Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (60 page)

OK. You can mail me in a week or so at the U.S. Consulate in Barranquilla. Unless we get seized. If that happens … well … I don't know.

Hunter

While in Barranquilla Thompson had spent an evening drinking whiskey with a group of local Indians and telling them he was a good friend of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy
.

May 26, 1962
En route to Bogotá

Yours reached me this morning, my man, and I can only say that … ah well … there is at this moment a beetle the size of god's ass on the table about six inches from the t-writer. It is worse than anything Kafka ever dreamed, so big I can see its eyes and the hair on its legs—jesus, suddenly it leaped off and now circles me with a menacing whir.

I face eight days of this. We have just left Barranquilla after fucking around all day with seven barges of beer for the interior. Now we are pushing them up the river and a huge beam of light pokes out ahead. In the beam are about six million bugs of various sizes—just snatched a beetle off my neck—constant stabbing of mosquitoes and things like mimis.
¹⁴
I have a choice tonight of sleeping outside on the deck or in a four-man cubicle over the engine room. I will give outside a try and retreat if I can't stand the bites. No repellent.

There will be no English spoken for eight days and maybe more. This boat is going only halfway, to an oil village on the Magdalena River. There I will have to find another boat, without English, but armed with a letter from a company bigwig. I can't read it, but it says I ride free. It is a deal I
made—free 400-mile ride for about ten photos of boat for advertising use. All in all, it is 750 miles or so from Barranquilla to Bogotá. Only 7½ more days to go.

The crew is primitive and vicious looking and the captain is an old river toad who can't understand why I'm here and doesn't much care for it. His daughter is here too, but she is scraggy. I was dealing in a whorehouse last night but refused to pay and could not make my concepts understood. I convinced the lovely, but the chickenheaded madam held firm. Fuck them all. These latins are all whores in their own various ways—even the presidents. (The crew is silently watching me type; I can see them about six feet behind me out of the corner of my eye.) I created quite a stir demonstrating my telephoto lens and this letter machine should do the dinga. The zippo is old hat, of course, or I would use that too. It is a constant challenge to keep them off balance and wondering, instead of crouched for the kill.

A week ago I came over from Aruba on a fishing boat and spent three days with allegedly savage and fearsome indians. As it turned out, they were the best people I've met. Loíza Aldea is like Harlem compared to Guajira. They wear nothing but sashes around the waist and speak their own language, not Spanish. It is a smugglers' port of entry and for three days we drank the best scotch and stayed drunk as loons. A wonderful time but there was no water and the food was unfit for dogs. I had to eat it anyway, for fear of insulting them. I was warned about that in Aruba. I was in Colombia four days before anyone saw my passport. That was in Barranquilla. and I had a bit of a hard time explaining how I got in. There is no law in Guajira, no customs, no immigration, no white men, no nothing but indians and whiskey. Barranquilla was a city, of course, too much like San Juan for my taste, but now we are heading into wild country again—with seven barges of beer. If I can make any friends in the crew I will try to have at the beer. Seven barges should yield enough for all. I have been swilling beer like a bastard—one dime a bottle, cigs 8 cents. I am down to 10 U.S. dollars but have developed a theory which will go down as Thompson's Law of Travel Economics. To wit: full speed ahead and damn the cost; it will all come out in the wash.

I have just received a clipping of mine from the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, a long and pondering thing on Cuban exiles. (Christ, that monster beetle is back, gripping and sucking at the tablecloth, which is already covered with ants. I may have to kill it, but why bother.)

Am meeting decent people all along. A Dutch journalist in Aruba and two ivy-type English teachers in Barranquilla. They gave me the name of a Fulbright type in Bogotá, who will feel the full weight of my presence in eight days. Unless the June 10 Peru elections look to be bloody, I will
stay in Bogotá two weeks or so, then proceed slowly to Ecuador and down the coast to Lima. I am moving more slowly than I thought and it is better for the oddities. I arrived on the South American coast with 12 U.S. dollars, and in Barran. with 11 dimes. (Great shit I was just stung on the neck by a bug twice the size of that beetle. Had to kill the bastard. I may not be able to keep up this typing—the light is bringing in the big ones.) They are all over me, look like scorpions. Jesus, eight days of this. You get what you pay for, I guess, and I ain't paid. But it will grab me some original photos, if nothing else. Maybe malaria too. I am drinking water everywhere and praying against fever. There is a definite sense of the Congo here; we have left Barran. behind and the banks are lined with palms and other shaggy matter. I can see it when they swing the light. The captain is going to bed, locking his daughter's door from the outside and eyeing me stonily. Maybe it is time to have at the cerveza. I will look up the mechanic, who has the grin of a drinker and arms like King Kong. The fucking bugs are on me in force. I can barely stand it. My balls for a sleeping pill. Or an air-conditioned cabin at $20 a night. There may be something to this tourism after all. Even the drinking water is hot now. I am sweating like an animal.

And now for you. “Cabin empty in April” sounds like the knell of doom. (Another huge beetle, slapped at him but missed.) About the time to dig down for that checkbook, eh? (Everyone seems to be going to bed here—they will probably get me up at some unholy hour.) I got 2 hours last night, after being ejected from the whorehouse at 5:00. Tossing pesos around like beans. It is hard to believe they are real. This morning I rated 3 inches on the social page of the Barranquilla
El Heraldo
. All lies, but in Spanish and harmless. My mind is wandering; I can't concentrate with these bugs. I keep seeing you running around there with a notebook, trying to drum up revolutions. Who in hell are you working for? Any money coming in? Still scratching after that nymphet? Is McGarr doing anything but eating and wandering around Berbers?
¹⁵
He claims to be writing; I guess art is dead. Now the bugs are dying on the table and crawling into the ty-writer. I am trying to blow them out, but can't. The lights keep dimming. I think the captain is fucking himself. Christ, my leg for a cool beer. 8 days of this. If I ever get to Bogotá, I may never leave. Got a forwarded letter from Hudson about five days ago and he is now the sole owner of the boat. Michael gave up the ghost. Harvey Sloane
¹⁶
plans to finish and take off near the end of summer. He broached the possibility of my meeting him somewhere and signing on, also asked about you. I doubt that he got your letter, from
what he said. Appeared to have no idea what you were doing or what plans. Nor do I, for that matter. Is it Africa after Spain? Hudson talked of having you join the crew, also Sandy. I am holding off any commitments till he gets the thing in the water and it floats. By summer's end I intend to be in Rio and zeroing in on October elections there. God, these bugs. I think I have to quit.

A word about Aruba, since you asked. It is decent for a short stay, very expensive and probably a cheap easy destination from any European oil port. From Aruba to Europe it is $3–5 a day by freighter. I fell among hospitable people there and had a good stay, but would not like to try it unaided. Of course, I am paving a way for other vagrants. The names are on file. Write me c/o U.S. Embassy, Consular section, Lima, Peru, or the box in New York, which is more reliable since my plans are subject to violent sudden changes. OK.… The U.S. is looking better and better. A job may be the answer. Or the dole.

Hunter

After the tortuous journey down the Magdalena River, Thompson arrived in Bogotá exhausted and nearly broke
.

June 6, 1962
Bogotá, Colombia

I am in Bogotá now, Semonin, and it is raining outside. I have just finished dinner in the dining room of the Imperial Hotel, and, due to that fact, am now writing in coat and tie. Like Thomas Mann. I am in the Imperial at 25 pesos a day,
con comida
[including food], and it is a moot question as to how and when I'll get out. I can meet tomorrow's bill, 75 pesos, but the next, on Monday, will come close to cleaning me out—and there are a good many miles to go before I rest. I am writing this letter because it has been drilled into my head that if I am going to write for money I cannot write a word that will mean a fucking thing in two weeks' time. I have been accused, in fact, of submitting articles that read “like letters and essays,” which of course they were. Needless to say, they have not seen print. And I have not seen money: $20 in all—two long-worked pieces in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, which is getting the bargain of the year. My mail has gone to the dogs, my photos are going nowhere, my bowels are racked with dysentery, my contacts speak no English, my countrymen want me deported, and my overall situation is a black X on a black wall. I have a suspicion that this is a good town, but I am damned if I know where to grab
it. I have done everything I could to find a beery journalist, but there are none and that is a bad sign in any town. The people at the Embassy and the USIS [United States Information Services] are so full of shit that the stench floats down to the street and disrupts traffic. I think all the good Americans died in a riot somewhere that I have not yet heard about because there is no news here. For all I know the world is burning or Germany has started another war. But regardless of what is happening, nobody here either knows or cares. Local news is big, of course, one strike after another—students, busmen, bondsmen—forever striking, and it is all I can do to wander around in the mobs and get photos that nobody will ever use for anything except as an excuse to bill me for development fees. Sex is the main bug, of course, not the actual lack of humping as much as the lack of any possibility, a sexual deadness in the air that makes me feel I might be locked up for looking at women on the street. Even in San Juan there was a fine, lusty tension in the air, a meeting and gripping of eyes at every corner. Aruba had a bit of the same thing, and so did the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Ah, but not here—here we wear coats and ties at all times. This morning I was asked to leave the dining room for not dressing for breakfast. I refused, of course, and ate in a black, sullen silence which will undoubtedly be reported somehow to President Kennedy and my passport will be revoked. No matter where I go I am the only man in sight without a sportcoat and tie. In all the cafés, on every street, even the beggars dress. I am not kidding—the waiters in the dining room dress immediately after each meal and hang around the hotel in filthy suits—but with ties. And this is one of the cheapest hotels in town.

Being a free-lancer is impossible, of course; they are used to the $100-a-day types who fly in and out without the faintest idea of who the president is or what it means. These are the Alliance for Progress boys, deft technicians all. And then there are the social workers, vastly dedicated people who make a man feel degenerate if he can't avoid a feeling that they are all phonies. It is like knocking the flag.

Everybody is working terribly hard on some Worthwhile Project, and for some queer reason it is depressing. They are hauling the indians out of mud huts and putting them in huts made of concrete blocks—then hiring $100-a-day photographers to take pictures of the progress. They have imported ping-pong and the Twist to combat the Red Menace, and an unsalaried cynic with no coat or tie might just as well slink off to some bistro and masturbate in a back booth.

Needless to say, my plans are changing with each passing week. Now I am ready to move on to Peru, write a few shitty things from there, then dash across the mountains to Rio, where, if nothing else, there is at least an English-language newspaper. Bone writes, for that matter, that he is pushing
for a job in Rio, the same one that was tentatively offered to me several months ago. Editing some kind of Chamber of Commerce magazine. My reply to that will probably blackball me forever in Rio, just as other letters have made me friends elsewhere. Just what I will do for money in Rio is one of those questions that I'd rather not consider. Or Peru, for that matter. Or anywhere else. Sandy reports that the agent still has not read the novel, after six weeks. It will take him six minutes, I think, to skim 15 pages and toss it aside as the work of a crank. I think the Mad Bomber had a point and I am beginning to understand my mystic attachment to my guns. If I had one now I would feel a lot better. Either I am going mad or there is a definite conspiracy afoot in the world, a conspiracy of fatness and blindness, backed up by a sinister mindless kind of reasoning that is only necessary to justify what is already a fact and what will always be a fact. But there is no sense rambling on like this at a time when I am beginning to doubt my own sanity. Maybe if I could burst into the streets speaking perfect Spanish I might find something sane, but I seriously doubt it. Whatever I am looking for here is not generally wrapped in words, which these people are full of. The students held a protest meeting on the steps of the presidential palace tonight and it looked like all those shouting photos of Castro, and probably sounded the same too. They are a gutsy lot at times, as a good many news pictures here will illustrate. The cops are what give me the creeps; to look at them in the jackboots is bad enough, but to see photos of them firing wildly into mobs of students is a bit unreal. Running them into corners and piling up bodies three deep—this has happened often enough to make me feel nervous even standing near a demonstration. Most of it, of course, took place several years back, and Colombia is supposed to be coming to its senses again. But yesterday in Barranquilla the army tackled a student protest march with clubs and gas, and it was only because the students fled that nobody was shot.