“Move her over a bit,” he said. The camera clicked. The woman looked down. “Tell her to lift her face. I can’t get a picture if she’s looking down.”
Obviously it had to be done. The photo op is all. The world only responds when they see the living proof in pictures, at which point it is often too late, but I was amazed and horrified by the photographer, by the whole world around this tragic scene, myself included. At one point we were talking to a little child. He started to have a kind of fit and passed out. One of the girls from the Banbury Road became slightly hysterical. Her anguish stood out among the silent nomads and her more experienced colleagues, who laid the boy down in silence on his side. She paced back and forth, turned grey and generally looked as though she too was about to have a fit. She was on her own. Western emotionalism had no place here. Our paranoid fear of death was ludicrous to these people; they had no energy for terror. Everything they had was given to survival.
We marched on through the wind. We talked too much and our eyes were on stalks, so our throats were parched and our eyes were bloodshot . . . We met village elders. We met kids. We watched little babies with huge stomachs being weighed. Everything was on camera. The nomads watched us silently, hardly moving. We must have looked like freaks. I certainly felt like one.
The next morning, after a fairly sleepless night, I went to the big table for breakfast at about seven o’clock. Brian arrived and suggested we walk around the town before breakfast and do some pictures. For some reason I remembered a conversation I had had with Madonna a couple of months earlier. I was complaining about having to do something or other. She looked at me like an alien who observes an earthling while she’s sucking out his database.
“Why can’t you learn to say no, Rupert?” I could suddenly hear her saying.
“No, no, no,” I said firmly. “We’ve got the whole day ahead, haven’t we?”
Brian looked at me for a moment and then disappeared. I sat down and had a cup of coffee. Five minutes later Marina appeared. “Brian’s leaving the trip!” she announced dramatically.
“Why?” I asked.
“He says no one has ever talked to him so rudely as you just did.”
“What? I just said I didn’t want to do pictures before breakfast. That’s not very rude.”
“Will you come and apologise? Maybe you can convince him to stay,” she pleaded.
“Okay,” I said and we went to the other side of the complex where Brian was sitting surrounded by the girls from the Banbury Road. You would have thought his whole family had been killed in a car crash.
I was beginning to feel angry. This was ridiculous. But we needed pictures. There was no point without them so I oiled up to Brian and his entourage, who were looking daggers at me. Soon he was huffing and puffing and saying that maybe he could stay after all, and we got on with the job. Later Marina and the girls from Oxfam told me that I was the second most difficult celebrity they had ever had.
“Who was the first?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Ooh, we couldn’t say. It wouldn’t be right,” they said. “How would you like it if we went around saying—”
“Saying I was the second most difficult celebrity? I should be honoured.”
I was a lost cause.
It was a disastrous trip, confirming what I’d always suspected. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for charity work. They all drove me mad with their piousness, and they couldn’t stand me. Soon I was hardly on speaking terms with the comrades from Oxfam. But we ended up in Nairobi, anyway, where as it happens my brother lived.
My parents, seizing the first opportunity in decades for a family reunion, flew out to join us. Pretty soon I found myself trapped between them with their friends from the frenetic colonial cocktail crowd and my new charity family, who stared at me accusingly over steaming mugs of tea at the Oxfam headquarters.
One morning we were going on a trip into Kibera, the huge slum in the centre of Nairobi. My mother asked whether she could come. Surrounded by police with machine-guns (quite unnecessary), we picked our way through open sewers and throngs of half-naked kids. The slum stretched for miles on either side in waves of plastic roofs. The railway track to Mombasa ploughed through the middle. Trains shrieked through and the plastic bags that littered the huge siding flew madly around in their wake.
“I’m afraid these espadrilles were not made for this terrain, darling. Would you mind if I went back to the house?” said my mother after about fifteen minutes. Typical. She hogged the whole police escort and hightailed it back to the army base at the edge of the slum, while we went on alone to meet the Rev. Anne Owiti.
