"When we first got involved here," said the embassy officer, "the right wing regarded us as pinko wimps, the left as pig imperialists."
"And things are better now?" I asked.
"Yes." He told me that death-squad activity had been curtailed. (Though Fenton later gave me a list of people who have disappeared since Duarte was elected.) He told me that the Gs were on the defensive and that the army seemed to be backing Duarte's attempts at reform.
"How about the economy?"
He sighed and said there wasn't enough land, wasn't enough industrial base. Natural resources are zilch. El Salvador needs a Singaporean high-tech solution. But the death squads murder the college-educated, and the Gs kidnap the entrepreneurs and chase capital out of the country.
"Well?" I asked.
"If everything goes the best it possibly can, they will be killing each other for another ten years."
I went out for a night on the town with the briefing officer, some other embassy people and some U. S. reporters. We went to the Zona Rosa, San Salvador's Montmartre or Bourbon Street. It's a tepid three-block area, site of Chili's and half a dozen other cafes, one discotheque and a few restaurants.
We drove there in an embassy car, a fully armored Chevy Blazer with bullet-proof glass so thick the passing scene was pulled like taffy and oncoming cars were foreshortened until they looked like Robert Crumb cartoons. Besides the glass and body armor, the Blazer had run-flat tires and a device beneath the back bumper that, if you turn a special key under the dash, sets off a flash-andconcussion grenade. I understand it's very effective. A Salvadoran driver turned that key by accident once and flattened the embassy parking lot.
We had an armed chauffeur and a guard with an Uzi riding in the front seat. A pistol hung from a holster on the door pillar, and there was another on the back-seat floor. When we got to the Zona Rosa, the electric door locks clicked open and the guard stepped out and surveyed the area, machine gun at port arms.
A band at one of the cafes was playing "For What It's Worth," by Buffalo Springfield ("Paranoia strikes deep/Into your life it will creep . . . "). We ate at a restaurant called Ciao, which looked exactly like a restaurant called Ciao would look in Atlanta-pink and black art deco with neon highlights-but we sat well back from the windows in case of grenade attacks.
The briefing officer described the security arrangements at his house. He has a lethargic, twenty-four-hour armed guard outside and a German-shepherd watchdog who's afraid of loud noises. He said his best hope was that the Gs would stumble over the sleeping guard. The guard would wake up and drop his gun. The gun would go off and scare the dog. The dog would run indoors to hide under the bed. And that would alert him in time to get out the back way.
A reporter asked me if I was going to turn this into a whole book, like Joan Didion did after her two rather uneventful weeks here. Didion's book, Salvador, is something of an in-country laughingstock. One heavy-breathing passage describes an incident in a posh neighborhood in San Salvador, where Didion reaches into her purse for something and suddenly hears the noise of all the armed guards on the street releasing the safeties on their guns. This set everyone at the table laughing uproariously. It seems no one in El Salvador has ever used the safety on a gun.
I said, no, no book for me. I said I was having trouble sorting out Salvadoran politics. Some of the principal supporters of the guerrilla front, the FMLN-FDR, were President Duarte's political allies when he was an opposition figure in the Seventies. And some of Duarte's present allies have reputed connections to the death squads, which were killing his supporters during the 1982 elections for the national legislature. Meanwhile, the army has supported torture-happy paramilitary organizations, engineered leftleaning coups and emerged as a force for social compromise, sometimes all at once. Was there, maybe, something I could read to get all this straight?
"Yes," said another embassy officer. "The Malachi Papers."
Several days later, on Christmas Eve, real havoc broke loose. From the balcony of my room at the Sheraton, I could see the entire city. There were powder flashes and staccato bursts in every neighborhood. Rockets whistled. Huge explosions illuminated the surrounding hills. A dozen blasts came inside the hotel compound itself. Bits of debris flew past my head. The brazen face of war? No, firecrackers.
