And show it’s not prose by frequent indenting. Just one restriction you can’t throw out: Don’t give the poem to the girl it’s about.
W is for Women. They’re awful, mendacious, Nasty and selfish, cruel and salacious, As thievish as gypsies, more crazy than Celts. Be sure that you never fuck anything else.
X is for the attitude of eXistential anomie. The French mean nothing by it, and neither do we. So don’t go around acting like Jean Paul Belmondo. Aspire instead to three cars and a condo.
Y is for Your future, supposedly pared By nuclear-holocaust world-end nightmare. Don’t get disconcerted by apocalyptic jive. It’s been just about to happen since 1945. And no matter the MIRVs, ICBMs, and SAMs, It’s not going to happen before final exams.
Z is for Zany, eternal class clown, Who won’t stop kidding, who won’t sit down. Bane of the Boys’ Dean, cursed by the teachers, Source of amusement in classrooms and bleachers. Zany is cute in a kitten or pup. But as an adult, please shut the fuck up.
Horrible Protestant Hats
I was getting ready to go outdoors on a drizzly afternoon. I put on a trench coat, picked up an umbrella, and deposited a waterproof canvas rain hat on my head. My girlfriend, a Catholic, began to laugh and point. “Oh!” she said, “what a horrible Protestant hat!” I looked in the mirror. True, the porkpie-style Brooks Brothers rain hat with the brim turned down on all sides does give one the look of. . . well, a poorly machined something on a recalled American car. It set me thinking.
Protestants do wear terrible hats, especially well-off adult male Protestants of the type we usually call WASPs. They wear woven-vegetable-matter summer hats with madras hatbands. These look like hospital gifts that died at the florists. They wear “Irish” tweed hats no self-respecting Irishman would put on his plowhorse. They wear herringbone wool caps that can give a bank president the semblance of a rioting English coalminer. Old artsy WASPs wear embarrassing berets. Middle-aged WASPs who’ve just gotten a divorce and a sports car wear dopey suede touring caps with a snap on the brim. Then there are the unspeakable hats favored by federal investigative agents and the fur Astrakhans worn by lawyers who, I guess, want their clients to think they run a gulag on the side.
Beyond city limits the situation is worse. Where I live in New England the summer people look like they’re trying to prove that slouch hats cause Down’s syndrome in adults. Panama hats produce a different effect—imbecility combined with moral turpitude. And there is no polite phrase in English for what a vacationing financial services executive looks like in a Greek fisherman’s cap.
Getting anywhere near the water seems to produce WASP hat lunacy. Fly fishermen wear astonishing things on their heads and always decorate them with dozens of dry flies as though at any minute they might dip their very skulls into the torrent and land giant trout with their necks. It’s hard to look more stupid than a deep-sea fisherman does in his swordbill cap. Hard, but not impossible. The ordinary Kennebunk cruiser hat accomplishes the task. This is simply the cap from a child’s sailor suit with its brim yanked down over eyes, ears, and sometimes nose. Worn thus it resembles nothing so much as a white cotton condom for the brain. Boat hats, indeed, run the gamut of foolery starting with the simple watch cap, making its wearers seem only unlettered, and winding up with the enormous yellow rubber sou’wester foul-weather chapeau, in which even George Bush would look like a drunk cartoon character doing a tuna-fish commercial.
Snow and other frozen forms of water make for no improvement. If there is anything—vassalage, Bolshevism, purdah—more deleterious to the spirit of human dignity than the knit ski cap, I have not seen it. Professional circus clowns, medieval court jesters, Trans-Carpathian village idiots—any one of them would balk at wearing a five-foot-long purple, green, red, pink, and orange cranial sock with a yard-wide pom-pom on the end. And even this is not so bad as what a WASP will wear in the winter when not on the ski slopes. That is when he goes out to shovel the walk in a vinyl-brimmed plaid cap with earflaps that tie up over the head—the worst hat on earth, the hat that turned America’s Midwest into the world’s laughingstock.
I am only half Protestant, but when I look on my closet shelf I find a disgusting Moose River canoeing hat, a regrettable corduroy Cragsmere, an incredibly idiotic Florida Keys bonefishing hat with brims at both ends, several crownless tennis visors that make me look like an Olympic contestant in double-entry bookkeeping, a John Lennon cap left over from my hippie days, and a plethora of the ubiquitous ad-emblazoned baseball caps. To judge by these I have been renting out frontal-lobe space to Purolator, Firestone, the NRA, and the Kittery, Maine, 1978 Jubilee Days. And let’s not even discuss the International Signal Orange dunce cap I wear to go bird shooting.
