The Rum Diary

by Hunter S. Thompson

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.

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.

Few girls look with favor on a man of my stripe, a brutalizer of old people.

Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I’d felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion.

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories—not of things

had done but of things I failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.

I quickly agreed, feeling that almost anything would be preferable to sitting there and stewing in my own lust.

wanted to cable them all—“Come quick stop plenty of room in the rum barrel stop no work stop big money stop drink all day stop hump all night stop hurry it may not last.”

And like all fans he was frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would be to run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then be hauled off by guards while the crowd laughed.

it was difficult to see him as the editor of a newspaper. He seemed to think that as long as he knew the score, that was enough. The idea that he should pass on what he knew to anyone else, especially to the public at large, would have struck him as dangerous heresy.

I began to feel like a social leper. This wouldn’t have bothered me at all had I felt it was my own doing, but the fact that Segarra was exercising some sinister

“It won’t last. Nothing lasts. But I’m happy now.”

if a man could muster the guts or even the desperation to move a few thousand miles there was a pretty good chance that he’d have money in his pocket and meat in his belly and one hell of a romping good time.

“That’s my trouble—I take vacations from thinking.” He nodded. “It works out the same way as all the other vacations—you relax for two weeks, then spend fifty weeks making up for it.”

Sounds of a San Juan

night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in the long Caribbean night.