Wry Martinis (28 page)

“Over there I watch a man shot. Pow! He have a suitcase with one million dollars. Cash. You see this hotel? The owner killed a few months ago. He wouldn’t sell. There on the corner—with the mustache. He was in Manaus three years prison for cocaine. Every day in Leticia—pow!” He shakes his head and frowns.

Getting close, now. The river continuing to narrow; the ship at times steering so close to the bank we can peer deep into the jungle. A curious and not unpleasant sensation, doing that while sitting amidst a Gainsborough and a Toulouse-Lautrec, air-conditioned and sipping Bloody Marys. A Conradian experience this is not.

Sad that tonight is our last—the Captain’s Dinner, as the occasion is formally called. We have covered nearly twelve hundred miles. Malcolm is an antidote to the horror stories about extreme wealth. He’s generous as hell and he likes to have fun.

This afternoon I run into him. He has the run of the most luxurious yacht afloat, yet there he is—oddly—alone, sitting on the top deck reading a book. We chat as the equatorial sun melts gloriously in an El Greco of blues and oranges. I ask him, well, why the trip? Malcolm looks off into the jungle, probably out of politeness.
What a stupid question
.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs and smiles.

Despite our magnificent insulation, it has been possible to absorb one or two impressions of Amazonia. What will be memorable ten years from now? Probably that night in the jungle, squatting in the native hut, trying, politely, to fend off a dinner of stewed catfish
dans son jus
. How freely it was given! That and the hard maize was all there was for this
large family. If we’d eaten, someone else would not have. I like to think that the spirit of the Amazonians is reducible to that one single act of generosity. An absurd proposition, of course. Shoumatoff writes of watching two Indian boys stoning a dog to death one afternoon out of sheer boredom and wickedness. But we will have our illusions, and the meal in the jungle will remain mine.

As for the river and land, what has surprised me is not the remoteness and the sparseness of the inhabitation, but just the opposite. Given what dire extremes nature has provided—heat, floods, disease, dangers from predators great and microbial—you wonder that man has survived here at all. Even the soil is not the rich land it is popularly supposed—a “counterfeit paradise,” in the words of one biologist. That’s why, in part, so many Big Thinkers like Daniel Ludwig and Henry Ford have gone bust trying to cultivate it. And why jungle can be turned into permanent desert with the aid of a few bulldozers. Once the web of interlocking fungi beneath the topsoil is disturbed, the verdure turns to moonscape, and remains so.

My own pathetic fallacy would be to say that it has great wit, the Amazon. It outfoxes everyone, from billionaires to bleeding hearts. A few years ago everyone was screaming because it was supposed to be the major source of our oxygen, and the deforestation was said to be tampering with our most basic need, the air we breathe. Now science has determined that our oxygen comes principally from marine algae. The current environmentalist worry is that the extensive deforestation may be playing havoc with the planet’s budget of nitrous oxide. The proposition is as wonderful as the river itself: that by plundering the Amazon we are endangering our chief source of laughing gas. I am sanguine. For I know that most laughing gas is manufactured by politicians, not plants.

Malcolm breaks out a Margaux ’78 for our last night on the Amazon. After the chocolate sundaes have been piped in, Malcolm is lavishly toasted. Archie reads a poem composed for the occasion. Malcolm toasts his pair of kings—a good hand—and says how ironic it is that the restoration of democracy in their two countries should depend on a restoration of the monarchy. Simeon rises, tears welling, and thanks him. We are on the verge of sentimentality, so Malcolm stands up, signaling coffee and cigars. “You see,” he turns with a wink to the king of Greece, “the advantages of
owning
the boat?”

We arrive at the dock in Iquitos. The current runs at five or six knots, so fast you think you’re still moving. Braided and holstered officials swarm over us, wanting to check our milk. Our Ultra High Temperature
milk!

