Hunter S. Thompson

by The Rum Diary

  Somewhere in Santurce we stopped to let some schoolchildren cross the street and they all began laughing at us. “La cucaracha!” they yelled. “Cucaracha! cucaracha!”

  Sala looked embarrassed.

  “What's going on?” I asked.

  “The little bastards are calling this car a cockroach,” he muttered. “I should run a few of them down.”

  I grinned and leaned back in the seat as we drove on. There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I'd come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time. Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue -- and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum. Everybody I met acted as if they had just come back from a crucial screen test. And I was being paid a ridiculous salary to wander around and take it all in, to “find out what was going on.”

  I wanted to write all my friends and invite them down. I thought of Phil Rollins, breaking his ass in New York, chasing after stalled subways and gang-fights in Brooklyn; Duke Peterson, sitting in the White Horse and wondering what in hell to do next; Carl Browne in London, bitching about the climate and grubbing endlessly for assignments; Bill Minnish, drinking himself to death in Rome. I wanted to cable them all -- “Come quick stop plenty of room in the rum barrel stop no work stop big money stop drink all day stop hump all night stop hurry it may not last.”

  I was considering this, watching the palms flash by me and feeling the sun on my face, when I was suddenly thrown against the windshield as we came to a screeching halt. At the same instant a pink taxicab streaked across the intersection, missing us by six feet.

  Sala's eyes bulged and the veins stood out in his neck. “Mother of God!” he screamed. “Did you see that bastard? Right through the red light!”

  He jerked the car into gear and we roared off. “Jesus!” he muttered. “These people are too much! I've got to get out of this place before they kill me.”

  He was trembling and I offered to drive. He ignored me. “Man, I'm serious,” he said. “I've got to get away -- my luck's running out”

  He had said the same thing before and I think he believed it. He was forever talking about luck, but what he really meant was a very ordered kind of fate. He had a strong sense of it -- a belief that large and uncontrollable things were working both for and against him, things that were moving and happening every minute all over the world. The rise of communism worried him because it meant that people were going blind to his sensitivity as a human being. The troubles of the Jews depressed him because it meant that people needed scapegoats and sooner or later he would be one of them. Other things bothered him constantly: the brutality of capitalism because his talents were being exploited, the moronic vulgarity of American tourists because it gave him a bad reputation, the careless stupidity of Puerto Ricans because they were forever making his life dangerous and difficult, and even, for some reason I never understood, the hundreds of stray dogs that he saw in San Juan.

  Not much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the fact that he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan who runs onto the field and tackles a player. He saw life as the Big Game, and the whole of mankind was divided into two teams -- Sala's Boys, and The Others. The stakes were fantastic and every play was vital -- and although he watched with a nearly obsessive interest, he was very much the fan, shouting unheard advice in a crowd of unheard advisors and knowing all the while that nobody was paying any attention to him because he was not running the team and never would be. And like all fans he was frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would be to run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then be hauled off by guards while the crowd laughed.

  We never got to the university because Sala had an epileptic fit and we had to turn around. I was rattled, but he shook it off and refused to let me drive.

  On the way back to the paper I asked him how he'd managed to keep his job as long as a year.

  He laughed. “Who else can they get? I'm the only pro on the island.”

  We crept along in a huge traffic jam and finally he got so nervous that I had to drive. When we got to the paper the vicious bums had disappeared, but the newsroom was in turmoil. Tyrrell, the workhorse, had just quit, and Moberg had been beaten half to death by the union goons. They had seized him outside the building and avenged their loss to Yeamon.

  Lotterman was sitting on a chair in the middle of the newsroom, groaning and jabbering while two cops tried to talk to him. A few feet away, Tyrrell sat calmly at his desk, going about his business. He had given a week's notice.

  The Rum Diary

  Four

  As I expected, my talk with Segarra turned out to be wasted time. We sat at his desk for almost an hour, trading inanities and chuckling at each other's jokes. Although he spoke perfect English there was still a language barrier, and I sensed immediately that no real meaning would ever pass between us. I got the impression that he knew what was going on in Puerto Rico, but he seemed to know nothing about journalism. When he talked like a politician he made sense, but it was difficult to see him as the editor of a newspaper. He seemed to think that as long as he knew the score, that was enough. The idea that he should pass on what he knew to anyone else, especially to the public at large, would have struck him as dangerous heresy. At one point he gave me a jolt when he mentioned that he and Sanderson had been classmates at Columbia.

  It took me a long time to understand Segarra's function at the News. They called him The Editor, but he was really a pimp and I paid no attention to him.

  Perhaps that's why I didn't make many friends in Puerto Rico -- at least not the kind of friends I might have made -- because, as Sanderson very gently explained to me one day, Segarra came from one of the wealthiest and most influential families on the island and his father was a former attorney general. When Nick became editor of the Daily News, the paper made a lot of valuable friends.