Now, it’s true, other ethnic groups also wear unusual headgear. Blacks, Orthodox Jews, Mexican archbishops, Italian steelworkers, to name a few. But the Stetsons of 125th Street are intentionally outrageous, yarmulkes are items of religious faith, and so forth. WASPs wear their hats in all seriousness, without spiritual reasons or historical traditions for doing so, and not a single one of their bizarre toppers would be any help if an I-beam fell on it. Nonetheless a WASP will tell you his hat is functional. It has been my experience that whenever anyone uses the word “functional” he’s in the first sentence of a lame excuse. The real reason WASPs wear goofy hats is that goofy-hat wearing satisfies a deep-seated need. In gin-and-tonic veritas. Give a WASP six drinks and he’ll always put something silly on his head—a lampshade, ladies’ underwear, Gorham silver nut dish, L. L. Bean dog bed, you name it. In more sober and inhibited moments he’ll make do with an Australian bush hat, a tam-o’-shanter, or the Texan monstrosity all WASPs affect when they get within telexing distance of a cow.
Until the last years of the Eisenhower era, WASPs wore wonderful haberdashery. They went about in perfectly blocked and creased homburgs, jaunty straw boaters, majestic opera hats, and substantial bowlers. A gentleman would sooner wear two-tone shoes to a diplomatic reception than appear in public without a proper hat. Then something happened.
Adult male Protestants of the better-off kind are a prominent social group. They make up a large percent of our national leaders in business, politics, and education. Maybe it’s no accident that the rise of the silly hat coincides with the disappearance of a coherent American foreign policy, the decay of business ethics, the increase in functional illiteracy, and the general decline of the United States as a world power. The head is symbolic of reason, discipline, good sense, and self-mastery. Putting a fuzzy green Tyrolean hat decorated with a tuft of deer behind on top of it means trouble. Our native aristocracy, those among us with the greatest advantages, the best resources, and the broadest opportunities to do good, have decided to abrogate all civilized responsibilities, give free play to the id, and run around acting like a bunch of . . .
Wait a minute! Down by the dock—I just saw a WASP with a pitcher of martinis trying to put a fedora on his dog. Does this mean Henry Kissinger will be made Secretary of State again?
The Ends of the Earth
In Search of the Cocaine Pirates
I had money in the bank, a pretty girlfriend, an assignment from a slick magazine to interview some business executives. That is, I was bored, restless, and irritable. The difference between journalists and other people is that other people spend their lives running from violence, tragedy, and horror and we spend ours trying to get in on it. Blood was running through the streets of San Salvador, commie choppers thrashed the hills of Afghanistan, Africa was positively in the toilet from Addis Ababa to the Cape, and here I was in a goddam luxury hotel waiting to have lunch with a friendly corporate VP. I longed for stray mortar rounds, typhus epidemics, starving babies at the very least. Please understand, this isn’t courage or a desire to tell the world the truth. It’s sloth. Nothing makes an easier lead sentence than a stray mortar round hitting a starving baby in a typhus hospital. That is Pulitzer stuff. But try writing even a dependent clause about an honest comp
troller giving you net sales figures over pasta salad.
In this funk of self-pity, a headline caught my eye: “Caribbean Islands’ Top Officials Held in Drug Smuggling Plot.” It seemed that on March 6, 1985, in a Miami Ramada Inn, the Drug Enforcement Agency had arrested Norman Saunders, the chief minister and head of state of a British Crown Colony called the Turks and Caicos Islands. Saunders was videotaped stuffing $20,000 into his pants pockets. He and two other officials from the islands’ eleven-member parliament—Minister of Commerce and Development Stafford Missick and legislator Aulden “Smokey” Smith—were charged with seventeen counts of conspiracy to smuggle narcotics. Thus, at day’s end, 27 percent of the Turks and Caicos elected government was cooling its heels in a U.S. slammer.
That was more like it. No national magazine had done a story about drug smuggling in the Caribbean for, I don’t know, a week. I could fly to the Turks and Caicos in between chats with fiduciary nabobs and get trouble plenty.
