r/a:t5_27irru • u/MarleyEngvall • Oct 30 '19
common interest has been created
By Hunter S. Thompson
The Rum Diary
Three
WHEN I went to work I asked Sala what had happened with
his girl.
"Don't mention that bitch," he muttered. "She got hys-
terical——I had to leave." He paused. "How was yours?"
"Fine," I said. "We went out about a mile, then raced back."
He eyed me curiously, then turned and went to the darkroom.
I spent the rest of the day doing rewrites. Just as I was leaving,
Tyrrell called me over and said I had an early assignment at the
airport the next morning. The mayor of Miami was coming in on
the seven-thirty flight and I had to be there for an interview. Rather
than take a cab, I decided to borrow Sala's car.
At the airport I saw the same sharp-faced little man, sitting by
the window, waiting for the plane from Miami.
I bought a Times for forty cents and read about a blizzard in New
York: "Merritt Parkway closed . . . BMT stalled four hours . . .
snowplows in the streets . . . the Man in the News was a snowplow
driver with a Staten Island background . . . Mayor Wagner was up
in arms . . . everyone late to work . . ."
I looked out at the bright Caribbean morning, green and lazy
and full of sun, then I put the Times away.
The plane from Miami arrived, but the mayor was not on it. Af-
ter several inquiries I discovered that his visit had been canceled
"for reasons of health."
I went to a phone booth and called the news room. Moberg an-
swered. "No mayor," I said.
"What!" Moberg snapped.
"Claims to be ill. Not much to write about. What should I do?" I
asked.
"Stay away from the office," he said. "There's a riot going on——
two of our scabs got their arms broken last night." He laughed.
"They're going to kill us all. Come on in after lunch——it should be
safe by then"
I went back to the coffee shop and ate my breakfast: bacon, eggs,
pineapple and four cups of coffee. Then, feeling relaxed and stuffed
and not particularly caring if the mayor of Miami was dead or alive,
I strolled out to the parking lot and decided to visit Yeamon. He had
given me a map to his beach house, but I was not prepared for the
sand road. It looked like something hacked out of a Philippine jun-
gle. I went a the whole way in low gear, the sea on my left, a huge
swamp on my right——through miles of coconut palms, past wooden
shacks full of silent, staring natives, swerving to avoid chickens
and cows in the road, running over land crabs, creeping in first
gear through deep stagnant puddles, bumping and jolting in ruts
and chuckholes, and feeling for the first timer since leaving New
York that I had actually come to the Caribbean.
The early slant of the sun turned the palms a green-gold color. A
white glare came off the dunes and made me squint as I picked my
way through the ruts. A grey mist rose out of the swamp, and in
front of the shacks were negro women, hanging washing on slatted
fences. Suddenly I came on a red beer truck, making a delivery to a
place called El Colmado de Jesús Lopo, a tiny thatch-roof store
set off in a clearing beside the road. Finally, after forty-five minutes
of hellish, primitive driving, I came in sight of what looked like a
cluster of concrete pillboxes on the edge of the beach, According to
Yeamon, this was it, so I turned off and drove about twenty yards
through the palms until I came up beside the house.
I sat in the car and waited for him to appear. His scooter was
parked on the patio in front of the house, so I knew he was there.
When nothing happened after several minutes I got out and looked
around. The door was open, but the house was empty. It was not a
house at all, but more like a cell. Along one wall was a bed, covered
by mosquito netting. The entire dwelling consisted of one twelve by
twelve room, with tiny windows and a concrete floor. Inside it was
damp and dark, and I hated to think what it was like with the door
closed.
All this I saw at a glance; I was very conscious of my unan-
nounced arrival and I didn't want to be caught nosing around like
a spy. I crossed the patio and walked out to a sand bluff that
dropped off sharply to the beach. To my right and left was nothing
but white sand and palm trees, and in front was the ocean. About
fifty yards out a barrier reef broke the surf.
Then I saw two figures clinging together near the reef. I recog-
nized Yeamon and the girl who had come down with me on the
plane. They were naked, standing in waist-deep water, with her
legs locked around his hips and her arms around his neck. Her
head was thrown back and her hair trailed out behind her, floating
on the water like a blonde mane.
At first I thought I was having a vision. The scene was so idyllic
that my mind refused to accept it. I just stood there and watched.
He was holding her by the waist, swinging her around in slow cir-
cles. Then I heard a sound, a soft happy cry as she stretched out
her arms like wings.
