The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  3. The Author and I are going to spare you the details. I told my dad the deed happened on a boat in Jamaica. Or it may have been with a “lady of the evening.” What I will say was that it was not a fun time. I felt awful afterward. Which is the opposite of what you’re supposed to feel. Which is love, right?

  4. The Author found this card stashed in the Sanderson family archives.

  5. The Author actually swiped these lines of dialogue, and some other details, from one of my novels. The man has few scruples.

  9. Decatur, Illinois. Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri

  1. It ended up in a box in my dad’s house, after he moved to Arizona. A dead manuscript in a box is the saddest thing a writer can know. Almost as sad as being trapped inside the footnotes of the novel you were never able to write, looking over at the flurry of words hacked out by the Author as he steals your story.

  2. Great publishing house. Still is. Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller wrote for them. Naturally I thought they would publish the bold and brilliant young writer that was me.

  3. From here on out, all of my bumming is gonna be self-financed. Más o menos. Just like Thoreau, who worked a few weeks of manual labor each year and spent the rest being, well, Thoreau. Paid for with flagpole money. No more gifts from Ma and Pa. (Though sometimes a loan, which I always paid back.) I’ll be a grown-up road bum, and not just a spoiled college-professor kid skimming off the fat of the family savings account. The Author approves, I think. And so do you.

  4. Like all the shooting I did as a kid, my soldier training and medic work is going to come in handy later. You’ll see. The Author will get to all that. Eventually. I hope.

  5. Is this really necessary?

  10. Tampico, Mexico. British Honduras. Guatemala City. The Panama Canal. Lima, Peru. Santiago, Chile. The Strait of Magellan

  1. Sí, aprendí español. Bastante bien. Réquete bien. Like a native, eventually. Just ask my Salvadoran friends, those cipotes who are all grown up now, grandfathers even. They remember.

  2. Ah, that time. The bumming beauty of it all and the freedom to be a screwup, a happy wanderer, a failed novelist. As another gringo writer and onetime fuckup put it: “That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere.”

  3. I didn’t know a novel could do this either: just become the people on the road, one after the other. It’s a cool trick, I guess. Omniscience. The writer as God. I was never that full of myself. Certainly not at the age you’re reading about now. I was the happiest I’d ever been, going where the road took me. Do people still do that? Just go? Without bothering to buy a car, or getting travel insurance, or making reservations, or checking what the weather is like where you’re headed?

  11. Buenos Aires. Lisbon. Paris. Tangier. Tripoli. Damascus. Jerusalem. Baghdad. Kuwait. New Delhi. Kathmandu. Kabul. Teheran. Istanbul. London

  1. I was still carrying my .22-caliber revolver. Silly me. If the Argentine police had caught me, it wouldn’t have been fun. But I lived in a kind of innocent haze then. People smiled when they saw me coming. We American boys were the tanned princes of the world. People didn’t hate us then. As much.

  2. What happens next is that I meet one of the great loves of my life. The Author spoke to this woman, and this frightens me. She’s the one who told him about me carrying a gun, and she’ll keep showing up for the rest of the book. What did she tell him? That I was sweet and handsome, of course. A dreamer like her, a kindred spirit. That’s what he’s whispering into my ear right now, to reassure me, because like all good book characters, I worry what My Author will do to me. She said she was still in love with me, fifty years later. So I guess that means I wasn’t a total jerk, right?

  3. The Author is in a hurry. I want him to slow down and smell those Damascus flowers again. I suppose you all are in a hurry too, and anxious to get to the “good” parts, the war we’ve promised you. But let me just say this: take a moment to appreciate the world as it was. Because just about everywhere I went on this bumming trip, war will follow in my footsteps; even in that café in Morocco I visited, where some jerk planted a bomb to kill the tourists. And Beirut, and Syria. Well, y’all know the story.