Nor was this the first spore of dark narco evil to come whiffing out of these airstrip-dotted, many-harbored cays at the remote southeastern reach of the Bahamas chain. We journalists keep up on such things. For years the English press had been running articles like “Paradise for Pedlars—Island Colony Key to a Multimillion Drug Trade” (Daily Express, September 7, 1982). The London Times said that in the late seventies “law enforcement officials reckoned that 90 percent[!] of the marijuana entering the United States was being moved through the Turks and Caicos.” The Sunday Telegraph warned, “Narcotics money is so influential that it is rapidly bringing about the creation of a completely new power structure in the Turks, a whole new political system.”
I checked the Saunders story in various newspapers. Apparently the Turks and Caicos natives were not grateful for the DEA’s efforts. “Talk of retribution, of hostages ... and of British warships rushing to the scene” was reported by the Washington Post under the front-page headline “Drug Arrests Raise Islands’ Tension—British Governor Urges Populace Not to ‘Take to the Streets.’” The New York Times said the new acting chief minister, Mr. Nathaniel “Bops” Francis, “declared indignantly that Mr. Saunders was ‘framed’ and he spoke angrily of a racist plot hatched by white Americans.” “Aftershocks . . . rumbled through the eight-isle British territory,” read the lead on a Miami Herald story which quoted the commerce minister’s nephew as saying, “It’s not a disgrace that they were interested in money. It is a disgrace that they got caught.” And what kind of country has members of Parliament with names like Bops and Smokey, anyway? The place must be a new pirate republic.
There were a number of these in the Caribbean, Tortuga being the most famous. It was colonized in the 1600s by a group of French buccaneers called the Coast Brotherhood. They preyed on the Spanish plate fleet (and anything else). Another freebooter mini-nation was New Providence, on the site of modern Nassau. Founded in 1716, it counted among its citizens “Calico Jack” Rackham and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach. Rackham was famous for wearing lightweight cotton clothing, Blackbeard for setting off firecrackers in his beard and drinking rum and gunpowder. They robbed ships and killed people too. The head of state in New Providence was a half-mad castaway the pirates found on the beach. They styled him “Governor” and made up elaborate official protocols.
The Turks and Caicos would be up-to-date, of course. There’d be no Jolly Rogers on the big Herreshoff yachts, just Colombian registries. Sinister black cigarette speedboats would be bobbing at the docks, no doubt, Learjets lurking under camouflage nets, big campesinos in Armani suits fingering their Uzis and MAC-10s while Guajira Peninsula warlords gestured grandly to scruffy Americans with Rolex watches. And, naturally, there would be tow-haired, Hershey-tanned, near-naked dope-dealer girlfriends everywhere—bodies hard, eyes hard too. Plus bartops slathered with fine-chopped pink-auraed Andean flake pushed into lines thick as biceps.
What to pack? Swim suit, flip-flops, .357 magnum ... On the other hand, given the Latin blow vendors’ penchant for murdering wives, infants, not to mention writers, maybe a note from my doctor about taking a sunshine psoriasis cure. The travel brochures made prominent mention of bank secrecy laws, I noticed. The Third Turtle Inn on the island of Providenciales seemed to be the first-rate place to stay. I hit on a cautious, neutral sort of disguise: summer-weight blue blazer, chinos, and deck shoes—a bit lawyerish, a touch bankery, just a South Florida yuppie, you know, just brushing shoulders with the scene, in for a little sit-down with a client maybe or bundling some fungibles through a corporate shell. Businesslike, that is, but not undercover, for God’s sake, or nosy or too businesslike. I flew in from Miami. The sweltering tin-roofed airport, the too-casual customs agents, the thornbush-and-palm-scrub landscape all breathed menace. I went to the bar at the Third Turtle, ordered a gin—“Make that a double”—lit a cigarette, and looked knowing.
“Jesus Christ,” said somebody in the bar, “another newspaper reporter. How come all you guys wear blue blazers? Is it a club or what?”
“Uh,” I said. “Er . . . oh . . .I’ll bet folks around here are pretty upset about Norman Saunders and everybody getting arrested in Miami,” I said, subtly turning the subject toward drugs.
“Upset?!” said someone else, “Goddam right we’re upset. Norman and Smokey are the two best tennis players in the islands, and the tournament is next week!”
Perhaps this wasn’t exactly the story I thought.
