Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (25 page)

In layman's terms this means length (L) of the boat owner's insidertrading securities-fraud-trial transcript plus all the dollars (d) in
the world times 2 plus the square root of the Ralph Lauren designer
sheets (\ ) ruined by the crew members sleeping with the
spoiled rich girls who follow boat races around minus the number
of ugly and embarrassing free (F) boat visors given away by the
boat's principal sponsor divided by all sorts (.751r) of snits and
quarrels over the rules.

The race ended at last and somebody won, but the Sea
Chunder was still going UP and down and UP and down and UP
and down and oh, God, I had to get to a bathroom, I mean "head." I
worked my way along the "deck," holding onto the "bulkhead" and
I had just made it to the "companionway hatch" when we hit an
extra-messy wave. Blaauuuuughhh. "Gangway," indeed.

There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why
anyone would get on one voluntarily. But the most mysterious thing
is why rich people like them. Rich people are nuts for boats. The
first thing that a yo-yo like Simon LeBon or Ted Turner does when
he gets rich is buy a boat. And, if he's a high-hat kind of rich-that
is, if he made his money screwing thousands of people in arbitrage instead of screwing hundreds selling used cars-he buys a sailboat. I don't know about you, but if I got rich I'd buy something
warm and weatherproof that held still, like a bar. But not your true
cake-eater; he has to have a breeze bucket, a puff-powered moola
scow, a wet-ended WASP Winnebago.

Although I don't know why rich people like boats, I do know
that many of them deserve no better. And it's all right with me if
they spend the privileged hours of their golden days cramped and
soggy and bobbing at a clam's pace from Cold Hole Harbor, Maine,
to Muck Cay in the Bahamas to Cap de Tripe on the Riviera to
Phooey-Phooey in the Solomon Islands. And then there's Fremantle, Western Australia.

Fremantle doesn't seem to fit the mold. I mean, the place is
okay, and I was glad to be there as opposed to being on the Sea
Chunder. But Fremantle is Dayton-on-the-Sea. In fact, Western
Australia is Ohio with one side of its hat brim turned up. As soon as
I got on solid ground, I went over to the famed Royal Perth Yacht
Club. It looked like a cinder-block drive-through bottle store.
(Cinder-block drive-through bottle stores are the main architectural
features of the greater Perth-Fremantle metropolitan area.) Then I
visited the Fremantle docks where the twelve-meters are parked.
Welcome to Hoboken, circa 1950. I expected Marlon Brando to
saunter out at any moment and have the climactic fist fight in On
the Waterfront. God knows how the America's Cup race wound up
out here. Somebody told me it had to do with Australia cheating in
1983 and putting tail fins on their boat bottom, but that sounds
unlikely. I think the International Sailboat Racing Politburo, or
whatever it's called, got Fremantle mixed up with Fort-de-France
and thought they were going to Martinique. In Western Australia
they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailboating
equipment, the gin and tonic. If you don't watch them, they squirt
Rose's Lime Juice in it.

Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they
still ask if you've been convicted of a felony-although they are
willing to give you a visa even if you haven't been. Australia is
exotic, however. There are kangaroos and wallabies and wombats
all over the place, and even the Australian horses and sheep and
house cats hop around on their back legs and have little pouches in front. Well, maybe they don't. Actually I never saw a kangaroo. I
saw kangaroo posters and kangaroo postcards and thousands of
kangaroo T-shirts. Kangaroos appear on practically every advertising logo and trademark. You can buy kangaroo-brand oleo and
kangaroo bath soap, and get welcome mats, shower curtains and
beach towels with kangaroos on them and have kangaroos all over
your underpants. But, as for real live kangaroos, I think they're all
in the Bronx Zoo.

While I was visiting every bar in Fremantle, trying to recover
from my Sea Chunder ordeal, I heard the Australians talking about
how much they drink and punch each other. True, Australians do
drink mug upon mug of beer. But these are dainty little mugs that
hardly contain enough beer for one serving of fish-fry batter back
where I come from. I could tell the Americans by the way they
ordered four or six of these baby brewskis at a time. And the only
fight I saw was between two U.S. boat groupies because one threw
the other into a swimming pool and ruined his favorite pair of
purple boat socks with little pom-poms on the heels.

Australia was like "Australia Nite" at the Michigan State Phi
Delt house. The big excitement was driving on the wrong side of the
road. Not that I drove on the wrong side. I was over on the right
where I was supposed to be. But the Australians were on the left
and coming straight at me. After ten or twelve of those lime juice
G&Ts, this got very exciting.

I also went to the exciting Royal Perth Yacht Club Ball. The
ticket prices were exciting anyway-$300 a pop. The invitation
said black tie so I called South Perth Formal Hire and Live Bait and
got a polyester quadruple-knit dinner suit with foot-wide lapels and
bell bottoms in the Early Sonny Bono cut. When I arrived at the
dance, I was too embarrassed to get out of the car, especially since
it was 100 degrees and I was sweating like a hog and the polyester
had made my whole body break out in prickly heat. But nobody
else in Western Australia owns a tuxedo either. Every guy there was
wearing a rented one exactly like mine. We all spent the evening
itching and squirming and scratching ourselves like apes.

The R. P. Y. C. buffet, booze-up and fox-trot exhibition had
2,500 guests. This was more than the Royal P's dinky clubhouse or
even its parking lot could hoed. So the ball was given in an old wool barn that had been decorated to look like, well, an old wool barn.
And there was no air conditioning. Lanolin, ahoy.