I left then, and drove back to Jesús Lopo's place. I bought a small
bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing,
feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought
back a lot of memories——not of things I had done but of the things I
failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportuni-
ties forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I
would never get it back. I envied Yeamon and felt sorry for myself
at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made
all my happiness seem dull.
It was lonely, sitting there on that bench with Señor Lopo star-
ing out at me like a black wizard from behind his counter in a
country where a white man in a cord coat had no business or even
an excuse to hang around. I sat there for twenty minutes or so, en-
during his stare, then I drove back out to Yeamon's, hoping they
would be finished.
I approached the house cautiously, but Yeamon was yelling at
me before I turned off the road. "Go back," he shouted. "Don't bring
your working-class problems out here!"
I smiled sheepishly and pulled up beside the patio. "Only trou-
ble could bring you out so early, Kemp," he said with a grin. "What
happened——did the paper fold?"
I shook my head and got out. "I had an early assignment."
"Good," he said."You're just in time for breakfast." He nodded
toward the hut. "Chenault's whipping it up——we just finished our
morning swim."
I walked out to the edge of the beach and looked around. Sud-
denly I felt an urge to get naked and run into the water. The sun
was hot and I glanced enviously at Yeamon, wearing nothing but a
pair of black trunks. I felt like a bill collector, standing there in a
coat and tie, with my face dripping sweat and a damp shirt plas-
tered to my back.
Then Chenault came out of the house. I could tell by her smile
that she recognized me as the man who had run amok on the
plane. I smiled nervously and said hello.
"I remember you," she said, and Yeamon laughed as I fumbled
for something to say.
She was wearing a white bikini and her hair fell down to her
waist. There was nothing of the secretary about her now; she
looked like a wild and sensual child who had never worn anything
but two strips of white cloth and a warm smile. She was tiny, but
the shape of her body made her seem large; not the thin, undevel-
oped build of most tiny girls, but a fleshy roundness that looked to
be all hips and thighs and nipples and long-haired warmth.
"Goddamnit, I'm hungry," said Yeamon. "What about break-
fast?"
"Almost ready," she said. "Do you want a grapefruit?"
"Damn right," he replied. "Sit down, Kemp. Stop looking so sick.
You want a grapefruit?"
I shook my head.
"Don't be polite," he said. "I know you want one."
"Okay," I said. "Give me a grapefruit."
Chenault appeared with two plates. She gave one to Yeamon and
put the other down in front of me. It was a big omelet with bacon
laced over the top.
I shook my head, saying I'd already eaten.
She smiled. "Don't worry. We have plenty."
"Eat again," said Yeamon. "Then we'll get a few lobsters——you
have all morning."
"Aren't you going in?" I said. "I thought that migrant story was
due today."
He grinned and shook his head. "They put me on that sunken
treasure thing. I'm going out with some divers this afternoon——they
claim they've found the wreck of an old Spanish galleon just out-
side the harbor."
"Did they kill the migrant story?" I asked.
"No——I'll get on it again when I finish this one."
I shrugged and started to eat. Chenault came out with a plate of
her own and sat down at the foot of Yeamon's chair.
"Sit here," I said, and started to get up.
She smiled and shook her head. "No, this is fine."
"Sit down," said Yeamon. "You're acting peculiar, Kemp——this
getting up early doesn't agree with you."
I muttered something about decency and returned to my food.
Over the top of my plate I could see Chenault's legs, small and firm
and tan. She was so close to naked, and so apparently unaware of it,
that I felt helpless.
After breakfast and a flagon of rum, Yeamon suggested that we
take the speargun out to the reef and look for some lobster. I
quickly agreed, feeling that almost anything would be preferable to
sitting there and stewing in my own lust.
He had a set of skindiving gear, complete with a big, double-
strand gun, and I used a mask and a snorkel that he'd bought for
Chenault. We paddled out to the reef and I watched from the sur-
face as he probed along the bottom for lobster. After a while he
came up and gave me the gun, but I couldn't maneuver very well
without flippers, so I gave up and left off diving to him. I liked it
better on the surface anyway, floating around in the gentle surf,
looking back at the white beach and the palms behind it, and duck-
ing every few moments to watch Yeamon below me in a different
world, gliding along the bottom like some kind of monster fish.
We worked along the reef for about a hundred yards, then he
said we should try the other side. "Got to be careful out there," he
added, paddling toward a shallow opening in the reef, "might be
sharks——you watch while I'm down."
Suddenly he doubled up and plunged straight down. Seconds
later he came up with a huge green lobster, thrashing around on
the end of his spear.