  4. Do you envy me? Resent me? I wouldn’t blame you. I can’t quite believe it myself. An average Joe, wandering around the future sites of various regional apocalypses without a care in the world. Making new girlfriends here and there. My letters are carefree, but I didn’t have blinders on, I swear. These messages home were to my mom, remember, and like a good boy I didn’t want her to worry. Secretly, I was scared shitless. Scared someone would drop a mickey into our drinks and kidnap Rebecca and do horrible things to her. Scared that I’d wind up in some Middle Eastern jail. Scared that Rebecca might fall in love with me, or worse—that I’d fall for her. Always a little scared. But that’s something a good Midwestern boy would never tell his mom, and make her worry, maybe for nothing.

  5. Where I come from, owing people money is about the worst thing you can do. A lot worse than being rude, or slipping away from someone who wants to hug and hold and kiss you.

  12. Lafayette, Louisiana. Los Angeles. Oakland, California. Hokkaido, Japan. Seoul. Saigon, Republic of Vietnam

  1. What was I doing? Seeking out war like this? I take it young folks these days aren’t quite as daring. They’ve seen too much real-life death and gunfire on television. We were innocent that way; on TV we were watching moms bake apple pie and serving it on checkered tablecloths. When our movie heroes died, it was in black-and-white. Death wasn’t gory and stark and in color. And yeah, I’ll admit it: looking for war on the road seemed like a game to me. But very soon I’m going to get my first education in true violence. It wasn’t in Korea; though Korea was crazy enough, as you’ll soon see.

  2. I can hear your voices. And the Author can too. With what right, you ask yourselves, does he do this … stuff? Was nothing sacred to this blue-eyed man as he wandered the globe? This is the beginning of the people around me thinking I was a little unhinged: that I was trying to destroy myself. I wasn’t.

  3. “Not once did I catch any sniping.” Not my best moment. But the Author doesn’t care. The whole sympathetic-protagonist thing has gone out the window. Lucky me.

  13. Vientiane, Laos. Bali, Indonesia. Djibouti, Afars and Issas. Addis Ababa. Kigali, Rwanda. Stanleyville, Congo. Johannesburg. Lagos. Uyo, Biafra

  1. It’s hard to see my life played out like this: the silly boy I was, the thoughts of the people who loved me. Imagine yourself, watching the slideshow of your life, listening to your exes weigh in on you. Would you still like yourself afterward? Does the Author still like me? Do you? Like me or not, the Author is sticking with me, trying to squeeze in every country, war and massacre, despite the voice of His Editor and His Agent, who are gently suggesting he trim the shit out of it. I guess the Author is just as mesmerized by the spectacle as I was. The finned bombs, the graves of the teachers. Like me, the Author is sleepwalking through the battlefields, past the corpses, as if they’d all been arranged for him to see.

  2. I think the Author isn’t quite up to the moment here. To the nightmare. It was all much more horrible than this. But could any writer make you feel the sick real of it all? I certainly couldn’t. I never did manage to find the words to capture what happens to your soul when a child dies in your arms. Only a genius could, I guess. Or a psychopath.

  3. Another passage swiped (and rejiggered) from one of my novels.

  14. La Paz, Bolivia

  1. The Author is getting impatient with my aimlessness. He’s starting to compress my life, squeezing years into paragraphs. And he’s going to shortchange me a half dozen girlfriends or more. Sorry, ladies. All in all, this is brutal. I see now the disadvantage of being a character in a novel. There’s no guarantees with these clowns writing your story.

  2. They told me, “We don’t like you. We know you are accepting money from cocaine producers (maybe I was), and we suspect you may be selling cocain
e yourself (not true, yet). We know you are using marijuana with our youth and corrupting them (big deal). And we believe yoga is an exotic foreign idea with potentially dangerous uses.”

  15. Cuzco, Peru. Pensacola, Florida

  1. The Author did not make this name up. I did. Kilo + Kilroy. I thought it was funny.

  16. San Salvador, El Salvador

  1. In the name of “art,” the Author is neglecting to explain some pretty basic facts: Namely, why the Salvadoran people were up in arms. Back then—and maybe even now, for all I know—“Fourteen Families” owned the country. We’re talking comic book evil, and “let them eat cake” privilege. And when the smart and the brave rose up, they were kidnapped and never seen again. That’s why all those kids in the march were carrying guns. For self-defense.