At least the Australians weren't dressed the way they usually
are, which is in kangaroo T-shirts, khaki short shorts, work boots
and black mid-calf socks. You could tell this was genuine Perth
and Fremantle high society because hardly anybody yelled,
"G'day, Mate!" They yelled, "Ciao, Mate!" instead.

Australians are friendly, very friendly. I couldn't spend three
seconds eating my dinner without one of them butting in at the top
of his lungs, "G'day, Mate! Eatin' are ya? Whatzit? Food? Good on
ya!" Followed by an enormous backslap right in the middle of my
mouthful of boiled lamb brisket (which is either the national dish or
just what everything in Australia tastes like). The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about
six words. There's g'day, which means "hello." There's mate, which
is a folksy combination of "excuse me, sir" and "hey you." There's
good on ya, which means "that's nice" and fair dinkum, which
doesn't mean much of anything. Australian does have, however,
more synonyms for vomit than any other non-Slavic language. For
example: "liquid laughter," "technicolor yawn," "growling in the
grass' and "planting beets." These come in handy for the would-be
boat reporter or the would-be Yacht Club Ball society columnist,
for that matter.

Stars & Stripes captain and future White House guest Dennis
Conner was there, also in a bad tux. He looked like a poster child
for the Penguin Obesity Fund. Dennis is supposed to be something
of a personality, but with 2,499 other drunks with skin rashes all
around it was hard to tell.

In the middle of the wool-barn dance floor, flanked by armed
guards, was the America's Cup itself. The America's Saucer, the
America's Dinner Plate, the America's Soup Tureen and the America's Gravy Boat that go with it are presumably held by other yacht
clubs. It must be quite a place setting when it's all put together.

I was milling through the crowd of Cup admirers when I
bumped into Jimmy Buffett, on tour in Australia and looking, as
usual, like a one-man Spring Break. I've known Buffett since he
was playing for Coppertone handouts on the beach at Key West.
He's a sterling character and so forth, except he's under the misapprehension that sailboats are fun. He nearly drowned me in a
sailboat one time when we almost collided with a supertanker off
Miami Beach. It was a Gulf supertanker, but it came so close all we
could see was the U. Anyway, Buffett had written the Stars &
Stripes fight song "Take It Back" and was in a tizzy of spectator
enthusiasm.

"Oh, come on," I said. "This is about as interesting as
watching George Bush get ready for bed."

"Goddamn it, P.J.," said Buffett, "you dumb-ass Yankee
landlubbing typewriter skipper with your phony-baloney job making fun of everything-this is the most spectacular sporting event
of the decade." And he promised to explain twelve-meter racing to
me so that I'd feel about the America's Cup like David Hinkley felt
about Jodie Foster.

Buffett and I went off to show the Australian bartender what
he could do with his Rose's Lime Juice. And before you could say,
"G'day, Mate! Got a fair dinkum hangover? Good on ya!" We were
back on the Sea Chunder, flopping around like tropical fish on the
carpet.

This time I had a better view of the action, not that there was
any. "Look!" yelled Buffett, "They're jibing! They're heeling!
They're running! They're reaching! Oh, my God, they're jibing
again!" All of which seemed to mean that they weren't doing much.

A twelve-meter is a big boat, some sixty-five feet long, with
eleven people sailing it all at the same time. But, no matter how
much fooling around they do with the ropes and the steering wheel
and stuff, the boat just keeps piddling along in the water. Now and
then they put up a spinnaker-a great big sail that looks like what
happens when a fat girl in a sun dress stands over the air vent at a
Coney Island fun house. The purpose of the spinnaker is, I believe,
to give the sponsor some place where he can put the name of his
company in really gigantic letters.

"Jimmy," I said, "I could probably get into this if they'd arrn
these twelve-meters. You know, maybe twin-mount .50-calibers
right up in the pointy part at the front-with tracer bullets."

"P. J.," said Buffett, "shut up."

Fortunately, there was a wild-ass drug scene on the Sea
Chunder. I was popping fistsful of hyoscine hydrobromide (mar keted under the Barf-No-Mor label). Enough of this in your system
and you get seriously bent. Your vision goes zoom lens and begins
doing Top Gun special effects, aboriginie didjeridoos start playing
in your brain, your temples inflate and your mouth tastes like
Lionel 0-Gauge track. You don't feel like throwing up. But you do
feel like wetting yourself and raping the first mate and eating all the
colorful boat clothes. Sailboat racing can be interesting. So was
Altamont.

I went downstairs to the Sea Chunder's first floor and had
twelve beers to cool out and make myself regular sick instead of
hyoscine hydrobromide sick. Also, I figured it was important not to
see any more of this America's Cup stuff sober, or I might start
thinking about how many starving Ethiopian kids you could feed
with just one of these twelve-meters. Of course, that's ridiculous.
You can boil Kookaburra III for as long as you want, and starving
Ethiopian kids still won't eat it.

I spent the rest of the race in the Sea Chunder bar watching
"Dialing for Dingos' on local TV. Eventually I heard Buffett outside
hollering, "We won! We won!" And I guess we did. That's nice. We
now have a new national hero, size extra-large. I like it that Dennis
Conner, 1987 Athlete of the Year, can't touch his toes or even see
them. And twelve-meter racing is the perfect sport for the
Eighties-snobbish, expensive and high-tech in a pointless way.
You have to be rich even to afford to go see it. I'm sure there are two
dozen Hollywood mudsuckers slithering around L. A. this moment
pitching twelve-meter movie ideas. "Like Karate Kid," they're
saying, "but with boats."

Already a great national debate has started about where the
next America's Cup race should be held. Let me be the first to
suggest Aspen. I'll bet these twelve-meters go like a bitch downhill.