Kingdom of Fear (30 page)

Anyway, this act with the
Plank
might have legs. Let’s give it a whirl in HAVANA. We could both load up on Absinth & trash a nice suite in the
Hotel Nacional.
Invite 50 or 60 Beautiful People to a party/celebration in honor of Che Guevara, which then “got out of hand.”
DEPP JAILED AFTER ORGY IN CUBA, PROSTITUTES SEIZED AFTER MELEE IN PENTHOUSE, ACTOR DENIES TREASON CHARGES.

Why not? And I do, in fact, have a balcony suite at the Hotel Nacional a/o February 4-14, and I could use a suave Road Manager. Shit, feed the tabloids a rumor that you have Fled to Cuba to avoid British justice. Yeah, crank that one up for a few days while you drop out of sight—and then we hit them with the ORGY IN CUBA story, along with a bunch of lewd black-and-white photos, taken by me. Shocking Proof.

Yessir. This one is definitely do-able, & it will also give me
a story.
You bet. And
Sleepy Hollow
will open in the Top Three. Trust me. I understand these things.

Meanwhile, you should be getting your finished album & 6,666
pounds
(less my 10%)
in coin
from EMI very shortly. And I am going off to Cuba, for good or ill, on Thursday. Send word soonest.

DOC

MEMO ON WHY I AM GOING TO CUBA: WRITE THIS MESSAGE DOWN & REPEAT IT EVERY DAY. . .

I AM GOING TO CUBA TO PAY MY RESPECTS TO THE CUBAN PEOPLE & TO THANK FIDEL CASTRO FOR THE COURAGE OF HIS STRUGGLE & THE BEAUTY OF HIS DREAM. But I am mainly going for
Fun.
First, the Diary, then the Meaning . . . Remember that.

SATURDAY NIGHT, MARCH 27, 1999 NOTES

Today is not a good day for traveling to Cuba.

Hot damn, the White House is getting aggressive again.

(I understand it now. Clinton’s current behavior correlates with The Advanced Syphilis Syndrome.)

Maybe this is not the time for me to travel to Cuba & denounce my own country as Nazis & be quoted on the AP wire as saying “The President is entering the final stages of Terminal Syphilis. Nothing else can explain it.” (Note: Call my old friend Sandy Berger & ask
him
why we are bombing Yugoslavia.)

Ten thousand Serbs rioted in Grand Central Station yesterday, carrying signs that said
NATO = NAZIS
. U.S. embassies all over the world are on Red Alert & the president of Yugoslavia is on TV urging people all to strike
now
against American interests everywhere.

(5:33
A.M
. Sunday morning): Jesus! Now CNN has a bulletin about a grenade attack on the U.S. embassy in Moscow: 2
grenade launchers & a Kalashnikov machine gun. Then the man fled in a white car. Who was it? Who knows? Police are rounding up the usual suspects . . . Stealth bombers blasted out of the sky over Belgrade, brave pilot flees in white car, Troops massed for invasion, WWIII looms . . . Yes sir, now is the time to go abroad & pass through many foreign airports. No problem. . . .

In the Hemingway Boat Marina, Havana, 1999 (Heidi Opheim)

Holy shit. This is insane. Now the official spokesman for NATO comes onstage & launches into a bleeding rave about War Crimes & Atrocities & a blizzard of bombs on all Warmongers who think they can get away with butchering innocent people as a way of life.

“Let me say, however, that if Yugoslavia had a democratic government, none of this would ever have happened.”

What? Who are we talking about here? Who is flying those planes that are carpet bombing civilian targets 6,000 miles away from home?

Don’t tell me, Bubba—let me guess. It must be the Hole in the Wall gang. No?

Well, his name ain’t
Milosovich,
Bubba. And Adolf Hitler has been dead for 50 years.

There is something happening here, Mr. Jones—and you don’t know what it is, do you? It sounds like a blizzard of Syphilis. Madness. Clinton, etc. . . .

These people are different from the others, Jack—they went to Yale, they play bridge, they fuck each other.

