by Paul Theroux
Sensing this scrutiny from car passengers and pedestrians, George said, "Watch this," and smiled at the strangers, giving them his irresistible George Davis smile. He never failed to provoke a smile in return.
What the strangers saw was partly true. We were men in suspension, performing hard-to-describe jobs, keeping odd hours—high school buddies thirty-four years after graduation, grizzled but still fit, the runner and the rower, crowding the bench by the Mystic River, or near the Admiral Morison statue on Commonwealth Avenue, single again, back home.
All the pain and the pleasure, all the difficulty of living, were in the past, with the risks, the compromises, the friendships, the failures. Now our lives were just talk. And it was random. We would launch on a theme—drugs, civil rights, school—and end up talking about our ex-wives, or injuries, or children, or music, or baseball.
"Back home" said it all. George was living at his parents' house on Jerome Street; I was alone on the Cape. My wife and I had split up—I accepted it now; George and Tunie had done the same. George was not working, I was not writing. But no matter what had happened in all the eventful intervening years, still we had started off together, white boy, black boy. Now we were back where we had started, living outside Boston, not needing to be hopeful, because although no miracle would happen to us, the danger was in the past, with the sorrow, the risk, the great anger that comes from impatience and ambition. What we felt was not resignation but a kind of enlightenment, even wisdom. No bitterness, only mercy and gratitude for being still alive. As George said: Smile back at them.
Being here on the bench, whole and healthy, was a kind of victory. The place itself was important. The bench might have seemed to those passersby like a featureless prop on a bleak stage. But this was home for us. No one could question our right to be here, nor send us away. We had survived to tell the tale.
Somehow we had arrived back at the same place, in the same mood. George had not changed: he was as kind, as generous as ever; as watchful and alert, as funny, and still the athlete, still fast. But George's suffering had been far worse than mine.
"I don't know how I didn't die," he said.
I invited him to the Cape. He brought the new woman in his life, and her two children. "Yup," George said, looking around, and he walked across the grass. "Yup," he said again, nodding and sizing up my house. He was pacing again, not agitated but reflecting. "This is cool. This is a long way from Mess Dedford."
We were soon back on our benches, in Boston, in Medford, under the leafy maples, and sun-heated and resinous pitch pines, talking. How far had we got? I wondered. Oh, yes, George living large in Ecuador, a house in Quito, someone to be reckoned with in Esmeraldas.
One day at his house in Quito, at the beginning of 1972, George was making a package to send to some friends in the States. "And I just felt it—you know how you just get the feeling?"
He went outside the house and saw two plainclothesmen asking for Señor Davis at the next house. He walked off, slowly, and as soon as he turned the corner he ran—the fastest man at Medford High was sprinting through Quito. He was seen, and stopped by police, and he realized that he had been turned in by one of his runners, who had been caught and beaten.
"Where's the cocaine?" the police asked George.
At first he stalled, to give another runner time to leave the house, but the police were suspicious and losing patience. He was arrested, not formally, just taken to the basement of the police station. There were five men on him, trying to get him to talk about drugs.
"They kept me awake all night. They hauled me up and they stretched me, pulling my arms and legs apart—pulling hard."
One of the men held a bayonet to his face. Three other men were still pulling on his arms and legs, stretching him. Later, as a result of this Ecuadorian version of the rack, George developed a hernia and underwent a serious operation.
"Which eye do you want?" the man with the bayonet said. "Left or right?"
And when George remained silent the man made the motions of beginning to cut his left eye from the socket.
I said, "At this point weren't you terrified?"
"I was numb. Everything in me closed down. My mind was gone," he said. "And somehow I know that they're threatening me but what they really want is money."
And giving him confidence was the knowledge that at this point the men had found no drugs at all.
"I took the beef," George said. "And that stopped the case."
While everyone he had ever known or associated with in Quito was arrested (taxi drivers, hotel managers, and "all my field associates"), George was put into a prison in Quito, a dungeon. "It was horrible, a hole, rats crawling over me—terror, terror. And after three days they took me down to Guayaquil, to put together a major case."
The more people involved in the case, the greater the likelihood for bribes.
George was taken to Guayaquil's penitentiary, where first he was put in isolation while his case was being prepared, and then in what they called casal, with the general population in a large prison hall—an enormous open cell, the size of two basketball courts, with at times as many as three hundred men. Each man had marked out his own space on the floor—some had put a sheet or curtain around it—which was not much larger than his sleeping area. They were locked up all day.