  17. Mejicanos

  1. I landed in L.A., and then I went to Arizona. Told my dad all about the revolution in El Salvador, but not my part in it. I was paranoid. Incredibly paranoid. I didn’t want to tell him anything that would get him in trouble. But I did describe the massacres and the dead. He bought a bottle of wine for us to share, but I talked so much, we never got around to opening it.

  18. Urbana, Illinois

  1. Excuse my French, but I fucking hated it. The Silver Triangle was like a dog whose nuts had been cut off. And don’t just take my word for it; the Author agrees. My version was better. So there.

  19. Usulután, El Salvador

  1. One day, a writer will be brave enough to tackle Mafalda’s story. She’s a novel unto herself, her own epic of bumming and loving and loss and beauty. The Author shortchanged her. He had his hands full with me, I guess. With the knuckleheaded me.

  20. La Guacamaya, Morazán

  1. The Author isn’t being a sentimentalist. The Salvadoran revolution really was like that. All those handsome and pretty young dreamers thrown together in the prime of their lives, facing death. When the bullets weren’t flying, it became a real love fest.

  22. Cerro Pando. Perquín

  1. To my friends and fellow alumni of Radio Venceremos, let me say this: I loved you all and I know you loved me. Don’t read too much into the Author’s melodramatic descriptions of our “conflictos.” I was just too old and too gringo to be there, among you, for so long.

  24. Yoloaiquín. San Francisco Gotera

  1. Yeah, I know: This is starting to get a little repetitive. Me and my guerrilla pals enter a town, and then we pull out, and then we enter new ones, and pull out again. Fear not, my participation in this war will soon come to a close. In one month. Unfortunately, the fighting went on a lot longer for my pals. Nine years, eight months and sixteen days, to be precise. War is hell. And the hell is in the repetition of it. One terrifying thing after another, until terror itself is tedious. But the novel character that is me has to put up with another kind of tedium now. The boredom of waiting for my role in the battle to begin. The next battle, after the battle before.

  2. The Author, following a recent fad for untranslated Spanish in American novels, doesn’t think he should translate this. I’ll do it for him. “One fell! Look, on this little hill. Sonofabitch!”

  25. San Miguel

  1. My book was writing itself. The older and wiser voice in my head was taking over. I stopped being a numbskull trying to imitate James Jones or Hemingway and just told the story. Scene by scene, the adventures of Lucas and the guerrilla army. As if I were scribbling a letter home to Mom. I had to face death, and then kill someone, to see that my writing should be free and easy. The mass murder around me made me into a writer, finally, which is a completely fucked-up thing to say. But in my case, it’s the truth.

  2. Like writing a letter home to Mom.

  3. The Author is faithfully reproducing here what he found on pages 105, 106, and 107 of my war diary, now stored at the archive of the revolution Santiago assembled after the fighting was over. But here the Author has refrained from his somewhat annoying (to me) practice of snipping out my bad writing. He’s keeping my “fondled” dreams and my somewhat confusing “long and familiar savor.” What can I say? After all the battles and marching I was living a beautiful moment. I laid it on thick, but the Author is going to print it as is, so that you know it was really me who wrote it. So that you can imagine me there, the real person I was. Thankfully, however, he’s going to spare y’all a bit of trouble, and summarize what I scribbled next.

  4. Informants. Literally, it means “ears.”

  5. A sandwich for the mountain men!

  6. That’s a genus of mosquito. The one that transmits the malaria virus.

  7. At this point the Author is going to hand it over to me. Entirely. He’s going to quote directly, and at length, from pages 160 through 181 of my journal—with just some minor editing here and there. Well, a lot of editing, actually. Nevertheless, we have reached an important milestone in my story. Because with the printed words that follow, I, Joe Sanderson, will become, after a mere half century of waiting, a published writer at last.

