The Rum Diary
Five
Sala's apartment on Calle Tetuan was about as homey as a cave, a dank grotto in the very bowels of the Old City. It was not an upscale neighborhood. Sanderson shunned it and Zimburger called it a sewer. It reminded me of a big handball court in some stench-ridden YMCA. The ceiling was twenty feet high, not a breath of clean air, no furniture except two metal cots and an improvised picnic table, and since it was on the ground floor we could never open the windows because thieves would come in off the street and sack the place. A week after Sala moved in he left one of the windows unlocked and everything he owned was stolen, even his shoes and his dirty socks.
We had no refrigerator and therefore no ice, so we drank hot rum out of dirty glasses and did our best to stay out of the place as much as possible. It was easy to understand why Sala didn't mind sharing; neither of us ever went there except to change clothes or sleep. Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al's, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn't stand the idea of going back to the apartment.
After living there a week I'd established a fairly strict routine. I would sleep until ten or so, depending on the noise level in the street, then take a shower and walk up to Al's for breakfast. With a few exceptions, the normal workday at the paper was from noon until eight in the evening, give or take a few hours either way. Then we would come back to Al's for dinner. After that it was the casinos, an occasional party, or simply sitting at Al's and listening to each other's stories until we all got drunk and mumbled off to our beds. Sometimes I would go to Sanderson's and usually there were people there to drink with. Except for Segarra and the wretched greedhead Zimburger, almost everyone at Sanderson's was from New York or Miami or the Virgin Islands. They were buyers or builders or sellers in one way or another, and now that I look back on it I don't recall a single name or face out of the hundred or so that I met there. Not a distinctive soul in the lot, but it was a pleasant, social kind of atmosphere and a welcome break from those dreary nights at Al's.
One Monday morning I was awakened by what sounded like children being butchered outside the window. I looked through a crack in the shutter and saw about fifteen tiny Puerto Ricans, dancing on the sidewalk and tormenting a three-legged dog. I cursed them viciously and hurried up to Al's for breakfast.
Chenault was there, sitting alone in the patio and reading a secondhand copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. She looked very young and pretty, wearing a white dress and sandals, with her hair falling loose down her back. She smiled as I went over to the table and sat down.
“What brings you in so early?” I asked.
She closed her book. “Oh, Fritz had to go somewhere and finish that story he's been working on. I have to cash some traveler's checks and I'm waiting for the bank to open.”
“Who's Fritz?” I said. . .
She looked at me as if I were not quite awake.
“Yeamon?” I asked quickly.
She laughed. “I call him Fritz. That's his middle name -- Addison Fritz Yeamon. Isn't that fine?”
I agreed that it was. I had never thought of him as anything but Yeamon. As a matter of fact I knew almost nothing about him at all. During the course of those evenings at Al's I had heard the life story of almost every man on the paper, but Yeamon invariably went straight home after work and I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it. Nonetheless, I felt that I knew him well enough so that we did not have to do much talking. From the very beginning I had felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is pretty cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.
Nor did I know anything about Chenault, except that she had undergone a tremendous change since my first sight of her at the airport. She was tan and happy now, not nearly so tense with that nervous energy that had been so obvious when she wore her secretary suit. But not all of it was gone. Somewhere beneath that loose blonde hair and that friendly, little-girl smile I sensed a thing that was moving hard and fast toward some long-awaited opening. It made me a little nervous; and on top of that I remembered my initial lust for her and the sight of her locked with Yeamon that morning in the water. I also remembered those two immodest strips of white cloth around her ripe little body on the patio. All this was very much on my mind as I sat with her there at Al's and ate my breakfast.
It was hamburger with eggs. When I came to San Juan Al's menu consisted of beer, rum and hamburgers. It was a pretty volatile breakfast, and several times I was drunk by the time I got to work. One day I asked him to get some eggs and coffee. At first he refused, but when I asked him again he said he would. Now, for breakfast, you could have an egg on your hamburger, and coffee instead of rum.
“Are you here for good?” I said, looking up at Chenault.
She smiled. “I don't know. I quit my job in New York.” She looked up at the sky. “I just want to be happy. I'm happy with Fritz -- so I'm here.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that seems reasonable.”
She laughed. “It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.”
“Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception -- especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.
I was not ready to put any labels on Chenault, so I tried to change the subject.
“What story is he working on?” I asked, offering her a cigarette.
She shook her head. “The same one,” she replied. “He's had a terrible time with it -- that thing about Puerto Ricans going to New York.”
“Damn,” I said. “I thought he finished that a long time ago.”
“No,” she said. “They kept giving him new assignments. But this one has to be in today -- that's what he's doing now.”
I shrugged. “Hell, he shouldn't worry about it. One story more or less on a sloppy paper like this doesn't make much difference.”
About six hours later, I found out that it did make a difference, although not in the way I had meant. After breakfast I walked with Chenault to the bank, then I went to work. It was just about six when Yeamon came back from wherever he had been all afternoon. I nodded to him, then watched with mild curiosity as Lotterman called him over to the desk. “I want to talk to you about that emigration story,” he said. “Just what in hell are you trying to put over on me?”