Anne looked like one of the Mamas and the Papas, in a bright kaftan over a full body. She was very imposing, with a heavy brow and the bewildered regard of someone who is about to bludgeon you with a sledgehammer, but she had the voice of a little girl. I liked her immediately. She marched us around a school where orphans of every age sat at tiny desks. When we came into a classroom they all stood up and sang a little song. “We-lcome, we-elcome. Welcome to our community.”
After a while I felt like Deborah Kerr in The King and I, and only the glum long faces of Marina, Brian and the Banbury Road mob stopped me from breaking into a rousing chorus of “Getting to Know You.”
Later, in a dark room with windows onto the seething street, we met a woman of about thirty-five and her son, a boy of sixteen. She had AIDS. Her eighteen-year-old daughter had AIDS. Her sixteen-year-old son had AIDS, and her fourteen-year-old daughter had it too. She was being re-educated so that she could sell charcoal on the side of the road, but now she was very sick. Her sixteen-year-old was with her. He was beautiful with a shaved head and a long graceful neck. He had been raped when he was twelve (in Africa the witch doctors promise cures to people who have sex with a virgin) and had developed full-blown AIDS the previous year, although you wouldn’t have known it that day. Mother and son were silhouettes, almost ghosts in the dull light from the dirty window. It was utterly quiet in the room. The two spoke softly to Anne and she translated their stories in her girlish voice, like a medium passing on messages from the dead. There was a strange presence in the room, and the screams and shouts from outside in the street seemed to come from another world. Here, if anywhere, was God; for there was an awe-inspiring beauty in the quiet dignity of these two souls sharing their terrifying secrets and expecting nothing in return.
Next, Anne took us to a room where a sick boy was having treatment. His legs were covered in cracking lumps. A lady rubbed Vaseline on them. That was all they had. The boy watched us solemnly and was too shy to answer questions. Next door was a small room with an earth floor and a table with a pair of stirrups tied to it where Anne and her girlfriends delivered babies for women who were HIV positive and had been turned away from the local hospitals. At the back of the house was the medicine cabinet for the whole compound. It contained no more than a couple of boxes of tetracycline. Anne watched me closely as she opened the door, talking all the time. She was mesmerising me and I had to look away. Next to the cupboard was a window. I looked out. The house must have been at the edge of the slum because on the other side was the closely mown green of an exclusive golf course. A little red flag waved happily in the breeze. Three men practised their swings and laughed.
If Connie had meant for me to seem less selfish, to give a saintly hue to my public persona, she couldn’t have failed more dismally. Marina’s article ran in the Sunday Times with the heading “Rupert Says ‘Let Them Eat Cake.’” Like poor Marie Antoinette before me, I had been wildly misquoted.
I escaped from Africa and did my best to forget I had ever been there. Back in the Hollywood stream, even the most successful star has the impression that imminent death could be just around the corner. Was the last job career-icide? Should I have butt implants? Are my tits pointing in the right direction? Do I have enough hair? Should I do a stack of steroids? It was taking all the attention I had to ride the rapids of blind ambition and I pushed the
African experience to the back of my mind. But once you’ve seen, there is no way back. You may be in New York at the top of the tallest tower looking out over the world’s most exciting city, but now you know that in the same moment the other is happening, and no matter how much you try to confine this “other” to some dark gurgling recess of the brain, it lies there waiting for you to stop thinking, because that is its chance to escape.
Drifting away during a dreary meeting, or posing in front of a camera, it would literally flood out, and I’d be back in that darkened room in Kibera with the lady who learnt how to sell charcoal and the boy who was raped at the age of twelve. Their murmurs and Anne Owiti’s childish sing-song voice would cut through the instructions of a photographer like invisible spirits during a seance.
“Ye-as, Rupert. Wha’ dey are saying is da’ dey need help very bad. Ve-ree bad!”
“Can you give us a smile, Rupert? Thaat’s right. Now. One. Two. Three. Chins up, and flashing.”
I lived in denial for a year. Then one day at the beginning of 2001, I woke up and wrote a letter to all the richest people I knew. Without that much effort I raised a considerable amount of money. Some people sent me a lot. (Madonna, Elton John and George Michael were the most generous.)