  8. I am poor! Poor! I am a poor fisherman.

  9. Thievery.

  10. And now my writing soul can rest in peace.

  26. Crossing the Río Sapo

  1. Mistrust.

  2. Outside, i.e., out of the war zone.

  A Few Closing Thoughts from the Author

  AFTER HER SON’S DEATH, Virginia Colman preserved and cataloged the letters Joe sent her during the twenty-odd years of his bumming adventures around the globe. She prepared index cards listing his various journeys away from Urbana. (Crossed the Pacific, Feb. 1968–Apr. 1969; Back to El Salvador for last time, Sept. 1980 to Apr. 27, 1982.) When she died of a heart attack in 1986, her son Steve Sanderson inherited those letters. Steve, in turn, assembled an archive of Joe’s writings and life, which also included mementos from his life and travels, and the boxes of his brother’s unpublished novels.

  Steve didn’t quite believe me when I told him, in a series of e-mails and phone calls from Latin America in 2008, that I had discovered Joe’s diary in El Salvador. But once he saw a few sample pages from that journal, and confirmed they were in Joe’s handwriting, he opened his home and archive to me as I began to write about his brother’s life. Eventually, after conducting interviews in El Salvador and Mexico, I was able to tell him the exact circumstances of his brother’s death, details Steve had been waiting to hear for more than a quarter century. “The first time I was ever convinced that there was no possibility that Joe could come knocking at my door,” he told me, “was when I talked to you.”

  * * *

  AS A WRITER, and as a centroamericano and a California Yankee, I am so grateful to Steve and to his wife, Jenny Bloom, for their friendship and their help with this project, and for their patience with me during the eleven years it took me to complete it. Steve introduced me to Jim Adams in Urbana, and to his daughter Kathy, and insisted I speak to his father, Milt Sanderson, which I did not long before Milt died in 2012. He also introduced me to Mafalda.

  Mafalda had learned of Joe’s death from a story in Mother Jones in 1984, two years after he was killed in El Salvador; she saw Susan Meiselas’s photograph of Joe looking up at her from a copy of the magazine lying open in a college-town café. Like Joe’s mother, she preserved her letters from Joe, and I am so grateful to her for sharing them with me, and for the conversations with her about Joe and the time she shared with him.

  * * *

  WERE IT NOT FOR ALEX RENDEROS, and his professionalism and dedication to El Salvador and its history, I would never have learned of Joe’s contribution to the Salvadoran revolution, and of the existence of Joe’s war journals, as preserved at the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagén in San Salvador. Alex and I worked for the Los Angeles Times, and as I prepared to write a story about Joe for that newspaper, he conducted interviews with a pair of former rebel fighters who’d played key roles in Joe’s entry into the rebel army: the fighter “Fito” and the man known as Comandante Jonás. Just as important, Alex introduced me to Carlos Co
nsalvi, aka “Santiago,” who preserved Joe’s wartime writings, and so many other documents and artifacts produced by the Salvadoran revolution. The memories Consalvi shared with me, and his book Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador: A Memoir of Guerrilla Radio, proved indispensable in my reconstruction of Joe’s time in eastern El Salvador with the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo. And so did a two-day tour of the rebel-controlled areas and battlefields Consalvi gave me in 2008. Similarly, I owe thanks to “Eduardo,” the Mexico City doctor who was with Joe when he died, and to all the former rebel soldiers and medical workers I met in Morazán during my visit there, who shared their stories about Joe with me.

  In writing this novel, I also consulted Mark Danner’s excellent 1994 book The Massacre at El Mozote, and the 1984 piece on Joe written by Peter Canby and Jay Dean for Mother Jones—a remarkable work of journalism they reported while the war was still being fought. Thanks, also, to the courageous Susan Meiselas, the photographer who documented so many Latin American struggles and who captured the iconic photograph of Joe as a guerrilla fighter.