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The Rum Diary
The Long Lost Novel
by Hunter S. Thompson
eVersion 4.0 / Notes at EOF
Back Cover Blurbs
Begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson,
The Rum Diary
is a
brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean
boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. Exuberant and mad, youthful and
energetic,
The Rum Diary
is an outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's bestselling
Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas
and
Hell's Angels.
"A great and an unexpected joy. . . reveals a young Hunter Thompson brimming with talent." -
-
T
HE
P
HILADELPHIA
I
NQUIRER
"The tools Hunter S. Thompson would use in the years ahead -- bizarre wit, mockery without
end, redundant excess, supreme self-confidence, the narrative of the wounded meritorious ego, and the
idiopathic anger of the righteous outlaw -- were all there in his precocious imagination in San Juan.
There, too were the beginnings of his future as a masterful prose stylist." -- William Kennedy, Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of
Ironweed
''The Rum Diary
shows a side of human nature that is ugly and wrong. But it is a world that
Hunter Thompson knows in the nerves of his neck. This is a brilliant tribal study and a bone in the
throat of all decent people." -- Jimmy Buffett
SCHIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION
Simon & Schuster Inc.
Rockefeller Center
1250 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Gonzo International Corp.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1999
S
CRIBNER
P
APERBACK
F
ICTION
and design are trademarks of
Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by
Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
Map copyright © 1998 by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp
ISBN 0-684-85521-6
0-684-85647-6 (Pbk) 5
To Heidi Opheim, Marysue Rued and Dana Kennedy
My rider of the bright eyes,
What happened you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart,
When I bought your fine clothes,
A man the world could not slay.
-- Dark Eileen O'Connell, 1773
San Juan, Winter of 1958
In the early Fifties, when
San Juan first became a tourist
town, an ex-jockey named Al
Arbonito built a bar in the patio
behind his house on Calle O'Leary.
He called it Al's Backyard and
hung a sign above his doorway on
the street, with an arrow pointing
between two ramshackle buildings
to the patio in back. At first he
served nothing but beer, at twenty
cents a bottle, and rum, at a dime a
shot or fifteen cents with ice. After
several months he began serving
hamburgers, which he made
himself.
It was a pleasant place to
drink, especially in the mornings
when the sun was still cool and the salt mist came up from the ocean to give the air a crisp, healthy
smell that for a few early hours would hold its own against the steaming, sweaty heat that clamps San
Juan at noon and remains until long after sundown.
It was good in the evenings, too, but not so cool. Sometimes there would be a breeze and Al's
would usually catch it because of the fine location -- at the very top of Calle O'Leary hill, so high that if
the patio had windows you could look down on the whole city. But there is a thick wall around the
patio, and all you can see is the sky and a few plantain trees.
As time passed, Al bought a new cash register, then he bought wood umbrella-tables for the
patio; and finally moved his family out of the house on Calle O'Leary, out in the suburbs to a new
urban-izacion near the airport. He hired a large negro named Sweep, who washed the dishes and
carried hamburgers and eventually learned to cook.
He turned his old living room into a small piano bar, and got a pianist from Miami, a thin, sad-
faced man called Nelson Otto. The piano was midway between the cocktail lounge and the patio. It was
an old baby-grand, painted light grey and covered with special shellac to keep the salt air from ruining
the finish -- and seven nights a week, through all twelve months of the endless Caribbean summer,
Nelson Otto sat down at the keyboard to mingle his sweat with the weary chords of his music.
At the Tourist Bureau they talk about the cooling trade winds that caress the shores of Puerto
Rico every day and night of the year -- but Nelson Otto was a man the trade winds never seemed to
touch. Hour after muggy hour, through a tired repertoire of blues and sentimental ballads, the sweat
dripped from his chin and soaked the armpits of his flowered cotton sportshirts. He cursed the
"goddamn shitting heat" with such violence and such hatred that it sometimes ruined the atmosphere of
the place, and people would get up and walk down the street to the Flamboyan Lounge, where a bottle
of beer cost sixty cents and a sirloin steak was three-fifty.