The Turks and Caicos rope through eighty miles of ocean. They are outcroppings of eolian limestone, piles of fossil seashell bits, really. There are a few hills, but mostly the islands are near sea level or at it. Mangrove tangles fill the low spots. On first glance, as tropical paradises go, the Ts and Cs are sort of like the roof of your apartment building. Rainfall is scant, topsoil rare. Nice beaches, though, and the wind and water carve the soft rock into rococo shorelines and mysterious sea caves and startling sinkholes fit for Aztec maiden sacrifices. The people are hopelessly friendly. I had to trade in my rented scooter for a Jeep because of so much waving. You don’t want to take a hand off the handlebars on what passes for a road down there. A few hundred yards from shore are splendid coral reefs poised on the edge of “the wall,” the thousandmeter dropoff at the end of the continental shelf. It’s a good place to scuba-dive (or, I mused hopefully, lose a competitor wearing cement Top-Siders). The vegetation is low, harsh, and tangled, but it goes on for miles without human interruption, some of the last truly wild land left in the North Caribbean.
There are thirty-seven islands according to the New York Times, forty-two according to the Washington Post, eight according to the Miami Herald. I counted sixty-three on the only chart I could find, which was also a placemat. Anyone in earshot—taxi drivers, fishing-boat captains, hotel maids, people standing in the road—got involved whenever I asked this question. “East Caicos, West Caicos, North Caicos, South Caicos ...” Once they started naming islands it was impossible to stop them. “... and Middle Caicos and Providenciales and Pine Cay and Grand Turk and Guana Cay and Nigger Cay but we don’t call it that anymore and Back Cay and French Cay, Bush Cay, Fish Cays, Big Ambergris, Little Ambergris . . . wait, now, do you mean high tide or low?”
Only eighty-five hundred people live on only six of those islands. Almost as many more are in the Bahamas, Britain, the United States, or somewhere else they can find jobs.
Every spring in the Turks and Caicos there’s a hatch of handsome black handspan-sized Erebus moths. They’re called “money bats.” If they land on you it’s said they bring fortune. Obviously they don’t bring much. The locals work at conch diving, lobster fishing, a few tourism jobs—there’s not a lot to do for a living. In fact, there’s not a lot to do.
I interviewed the British governor, the opposition leader, and (the arrested people having politely resigned) the new chief minister and the new minister of commerce, development, and tourism.
Nobody had a bad word, or even an enlightening one, to say about former chief minister Norman Sau
nders. He’s personable, generous, easy to work with. He’s handsome and a tasteful dresser as well. On his home island of South Caicos he commands special affection. His picture is all over the place above a political slogan that sounds like rejected name ideas from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”: “Firm, Frank, Friendly, Faithful.” I was counting on an earful from opposition leader Clement Howell. But they’ve only had party politics in the Turks and Caicos since 1975, and as yet they seem politely confused about what to do with them. Howell is head of the slightly more populist PDM (Popular Democratic Movement). Saunders was or is head of the slightly more business-oriented PNP (People’s National Party). “Sort of like Democrats and Republicans?” I ventured to Howell.
He pondered that. “What’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans?”
“The Republicans won.”
“Exactly,” he said. Was this, I thought, the “whole new political system” the Sunday Telegraph had warned about?
Saunders seems to have founded the PNP because another fellow, the late “JAGS” McCartney, had founded the PDM. The PDM was founded because the Turks and Caicos were engaged in what may be history’s most halfhearted struggle against British colonialism. This culminated in the “Junkanoo Club incident.” In 1975 the British were recruiting Turks and Caicos policemen from other Caribbean islands. JAGS and fellow natives booed the off-island police officers. Some of those officers were, contrary to local custom, wearing guns, and they fired into the air. JAGS and his friends barricaded themselves in the Junkanoo Club and fired into the air back. Hostages were held. Demands were made. (Actually there’s some doubt about the hostages. A local newspaper publisher and two other non-PDM characters were in the club, but they were being given unlimited free drinks and may not have known they were hostage.) The principal demand during the Junkanoo Club incident was that a commission be appointed to investigate the Junkanoo Club incident. After an all-night standoff the demand was met. The next year JAGS McCartney was elected the first native chief minister. The struggle for independence ended shortly thereafter when the Thatcher administration told the Turks and Caicos that they were going to be independent whether they liked it or not.