Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (24 page)

I did, however, see their press agent. I'm making a joke,
actually. David Fenton, head of Fenton Communications, is a New York-based public-relations executive specializing in efforts to
make the world-especially the Third World-a better place. His
firm is a sort of grown-up version of the mimeograph machine in the
old Vietnam Moratorium office. I talked to Fenton after I got back to
the United States. He emphasized that he is hired by U.S. citizens
and U. S. foundations, not by the rebels, to "tell the other side of
the story in Central America."

"I don't think the rebels are entirely Marxists," Fenton said.
"Personally, I'm a social democrat." I asked him what he could tell
me about El Salvador. He said, "There are two things people have
to understand about El Salvador: One is the culture of violence.
Two is what average daily poverty is really like. Poverty and
violence."

"Violence and poverty: those are the two things you have to
understand about the country," the briefing officer at the American
embassy in El Salvador told me. The embassy officer did not think
the Gs were social democrats. He noted they weren't getting their
guns from Sweden or the British Labor party. He gave me a threepage list of attacks on the U. S. Embassy, apparently a routine
handout, like a communion card. But not all the attacks had been
launched by the left.

"When we first got involved here," said the embassy officer,
"the right wing regarded us as pinko wimps, the left as pig
imperialists."

"And things are better now?" I asked.

"Yes." He told me that death-squad activity had been curtailed. (Though Fenton later gave me a list of people who have
disappeared since Duarte was elected.) He told me that the Gs
were on the defensive and that the army seemed to be backing
Duarte's attempts at reform.

"How about the economy?"

He sighed and said there wasn't enough land, wasn't enough
industrial base. Natural resources are zilch. El Salvador needs a
Singaporean high-tech solution. But the death squads murder the
college-educated, and the Gs kidnap the entrepreneurs and chase
capital out of the country.

"Well?" I asked.

"If everything goes the best it possibly can, they will be
killing each other for another ten years."

I went out for a night on the town with the briefing officer,
some other embassy people and some U. S. reporters. We went to
the Zona Rosa, San Salvador's Montmartre or Bourbon Street. It's a
tepid three-block area, site of Chili's and half a dozen other cafes,
one discotheque and a few restaurants.

We drove there in an embassy car, a fully armored Chevy
Blazer with bullet-proof glass so thick the passing scene was pulled
like taffy and oncoming cars were foreshortened until they looked
like Robert Crumb cartoons. Besides the glass and body armor, the
Blazer had run-flat tires and a device beneath the back bumper
that, if you turn a special key under the dash, sets off a flash-andconcussion grenade. I understand it's very effective. A Salvadoran
driver turned that key by accident once and flattened the embassy
parking lot.

We had an armed chauffeur and a guard with an Uzi riding in
the front seat. A pistol hung from a holster on the door pillar, and
there was another on the back-seat floor. When we got to the Zona
Rosa, the electric door locks clicked open and the guard stepped
out and surveyed the area, machine gun at port arms.

A band at one of the cafes was playing "For What It's Worth,"
by Buffalo Springfield ("Paranoia strikes deep/Into your life it will
creep . . . "). We ate at a restaurant called Ciao, which looked
exactly like a restaurant called Ciao would look in Atlanta-pink
and black art deco with neon highlights-but we sat well back from
the windows in case of grenade attacks.

The briefing officer described the security arrangements at his
house. He has a lethargic, twenty-four-hour armed guard outside
and a German-shepherd watchdog who's afraid of loud noises. He
said his best hope was that the Gs would stumble over the sleeping
guard. The guard would wake up and drop his gun. The gun would
go off and scare the dog. The dog would run indoors to hide under
the bed. And that would alert him in time to get out the back way.

A reporter asked me if I was going to turn this into a whole
book, like Joan Didion did after her two rather uneventful weeks
here. Didion's book, Salvador, is something of an in-country laughingstock. One heavy-breathing passage describes an incident in a
posh neighborhood in San Salvador, where Didion reaches into her
purse for something and suddenly hears the noise of all the armed
guards on the street releasing the safeties on their guns. This set everyone at the table laughing uproariously. It seems no one in El
Salvador has ever used the safety on a gun.

I said, no, no book for me. I said I was having trouble sorting
out Salvadoran politics. Some of the principal supporters of the
guerrilla front, the FMLN-FDR, were President Duarte's political
allies when he was an opposition figure in the Seventies. And some
of Duarte's present allies have reputed connections to the death
squads, which were killing his supporters during the 1982 elections for the national legislature. Meanwhile, the army has supported torture-happy paramilitary organizations, engineered leftleaning coups and emerged as a force for social compromise,
sometimes all at once. Was there, maybe, something I could read
to get all this straight?

"Yes," said another embassy officer. "The Malachi Papers."

Several days later, on Christmas Eve, real havoc broke loose.
From the balcony of my room at the Sheraton, I could see the entire
city. There were powder flashes and staccato bursts in every neighborhood. Rockets whistled. Huge explosions illuminated the surrounding hills. A dozen blasts came inside the hotel compound
itself. Bits of debris flew past my head. The brazen face of war? No,
firecrackers.

Everybody in Latin America likes to set off firecrackers on
Christmas Eve, but nobody likes it more than the Salvadorans.
They have everything-cherry bombs, M80s, defingering little
strings of one-inchers and items of ordnance that can turn a fiftyfive-gallon oil drum into a steel hula skirt. The largest have a
warning printed on them, that they shouldn't be lit by drunks. I am
no stranger to loud noise. I've been to a Mitch Ryder and the
Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids. But at
midnight on Christmas Eve-with the windows shut, the air conditioner on, the TV turned up and the bathroom door closed-I
couldn't hear myself sing "Wild Colonial Boy" in the shower. On
Christmas Day I saw people raking their yards, gathering mounds
of spent gray firecrackers as large as autumn leaf piles.