Suddenly a whole world opened up and I was on that ropy old bridge called charity that spanned the gulf between the Third World and ours, with all its merchants and fortune-tellers, its saints and its sinners, that flitted back and forth selling their wares. I took part in debates at international AIDS conferences. I listened to an archbishop peddling abstinence, and a witch doctor who prescribed rape. Interestingly, both men had HIV. I was invited by a revolutionary student group in Washington to speak about my experiences. I accepted, even though the only one I really had was of First World indifference and sloth, my own self-obsession and that curious sensation that constipates action. I was too busy drowning in my own life to act. Knowing nothing, I lobbied Congress with a brilliant preacher activist. We spent fifteen minutes with a babe in a miniskirt who worked for Senator McCain. Her voice was so high, it could only be heard by bats. “As you know,” she squealed, “this isn’t really the senator’s area, but I’ll be sure to let him know about your concerns. Have a great day, now.” While we were there over a hundred people died horribly in Africa.
I met three sisters from Lusaka who ran a magazine that brilliantly combined gossip and AIDS awareness. With them I trekked into the Zambian bush and saw exactly how the other half lived. The men did nothing. The women did everything. They got up with the first streaks of dawn. They walked for miles to get water and firewood, with babies on their backs and worked all day, while their husbands sat around.
I met a brilliant doctor from America who lived in a hut in the mountains of Haiti. I watched child prostitutes at work in the graveyards of Port-au-Prince and felt the tremors of civil unrest like a grating fault line across the country. Eventually, I became involved with a G8 invention—The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria—and then the full horror of our two-faced relationship with the Third World slowly dawned. The Global Fund was a good idea, a partner without ideology for any grass-roots group with a good business plan, but it was deeply underfunded and in the end seemed to be little more than a net curtain for us all, the gun runners and trade terrorists of the G8, to hide behind. It was desperately ineffective mostly because it was being systematically destroyed from within. First by Bush who had his own kitty for AIDS, the PEPFAR—a carrot he was dangling to attract the neo-Christian voter in America. Together they could “save” Africa, even if it meant losing a few million lives in the process. The Christian soldiers offered medication in return for abstinence because, according to them, Jesus would never wear a condom. The Republican Congress cut funding to the Global Fund and discredited it whenever they could. Desperate to score, they threw money indiscriminately around Africa, to the point that in one country they managed to create inflation.
And so the images stubbornly stay the same. The shrunken woman writhing on the mud floor of a hut. The dead boy lying by the side of a busy road. The child prostitute racked by a hacking cough. And, ironically, wandering through it all, the embedded celebrity, the image of the West, ineffective and self-absorbed, out of his depth and impotent.
CHAPTER 43
Goodbye, Albert, Goodbye, Mo
On September 10, 2001, at about the same time as Mohamed Atta was drawing money from an ATM in Portland, Albert and his sidekick Reuben, a penniless Dominican rogue whom Albert used as a slave, were scoring an eight-ball of coke in Hialeah before going to see Albert’s parents in Coral Gables. His mother Sylvia, an incredibly active woman, had not been well and was more or less living in bed. This latest twist of old age had driven her slightly mad. The two “boys” stayed for a couple of hours, flitting back and forth to the bathroom, before driving back to the beach.
At about five o’clock the next morning, Albert had a massive heart attack. He was rushed to Mount Sinai hospital where they were unable to operate because he was too high. Instead they pumped him full of something that left him in a very curious state. The family were called. As they arrived at the emergency room, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and things came to a standstill in the world. In the hospital people crowded around TV screens and watched in horror as America seemed to crumble to the ground with the two towers. Delirious in his recumbent position, flying about on a gurney, Albert couldn’t figure out what was going on. All he could see were the taut faces of his trolley dollies. In the corridors between the emergency room and intensive care, large groups stood horrified around TV screens. As they flashed past, Albert thought he saw two burning candles on the screen.
