Thompson, Hunter S

by The Rum Diary

  He stared at me and I could see him mulling the thing over in his mind. Suddenly he whacked the ball off his desk and sent it bouncing into a corner. “Goddamnit!” he yelled. “Here I pay that guy a fat salary and what do I get out of him? A bunch of crap I can't use!” He fell back in the chair. "Well, he's finished. I knew he was trouble the minute I saw him. Now Segarra tells me he's running around the city on a motorcycle with no muffler, scaring the hell out of people. Did you hear him threaten to twist my head! Did you see his eyes? The guy's a nut -- I should have him locked up!

  “We don't need people like that,” he said. “It's one thing if they're worth a damn, but he's not. He's just a big bum, trying to make trouble.”

  I shrugged and turned to go, feeling angry and confused and a little ashamed of myself.

  Lotterman called after me. “Tell him to come in here. We'll pay him off and get him out of the building.”

  I crossed the room and told Yeamon that Lotterman wanted to see him. Just then I heard Lotterman call Segarra into his office. They were both in there when Yeamon went in.

  Ten minutes later he reappeared and came over to my desk. “Well, no more salary,” he said quietly. “Claims he doesn't owe me any severance pay either.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Man, what a rotten deal. I don't know what the hell is wrong with him.”

  Yeamon looked idly around the room. “Nothing unusual,” he said. “I think I'll go up to Al's for a beer.”

  “I saw Chenault up there earlier,” I said.

  He nodded. “I took her home. She cashed in the last of her traveler's checks.”

  I shook my head again, trying to think of something quick and cheerful to say, but before I could think of anything he was halfway across the room.

  “See you later,” I called after him. “We'll get drunk.”

  He nodded without turning around. I watched him clean out his desk. Then he left, saying nothing to anyone.

  I killed the rest of the day writing letters. At eight I found Sala in the darkroom and we drove up to Al's. Yeamon was alone in the patio, sitting at a corner table with his feet propped up on a chair and a distant expression on his face. He looked up as we approached. “Well,” he said quietly. “The journalists.”

  We mumbled and sat down with the drinks we had brought from the bar. Sala leaned back and lit a cigarette. “So the son of a bitch fired you,” he said.

  Yeamon nodded. “Yep.”

  “Well, don't let him play games with that severance pay,” Sala said. “If he gives you any trouble put the Labor Department on his ass -- you'll get paid.”

  “I'd better,” said Yeamon. “Otherwise I'll have to catch that bastard outside the building some night and beat it out of him.”

  Sala shook his head. “Don't worry. When he fired Art Glinnin he got socked for five bills. Glinnin finally took him to court.”

  “He paid me for three days,” said Yeamon. “Figured it out to the last hour.”

  “Hell,” said Sala, “report him tomorrow. Bust him. Let them serve a complaint -- he'll pay.”

  Yeamon thought for a moment. “That should come to a little over four hundred. I could live for a while, anyway.”

  “This is a hell of a place to go broke,” I said. “Four hundred's not much when you figure you need fifty just to get to New York.”

  He shook his head. “That's the last place I'll go. I don't get along with New York.” He sipped his drink. “No, when I abandon this place I think I'll head south down the islands and look around for a cheap freighter to Europe.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I don't know about Chenault.”

  We stayed at Al's all evening, talking about the places a man could go in Mexico and the Caribbean and South America. Sala was so bitter about Yeamon's being fired that he said several times that he was going to quit. “Who needs this place?” he shouted. “Blow it off the goddamn face of the earth -- who needs it?”

  I knew it was the rum talking, but after a while it began to talk for me too, and by the time we started back to the apartment I was ready to quit, myself. The more we talked about South America, the more I wanted to go there.

  “It's a hell of a place,” Sala kept saying. “Plenty of money floating around, English-language papers in all the big cities -- by God, that may be the place!”

  On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.

