eh, Edgar?”

  He leads the American to another hotel and asks the landlady there to put him to bed. She has performed this deed of charity often before, but tonight she shies away from the bloody face and refuses.

  “Please,” the policeman says in French. “The night is over. Put him to bed.”

  “Throw him in there,” she growls.

  There is a commotion, of course, before the painter can be got into the bed, so that in a room down the hall a woman who once lived with Leeteg hears that he is back in town. Quietly she slips away from her man of the evening, scurries along the hall, and darts into Edgar’s room. Her man misses her and begins to bellow, “Teuru, come back here!”

  When there is no reply he suspects that she has gone to Leeteg, so he roars down the passageway and begins to bang on the artist’s door. “Goddam you, Teuru! Come out here.”

  There is a soft giggle inside and he becomes infuriated. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

  He does not specify whom he is going to murder but after a while the patient policeman appears and tells him to go back to bed. “My girl’s in there!” the outraged man reports.

  The policeman studies the man, studies the door. “You better go back to sleep,” he advises.

  When all is quiet, Leeteg’s door opens. He appears wrapped in a woman’s pareu, and after him tiptoes the water-front girl he knew years ago. They slip along the darkened hallway and out into the fragrant tropical night. A breeze has set in from Mooréa, and the palms along the shore are bending against the moon. Silently the accidental lovers steal out of the hotel and across the main street, and make a dash for the Philante. This time Leeteg is in much too bad shape to negotiate the gangplank, and again he pitches into the bay.

  “He’s drowning!” the girl screams in French.

  The policeman walks unhurriedly up, looks over the situation and calls, “Philante! You got a boat hook?”

  A tiny light appears aboard, followed by Case, the American sailor, who fishes the
drowning artist from the bay. Unsteadily, Leeteg climbs aboard, refreshed by the cold water. “You got any girls here?” he mumbles.

  “Christ, what hit your face? Looks like a shoe heel.”

  “You got any girls?”

  The owner of the yacht appears in shorts. “Oh, dammit, Edgar. Not all night again, please.”

  “You got any girls?” Leeteg asks huskily.

  “Shall I take him to jail?” the policeman asks.

  “No, we’ll bunk him down somewhere.”

  “Where are the girls?” Leeteg demands in a roar.

  Up the gangplank hurries the dark-skinned girl who rescued him from the hotel. “Hello, Teuru,” the Philante men say.

  “We sleep him here,” she says solicitously.

  But at that moment Leeteg collapses on the deck and it takes two sailors and the girl to drag his leaden body into the saloon, where he promptly and happily begins to snore. The girl covers him with a blanket and lies beside him. Then she too falls asleep. A bright rosy glow begins to rise on the peaks of Mooréa and a fishing boat puts into the magic harbor with its night’s catch, while a church bell rings across the town.

  Tuesday is over in Tahiti.

  This account does not exaggerate Edgar Leeteg’s regular Tuesday performances during the middle years of this century. He rioted, dissipated his energies, destroyed his health, fornicated with anyone he could find, often wound up in jail or hospital, and awoke on Wednesday with a clear head. That he survived even a year of such abuse is a miracle. That he died in the middle of such a night was appropriate.

  The immediate impulse that launched such astonishing performances is found in his report to a friend: “I’ve rolled up enough fool adventures here to perpetuate my memory for years to come.” No one can read Leeteg’s painstaking accounts of his binges without realizing that the artist planned them, carried them out and wrote about them with one purpose in mind. He wanted to be talked about and remembered as a wild character. He wanted to become a legend.

  What were the details of the legend he worked so hard to create?

  His grandfather Lütig (Lutteg, Leeteg) had been a graveyard sculptor in Germany, his great-grandfather an architect. Leeteg was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, on April 13, 1904, the son of a butcher who worked across the river in St. Louis, but Leeteg once claimed that his first breath was a whiff of the Chicago stockyards, a city which he later admitted he had never seen and didn’t want to see. At sixteen he went to work for an uncle in Little Rock, Arkansas, after which he shifted to many jobs: cotton picking in Louisiana, foundry work in Illinois, herding cows in Texas, odd jobs in Alaska.

  At twenty-two he landed a good position with Foster & Kleiser, a large outdoor advertising concern in Sacramento, California, where he mastered the art of working from a small photograph or drawing which was to be expanded until it filled a billboard. He was especially skilled in making the required enlargements with his unaided eye and at depicting, even on billboards of mammoth size, human figures that created the illusion of roundness. He favored bright colors and prided himself on producing a billboard whose parts were in harmony. After he became a successful artist he was often accused of being nothing but a hack letterer; actually, he was not much good at lettering and could not have made a living that way, but he was already highly skilled at copying photographs of the human figure.

  Toward the end of his life, a Boston publisher asked him to write his autobiography, and the world lost a lusty volume when he completed only a few pages and quit the effort. His words do explain, however, how he stumbled upon Tahiti.

  “My first trip to Tahiti was a vacation of six weeks in 1930. I chose Tahiti from a bunch of travel folders because the $134 round-trip fare by the Union Steamship Co. fitted into my year’s savings for a vacation. Even at that my vacation was almost cut short upon arrival because the Tahiti government demanded $20 of the $54 I had in my pocket as a landing tax for a sojourn of over three days.