  I had not given Lotterman credit for this kind of devious thinking, but as time went by I saw that he used Segarra solely as a front man, a sleek, well-oiled figurehead to convince the literate public that the News was not a yanqui mouthpiece, but a fine local institution like rum and sugarballs.

  After our first talk, Segarra and I exchanged an average of about thirty words a week. Once in a while he would leave a note in my typewriter, but he made a point of saying as little as possible. In the beginning this suited me well enough, even though Sanderson explained that as long as Segarra had the nix on me I was doomed to social oblivion.

  But I had no social ambitions in those days. I had a license to wander. I was a working journalist and I had easy access to anything I needed, including the finest cotillions and the Governor's house and secret coves where debutantes swam naked at night.

  After a while, however, Segarra began to bother me. I had a feeling that I was being cut out of things and that he was the reason for it. When I was not invited to parties that I would not have gone to in the first place, or when I called some government official on the phone and was brushed off by his secretary, I began to feel like a social leper. This wouldn't have bothered me at all had I felt it was my own doing, but the fact that Segarra was exercising some sinister control over me began to get on my nerves. Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want

  At first I was tempted to laugh it off, to give him as hard a time as I could and let him do his worst. But I didn't, because I was not quite ready to pack up and move on again. I was getting a little
too old to make powerful enemies when I held no cards at all, and I had lost some of my old zeal that had led me, in the past, to do what I damn well felt like doing, with the certain knowledge that I could always flee the consequences. I was tired of fleeing, and tired of having no cards. It occurred to me one evening, as I sat by myself in Al's patio, that a man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. I'd been doing it for ten years and I had a feeling that my reserve was running low.

  Segarra and Sanderson were good friends, and, oddly enough, although Segarra considered me a boor, Sanderson went out of his way to be decent. A few weeks after I met him I had to call Adelante about a story I was doing, and I thought I might as well talk to Sanderson as anyone else.

  He greeted me like an old buddy, and after giving me all the information I needed, he invited me out to his house for dinner that night. I was so surprised that I accepted without a thought. The tone of his voice made it seem so natural that I should eat dinner at his house that I had already hung up before I realized that it was not natural at all.

  After work I took a cab out to his house. When I got there I found Sanderson on his porch with a man and a woman who had just come in from New York. They were on their way to St. Lucia to meet their yacht, which the crew had brought back from Lisbon. A mutual friend had told them to look up Sanderson when they stopped in San Juan and they had taken him completely by surprise.

  “I've sent out for some lobster,” he told us. “We have no choice but to drink until it arrives.”

  It turned out to be an excellent evening. The couple from New York reminded me of something I had not seen in a long time. We talked of yachts, which I knew because I had worked on them in Europe, and which they knew because they came from a world where everyone seemed to own one. We drank white rum, which Sanderson said was much better than gin, and by midnight we were all drunk enough to go down to the beach for a naked swim.

  After that night I spent almost as much time at Sanderson's as I spent at Al's. His apartment looked like it had been designed in Hollywood for a Caribbean movie set. It was the bottom half of an old stucco house, right on the beach near the edge of town. The living room had a domed ceiling, with a fan hanging down and a wide door that opened on a screen porch. In front of the porch was a garden full of palms, with a gate leading down to the beach. The porch was higher than the garden, and at night you could sit there with a drink and see all the way into the city. Once in a while a cruise ship passed out at sea, brightly lit and heading for St. Thomas or the Bahamas.

  When the night was too warm, or when you got too drunk, you could take a towel and go down to the beach for a swim. Afterward, there was good brandy, and if you were still drunk there was an extra bed.

  Only three things bothered me at Sanderson's -- one was Sanderson, who was such an excellent host that I wondered what was wrong with him; one was Segarra, who was very often there when I came by; and the other was a man named Zimburger, who lived in the top half of the house.

  Zimburger was more beast than human -- tall, paunchy and bald, with a face out of some fiendish comic strip. He claimed to be an investor and was forever talking about putting up hotels here and there, but as far as I could see the only thing he did was go to Marine Corps Reserve meetings on Wednesday nights. Zimburger had never got over the fact that he had been a captain in The Corps. Early on Wednesday afternoon he would put on his uniform and come down to Sanderson's porch to drink until it was time for the meeting. Sometimes he wore the uniform on Mondays, or Fridays -- usually on some flimsy pretext.

  “Extra training today,” he would say. “Commander So-and-So wants me to help out with pistol instruction.”

  Then he would laugh and get another drink. He never took off his overseas cap, even after he had been indoors for five or six hours. He drank incessantly, and by the time it got dark he was steaming drunk and shouting. He would pace around the porch or the living room, snarling and denouncing the “cowards and the back-dusters in Washington” for not sending the Marines into Cuba.

  “I'll go!” he would shout. “Goddamn right I'll go! Somebody has to stomp them bastards and it might as well be me!”