  The Rum Diary

  Six

  Needless to say, Sala didn't quit and neither did I. The atmosphere at the paper was more tense than ever. On Wednesday, Lotterman got a summons from the Department of Labor, ordering him to a hearing on the question of Yeamon's severance pay. He cursed about it all afternoon, saying it would be a cold day in hell before he'd give that nut a dime. Sala began taking bets on the outcome, giving three-to-one odds that Yeamon would collect.

  To make things worse, Tyrrell's departure had forced Lotterman to take over as city editor. This meant he did most of the work. It was only temporary, he said, but so far his ad in Editor & Publisher had drawn a blank.

  I was not surprised. “Editor,” it said. “San Juan daily. Begin immediately. Drifters and drinkers need not apply.”

  At one point he offered the job to me. I came in one day and found a note in my typewriter, saying Lotterman wanted to see me. When I opened the door to his office he was fumbling idly with his baseball. He smiled shrewdly and tossed it up in the air. “I've been thinking,” he said. “You seem pretty sharp -- ever handled a city desk?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Like to give it a whirl?” he asked, tossing the ball again.

  I wanted no part of it. There would be a good raise, but there would also be a hell of a lot of extra work. “I haven't been here long enough,” I said. “I don't know the city.”

  He tossed the baseball up in the air and let it thud on the floor. “I know,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

  “What about Sala?” I said, knowing Sala would turn it down. He had so many freelance assignments that I wondered why he bothered to keep his job at all.

  “Not a chance,” he replied. “Sala doesn't give a damn about the paper -- he doesn't give a damn about anything.” He leaned forward and dropped the baseball on the desk. “Who else is there? Moberg's a drunk, Vanderwitz is a psycho, Noonan's a fool, Benetiz can't speak English. . . Christ! Where do I get these people?” He fell back in his chair with a groan. “I've got to have somebody!” he shouted. “I'll go crazy if I have to do the whole paper myself!”

  “What about the ad?” I said. “No replies?”

  He groaned again. “Sure -- wineheads! One guy claimed to be the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes -- as if I gave a goddamn!” He slammed the ball violently on the floor. “Who keeps sending these wineheads down here?” he shouted. “Where do they come from?”

  He shook his fist at me and spoke as if he were uttering his last words: “Somebody has to fight it, Kemp -- they're taking over. These wineheads are taking over the world. If the press goes under, we're sunk -- you understand that?”

  I nodded.

  “By Jesus,” he went on, “we have a responsibility! A free press is vital! If a pack of deadbeats get hold of this newspaper it's the beginning of the end. First they'll get this one, then they'll get a few more, and one day they'll get the Times -- can you imagine it?”

  I said I couldn't.

  “They'll get us all!” he exclaimed. “They're dangerous -- insidious! That guy claiming he was the son of Justice Holmes -- I could pick him out of a crowd -- he'd be the one with hair on his neck and a crazy look in his eye!”

  Just then, as if on cue, Moberg came through the door, carrying a clipping from El Diario.

  Lotterman's eyes became wild. “Moberg!” he screamed. “Oh Jesus -- where do you get the nerve to come in here without knocking! By God I'll have you locked up! Get out!”

&nb
sp; Moberg retreated quickly, rolling his eyes at me as he left.

  Lotterman glared after him. “The nerve of that goddamn sot,” he said. “Christ, a sot like that should be put to sleep.”

  Moberg had been in San Juan only a few months, but Lotterman seemed to loathe him with a passion that it would take most men years to cultivate. Moberg was a degenerate. He was small, with thin blond hair and a face that was pale and flabby. I have never seen a man so bent on self-destruction -- not only self, but destruction of everything he could get his hands on. He was lewd and corrupt in every way. He hated the taste of rum, yet he would finish a bottle in ten minutes, then vomit and fall down. He ate nothing but sweet rolls and spaghetti, which he would heave the moment he got drunk. He spent all his money on whores and when that got dull he would take on an occasional queer, just for the strangeness of it. He would do anything for money, and this was the man we had on the police beat. Often he disappeared for days at a time. Then someone would have to track him down through the dirtiest bars in La Perla, a slum so foul that on maps of San Juan it appears as a blank space. La Perla was Moberg's headquarters; he felt at home there, he said, and in the rest of the city -- except for a few horrible bars -- he was a lost soul.