—CIA gossip, Havana

Right. That’s what they were saying about the CIA 40 years ago, back in the good old days when they were feeding LSD-25 to each other for experimental purposes in the name of National Security. The Agency was planning to drop LSD bombs on Moscow & other enemy cities when WWIII got going. That is where the phrase “bomb their brains loose” comes from. It was CIA jargon, top secret.

But the experiments got out of hand & WWIII never happened—at least not the way they were planning it—so the phrase was dropped from the secret agency codebook.

Until now. Now it is back in style. Spooks laugh when they say it to each other at lunch. “Yes sir, we are bombing their brains loose in Belgrade. They can run, but they can’t hide.” That is the way CIA men talk.

We were listening to three of them flirt with one another like brutalized Yalies do.

We
ran into them in a lounge at Miami International Airport when
the plane was delayed for three hours by a bomb scare. There was panic for a while, but the spooks paid no attention & kept drinking, so I figured I’d do the same. Why worry? I thought. The safest place to be in a bomb panic is close to police. Keep smiling & act like a deaf person. If you accidentally drop money on the floor, count to three before you reach down to grab it. They are trained to shoot anything that moves suddenly or starts talking to the bartender about Bombs.

. . .

I was killing some time in the smoking lounge at the Miami International Airport when I noticed a man waving to me from the other side of the room. I came alert instantly. It is not a good omen, in my business, to see a strange man pointing his finger at you in a crowd at the Miami airport. For many people it is the last thing they see before they are seized by police & dragged off to jail in a choke hold. Suspicion of Criminal Activity is all they need here to lock you up & do serious damage to your travel plans. . . . Being arrested in any airport is bad, but being arrested in the Miami airport is terrifying.

I tried to ignore the man as I saw him approaching my table. Stay calm, I thought, maybe it’s only an autograph seeker. . . . Then I felt his hand on my arm and he hoarsely shouted my name. I recognized the voice.

It was my old friend Rube, a rich cop from Oakland. He was on his way to Cuba, he said, to do some business and look for a woman to marry. “I have been in love with her for a long time,” he said. Now he was finally free to get married. His wife back in Oakland had frozen all his assets.

I knew at once that he was on the lam. There was a fugitive look about him, despite his appearance of wealth & confident suaveness.

. . .

Cuba is not a new story for me. I have been on it for 40 years, and at times I have been very close to it—too close, on some days, and I have never pretended to be neutral or dispassionate about it. When I was 20 years old I harangued the editors of the
Louisville Courier-Journal
to send me to Cuba so I could join Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains and send back dispatches about the triumph of the revolution. I was a Believer—not a Marxist or a Communist or some kind of
agrarian Stalinist dilettante—but I was also a working journalist, and editors were not eager to pay my expenses to go to Cuba to fight with Castro in the mountains.

HAVANA
(CNN): FEBRUARY 15, 1999—
Cuba unveiled a two-pronged crackdown Monday, proposing harsh new penalties for common criminals and political opponents who “collaborate” with the U.S. government. The planned legislation, which would expand the use of the death penalty and introduce life imprisonment, follows a speech last month by President Fidel Castro in which he pledged to get tough on the growing crime problem on the Communist-ruled island.

“There are even irresponsible families who sell their daughters’ bodies and insensitive neighbors who think this is the most natural thing in the world. . . . There will be no escape for those who want to live like parasites at any price, at any cost, outside the law.”

—Fidel Castro, January 5, 1999

It is a straight shot from Cancun to Havana, sixty-six minutes by jet plane across the Gulf of Mexico with a Soviet-blonde stewardess serving free rum and synthetic ham and cheese sandwiches. It is an easy trip on most nights, and innocent people have nothing to worry about. As our plane approached Havana our mood was almost festive. Heidi filled out the visa forms while I jabbered in broken Spanish to the man sitting next to me, asking how much money I should pay for the food.