  Often he wore his pistol belt and his holster -- he had to leave his gun on the base -- and from time to time he would slap leather and bark at some imaginary foe outside the door. It was embarrassing to see him go for his gun, because he seemed to think it was really there, riding large and loose on his flabby hip, “just like it was on Iwo Jima.” It was a pitiful sight and I was always glad when he left.

  I avoided Zimburger whenever I could, but sometimes he took us by surprise. I would go to Sanderson's with a girl I had met somewhere; we would have dinner and sit around talking afterward -- and suddenly there would be a pounding on the screen door. In he would come, his face red, his khaki shirt stained with sweat, his overseas cap crushed down on his bullet-shaped head -- and he would sit down with us for God knows how long, carrying on at the top of his lungs about some international disaster that could easily have been averted “if they'd just let the goddamn Marines do their job, instead of keeping us penned up like dogs.”

  For my money, Zimburger should not only have been penned up like a dog, but shot like a mad one. How Sanderson tolerated him I couldn't understand. He was never anything but gracious to Zimburger, even when it became obvious to everyone else that the man should be strapped up and rolled into the sea like a sack of waste. I guessed it was because Sanderson was too much a public relations man. I never once saw him lose his temper, and in his job he was saddled with more bores and bastards and phonies than any man on the island.

  Sanderson's view of Puerto Rico was very different from any I'd heard at the News. He had never seen a place with more potential, he said. In ten years it would be a paradise, a new American gold coast. There was so much opportunity that it staggered his imagination.

  He got very excited when he talked about all the things that were happening in Puerto Rico, but I was never sure how much of his talk he believed. I never contradicted him, but he knew I didn't take him quite seriously.

  “Don't give me that crooked smile,” he would say. “I worked for the paper -- I know what those idiots say.”

  Then he'd get even more excited. “Where do you get this superior attitude?” he would say. “Nobody down here cares if you went to Yale or not. All you are to these people is a low-life reporter, just another bum from the Daily News.”

  This business about Yale was a grisly joke. I had never been within fifty miles of New Haven, but in Europe I discovered that it was much easier to say I was a Yale graduate than to explain why I quit after two years at Vanderbilt and volunteered for the draft. I never told Sanderson I went to Yale; he must have got it from Segarra, who undoubtedly read my letter to Lotterman.

  Sanderson had gone to the University of Kansas, then to Columbia's journalism school. He claimed to be proud of his farm-belt background, but he was so obviously ashamed of it that I felt sorry for him. Once when he was drunk he told me that the Hal Sanderson from Kansas was dead -- he had died on the train to New York, and the Hal Sanderson I knew had been born the moment that train pulled into Penn Station.

  He was lying, of course. For all his Caribbean clothes and his Madison Avenue manners, even with his surfside apartment and his Alfa Romeo roadster, there was so much Kansas in Sanderson that it was embarrassing to see him deny it. And Kansas was not all that was in him. There was a lot of New York, a little of Europe, and something else that has no country at all and was probably the largest single fact of his life. When he first told me that he owed twenty-five hundred dollars to a psychiatrist in New York and was spending fifty dollars a week on one in San Juan, I was dumbfounded. From that day on I saw him in a very different light.

  Not that I thought he was crazy. He was a phony, of course, but for a long time I thought he was one of those phonies who can snap it on and off at will. He seemed honest enough with me, and in those rare moments when he relaxed I enjoyed him
immensely. But it was not often that he dropped his guard, and usually it was rum that made him do it He relaxed so seldom that his natural moments had an awkward, childish quality that was almost pathetic. He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

  For all his flaws, I respected Sanderson; he had come to San Juan as a reporter for a new paper that most people thought was a joke, and three years later he was vice president of the biggest public relations firm in the Caribbean. He had damn well worked at it -- and if it was not the sort of thing I had much use for, I had to admit he had done it well.

  Sanderson had good reason to be optimistic about Puerto Rico. From his vantage point at Adelante, he was in on more deals and making more money than he knew what to do with. I had no doubt that, barring the possibility of a great upswing in analysts' fees, he was no more than ten years away from being a millionaire. He said five, but I doubled it because it seemed almost indecent that a man doing Sanderson's kind of work should make a million dollars before he was forty.

  He was so much on top of things that I suspected that he had lost sight of the line between business and conspiracy. When somebody wanted land for a new hotel, when a top-level disagreement sent rumblings through the administration, or when anything of importance was on its way to happening, Sanderson usually knew more about it than the Governor.

  This fascinated me, for I had always been an observer, one who arrived on the scene and got a small amount of money for writing what he saw and whatever he could find out by asking a few hurried questions. Now, listening to Sanderson, I felt on the verge of a massive breakthrough. Considering the confusion of The Boom and the grab-bag morality that was driving it along, I felt for the first time in my life that I might get a chance to affect the course of things instead of merely observing them. I might even get rich; God knows, it seemed easy enough. I gave it a lot of thought, and though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.