Kingdom of Fear (32 page)

Skaggs slammed his fist on the table and cried out: “GOD-DAMNIT, THIS IS TOO DEPRESSING. THEY SHOULD TAKE THOSE BASTARDS OUT AND EXECUTE THEM TOMORROW MORNING.”

“What?” I said. “Get a grip on yourself, Skaggs. Those people can’t be executed. They are prisoners of war.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “They are spies. They should be EXECUTED. That’s the only way to get the president’s attention.”

I was shocked. Skaggs is a died-in-the-wool Clinton backer, and his wife is strongly opposed to the death penalty under any circumstances. She makes two or three trips to Washington every year to lobby against Police Brutality. It was weird to hear him calling for the execution of U.S. POWs.

But she was not with us on the boat in Cuba that night, so he felt free to vent. “The bastard has gone too far this time,” he explained. “He thinks he can drop a 2,000-pound bomb on anybody who won’t salute him.” He shook his head angrily and chopped off another few chunks of ice with his fishing tool. “The president is not crazy. He’s just plain stupid. I learned that a long time ago, back when I was still raising money for his goddamn never-ending campaigns.”

The boat rocked gently beneath our feet as he jumped down into the darkened hold where he kept his music equipment. “Hot damn!” he exclaimed. “Let’s hear some Sonny Boy Williamson!”

I felt a shudder go through me as the amp kicked in. Everybody jumped and Heidi tried to stand up, but the music was too powerful. It turned every beam and strut and bench on the boat into a wooden tuning fork; it was like a shock through the colon every time Sonny Boy hit a G string. Glasses rattled on the table.

The music was so loud and the War news so terrifying that it took us a while to realize that somebody was pounding on the back door. It
was a cop complaining about the noise, but Skaggs took him outside and we went back to sucking heavily on our Cohibas.

We were not degenerates, and neither was Skaggs, to my knowledge, and we were doing nothing illegal. But cops were watching us anyway, and that is a nervous feeling when you’re sitting on a boat in a foreign harbor.

. . .

We were waiting for Ray (a.k.a. Colonel Depp)—my personal bodyguard and international road manager from London—in the airport lounge when I heard the unmistakable whine of an electric drill from behind a closed door near the baggage carousel. It was penetrating something that was too soft to offer much resistance, and I thought I knew what it was. My own Kevlar suitcase had been drilled five times when we came through the airport two nights earlier—five neat little holes going into the bag from five different directions—and now I knew it was Ray’s turn. I knew we were in for a long wait.

Halsband slumped on his stool and ordered four more Mojitos while Heidi paced crazily back and forth on the slick tile floor. Ray was nowhere in sight, and we could only guess at his fate. Once they start drilling your luggage in this country, the next few hours are going to be very edgy. First your bag will be marked with an ominous red XXX, then it will be thoroughly searched and examined. You will be questioned repeatedly about the same things: “Why do you have all these red cigarettes? Are you wearing false teeth? Will you come with me to the X-ray machine on the other side of that wall? Why are you here? What are you carrying in that toothbrush? Was your mother born in Algiers? Who is your personal dentist? Why are you acting so nervous?”

The correct answer to all of these questions is “No”—over and over, “No”—and the price of inconsistency can be ten years in a Cuban prison. Never be inconsistent. If the Customs cop thinks he heard you say that your mother is a dentist in Algiers the first time he asks, your answer must be exactly the same when he asks the same question five minutes later. Do not change your story in even the smallest detail. That way lies trouble.

I knew Ray was carrying a mixed bag of personal presents, including bottles of Absinth and night-vision binoculars and frozen shirts
and Nazi SS jewelry. He also had rare medicines from Europe and oriental hand fans and many thousands of dollars and perfumes and cameras and pornography and sophisticated tattoo paraphernalia. He looked like an international Pimp with no respect for the law. If his luggage was searched he was doomed.

A Cuban band was singing “Guantanamera” on TV in the airport bar, but we were all too nervous to enjoy the music. “We may have to make a run for the car,” I whispered to Halsband. “Somebody is about to get busted here.”

He looked startled and quickly drank off his Mojito. “Stop worrying about cops,” he said. “Everybody’s a cop in this country. Ray will have no trouble,” he said. “He is bulletproof.”

Just then the lights went dim in the airport and people stopped talking. I felt a hand clutch my arm in the darkness and heard Heidi moaning, “O my god, O my god . . .”

It was Ray. He had slipped unnoticed through the gate when the lights went dim and the mob of paranoid tourists began to panic. We paid the bill quickly and rushed out to our waiting white “limousine,” saying nothing. Terror is never very far away in Cuba, and smart people flee like rats at the first sign of it. The first thing to do when a panic starts is get a grip on your wallet and walk, not run, toward the nearest exit. Women always clutch their purses and try not to show signs of fear in these moments, but suave behavior is difficult when the lights go out in a foreign airport full of perverts and thieves and spies and Communist police all around you.

Yes sir, and that is when the last thing you need for a goddamn failsafe escape vehicle is a broken-down 49-year-old Cadillac sedan with a secondhand Yugo engine under the hood.

