The Rum Diary

by Hunter S. Thompson

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.

Yeamon was familiar too, but not quite as close—more like a memory of somebody I’d known in some other place and then lost track of. He was probably twenty-four or -five and he reminded me vaguely of myself at that age—not exactly the way I was, but the way I might have seen myself if I’d stopped to think about it. 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.

For the first time I felt the foreignness of the place, the real distance I had put between me and my last foothold. There was no reason to feel pressure, but I felt it anyway—the pressure of hot air and passing time, an idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day.

I stopped and listened, standing in the shadows of an ancient warehouse and feeling like a man with no country at all.

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories—not of things I 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 grinned and leaned back in the seat as we drove on. There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I’d come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time. Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue—and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum. Everybody I met acted as if they had just come back from a crucial screen test. And I was being paid a ridiculous salary to wander around and take it all in, to “find out what was going on.”

He was forever talking about luck, but what he really meant was a very ordered kind of fate. He had a strong sense of it—a belief that large and uncontrollable things were working both for and against him, things that were moving and happening every minute all over the world. The rise of communism worried him because it meant that people were going blind to his sensitivity as a human being. The troubles of the Jews depressed him because it meant that people needed scapegoats and sooner or later he would be one of them. Other things bothered him constantly: the brutality of capitalism because his talents were being exploited, the moronic vulgarity of American tourists because it gave him a bad reputation, the careless stupidity of Puerto Ricans because they were forever making his life dangerous and difficult, and even, for some reason I never understood, the hundreds of stray dogs that he saw in San Juan.

I had a license to wander. I

I felt for the first time in my life that I might get a chance to affect the course of things instead of merely observing them.

“Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

It was a dreary document, but when I finished it there was no doubt in my mind as to why these people were leaving. Not that their reasons made sense, but they were reasons, nonetheless—simple statements, born in minds I could never understand because I had grown up in St. Louis in a house with two bathrooms and I had gone to football games and gin-jug parties and dancing school and I had done a lot of things, but I had never been a Puerto Rican.

Tell them that this man Kemp is fleeing St. Louis because he suspects the sack is full of something ugly and he doesn’t want to be put in with it. He senses this from afar. This man Kemp is not a model youth. He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the line he got warped. Now all he wants is Out, Flee. He doesn’t give a good shit for St. Louis or his friends or his family or anything else… he just wants to find some place where he can breathe… is that good enough for you?”

Somehow they got the idea that by getting the hell away from where they were they could find something better.

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.

In twenty-six pages he had gone way beyond the story of why Puerto Ricans shove off for New York; in the end it was a story of why a man leaves home in the face of ugly odds,

They made a great deal of noise, singing and shouting with the jukebox, but they all seemed tired and depressed. It was not the rhythmic sadness of Mexican music, but the howling emptiness of a sound I have never heard anywhere but in Puerto Rico—a combination of groaning and whining, backed up by a dreary thumping and the sound of voices bogged down in despair.

I remembered him telling me that the Hal Sanderson from Kansas had died when his train got to New York—and any man who can say a thing like that, and attempt to say it with pride, is worth listening to unless you have something a hell of a lot better to do with your time.

The thing that disturbed me most was that I really didn’t want to go to South America. I didn’t want to go anywhere. Yet, when Yeamon talked about moving on, I felt the excitement anyway. I could see myself getting off a boat in Martinique and ambling into town to look for a cheap hotel. I could see myself in Caracas and Bogotá and Rio, wheeling and dealing through a world I had never seen but knew I could handle because I was a champ. But it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I’d finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn’t feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

was being paid twenty-five dollars a day to ruin the only place I’d seen in ten years where I’d felt a sense of peace.

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction—toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

He was perfectly capable of doing a strange and irregular thing, but only if he’d planned it. Anything done on the spur of the moment was not only stupid, but immoral.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.

She kept staring at me with an expression that made me more nervous than ever. It was humiliation and shock, I suppose, but there was something else in it—a shade of sadness and amusement that was almost a smile. It was a frightening thing to see, and the longer I looked at it the more convinced I was that she’d lost her mind. Then

Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn’t even know it. He was forever yapping about Freedom of the Press and Keeping the Paper Going, but if he’d had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he’d still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn’t smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who march between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honor—you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.

“I’m tired of being a punk—a human suckfish.”

over—I’ve been grabbing leftovers so long I don’t know what the real thing looks like anymore.”

There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.

I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.

Then came noon, and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and the rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn’t stand the heat. When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was—cheap, sullen, and garish—nothing good was going to happen here.

Dear Paul, I can’t stand it anymore. My plane leaves at six. You love me. We are soul-mates. We will drink rum and dance naked. Come see me in New York. I will have a few surprises for you. Love, Chenault

I kept at it as long as I could stand up, riding out with the riptide and waiting for the next big one to throw me back at the beach.

A warm Caribbean night, with time passing slowly and at a respectful distance.

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.