Yeamon looked surprised. “What do you mean?”
Lotterman suddenly began to shout. “I mean you're not getting away with it! You spent three weeks on that story and now Segarra tells me it's useless!”
Yeamon's face turned red and he leaned toward Lotterman as if he were going to grab his throat. “Useless?” he said quietly. “Why is it. . . useless?”
Lotterman was as angry as I'd ever seen him, but Yeamon looked so threatening that he quickly changed his tone -- just slightly, but enough to notice. “Listen,” he said. “I'm not paying your salary so you can write magazine articles-- what the hell were you thinking about when you turned in twenty-six pages of copy?”
Yeamon leaned forward. “Break it up,” he replied. “You don't have to run it all at once.”
Lotterman laughed. “Oh -- so that's it! You want me to run a serial -- you're looking for a Pulitzer Prize, eh?” He stepped forward and raised his voice again. “Yeamon, when I want a serial I'll ask for a serial -- are you too dense to understand that?”
Everyone was watching now and I half expected Yeamon to scatter Lotterman's teeth all over the newsroom. When he spoke I was surpr
ised at his calm. “Look,” he said sharply, “you asked for a story on why Puerto Ricans leave Puerto Rico -- right?”
Lotterman stared at him.
“Okay, so I worked on the story for a week -- not three, if you remember that other crap you gave me -- and now you're yelling because it's twenty-six pages long! Well, goddamnit it should have been sixty pages long! If I'd written the story I wanted to write you'd be run out of town for publishing it!”
Lotterman seemed uncertain. “Well,” he said after a pause, “if you want to do a sixty-page story that's your business -- but if you want to work for me I'll have that story in a thousand words for tomorrow morning's paper.”
Yeamon smiled faintly. “Segarra's good at that sort of thing -- why don't you have him condense it?”
Lotterman swelled up like a toad. “What are you saying?” he shouted. “That you won't do it?”
Yeamon smiled again. “I was just wondering,” he said, “if you've ever had your head twisted.”
“What's that?” snapped Lotterman. “Did I hear you threaten to twist my head?”
Yeamon smiled. “A man never knows when his head might get twisted.”
“Good God!” Lotterman exclaimed. “You sound like a nut, Yeamon -- people get locked up for saying things like that!”
“Yes indeed,” Yeamon replied. “Heads get TWISTED!” He said this in a loud voice and made a violent twisting gesture with his hands, never taking his eyes off Lotterman.
Now Lotterman seemed genuinely alarmed. “You are a nut,” he said nervously. “Maybe you'd better resign, Yeamon -- right now.”
“Oh no,” Yeamon said quickly. “No chance of that -- I'm too busy.”
Lotterman was getting shaky. I knew he didn't want to fire Yeamon, because he'd have to give him a month's severance pay. After a pause, he said again: “Yes, Yeamon, I think you'd better resign. You don't seem happy here -- why don't you quit?”
Yeamon laughed. “I'm happy enough. Why don't you fire me?”
There was a tense silence. We all waited for Lotterman's next move, amused and a little bewildered by the whole scene. At first it had seemed like just another one of Lotterman's tirades, but Yeamon's maniacal replies had given it a weird and violent flavor.
Lotterman stared at him for a moment, looking more nervous than ever, then he turned and went into his office.
I sat back in my chair, grinning at Yeamon, then I heard Lotterman shouting my name. I spread my hands in a public shrug, then got up slowly and went to his office.
He was hunched over his desk, fumbling with a baseball that he used as a paperweight “Take a look at this,” he said. “Tell me if you think it's worth condensing.” He handed me a sheaf of newsprint that I knew was Yeamon's story.
“Suppose it is,” I said. “Then I condense it?”
“That's right,” he replied. “Now don't give me any shit. Just read it and tell me what you can do with it.”
I took it back to my desk and read it twice. After the first reading I knew why Segarra had called it useless. Most of it was dialogue, conversations with Puerto Ricans at the airport. They were telling why they were going to New York, what they were looking for and what they thought of the lives they were leaving behind.
At a glance, it was pretty dull stuff. Most of them seemed naive and ignorant -- they hadn't read the travel brochures and the rum advertisements, they knew nothing of The Boom -- all they wanted was to get to New York. It was a dreary document, but when I finished it there was no doubt in my mind as to why these people were leaving. Not that their reasons made sense, but they were reasons, nonetheless -- simple statements, born in minds I could never understand because I had grown up in St. Louis in a house with two bathrooms and I had gone to football games and gin-jug parties and dancing school and I had done a lot of things, but I had never been a Puerto Rican.
It occurred to me that the real reason these people were leaving this island was basically the same reason I had left St. Louis and quit college and said to hell with all the things I was supposed to want -- indeed, all the things I had a responsibility to want -- to uphold, as it were -- and I wondered how I might have sounded if someone had interviewed me at Lambert Airport on the day I left for New York with two suitcases and three hundred dollars and an envelope full of my clippings from an Army newspaper.