  He told me that he'd spent the first twenty years of his life in Sweden, and often I tried to picture him against a crisp Scandinavian landscape. I tried to see him on skis, or living peacefully with his family in some cold mountain village. From the little he said of Sweden I gathered he'd lived in a small town and his parents had been comfortable people with enough money to send him to college in America.

  He spent two years at NYU, living in the Village at one of those residence hotels that cater to foreigners. This apparently unhinged him. Once he was arrested on Sixth Avenue, he said, for pissing on a fireplug like a dog. It cost him ten days in the Tombs, and when he got out he left immediately for New Orleans. He floundered there for a while, then got a job on a freighter headed for the Orient. He worked on boats for several years before drifting into journalism. Now, thirty-three years old and looking fifty, his spirit broken and his body swollen with drink, he bounced from one country to another, hiring himself out as a reporter and hanging on until he was fired.

  Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of a stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard.

  “Lotterman thinks I'm a Demogorgon,” he would say. “You know what that is? Look it up -- no wonder he doesn't like me.”

  One night at Al's he told me he was writing a book, called The Inevitability of a Strange World. He took it very seriously. “It's the kind of book a Demogorgon would write,” he said. “Full of shit and terror -- I've selected the most horrible things I could imagine -- the hero is a flesh eater disguised as a priest -- cannibalism fascinates me -- once down at the jail they beat a drunk until he almost died -- I asked one of the cops if I could eat a chunk of his leg before they killed him. . .” He laughed. “The swine threw me out -- hit me with a club.” He laughed again. “I would have eaten it -- why shouldn't I? There's nothing sacred about human flesh -- it's meat like everything else -- would you deny that?”

  “No,” I said. “Why should I deny it?”

  It was one of the few times I talked to him that I could understand what he said. Most of the time he was incoherent. Lotterman was forever threatening to fire him, but we were so understaffed that he couldn't afford to let anyone go. When Moberg spent a few days in the hospital after his beating at the hands of the strikers, Lotterman had hopes that he might straighten out. But when he came back to work he was more erratic than before.

  At times I wondered which would be the first to go -- Moberg, or the News. The paper gave every appearance of being on its last legs. Circulation was falling off and we were losing advertising so steadily that I didn't see how Lotterman could hold out. He had borrowed heavily to get the paper going, and according to Sanderson, it had never made a nickel.

  I kept hoping for an influx of new blood, but Lotterman had become so wary of “wineheads” that he rejected every reply to his ads. “I've got to be careful,” he explained. “One more pervert and we're finished.”

  I feared he couldn't afford to pay any more salaries, but one day a man named Schwartz appeared in the office, saying he had just been thrown out of Venezuela, and Lotterman hired him immediately. To everyone's surprise he turned out to be competent. After a few weeks he was doing all the work that Tyrrell had done.

  This took a lot of the strain off Lotterman, but it didn't do much for the paper. We went from twenty-four pages down to sixteen, and finally to twelve. The outlook was so bleak that people began saying El Diario had the News's obituary set in type and ready to go.

  I felt no loyalty to the paper, but it was good to have a salary while I fished for something larger. The idea that the News might fold began to worry me and I wondered why San Juan, with all its new prosperity, couldn't support such a small thing as an English-language newspaper. The News was no prize-winner, but it was at least readable.