Everybody in Latin America likes to set off firecrackers on Christmas Eve, but nobody likes it more than the Salvadorans. They have everything-cherry bombs, M80s, defingering little strings of one-inchers and items of ordnance that can turn a fiftyfive-gallon oil drum into a steel hula skirt. The largest have a warning printed on them, that they shouldn't be lit by drunks. I am no stranger to loud noise. I've been to a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids. But at midnight on Christmas Eve-with the windows shut, the air conditioner on, the TV turned up and the bathroom door closed-I couldn't hear myself sing "Wild Colonial Boy" in the shower. On Christmas Day I saw people raking their yards, gathering mounds of spent gray firecrackers as large as autumn leaf piles.
You'd think after six years of civil war and 464 years of civil unrest, more explosions would be the last thing the Salvadorans would want. Or, maybe, the thing they want most.
At Sea with the America d Cup
FEBRUARY 1987
I hear the America's Cup race was the most spectacular sporting event of the decade. You could have fooled me. I was right there in the middle of it on the official press boat, the Sea Chunder, getting bounced around and shook silly. I had a psychopathic strangler's grip on the railing and was staring out at the horizon like some idiot Ahab who'd run out of whale bait. All I could see was a whole bunch of ocean and wet, messy waves. Though, as it turned out, I was facing the wrong way, and had to clamber and stumble and crawl on all fours over to the Sea Chunder's other railing. There was a whole bunch of ocean on that side, too, if you ask me.
Way off in the distance, or so I was told, were Stars & Stripes and Kookaburra III. They looked like two dirty custard-pie slices stood on end. First one tipped one way, then the other tipped the same way, then the first tipped the other way and so did the second.
"Awesome!" "A brilliant tacking duel!" "Superb seamanship!" said the professional boat reporters from Dinghy & Dock, Flaps Afloat and other important journals of the sport. I don't think I'll ever be a real boat reporter. My Rolex isn't big enough. Also, I don't have the color sense. You have to wear orange Top-Siders and a pair of electric-blue OP shorts and a vermilion-and-yellowstriped Patagonia shirt and a hot-pink baseball cap with the name of somebody's boat on it in glitter, plus Day-Glo-green zinc oxide smeared down your nose and around your lips like a radioactive street mime. I do have one loud necktie with little Santas that I wear at Christmas, but this isn't enough to qualify. And professional boat reporters love to hang bushels of stuff around their necks-press passes, dock passes, ball-point pens that float, cameras, binoculars and Vuarnet sunglasses on those dangle cords that are supposed to look so cool nowadays but which remind anyone over thirty-five of the high school librarian. Good luck to these men and women if they happen to fall over the side.
Falling over the side, however, was something the boat reporters were disappointingly bad at. While the Sea Chunder bucked like a fake Times Square sex act, the boat reporters assumed poses of studied nonchalance, talking boat talk in loud and knowing voices.
It's no use my trying to describe this America's Cup business if you don't understand boat talk. Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college. During the brief intervals on the Sea Chunder when I wasn't blowing lunch, I compiled a glossary:
Fore-Front.
Aft-Back.
Midships-You don't know "fore" from "aft" and had better stay where you are.
Bow and Stern-These also mean front and back. Yet although you can go back to the
front of a boat, you cannot go aft to the bow (which shows that even boat people get confused by boat talk).
Port-Left. Easy to remember because port wine is red and so's your face if you say "left" instead of "port" on a boat.
Starboard-Right. Not so easy to remember.
Leeward-The direction to throw up in.
Windward-The direction not to.
Avast-A warning that you're talking boat talk or are about to start.
Ahoy-Ditto.
Deck The floor, except it's also the ceiling and this can be perplexing during bad weather when you're not sure which one you're standing on.
Bulkhead-A wall.
Hatch-A door.
Companionway-A staircase.
Gangway-When you're moving along a wall, trying to stay on the floor, and you go through a door and fall down a staircase, you yell "Gangway!"
Sheets-Ropes and not the things that look like great big bed sheets, which are sails, even though the sheets tend to sail all over the place and the sails are really just big sheets.