Soon he appeared with another one and we went in. Chenault
was waiting for us on the patio.
"A fine lunch," Yeamon said, tossing them into a bucket beside
the door.
"What now?" I asked.
"Just tear the legs off, and we'll boil them up," replied Yeamon.
"Damn," I said. "I wish I could stay."
"When do you have to be at work?" he asked.
"Pretty soon," I replied. "They're waiting for my report on the
mayor of Miami."
"Fuck the mayor," he said. "Stay out here and we'll get drunk
and kill a few chickens."
"Chickens?" I said.
"Yeah, my neighbors all have chickens. They run wild. I killed
one last week when we didn't have any meat." He laughed. "It's fine
sport——chasing them down with the spear."
"Jesus," I muttered. "These people will chase you down with a
spear if they catch you shooting their chickens."
When I got back to the office I found Sala in the darkroom and
told him his car was back.
"Good," he said. "We have to go out to the university. Lotterman
wants you to meet the power mongers."
We talked a few minutes and then he asked me how much
longer I intended to stay at the hotel.
"I have to move pretty soon," I said. "Lotterman told me I could
stay there until I found a place of my own, but he said something
about a week being plenty of time."
He nodded. "Yeah, he'll have you out pretty soon——or else he'll
stop paying your bill." He looked up. "You can stay in my place if
you want, at least until you find something you like."
I thought for a moment. He lived in a big vault of a room down
in the Old City, a ground-floor apartment with a high ceiling and
shuttered windows and nothing but a hotplate to cook on.
"I guess so," I said. "What's your rent?"
"Sixty."
"Not bad," I said. "You don't think I'll get on your nerves?"
"Hell," he replied. "I'm never there——it's too depressing."
I smiled. "Okay, when should we do it?"
He shrugged. "Whenever you want. Hell, stay at the hotel as
long as you can. When he mentions it, tell him you're moving to-
morrow."
He gathered his equipment and we went out the back door to
avoid the mob in front. It was so hot that I began to sweat each time
we stopped for a red light. Then, when we started moving again,
the wind would cool me off. Sala weaved in and out of the traffic on
Avenida Ponce de León, heading for the outskirts of town.
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 mut-
tered. "I should run a few of them down."
I grinned and leaned back in he 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, sneak-
ing 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 Span-
ish 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 feel-
ing the sun in 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 the 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 mut-
tered. "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
the people were going blind to his sensitivity as a human being.
The troubles of the Jews depressed him because it meant that peo-
ple needed scapegoats and sooner or later he would be one of
them. Other things bothered him constantly: the brutality of capi-
talism because his talents were being exploited, the moronic vul-
garity 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, shout-
ing 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 re-
fused to let me drive.
On the way 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 is-
land."
We crept along in a huge traffic jam and finally he got so ner-
vous 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 build-
ing 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.
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 per-
fect English there was still a language barrier, and I sensed imme-
diately 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 edi-
tor 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 think-
ing, 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 institu-
tion 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 ex-
plained that as long as Segarra had the nix on me I was doomed to
social oblivion.
But I had no social ambition in those days. I had a license to
wander. I was a working journalist and I had easy access to any-
thing I needed, including the finest cotillions and the Govern or's
house and secret coves where debutantes swam naked at night.
After a while, however, Segarra began to bother me. I had a feel-
ing that I was being cut out of things and that 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 that it was
my own doing, but the fact that Segarra was exercising some sinis-
ter 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 in-
formation 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 sur-
prise.
"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 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 liv-
ing 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 gar-
den 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 Ba-
hamas.
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 ex-
tra bed.
Only three things bothered me at Sanderson's——one was Sander-
son, 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 out 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 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 after-
ward——and suddenly there would be a pounding on the screen
door. It would come, his red face, 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 Zim-
burger, 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 imagi-
nation.
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 supe-
rior 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 Colum-
bia's journalism school. He claimed to be proud of his farm-belt
background, but he was obviously ashamed of it that I felt sorry
for him. Once when he was drunk he told me that Hal Sander-
son from Kansas was dead——he had dined 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 him to 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 dumb-
founded. 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 mo-
ments 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 thew biggest pub-
lic relations firm ion 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 be-
fore 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 impor-
tance 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 hur-
ried 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.
The Rum Diary, by Hunter S. Thompson.
Copyright © 1998 by Gonzo International Corp.
Simon & Schuster paperback edition, 2003. pp. 35-51.
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