“Tell me, Mr. Kemp, just why are you leaving St. Louis, where your family has lived for generations and where you could, for the asking, have a niche carved out for yourself and your children so that you might live in peace and security for the rest of your well-fed days?”
“Well, you see, I. . . ah. . . well, I get a strange feeling. I. . . ah. . . I sit around here and I look at this place and I just want to get out, you know? I want to flee.”
“Mr. Kemp, you seem like a reasonable man -- just what is it about St. Louis that makes you want to flee? I'm not prying, you understand, I'm just a reporter and I'm from Tallahassee, myself, but they sent me out here to --”
“Certainly. I just wish I could. . . ah. . . you know, I'd like to be able to tell you that. . . ah. . . maybe I should say that I feel a rubber sack coming down on me. . . purely symbolic, you know. . . the venal ignorance of the fathers being visited on the sons. . . can you make something of that?”
“Well, ha-ha, I sort of know what you mean, Mr. Kemp. Back in Tallahassee it was a cotton sack, but I guess it was about the same size and --”
“Yeah, it's the goddamn sack -- so I'm taking off and I guess I'll. . . ah. . .”
“Mr. Kemp, I wish I could say how much I sympathize, but you understand that if I go back with a story about a rubber sack they're going to tell me it's useless and probably fire me. Now I don't want to press you, but I wonder if you could give me something more concrete; you know -- is there not enough opportunity here for aggressive young men? Is St. Louis meeting her responsibilities to youth? Is our society not flexible enough for young people with ideas? You can talk to me, Mr. Kemp -- what is it?”
“Well, fella, I wish I could help you. God knows I don't want you to go back without a story and get fired. I know how it is -- I'm a journalist myself, you know -- but. . . well. . . I get The Fear. . . can you use that? St. Louis Gives Young Men The Fear -- not a bad headline, eh?”
“Come on, Kemp, you know I can't use that; Rubber Sacks, The Fear.”
“Goddamnit, man, I tell you it's fear of the sack! Tell them that this man Kemp is fleeing St. Louis because he suspects the sack is full of something ugly and he doesn't want to be put in with it. He senses this from afar. This man Kemp is not a model youth. He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the line he got warped. Now all he wants is Out, Flee. He doesn't give a good shit for St Louis or his friends or his family or anything else. . . he just wants to find some place where he can breathe. . . is that good enough for you?”
“Well, ah, Kemp, you sound a bit hysterical. I don't know if I can get the story on you or not.”
“Well fuck you then. Get out of my way. They're calling my flight -- hear that voice? Hear it?”
“You're deranged, Kemp! You'll come to no good end! I knew people like you back in Tallahassee and they all ended up --”
Yeah, they all ended up like Puerto Ricans. They fled and they couldn't say why, but they damn well wanted out and they didn't care if the newspapers understood or not. Somehow they got the idea that by getting the hell away from where they were they could find something better. They heard the word, the rotten devilish word that makes people incoherent with desire to move on -- not everybody in the world lives in tin shacks with no toilets and no money at all and no food but rice and beans; not everybody cuts sugarcane for a dollar a day, or hauls a load of coconuts into town to sell for two cents each -- the cheap, hot, hungry world of their fathers and their grandfathers and all their brothers and sisters was not the whole story, because if a man could muster the guts or even the desperation to move a few thousand miles there was a pretty good chance that he
'd have money in his pocket and meat in his belly and one hell of a romping good time.
Yeamon had caught their mood perfectly. In twenty-six pages he had gone way beyond the story of why Puerto Ricans shove off for New York; in the end it was a story of why a man leaves home in the face of ugly odds, and when I finished it I felt small and silly for all the tripe I had written since I'd been in San Juan. Some of the conversations were amusing and others were pathetic -- but through them all ran the main thread, the prime mover, the fact that these people thought they might have a chance in New York, and in Puerto Rico they had no chance at all.
When I finished reading it a second time I took it back to Lotterman and told him I thought he should run it as a five-part serial.
He slammed his baseball on the desk. “Goddamnit, you're as crazy as Yeamon! I can't run a serial nobody's going to read.”
“They'll read it,” I said, knowing they wouldn't.
“Don't give me that stuff!” he barked. “I read two pages and it bored me stiff -- a goddamn mountain of griping. Where does he get that kind of nerve? He hasn't been here two months and he tries to con me into using a story that sounds like something out of Pravda -- and he wants it run as a serial!”
“Well,” I said. “You asked what I thought.”
He glared up at me. “Is that your way of saying you won't do it?”
I wanted to flatly refuse -- and I would have, I think, but I hesitated an instant too long. It was no more than an instant, but that was long enough for me to consider the consequences -- fired, no salary, packing up again, fighting for a foothold somewhere else. So I said, “You're running the newspaper. I'm just telling you what I thought -- since that's what you asked for.”