Jibs, Mains, Mizzens, Jenoas, and Spinnakers-What you're supposed to call the sails if you're hep.
Cleats, Battens, Booms, Stays, Yards, Gaffs, Clews and Cheek Blocks-Things on a boat and you don't know what the hell to call them.
But none of this will help you with the most difficult part of boat talk which is how to spell yacht. I've tried "yacth," "yatch," "ychat" and "yot." None of them look quite right.
Meanwhile, out in the shark-semi-infested Indian Ocean (most of the sharks were back on the Fremantle docks selling Kookaburra sweatshirts for $65), the most spectacular sporting event of the decade dragged on.
If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Central Park Reservoir. The Sea Chunder-a lumbering diesel the size and shape of a Presbyterian church-can run rings around any twelve-meter ever built. So can a rowboat with a twentyhorsepower Evinrude on the back. The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race.
Stars & Stripes and Kookaburra III dawdled out to this thing, a buoy, that was floating in the water and from there sailed 3.64 miles to another thing, then turned around and did that seven more times. This took five hours at the end of which everybody was drenched and sick and sunburned, especially me.
Of course they couldn't do it in just any old boat or it might have been over in twenty minutes and cost only a hundred bucks, and what kind of fun would that be? They had to have special twelve-meter boats, which cost $1,000,000 apiece and don't even have a toilet. They also don't have a fridge full of tall cool ones or any tanned wahines in string-knit bathing-suit bottoms.
A twelve-meter is not twelve meters long or twelve meters wide or even wrecked and sunk and twelve meters under the water, no matter how good an idea that would be. A twelve-meter is a boat that conforms to a complex design formula:
In layman's terms this means length (L) of the boat owner's insidertrading securities-fraud-trial transcript plus all the dollars (d) in the world times 2 plus the square root of the Ralph Lauren designer sheets ( ) ruined by the crew members sleeping with the spoiled rich girls who follow boat races around minus the number of ugly and embarrassing free (F) boat visors given away by the boat's principal sponsor divided by all sorts (.751r) of snits and quarrels over the rules.
The race ended at last and somebody won, but the Sea Chunder was still going UP and down and UP and down and UP and down and oh, God, I had to get to a bathroom, I mean "head." I worked my way along the "deck," holding onto the "bulkhead" and I had just made it to the "companionway hatch" when we hit an extra-messy wave. Blaauuuuughhh. "Gangway," indeed.
There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily. But the most mysterious thing is why rich people like them. Rich people are nuts for boats. The first thing that a yo-yo like Simon LeBon or Ted Turner does when he gets rich is buy a boat. And, if he's a high-hat kind of rich-that is, if he made his money screwing thousands of people in arbitrage instead of screwing hundreds selling used cars-he buys a sailboat. I don't know about you, but if I got rich I'd buy something warm and weatherproof that held still, like a bar. But not your true cake-eater; he has to have a breeze bucket, a puff-powered moola scow, a wet-ended WASP Winnebago.
Although I don't know why rich people like boats, I do know that many of them deserve no better. And it's all right with me if they spend the privileged hours of their golden days cramped and soggy and bobbing at a clam's pace from Cold Hole Harbor, Maine, to Muck Cay in the Bahamas to Cap de Tripe on the Riviera to Phooey-Phooey in the Solomon Islands. And then there's Fremantle, Western Australia.
Fremantle doesn't seem to fit the mold. I mean, the place is okay, and I was glad to be there as opposed to being on the Sea Chunder. But Fremantle is Dayton-on-the-Sea. In fact, Western Australia is Ohio with one side of its hat brim turned up. As soon as I got on solid ground, I went over to the famed Royal Perth Yacht Club. It looked like a cinder-block drive-through bottle store. (Cinder-block drive-through bottle stores are the main architectural features of the greater Perth-Fremantle metropolitan area.) Then I visited the Fremantle docks where the twelve-meters are parked. Welcome to Hoboken, circa 1950. I expected Marlon Brando to saunter out at any moment and have the climactic fist fight in On the Waterfront. God knows how the America's Cup race wound up out here. Somebody told me it had to do with Australia cheating in 1983 and putting tail fins on their boat bottom, but that sounds unlikely. I think the International Sailboat Racing Politburo, or whatever it's called, got Fremantle mixed up with Fort-de-France and thought they were going to Martinique. In Western Australia they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailboating equipment, the gin and tonic. If you don't watch them, they squirt Rose's Lime Juice in it.
Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you've been convicted of a felony-although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven't been. Australia is exotic, however. There are kangaroos and wallabies and wombats all over the place, and even the Australian horses and sheep and house cats hop around on their back legs and have little pouches in front. Well, maybe they don't. Actually I never saw a kangaroo. I saw kangaroo posters and kangaroo postcards and thousands of kangaroo T-shirts. Kangaroos appear on practically every advertising logo and trademark. You can buy kangaroo-brand oleo and kangaroo bath soap, and get welcome mats, shower curtains and beach towels with kangaroos on them and have kangaroos all over your underpants. But, as for real live kangaroos, I think they're all in the Bronx Zoo.
While I was visiting every bar in Fremantle, trying to recover from my Sea Chunder ordeal, I heard the Australians talking about how much they drink and punch each other. True, Australians do drink mug upon mug of beer. But these are dainty little mugs that hardly contain enough beer for one serving of fish-fry batter back where I come from. I could tell the Americans by the way they ordered four or six of these baby brewskis at a time. And the only fight I saw was between two U.S. boat groupies because one threw the other into a swimming pool and ruined his favorite pair of purple boat socks with little pom-poms on the heels.
Australia was like "Australia Nite" at the Michigan State Phi Delt house. The big excitement was driving on the wrong side of the road. Not that I drove on the wrong side. I was over on the right where I was supposed to be. But the Australians were on the left and coming straight at me. After ten or twelve of those lime juice G&Ts, this got very exciting.
I also went to the exciting Royal Perth Yacht Club Ball. The ticket prices were exciting anyway-$300 a pop. The invitation said black tie so I called South Perth Formal Hire and Live Bait and got a polyester quadruple-knit dinner suit with foot-wide lapels and bell bottoms in the Early Sonny Bono cut. When I arrived at the dance, I was too embarrassed to get out of the car, especially since it was 100
degrees and I was sweating like a hog and the polyester had made my whole body break out in prickly heat. But nobody else in Western Australia owns a tuxedo either. Every guy there was wearing a rented one exactly like mine. We all spent the evening itching and squirming and scratching ourselves like apes.
The R. P. Y. C. buffet, booze-up and fox-trot exhibition had 2,500 guests. This was more than the Royal P's dinky clubhouse or even its parking lot could hoed. So the ball was given in an old wool barn that had been decorated to look like, well, an old wool barn. And there was no air conditioning. Lanolin, ahoy.
At least the Australians weren't dressed the way they usually are, which is in kangaroo T-shirts, khaki short shorts, work boots and black mid-calf socks. You could tell this was genuine Perth and Fremantle high society because hardly anybody yelled, "G'day, Mate!" They yelled, "Ciao, Mate!" instead.
Australians are friendly, very friendly. I couldn't spend three seconds eating my dinner without one of them butting in at the top of his lungs, "G'day, Mate! Eatin' are ya? Whatzit? Food? Good on ya!" Followed by an enormous backslap right in the middle of my mouthful of boiled lamb brisket (which is either the national dish or just what everything in Australia tastes like). The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words. There's g'day, which means "hello." There's mate, which is a folksy combination of "excuse me, sir" and "hey you." There's good on ya, which means "that's nice" and fair dinkum, which doesn't mean much of anything. Australian does have, however, more synonyms for vomit than any other non-Slavic language. For example: "liquid laughter," "technicolor yawn," "growling in the grass' and "planting beets." These come in handy for the would-be boat reporter or the would-be Yacht Club Ball society columnist, for that matter.
Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This? Page 16