He nodded sympathetically and stared down at his hands while I fumbled with my wallet, then he turned to face me and spoke calmly. “I speak no English,” he said. “I want no United States dollars.” Then he signaled for the stewardess and spoke rapidly to her in Spanish while I listened nervously. Flying into Cuba is not a good time to start arguing with passengers about money.

Finally she looked over at me and smiled. “No problem,” she said. “We cannot accept your dollars. All service on this flight is free of charge.”

Other passengers were staring at us now, but she laughed and
shrugged them off. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He misunderstood you. He thought you were trying to give him money.”

“Oh no,” I said quickly. “Of course not. I was talking about the sandwich. Money is not a problem for me. I have no money. I am a cultural ambassador.”

That seemed to satisfy her, and she went away. I had received detailed instructions about how to identify myself in Cuba, and I was well armed with credentials. “You are very famous down here,” the ambassador had told me on the telephone. “Your movie about Las Vegas was well received at the Cuban film festival recently, so you will enjoy a diplomatic status that will be very helpful, as long as you don’t bring any drugs.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “That movie was Hollywood propaganda. I am no longer a dope fiend. I gave that stuff up a long time ago.”

“That’s good,” he said. “A cultural ambassador enjoys many privileges in Cuba these days, but dope fiends are being rounded up and put in prison—sometimes for life, and we won’t be able to help you at all.”

I was thinking about this conversation as our plane approached the coast of Cuba, but I was not apprehensive. I was traveling officially this time and I knew I had nothing to fear. My nerves were calm and I leaned back. I was looking forward to some serious grappling with booze, which is still a very acceptable vice in Cuba. I was even considering an offer to become a distributor of Absinth on the island, but that was still in the planning stages and I was not in any hurry.

Cuba was going to be busy. My schedule was already thick with cultural obligations: dinner with the ambassador, lunch with the minister of culture, book signings at the Film Institute, judging the Water Ballet at the Hotel Nacional, marlin fishing with the Old Man of the Sea . . . The list was long, and I was already looking for ways to pare it down and make time for my nonofficial business, which was equally important and would probably involve meeting with people who had recently fallen out of favor with the government in the wake of the Crackdown that followed Castro’s ruthless denunciation of pimps and pederasts and collaborators at the beginning of’99.

There was also the matter of Johnny Depp’s arrival in three days, which I knew would attract some attention in cultural circles, and I understood that we would have to be suave and well liked in public.
We needed government approval to shoot our movie in Havana. It was definitely not the time to be getting any criminal publicity.

As the lights of the city came into view up ahead and the stewardess said it was time to buckle our seat belts, I began to feel nervous and I decided to go up to the lavatory for a shave and a lash of the toothbrush before we landed. There was muttering when I stood up, but I felt it was necessary. An ambassador should always be clean-shaven and never have booze on his breath. That is a cardinal rule of the business.

I was fumbling around for a razor when I discovered the ball of hashish in my dopp kit. It was snuggled into a corner behind a bar of soap from the Four Seasons in New York, and I tried to ignore it. No doubt it had been there for many months or even years, unnoticed by anybody until now. The sight of it made me dizzy and weak. The razor fell from my fingers and I sagged against the tin wall as the stewardess hammered on the door and I felt the plane descending. For an instant I was paralyzed by panic, then my criminal instincts took over and I fired a blast of Foamy into my shaving kit, making a nasty mess on the bottom, but it was no use. The ball of hash still loomed up like a black iceberg, so I grabbed it and tried to flatten it out, then I dropped it in my coat pocket and tried to forget about it.

When I got back to my seat I said nothing to Heidi about the hashish, for fear she would go all to pieces. (I had sworn to be clean and she had trusted me . . .) Nor did I say anything to Michael Hals-band, our tour guide and confidential photographer from New York, who had been assigned to this visit at the last moment.

He was a total stranger, in fact, and I was leery of him from the start, but he met us in Cancun anyway and attached himself like a leech. . . . I didn’t know it at the time, but he would be with me for the rest of the trip. He was a swarthy little man wearing a seersucker coat and a goofy grin of a surfer on his face.