When an ex-communist named Lotterman came down from Florida to start the
San Juan Daily
News,
Al's Backyard became the English-language press club, because none of the drifters and the
dreamers who came to work for Lotterman's new paper could afford the high-price "New York" bars
that were springing up all over the city like a rash of neon toadstools. The day-shift reporters and
deskmen straggled in about seven, and the night-shift types -- sports people, proofreaders and make-up
men -- usually arrived en masse around midnight. Once in a while someone had a date, but on any
normal night a girl in Al's Backyard was a rare and erotic sight. White girls were not plentiful in San
Juan, and most of them were either tourists, hustlers or airline stewardesses. It was not surprising that
they preferred the casinos or the terrace bar at the Hilton.
All manner of men came to work for the
News:
everything from wild young Turks who wanted
to rip the world in half and start all over again -- to tired, beer-bellied old hacks who wanted nothing
more than to live out their days in peace before a bunch of lunatics ripped the world in half.
They ran the whole gamut from genuine talents and honest men, to degenerates and hopeless
losers who could barely write a postcard -- loons and fugitives and dangerous drunks, a shoplifting
Cuban who carried a gun in his armpit, a half-wit Mexican who molested small children, pimps and
pederasts and human chancres of every description, most of them working just long enough to make the
price of a few drinks and a plane ticket.
On the other hand, there were people like Tom Vanderwitz, who later worked for the
Washington Post
and won a Pulitzer Prize. And a man named Tyrrell, now an editor of the London
Times,
who worked fifteen hours a day just to keep the paper from going under.
When I arrived the
News
was three years old and Ed Lotterman was on the verge of a
breakdown. To hear him talk you would think he'd been sitting at the very cross-corners of the earth,
seeing himself as a combination of God, Pulitzer and the Salvation Army. He often swore that if all the
people who had worked for the paper in those years could appear at one time before the throne of The
Almighty -- if they all stood there and recited their histories and their quirks and their crimes and their
deviations -- there was no doubt in his mind that God himself would fall down in a swoon and tear his
hair.
Of course Lotterman exaggerated; in his tirade he forgot about the good men and talked only
about what he called the "wineheads." But there were more than a few of these, and the best that can
be said of that staff is that they were a strange and unruly lot. At best they were unreliable, and at
worst they were drunk, dirty and no mare dependable than goats. But they managed to put out a paper,
and when they were not working a good many of them passed the time drinking in Al's Backyard.
They bitched and groaned when -- in what some of them called "a fit of greed" -- Al jacked the
price of beer up to a quarter; and they kept on bitching until he tacked up a sign listing beer and drink
prices at the Caribe Hilton. It was scrawled in black crayon and hung in plain sight behind the bar.
Since the newspaper functioned as a clearing-house for every writer, photographer and neo-
literate con man who happened to find himself in Puerto Rico, Al got the dubious benefit of this trade
too. The drawer beneath the cash register was full of unpaid tabs and letters from all over the world,
promising to "get that bill squared away in the near future." Vagrant journalists are notorious
welshers, and to those who travel in that rootless world, a large unpaid bar tab can be a fashionable
burden.
There was no shortage of people to drink with in those days. They never lasted very long, but
they kept coming. I call them vagrant journalists because no other term would be quite as valid. No two
were alike. They were professionally deviant, but they had a few things in common. They depended,
mostly from habit, on newspapers and magazines for the bulk of their income; their lives were geared
to long chances and sudden movement; and they claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no
currency but luck and good contacts.
Some of them were more journalists than vagrants, and others were more vagrants than
journalists -- but with afew exceptions they were part-time, freelance, would-be foreign correspondents
who, for one reason or another, lived at several removes from the journalistic establishment. Not the
slick strivers and jingo parrots who staffed the mossback papers and news magazines of the Luce
empire. Those were a different breed.
Puerto Rico was a backwater and the
Daily News
was staffed mainly by ill-tempered wandering
rabble. They moved erratically, on the winds of rumor and opportunity, all over Europe, Latin America
and the Far East -- wherever there were English-language newspapers, jumping from one to another,
looking always for the big break, the crucial assignment, the rich heiress or the fat job at the far end of
the next plane ticket.
In a sense I was one of them -- more competent than some and more stable than others -- and in
the years that I carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed. Sometimes I worked for three
newspapers at once. I wrote ad copy for new casinos and bowling alleys. I was a consultant for the
cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high-end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a
routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I made some interesting
friends, had enough money to get around, and learned a lot about the world that I could never have
learned in any other way.
Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser.
I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I
shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest
road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.
At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that
we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these
two poles -- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other -- that kept
me going.
One
My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I
often drank there, but I was never accepted because I wore a tie. The real people wanted no part of me.
I did some drinking there on the night I left for San Juan. Phil Rollins, who'd worked with me,
was paying for the ale, and I was swilling it down, trying to get drunk enough to sleep on the plane. Art
Millick, the most vicious cab driver in New York, was there. So was Duke Peterson, who had just come
back from the Virgin Islands. I recall Peterson giving me a list of people to look up when I got to St.
Thomas, but I lost the list and never met any of them.
It was a rotten night in the middle of January, but I wore a light cord coat. Everyone else had on
heavy jackets and flannel suits. The last thing I remember is standing on the dirty bricks of Hudson
Street, shaking hands with Rollins and cursing the freezing wind that blew in off the river. Then I got in
Millick's cab and slept all the way to the airport.
I was late and there was a line at the reservations desk. I fell in behind fifteen or so Puerto
Ricans and one small blonde girl a few places ahead of me. I pegged her for a tourist, a wild young
secretary going down to the Caribbean for a two week romp. She had a fine little body and an impatient
way of standing that indicated a mass of stored-up energy. I watched her intently, smiling, feeling the
ale in my veins, waiting for her to turn around for a swift contact with the eyes.
She got her ticket and walked away toward the plane. There were still three Puerto Ricans in
front of me. Two of them did their business and passed on, but the third was stymied by the clerk's re-
fusal to let him carry a huge cardboard box on the plane as hand baggage. I gritted my teeth as they
argued.
Finally I broke in. "Hey!" I shouted. "What the hell is this? I have to get on that plane!"
The clerk looked up, disregarding the shouts of the little man in front of me. "What's your
name?"
I told him, got my ticket, and bolted for the gate. When I got to the plane I had to shove past
five or six people waiting to board. I showed my ticket to the grumbling stewardess and stepped inside
to scan the seats on both sides of the aisle.
Not a blonde head anywhere. I hurried up to the front, thinking that she might be so small that
her head wouldn't show over the back seat. But she wasn't on the plane and by this time there were only
two double seats left I fell into one on the aisle and put my typewriter on the one next to the window.
They were starting the engines when I looked out and saw her coming across the runway, waving at the
stewardess who was about to close the door.
"Wait a minute!" I shouted. "Another passenger!" I watched until she reached the bottom of the
steps. Then I turned around to smile as she came on. I was reaching for my typewriter, thinking to put it
on the floor, when an old man shoved in front of me and sat down in the seat I was saving.
"This seat's taken," I said quickly, grabbing him by the arm. He jerked away and snarled
something in Spanish, turning his head toward the window.
I grabbed him again. "Get up," I said angrily. He started to yell just as the girl went by and
stopped a few feet up the aisle, looking around for a seat. "Here's one," I said, giving the old man a
savage jerk. Before she could turn around the stewardess was on me, pulling at my arm.
"He sat on my typewriter," I explained, helplessly watching the girl find a seat far up at the
front of the plane.
The stewardess patted the old man's shoulder and eased him back to the seat. "What kind of a
bully are you?" she asked me. "I should put you off!"
I grumbled and slumped back in the seat. The old man stared straight ahead until we got off the
ground. "You rotten old bastard," I mumbled at him.
He didn't even blink, and finally I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. Now and then I would glance
up at the blonde head at the front of the plane. Then they turned out the lights and I couldn't see
anything.
It was dawn when I woke up. The old man was still asleep and I leaned across him to look out
the window. Several thousand feet below us the ocean was dark blue and calm as a lake. Up ahead I
saw an island, bright green in the early morning sun. There were beaches along the edge of it, and
brown swamps further inland. The plane started down and the stewardess announced that we should all
buckle our safety belts.
Moments later we swept in over acres of palm trees and taxied to a halt in front of the big
terminal. I decided to stay in my seat until the girl came past, then get up and walk with her across the
runway. Since we were the only white people on the plane, it would seem quite natural.
The others were standing now, laughing and jabbering as they waited for the stewardess to open
the door. Suddenly the old man jumped up and tried to scramble over me like a dog. Without thinking,
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