We thank, inadequately, the crew for having got us here and pile into cars. The humidity is suffocating; shirts that were crisp five minutes ago are sopping. Only Simeon, dapper in gray suit, seems unwilted. As we pull away I have a last glimpse of King Constantine leaning over the rail of the
Virginian
, a dozen microphones thrust at him, the beautiful Lady Romsey at his side, translating.

Right after takeoff in
The Capitalist Tool
, Malcolm says, “Shall we buzz the ship?” He disappears forward and soon we are on a low run over the harbor. There below is
Highlander
, looking, for the first time, miniature, like one of the toy boats her owner used to float down the creek by the house he grew up in, dreaming of adventures.

—
Condé Nast Traveler
, 1987

I grew up in Connecticut, and always felt sorry for people who didn’t get to have their Christmases there. My mother was brilliant at them, and some of my happiest memories are of those long-ago, frosted times: shopping with her for wreaths and pine roping, decorating the house, making the crèche (using real moss for grass), buying the tree, delighting in the smell of it in the station wagon on the way home, writing my wish list to Santa Claus, a long one because I was an only child. She stuffed my
two
stockings, made of infinitely expandable wool knitting, until they were gorgeously misshapen and lumpy. (I learned the utility of doing this years later as a parent myself: it buys you an extra hour or two of sleep.) Then the great moment would come and there were the wonders beneath the tree, assembled late at night by my dad as I slept. After I spent hours of flying my new helicopter or manning the new battleship, my mother would announce that lunch was
finally
ready and in we would all go to immensities of roasted turkey and pheasant, browned stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pureed chestnuts, creamed onions, cranberry jelly, buttermilk biscuits, barges of gravy; followed by flaming plum puddings with crunchy hard sauce, mince pies, sugar cookies and candies. To fight off the post-festivity blues, we’d pile into the car in the darkness of late afternoon and go see a movie. My father would fall asleep, as he always did at movies, and awake with a snore every fifteen minutes to demand a plot summary from my increasingly out-of-patience mother. Such were my child’s Christmases in Connecticut.

My first Christmas away from home found me working on a Norwegian tramp freighter crossing the Pacific Ocean. I had been aboard for nearly a month, and so far no one had spoken to me, beyond to tell me
what my duties were: sweeping, painting, chipping, standing watch, moving heavy things, moving other heavy things, and basically swabbing everything that didn’t move. I was a deckboy, lowest of the low, and the only American on board, which was why no one had talked to me. They couldn’t figure out what I was doing aboard, so they ignored me. After a month of hard physical labor and not being spoken to by anyone, and many thousands of miles of often rough ocean, I was gloomy that Christmas Eve, thinking back on all those happy times at home.

I was reading—
Siddhartha
, I think—in my cabin, with the sound of loud partying going on in the mess hall, forward. I had to go to the bathroom. I went, and tripped over the prostrate body of one of the oilers, a tall, young man of twenty or so. He was lying face down by the toilet. When he gave no response to my inquiries after his general health, I turned him over and saw some blood clotting at the corner of his mouth. I checked his pulse. There was one, I could tell that much. I remembered from the movies that you were supposed to check their pupils, though I had no idea what for, specifically, but I checked anyway. They seemed more or less normal, for someone passed out bloody on a bathroom floor.

I rushed forward to the mess hall, where the party was going on and stuck my head in diffidently and told them that the oiler appeared to be in some distress and shouldn’t we alert the chief mate, who was the ship’s medical officer? This brought grunts of laughter. The carpenter, a large, round-faced man named Fitter, got up and tottered, bracing himself against the bulkhead and told me to lead him to the stricken oiler. He gave him a cursory look-over and pronounced, “Is drunk.” I volunteered that we should carry him back to his cabin. “No,” said Fitter, “Better he stay there so ven he”—he mimed copious vomiting—“is near toilet.” I agreed that this made good sense and was about to return to Govinda and the great brown river god when Fitter put a meaty hand on my shoulder and beckoned, “Come, is Christmas. Have a drink.”