  “I could have returned by the northbound steamer within three days, but I tightened my belt, sold my boots and camera, subsisted on a bowl of soup and bread bought for two francs nightly at a Chinese restaurant, and borrowed $8 from another American, C. C. Campbell, who operated a combination curio shop, rooming house, and real estate office in Papeete. I faced foodless days when a policeman caught me riding one of Campbell’s bicycles one evening at dusk and hauled me into court for riding without a light. The court summons set a date which would be later than my departure date. Campbell advised me to request the court to set the date forward rather than for me to sneak away like a cur avoiding punishment. So I asked for a trial date that would be prior to my departure. It was granted by a surprised official. At the trial my English testimony in a French court got me short shrift and a fine of five francs, which was not exorbitant to my lean purse until I discovered upon paying my fine that it meant sixty francs including costs. As an explanation the official told me that ink and paper for entering the court proceedings cost money.

  “Certainly the tropical splendor of Tahiti exceeded the glowing words of the travel folders. I hiked into jungle-choked Fautaua Valley and got lost looking for the waterfall. I rode the hundred-odd miles around Tahiti and to Tautira, the most beautiful native village. At a hotel near there I contracted ptomaine poisoning from a free breakfast given by a somewhat surly proprietor. At the time I thought his generosity strange; afterward I reasoned differently when I fell from the bicycle and lay beside the road doubled in abdominal pains until the retching came. The proprietor had evidently learned where his favorite maid had slept the previous night. Few people passed where I lay moaning on that country road, but of the few who did, none stopped to ask the trouble or offer aid. Tahiti seems to have a dearth of Good Samaritans. What charity is dispensed in Tahiti today is principally given by the American residents. The last night of my Tahiti vacation was in the company of another American and two island belles at the old Tiare Hotel, now dismantled but in those days the bright spot of the island.

  “Campbell trusted me with some souvenirs but the real Tahitian souvenir was given me by the little gal of the night before. I became increasingly aware of her souvenir as the boat steamed ten days back to San Francisco. No, I can’t say that my first acquaintance with Tahiti made me vow to return some day. Adding up and balancing the pleasure and the pain, I did not then care if I ever saw the place again.

  “When I returned from my Tahiti vacation I became aware of the effects of the 1929 depression upon my job with Foster & Kleiser Co. Some of my fellow workers and union brothers voiced regret that I came back to share the meager amount of work available. Another young man who had been taking over my work as pattern-maker was bitter that I was taking my job back. He complained that he was married and I was not, therefore he needed the work more than I did. As a more efficient and willing worker than some around me I now came in for more criticism for not slowing down. I was on trial at my labor union for working a few minutes overtime to complete a job in the country which otherwise would have necessitated another long trip the following morning. Fidelity to my work earned me the promotion to foreman of the hand-painted poster department. I could fire the men who worked under me. When they shirked and slowed down production I did fire some. Jobs became bones that the so-called brothers fought over. Work was spread out thinly a few days a week to keep all the men on the payroll. Still, jobs were bones that brothers fought over. One morning when I came to my work on a poster, the head designer, and my best friend, was working on it. ‘My kids have to eat!’ he shouted at me to hide his embarrassment.

  “All this was building up a bitterness in me. Letters were coming to me from Campbell saying there was opportunity awaiting me in Tahiti. A company was forming to build a theater in Papeete and he had wangled me the job of doing the decorating and subsequently the lobby advertising. They had great plans. With the passing years I learned that people of Papeete always have great plans, none of which materialize; the pleasure they deriv
e is from the dreaming, the profit from those they can convince of their dreams. The little lady who bequeathed me the souvenir mailed me a can of guava jelly and an offer to share her plantation with her. Neither was good. The jelly was spoiled by the customs poking an enquiring knife point into the can.

  “At this critical time I received a small inheritance due my deceased father, all that was left of his father’s estate in Germany. I had been trying to establish my claim to it for fourteen years. Finally a plea to Hitler himself freed the money. No, I didn’t sell our America nor myself to soften the dictator’s heart; it was probably just a brotherly tie between one housepainter and another that appealed to him. The lawyer went with us to his bank to cash the draft and took his half at the cashier’s window. The remaining half called for a decision as to how best to spend it. Mom and I talked it over again and again. Shall we use it to eke out a thin and thinning weekly pay check? Or shall we cut loose from the struggle and find a new hunting ground? Where to go? The depression was everywhere. As secretary to my union I received scores of printed requests such as ‘No work in Chicago,’ ‘Union clearance cards will not be received by local such-and-such.’ But there lay the last letter from Campbell offering opportunity in the Garden of Eden. The decision was not so hard after all. We packed our few belongings, bought new clothes. I stole several brushes from the plant where I was in charge of supplies. I washed out a dozen mayonnaise jars and filled them with paint from the stockroom. Then with a trusting gray-haired mother, a portable phonograph, and a dozen jars of assorted paints, I tossed my job to my hungry friends and set sail for Tahiti … where the happy failures go. And for me as well as the other odd hundred Americans in Tahiti, life began for us from the moment we waved at the sea of happy faces that meet every ship coming to Papeete.”