You'd think after six years of civil war and 464 years of civil
unrest, more explosions would be the last thing the Salvadorans
would want. Or, maybe, the thing they want most.

FEBRUARY 1987

I hear the America's Cup race was the most spectacular sporting
event of the decade. You could have fooled me. I was right there in
the middle of it on the official press boat, the Sea Chunder, getting
bounced around and shook silly. I had a psychopathic strangler's
grip on the railing and was staring out at the horizon like some idiot
Ahab who'd run out of whale bait. All I could see was a whole
bunch of ocean and wet, messy waves. Though, as it turned out, I
was facing the wrong way, and had to clamber and stumble and
crawl on all fours over to the Sea Chunder's other railing. There was
a whole bunch of ocean on that side, too, if you ask me.

Way off in the distance, or so I was told, were Stars & Stripes
and Kookaburra III. They looked like two dirty custard-pie slices
stood on end. First one tipped one way, then the other tipped the
same way, then the first tipped the other way and so did the second.

"Awesome!" "A brilliant tacking duel!" "Superb seamanship!"
said the professional boat reporters from Dinghy & Dock, Flaps
Afloat and other important journals of the sport. I don't think I'll ever be a real boat reporter. My Rolex isn't big enough. Also, I
don't have the color sense. You have to wear orange Top-Siders and
a pair of electric-blue OP shorts and a vermilion-and-yellowstriped Patagonia shirt and a hot-pink baseball cap with the name
of somebody's boat on it in glitter, plus Day-Glo-green zinc oxide
smeared down your nose and around your lips like a radioactive
street mime. I do have one loud necktie with little Santas that I
wear at Christmas, but this isn't enough to qualify. And professional boat reporters love to hang bushels of stuff around their
necks-press passes, dock passes, ball-point pens that float, cameras, binoculars and Vuarnet sunglasses on those dangle cords that
are supposed to look so cool nowadays but which remind anyone
over thirty-five of the high school librarian. Good luck to these men
and women if they happen to fall over the side.

Falling over the side, however, was something the boat reporters were disappointingly bad at. While the Sea Chunder bucked
like a fake Times Square sex act, the boat reporters assumed poses
of studied nonchalance, talking boat talk in loud and knowing
voices.

It's no use my trying to describe this America's Cup business
if you don't understand boat talk. Everything on a boat has a
different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this
is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around
with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished
college. During the brief intervals on the Sea Chunder when I
wasn't blowing lunch, I compiled a glossary:

Fore-Front.

Aft-Back.

Midships-You don't know "fore" from "aft" and had better stay
where you are.

Bow and Stern-These also mean front and back. Yet although
you can go back to the front of a boat, you cannot go aft to the bow
(which shows that even boat people get confused by boat talk).

Port-Left. Easy to remember because port wine is red and so's
your face if you say "left" instead of "port" on a boat.

Starboard-Right. Not so easy to remember.

Leeward-The direction to throw up in.

Windward-The direction not to.

Avast-A warning that you're talking boat talk or are about to start.

Ahoy-Ditto.

Deck The floor, except it's also the ceiling and this can be
perplexing during bad weather when you're not sure which one
you're standing on.

Bulkhead-A wall.

Hatch-A door.

Companionway-A staircase.

Gangway-When you're moving along a wall, trying to stay on the
floor, and you go through a door and fall down a staircase, you yell
"Gangway!"

Sheets-Ropes and not the things that look like great big bed
sheets, which are sails, even though the sheets tend to sail all over
the place and the sails are really just big sheets.

Jibs, Mains, Mizzens, Jenoas, and Spinnakers-What you're
supposed to call the sails if you're hep.

Cleats, Battens, Booms, Stays, Yards, Gaffs, Clews and
Cheek Blocks-Things on a boat and you don't know what the hell
to call them.

But none of this will help you with the most difficult part of boat
talk which is how to spell yacht. I've tried "yacth," "yatch,"
"ychat" and "yot." None of them look quite right.

Meanwhile, out in the shark-semi-infested Indian Ocean
(most of the sharks were back on the Fremantle docks selling
Kookaburra sweatshirts for $65), the most spectacular sporting
event of the decade dragged on.

If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working
right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve
miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around
the Central Park Reservoir. The Sea Chunder-a lumbering diesel
the size and shape of a Presbyterian church-can run rings around
any twelve-meter ever built. So can a rowboat with a twentyhorsepower Evinrude on the back. The America's Cup is like
driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter
buses race.

Stars & Stripes and Kookaburra III dawdled out to this thing, a buoy, that was floating in the water and from there sailed 3.64 miles
to another thing, then turned around and did that seven more
times. This took five hours at the end of which everybody was
drenched and sick and sunburned, especially me.

Of course they couldn't do it in just any old boat or it might
have been over in twenty minutes and cost only a hundred bucks,
and what kind of fun would that be? They had to have special
twelve-meter boats, which cost $1,000,000 apiece and don't even
have a toilet. They also don't have a fridge full of tall cool ones or
any tanned wahines in string-knit bathing-suit bottoms.

A twelve-meter is not twelve meters long or twelve meters wide
or even wrecked and sunk and twelve meters under the water, no
matter how good an idea that would be. A twelve-meter is a boat
that conforms to a complex design formula: