The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (41 page)

Without an editor to rein him in, Thompson couldn’t resist taking pot shots at such easy targets, and he seeded his article with belittling jabs at both the senators and the president of Rio’s Chamber of Commerce. As each of them took turns condemning the various popular movements around South America—movements that, unlike Thompson, they had not witnessed firsthand—Thompson countered with subtle mockery:

When the chamber president denounced the anti-business stance of Brazil’s leftist government, voicing concerns about the country’s “present climate,” Thompson noted wryly, “It was generally agreed that Mr. Fallon was not talking about the recent rainy spell.” The president went on to request that Senator Robertson “throw some light” on the issue of American businessmen operating in Brazil, but Thompson scoffed that “Sen. Robertson’s light was none too revealing.” Thompson painted Talmadge as a loudmouth who “delivered his address in such a way as to render the mike obsolete,” and he ended with a cheap shot at the chamber’s windbag president:

“It was pretty irreverent,” remembered Williamson. “Fortunately, I didn’t get much blame for it because I was out of the country.” Williamson admired Thompson’s cleverness, but the Chamber of Commerce and several major advertisers did not. The editor had to phase out Thompson as a reporter. He might have contributed a few more stories after that, Williamson told me, but Thompson’s byline never appeared again in the
Brazil Herald
.

“It upset a number of the powers that be,” said Williamson, “but I still laugh every time I read it.”

For all of Rio’s sun and sand, Bob Bone said that he, Thompson, Sandy, and their friends were really just “sit-around-and-talk people.” Sure, they’d hit the beach every so
often. Maybe they’d go for a quick swim, then lie around on their towels sipping liters of Brahma Chopp, the watery lager that’s still the de facto national beer of Brazil. More often than not, though, they pulled up a table at some dark bar and talked long into the night—about current events, mostly, but also about books, politics, ambitions. Wherever the conversation led. Drugs were out, of course. If there was a drug scene among Rio’s expats back in the day, Bone said they didn’t know about it. At that point in his life, even Thompson had only ever dabbled in drugs.

“He would put down drug people, in fact,” said Bone. “Called them ‘hopheads’ and things like that.”

Bone mentioned a bar called the Kilt Club, where the group used to hang out. Apparently Thompson didn’t care much for the place, but it was close to his apartment, and there were cheap drinks, girls, and dancing. I saw an ad for it in an old
Brazil Herald
(“Whisky a Gogo—Come Enjoy Yourself with International Singer Jean Pierre!”), and I scribbled down the address. The former Kilt Club turned out to be just a few blocks from my hostel, on a singleblock cobblestone pedestrian street called Rua Carvalho de Mendonça.

A little Googling told me that Rua Carvalho de Mendonça used to be a happening nightlife strip during the early days of bossa nova, with a number of small clubs that helped incubate the new sound. It’s not a leisure spot anymore, despite being just two blocks from the beach and the grand Copacabana Palace Hotel. I strolled the block one drizzly Saturday morning, passing a hardware store and a grungy-looking dry cleaner. The address that used to be the Kilt Club was now a bakery. There was only one bar on the whole block—an open-fronted affair with a blue awning, a
sandwich board, and a few simple wooden tables spilling out onto the sidewalk. I walked inside and took a seat.

It was early, and the place was empty. On the wall nearest me was a tacky airbrushed mural of a liquor bottle exploding its contents, announcing that I was the sole patron of the Orgasmo Bar. Classy, I thought. So much for International Singer Jean Pierre. In the back of the room, a wide-gutted guy in his fifties looked up from the cooler he was stocking. When he strolled out to my table, I asked in fumbling Portuguese whether he had any coffee.

“I’m sorry,” he said kindly. “We don’t serve coffee during lunch.”

I parsed this statement without making much sense of it. It was ten a.m. The alternative was either a sweet
caipirinha
cocktail or a tall liter bottle of beer. So I surrendered to fate, ordered a Brahma Chopp, and settled in for some morning-time drinking.

The Orgasmo had a television in the corner, and a Brazilian morning news show was showing pictures of President Obama standing in front of a pair of armed humvees. The voiceover was in Portuguese, but I gathered he had made a surprise trip to Afghanistan. Briefly, the screen flashed a picture of Obama meeting with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff a few weeks before, followed by a quick shot of a waving Mitt Romney, and I thought of how far away the whole shrill American news circus seemed. Election coverage had hardly begun when I’d left. By now, I thought, the commentators and pundits would be at full froth. The segment ended, and the news show cut back to its coanchors, a short-haired blond woman wearing an ear microphone, and what seemed to be a large green animatronic parrot. They exchanged a few observations, the parrot’s voice a kind
of sarcastic half squawk. Then they moved on to a cooking segment.

For Thompson and his friends, the biggest news story for cocktail chatter down at the Kilt Club would undoubtedly have been the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even as Thompson was subbing in as newsroom director at the
Brazil Herald
in October of ’62, twenty Soviet ships were streaming toward the US naval blockade around Cuba, possibly containing missiles capable of deploying nuclear warheads. The very night that he wrote his offending Chamber of Commerce piece, President Kennedy was on TV back home, announcing the discovery of missile bases in Cuba and warning that any attacks launched from Castro’s island would incur “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” The Cold War that Thompson had followed to South America was arguably reaching its apex. The possibility of all-out nuclear war had never seemed so real.

Thompson described the moment in his book
Kingdom of Fear
, published in 2003, just two years before his suicide. The crisis felt real despite the distance, he wrote. He was living well in Rio at the time, but feeling burned out from “a long year on a very savage road, mainly along the spine of the South American
cordillera
, working undercover in utterly foreign countries in the grip of bloody revolutions and counterrevolutions.” It must have been a hell of a thing, I thought, to have spent the year trying to make sense of South America’s violent power struggles only to settle in Rio just in time to see the United States poised on the brink of the greatest violence of all. It was a moment, Thompson wrote, “when expatriate Americans all over the world glanced around them in places like Warsaw and Kowloon or Tripoli and realized that life was going to be very different from now on.”

Absorbing the news of your homeland while traveling
abroad is like watching a car accident from a hot air balloon. On the one hand, the perspective is disorienting. You miss the vivid details that make rubbernecking so deeply satisfying, and your vantage point depends entirely on the prevailing winds. On the other hand, the picture you get is wider in scope. You’re undistracted by noise, heat, and light, and your bird’s-eye view imparts a kind of clarity and serenity that drivers and passengers on the ground can’t touch.

Back in 2000, I watched from Scotland with increasing dissociation as the United States spent thirty-six days trying to hash out who had just won the presidency. News sources in the UK covered the event with very little sensationalism, even less partisanship, and just the slightest dusting of sarcastic faux-amazement—a subtle tone that seemed to say, “What
will
those crazy Yanks do next?” My interest gradually shifted from impassioned to detached. I watched the story unfold as if I were watching the movie that I knew would inevitably be made from it. Which is not to say that I was disinterested—far from it. I still couldn’t wait to see how things played out, but the election’s outcome felt less like something to pull for than something to puzzle over, to analyze in the way that a film critic breaks down a movie in search of its themes. I learned some things I had never known about the Electoral College and the judicial process, and when the crisis ended with a result other than the one I’d first hoped for, I came back to the United States feeling a kind of enlightened disengagement that it would have been easy to mistake for cynicism. It was like I’d taken some kind of existentialist civics class; I felt a deeper understanding of the political forces that had brought about the whole fiasco, even while those forces had lost their gravity for me, even as they’d come to seem trivial and untethered.

I don’t mean to say that watching from Scotland allowed
me to take a more objective view of the election. It didn’t. What it did was to expose the myth that there ever was such a thing as an objective view for me to take. It was a radical unmooring, a slow-burn realization that everyone is watching everything
from
somewhere, that there is simply no alternative to perspective.

I imagine a similar process playing out for Thompson toward the end of 1962. In his “Anti-Gringo Winds” piece, he declared that “objectivity is the first casualty of culture shock,” and for a writer who so famously scorned objectivity in his later work, this amounts to a pretty ringing endorsement of travel. It’s a backward way of saying that radical perspectivism is the first benefit of leaving home, and I wondered how much of Thompson’s enthusiastic embrace of subjective journalism was informed by his perspective-jarring experiences in South America. It must have been surreal to watch the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold from the sunny, carefree environs of Copacabana. I looked up at the blond lady and her parrot and imagined them replaced by the grim black-and-white footage of missile silos, the shots of battleships lined up in the Atlantic, and behind it all a lilting bossa nova soundtrack, the clink of kissing bottles, the warm beach breezes rustling the palms.

“All things considered,” Thompson wrote in
Kingdom of Fear
, “Rio was pretty close to the best place in the world to be lost and stranded forever when the World finally shut down.”

Of course, the world didn’t shut down, and Thompson and his friends went right on living the expat life in South
America’s burgeoning expat capital. I went back to the Orgasmo for an occasional beer over the next few days, which I mostly spent interviewing modern-day expatriates around town, trying to tease out the common threads in their experience. I was curious to know how the lifestyle has evolved since Thompson, his girlfriend, and Bob Bone passed through fifty years ago. I met a wayward Texan drawn by Brazil’s burgeoning oil industry, an American concert cellist who’d once worked as a reporter for the
Brazil Herald
in the 1970s, and a pair of gorgeous thirtysomething chapter hostesses for a networking organization of young internationals. All of them agreed that certain places in the world simply have a magnetic pull, and that Rio is one of them.

“Rio and Brazil are like quicksand,” said the cellist, a former New Yorker named Harold. He’d come to play in the Brazilian Symphony in 1973, started moonlighting as a journalist shortly thereafter, married a Brazilian in ’77, and simply never left. These days, his only strong connection to New York is his accent. Brazil allowed Harold to live out ambitions that would have been unlikely at home. Growing up, he’d dreamed of playing in the New York Philharmonic or writing for the
New York Times
, and at best, his odds were long. But in Rio, he’d not only played with the national orchestra, he’d been a staffer at one of the national papers of record (for English-speakers, anyway). He remembered the
Brazil Herald
newsroom as a “beer-on-the-table kind of place,” a haven for both eccentric vagabonds and serious writers. Thanks in part to his connections there, he’d met visiting diplomats and even royalty. As an American abroad, Harold explained, he’d rubbed shoulders with “a different strata of people” than he ever would have met back home. He had access to better doctors in Rio, his money went farther, and he was more likely to know the right people in a pinch.

“The life I have here,” he said, “I could never give up.”

For the Texan, though, one of the main draws of Rio was that the social rift between locals and foreigners seemed comparatively narrow. He’d worked for years in Southeast Asia and grown tired of his conspicuous (and privileged) outsider status. In Brazil, he said over beers one night, the income gap was less pronounced than in Asia or even the Andes, and having pale skin didn’t immediately confer prestige. Gringos and Cariocas were on more equal footing, he explained, in part because of their shared passion for what he simply called “the Brazil lifestyle.”

“There’s definitely a kind of mysticism about
a vida boa
,” the girls from the expat organization told me the next night. “People from abroad just have this idea that ‘in Brazil, I will find the good life.’ ”

One of the networking hostesses was Portuguese and the other a Brazilian who’d spent time living in England. The Texan was right, they said. The barriers between Brazilians and expats are definitely porous, but they also cautioned that the seemingly uninhibited Cariocas can actually be quite hard to get to know. Rio’s exuberant beachgoers might warmly invite a stranger to join their volleyball game, but they have a reputation for being guarded when it comes to close friendships. For an outsider, the girls explained, Rio can be weirdly alienating in that way. One cliché holds that residents are a lot like their famous Christ the Redeemer statue: their arms are wide open, but they never close in an embrace.