. . .

Whenever I think of Cuba now I see the Malecon at night and Tall Cops on shiny, black motorcycles circling around on the boulevard far down below my balcony at the Hotel Nacional, controlling the traffic and scanning the seawall for pimps and accused collaborators . . . I remember the War news on TV and the constant babble of Christiane Amanpour somewhere in Albania and Dan Rather waiting to be bombed in Belgrade and U.S. prisoners of war exhibited on worldwide
TV with lumps on their heads and bleeding black eyes and their cheek muscles rigid with fear. I remember the War news raving twenty-four hours a day on both TV sets in our suite and people of all persuasions rushing in and out with crazy news and rumors. We went through thirty or forty weird meat sandwiches and forty-eight silver buckets of rare ice every twenty-four hours. The phones rang sporadically, often for no reason at all, and the few phone messages that got through were garbled and frightening: Havana was about to be bombed and/or destroyed by U.S. nukes full of napalm and nerve gas and vermin eggs. A man from Houston called and said a bomb blew the gates off the U.S. embassy last night. A lawyer from Sweden on a decadent-looking yacht called
White Power
said he’d heard on his shortwave radio that Clinton had officially declared a state of war against Cuba.

It turned out not to be true—but real news travels slowly in Cuba and the military police went on Invasion Alert status anyway, and the streets were swept clean of degenerates and other usual suspects who might be trying to swim naked in the harbor.

. . .

We were under close and constant surveillance the whole time. We were treated like rich prisoners of war. Our rooms were bugged, our baggage was drilled, cops roamed the hallways and had a key to every safe in the hotel.

There is a serious
crackdown
in Cuba on Drugs, Prostitution, and Bombs. You want to grin and do the Salsa any time you have to stand in line for anything, even waiting for a cab. The urge to dance and spend dollars is an acceptable vice on this island, but anything else can be dangerous.

Degenerates are no longer fashionable in Cuba, and anybody suspected of “collaborating” with the U.S. Embassy is a degenerate. That is the long and the short of it. War zones are always difficult, especially for the Enemy—and the Enemy, as we quickly discovered in Cuba, is us. You bet. You want to see the bogeyman, Bubba? Just look in the mirror. People in Cuba do not see the American Century the same way we do. If sheep go to heaven and goats go to hell, we are definitely the goats of this story.

HST and James Carville, Little Rock, 1992 (Stacey Hadash)

Statement by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,
March 13, 1990

BE ANGRY AT THE SUN

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people,
   those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies,
   the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You
   are far
From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes
   to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

—Robinson Jeffers

From the
Aspen Times Daily,
Monday, June 18, 1990

KNOCK, KNOCK—WHO’S THERE?

Editor:

And so it’s done
Who lost,
Who won—
Each and every
One and all
Both sides—
Losers
Winners—
None
Justice done
A dis-service
Did she—
Deserve this
Mockery?
Did we?
I think not
In the end
All we’ve got
Are the rules
We choose to play by
Fair and square
Even Steven
Even though
Who’s got the dough
’S better chance
To finish even
The good doctor
Fought the law
To a draw
Called their bluff
Had the stuff
The courage and conviction
To risk it all
Bet his freedom—
On a pair of deuces—
Right and privacy,
’Gainst a black king—
Of—hypocrisy
And so—
Now we know
Tho’ the Hunter prevailed
On this occasion,
Chased the fox
From his doors—
Is that someone
Knockin’ on yours?

—Edward T. Cross

(HST archives)

. . .

Why is it, Lord, that tonight I find myself writing feverishly on a 30-year-old IBM Selectric typewriter . . . It is sure as hell
not
a matter of convenience. This thing is slow and heavy and primitive. It is a sort of dark
institutional
red color that makes it appear to be twice as large as it is. Some people fear it—especially when they can see three or four brand-new customized
Super Electrics
laying idle around the house still wrapped in cellophane while the slow labored
THUNK
of these ancient keys slapping into the ribbon is the only sound in the room.

To me it sounds like hardened steel ball-bearing tumblers dropping into place. Indeed, I know that sound well. It is a sound you never hear except in quasi-desperate situations where the Fate of NEARBY people depends entirely on yr. ability to solve a particularly stubborn vault combination lock when you are trying to flee for yr. life before a horde of boozed-up cannibal Nazis swarms in through the windows and butchers your whole family, only to find that all yr. guns and money and helicopter keys are hopelessly locked up in this goddamn dysfunctional safe that refuses to open.

Ho ho. That is when you want to hear those beautiful little tumblers fall.
Click click click,
just like in Hollywood . . . These are the sounds that really matter in yr. life.

Yes sir, and that is about all we need to know about atavistic typewriters and amateur safecrackers for today. Let us return now at once to the more violent days of yesteryear and my fight to the death with vicious crooked cops in that incredibly violent winter of 1990 when they tried to take me into the system.

D.A. SNAGS THOMPSON IN SEX CASE
B
Y
D
AVID
M
ATTHEWS
-P
RICE
,
T
IMES
D
AILY
S
TAFF
W
RITER
F
EBRUARY
28, 1990