His best friend, the long-suffering Myrtha, rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard the news, but by this time Albert was locked in a furious hallucination and accused her of going behind the bed to take coke. Everywhere he saw cocaine. He thought the crowds around the TV screens were coke huddles. He told his bewildered father that he needed to get laid and then he’d feel better. He tried to call a dealer on his cellphone and soon was in such a state he needed to be re-sedated. By this time his family and friends were thoroughly distraught. Even as the tranquilliser took hold, he ploughed on in his mirage cocaine orgy.
“You’re doing it again,” he snapped at Myrtha, as the needle went in.
“We’re not doing coke, Albert!” sobbed Myrtha, reduced by now to tears.
“It’s hardly appropriate,” said Albert in a sing-song voice, as his eyelids fluttered like butterflies.
“Fuck you,” said Myrtha under her breath.
“Oh! Go, girl,” yawned Albert and passed out.
They prepared him for a quadruple bypass, shaved and painted his body, then dressed him in green. The anaesthesiologist came to check up on him once more before the operation. Albert clutched his arm. “Are my family outside?” he asked.
“Yes, your mom and dad, your brother, and your two friends,” replied the doctor.
“Christ,” groaned Albert. “Do we have to go past them on the way to the theatre?”
“Yes. They want to see you before you go in.”
“Okay. Just make sure that I’m out cold before we go?”
The anaesthesiologist laughed despite himself, and Albert didn’t have to worry. He was rigid with anaesthetic by the time he sailed by. The operation was much more complicated than anyone had imagined. His arteries were rotten and they had to use pig veins to rewire his calcified heart.
The next day the whole of America was in shock. As Albert drifted back, on a blanket of anaesthesia, barely able to breathe—he had been sawn right through, like a magic trick—he had nothing to do but watch TV. On the screen, the post-9/11 world was crystallising. “It’s not about healthcare,” screamed a fat man with piggy eyes. “It’s not about unemployment. It’s about homeland security.” It felt like a dream. Late at night, in that drugged trance somewhere between coma and consciousness, he surfed a t
housand channels, with just enough strength to work the remote control, and in the darkness watched America begin to bay for retribution.
Albert was not much of a one for introspection—no Cuban male is—but there are times when even the most cunning of escapologists is forced upon himself, and when President Bush came on the TV and said, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists,” Albert had an epiphany. His whole life slid out in front of him on the hospital bed, a completed jigsaw with one missing piece. Certainly he had been a terrorist all his life, to his family and friends. Even though technically he was still alive, as he watched the new America slither out of its chrysalis, he knew that there were no accidents and that, to all intents and purposes, he had gone down with the Trade Towers. He was never going to be one of “us.” Death was the missing piece and he held it in his hand calmly, enjoying the view of the whole jigsaw for a moment. The grim reaper could wait for a while, but Albert was not afraid.
On the other hand, the strain had been too much for poor Sylvia. A couple of days after 9/11 she collapsed and was rushed to the same hospital where she died a week later. No one told Albert that his darling mother was on the floor above fighting for her life. They were afraid he would have another heart attack.
I was back in Miami by the time Albert finally left the hospital. He had lost everything: his health, his mother, his apartment. (He had been evicted.) His world was unrecognisable. With nowhere to go, he was obliged to move into his parents’ house in Coral Gables. For nine months father and son lived together in a brief enchanted coda to the tempestuous telenovela of the last few years. Theobaldo was ninety-three, Albert was fifty-four. The one was an old-school, redneck sugar planter, a tough grim man who still plotted Fidel’s overthrow every Friday at a club in Hialeah, not particularly a friend to the friends of Dorothy; the other was a lying, cheating, dissolute queen; but they lived in a kind of harmony that was funny and touching. They were the Cuban “odd couple.” Theobaldo flirted with his nurse. Albert dabbled with the odd boatperson and redecorated the house in a thousand shades of white. They took naps together in the hot afternoons, and in the evenings they reminisced about Sylvia and life in Cuba. They had both adored little Sylvia and couldn’t think how to live without her. In their shared grief they forgot the past and attended to one another with an affection and care that reminded me of the end of King Lear.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 39