I was thrilled to be included in the festivities. I don’t remember a lot of what followed. I do remember being handed a beer—Ringnes. And another. And another, and another. I remember smoking, offering and accepting dozens of cigarettes. We all smoked cigarettes, of course. They were plentiful and cheap from the tax-free ship’s stores: one dollar a carton. (The Ringnes was three dollars a case.) The conversation, shouted
above the raucous din, consisted mainly of: “HOW MANY BROTHERS AND SISTERS DO YOU HAVE?” I remember the singing of songs, the telling of jokes, all of which had as their punch lines some graphic detail of syphilis, clap, crabs, or some exotic, penicillin-resistant chancre the size of a golf ball. I remember learning a toast in Norwegian that translates, “Shall we go to the attic and f- - -?” The last thing I remember was that we started to drink aquavit sometime after midnight.

I reentered consciousness on Christmas morning with a pounding on my cabin door by Loo, the Chinese messman, shouting, “Eggah!” This was his standard morning wake-up call, indicating “Eggs,” that is, breakfast.

At eighteen years of age, I had experienced a hangover or two before, but no youthful excess with vodka and Fresca had prepared me for this. Many years later I saw a wonderful movie called
Withnail and I
, starring my favorite actor, Richard E. Grant, and heard him use a phrase that aptly describes my predicament that day: “I feel like wild pigs have shat in my skull.”

I crawled to the toilet. The oiler was still there. I knelt on his chest and threw up several times. Took aspirin, which my stomach rejected a few minutes later. There was nothing to do but crawl back into my bunk and yearn for premature death. But then there was a hand shaking my shoulder. I looked up into the unforgiving face of the bosun, a grizzled seadog in his seventies with an IQ to match and a fondness for extremely young girls … at any rate, he was here to tell me to turn to. Ship-speak for “go to work.”

We were a day and a half from Manila, and the captain had decreed that he wanted the ship spruce for our arrival. Most of the men were delighted at the prospect of having to work on Christmas day because it paid triple-time. My own pay was twenty dollars a week; my overtime rate was sixty cents an hour. As much of a windfall as a buck-eighty was, it was far from enough to propel me from my death shroud of nausea and headache. What was enough was the prospect of wimping out in front of people who had just decided to accept me the night before. Slowly, very slowly, I made it to the deck.

The temperature that day was 105 degrees. A swell rocked the ship from side to side. I located the bosun and by means of a croaking sound alerted him to my existence. He gave me my assignment: spray painting the outside of the bridge.

Spray painting is a messy job of mixing paint with compressed air and then applying it with a large nozzle that looks like an assault weapon. A mist envelops everything within a three-foot radius of the nozzle. So you wear a suit that entirely covers you, even your head. You see out through built-in goggles. You smear petroleum jelly all over your hands, so the paint won’t stick to them. You are, in other words, completely enveloped.

I got into the suit and began woozily to spray. I couldn’t see very much because the steam coming off my body collected on the inside of the goggles. I’d taken off my shoes; soon my feet were squishing inside the suit, so much sweat had puddled around them. I don’t know how hot it was in there. I’ve been in saunas heated to about 150 degrees. It probably wasn’t that hot, but before long a condition the seamen called “heatsick” had taken over. The first sign is loss of rationality. I was now painting the windows of the bridge, to the violent consternation of the second mate. Painting the windows of a ship’s bridge is equivalent to painting over the windshield of a car: it makes it hard to see where you are going.

At some point I was no longer vertical. I was on the deck, and they were trying to get the suit off me. Someone emptied a bucket of water onto my head. Just like in the movies. I was between two of the men, who were trying to get me to stand and walk, but my legs were rubber and kept going out. They got me down to my cabin and Loo was assigned the job of trying to get me to ingest fluids, a complicated task as my hangover had left standing instructions with my stomach to repel all boarders. I dismally recall an exfusion of Coca-Cola through my nostrils.