  A large part of the trouble was Lotterman. He was capable enough, in a purely mechanical way, but he had put himself in an untenable position. As an admitted ex-communist, he was under constant pressure to prove how much he'd reformed. At that time the U.S. State Department was calling Puerto Rico “America's advertisement in the Caribbean -- living proof that capitalism can work in Latin America.” The people who had come there to do the proving saw themselves as heroes and missionaries, bringing the holy message of Free Enterprise to the downtrodden jibaros. They hated commies like they hated sin, and the fact that an ex-Red was publishing a paper in their town did not make them happy.

  Lotterman simply couldn't cope with it. He went out of his way to attack anything that smelled even faintly of the political Left, because he knew he'd be crucified if he didn't. On the other hand, he was a slave to the freewheeling Commonwealth government, whose U.S. subsidies were not only supporting half the new industry on the island, but were paying for most of the News advertising as well. It was a nasty bind -- not just for Lotterman, but for a good many others. In order to make money they had to deal with the government, but to deal with the government was to condone “creeping socialism” -- which was not exactly compatible with their missionary work.

  It was amusing to see how they handled it, because if they thought about it at all there was only one way out -- to praise the ends and ignore the means, a time-honored custom that justifies almost anything except shrinking profits.

  To go to a cocktail party in San Juan was to see all that was cheap and greedy in human nature. What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities. It was a new wave of Okies, heading south instead of west, and in San Juan they were kingfish because they had literally taken over.

  They formed clubs and staged huge social events, and finally one of them began publishing a merciless scandal sheet that terrified and intimidated everyone whose past was not politically pure. This took in half the gang, including poor Lotterman, who suffered some vicious libel almost every week.

  There was no shortage of free liquor for the press, because all hustlers crave publicity. No occasion was too small for them to give what they called a “press party” in its honor. Each time Woolworth's or the Chase Manhattan Bank opened a new branch, they celebrated with an orgy of rum. Not a month went by without the opening of a new bowling alley; they were building them on every vacant lot, so many bowling alleys that it was horrible to ponder the meaning of it.

  From the new San Juan Chamber of Commerce came a stream of statements and proclamations that made Jehovah's Witnesses seem pale and pessimistic -- long breast-beating screeds, announcing one victory after another in the crusade for Big Money. And on top of all this, there was a ne
ver-ending round of private parties for visiting celebrities. Here again, no half-wit Riwanian was too insignificant for a blow-out in his honor.

  I usually went to these things with Sala. At the sight of his camera the guests would turn to jelly. Some of them would act like trained pigs and others would mill around like sheep, all waiting for “the man from the paper” to push his magic button and make their lavish hospitality pay off.

  We tried to go early, and while Sala was herding them around for a series of meaningless photos that would probably never even be developed, I would steal as many bottles of rum as I could carry. If there was a bartender I would tell him I wanted a bit of drink for the press, and if he protested I would take them anyway. No matter what kind of outrage I committed, I knew they would never complain.

  Then we would head for Al's, dropping the rum at the apartment on the way. We put all the bottles on an empty bookshelf and sometimes there were as many as twenty or thirty. In a good week we would hit three parties and average three or four bottles for each half hour of painful socializing. It was a good feeling to have a stock of rum that would never run out, but after a while I could no longer stand even a few minutes at each party, and I had to give it up.

  The Rum Diary

  Seven

  One Saturday in late March, when the tourist season was almost over and the merchants were bracing themselves for the muggy low-profit summer, Sala had an assignment to go down to Fajardo, on the eastern tip of the island, and take some pictures of a new hotel that was going up on a hill overlooking the harbor. Lotterman thought the News could strike a cheerful note by pointing out that things were going to be even better next season.

  I decided to go along for the ride. Ever since I'd come to San Juan I'd been meaning to get out on the island, but without a car it was impossible. My furthest penetration had been to Yeamon's, about twenty miles out, and Fajardo was twice as far in the same direction. We decided to get some rum and stop by his place on the way back, hoping to get there just as he paddled in from the reef with a bulging sack of lobsters. “He's probably damn good at it by now,” I said. “God knows what he's living on -- they must have a steady diet of lobster and chicken.”