This was January 1972. I was still living with my wife and children in a cottage in Dorset, outside a tiny village of xenophobic and underpaid farm laborers.
Guayaquil, on the coast, by the muddy Guayas River, is one of the hottest and most humid places in Ecuador. I passed through Guayaquil in the late seventies, and in my room in the best hotel there were rats. Their nighttime squalling inside the dropped ceiling was so loud it kept me awake. It was a city of rats. They were fearless, like a protected species, and always underfoot.
"Oh, yeah, we had them," George said. But rats were the least of his worries in the prison. "Anything you get is what you fight for. And the prisoners—some of them—were messing with me. Trying to intimidate me, threatening me, throwing scorpions at me.
"I was rich. I had clothes. They thought I had money. They wanted me to get them reefer or give them money. Give them clothes, give them shoes. When the guards left, the cons jammed my food slot from the outside so I couldn't open it."
"And then I'm caught smoking reefer. The guard had supplied it. And I'm caught. The other guards threatened to torture me, to find out where I got it. A crew of reefer smokers showed up at my cell, and one guy gave me a razor blade. He told me to cut myself—deep cuts in my stomach and arms, so I'll bleed. If I do that, the prison guards won't hang me up by my thumbs and beat me or I will bleed to death. But I didn't slash myself. I bribed my way out of it with a fifty-sucre note."
George signed a confession and soon after was admitted to the prison clinic for his hernia operation. The hernia was a result of the stretching and pulling that first night when the guards tortured him to get information. The doctor there told him that if he paid enough money he could buy his way out of prison. But the sum was more than George had—and in that first year, everyone was hitting George up for money.
After the operation George was assigned to Pavilion C, and there began another year of Ecuadorian prison life. By now his money was diminished. Instead of giving other prisoners food, he was himself begging. The prisoners who had been rapacious when George had been new and flush proved unexpectedly sympathetic when he was needy.
George joined the volleyball team and, as always a fast learner, developed his skill to the point where he led his cellblock to the prison volleyball championships.
Still, everything was available somehow to the prisoners—food, alcohol, reefer, "red devils" (a type of Seconal)—but it all cost money. As a star volleyball player George was allowed the occasional phone call home. He had the respect of the other prisoners as well as the prison administrators. Now George had become a habituated inmate. "I've got a new walk—I'm a prisoner, I'm a person, and I'm not a gringo
. I'm an old-timer."
And on Tuesdays there was visita intima, when girlfriends or wives came. Whores were provided for the single inmates.
"What did they look like?"
"That was the problem. They were old, they were fat. They were the ones that couldn't make it out on the street. Pavilion C was a poor cellblock, so we only had one whore. B and A were a little more upscale. On Tuesdays they had lots of whores and music and dancing. The best block was pabellón político, where the politicals were kept. The former mayor of Guayaquil was in there—the governor of the province used to visit him, to pay his respects to Don Jaime."
An incident on New Year's Eve almost resulted in George's death. George was walking down a stairway when he met Indiano, a psychopath, coming up. Indiano had already killed three men in prison with a sharpened bicycle spoke. George moved aside to give him room, and the insane man rose up and thrust at him with his hand, gesturing, I can kill you. George went backwards over the side of the stairs and fell eight feet and somehow managed to land without breaking any bones.
"But I was so shaken up I asked the guard if I could see Don Jaime, the former mayor of Guayaquil. He was a big-shot drug man—he did one or two hundred keys at a time. I told him what happened. And that night I was moved to pabellón político."
That was the third stage of George's prison life. From fighting for his existence in the mob of inmates to excelling at volleyball and making his way in the cellblock, he had now arrived at the most exclusive area of the prison, where the prisoners were men who had influence on the outside and still had rights and privileges and a sense of power. This gave George hope—not of being released and going home, but of having status and a future in the prison, of "being a pure prisoner."
Although George had written many letters to the consul in Guayaquil, nothing had come of them, yet the consular officials visited other American inmates. Once George noticed an American official visiting Frankie Diaz, who had worked for the mafioso Joseph ("Crazy Joe") Gallo. This man from the consulate kept looking over at him, and in spite of the man's pale skin, George said to himself: He's black. "I just knew it. It was from having lived in the South and knowing about black people who pass."
The man, who was the vice-consul, came up to George and said a secret word that is known to all brothers in Omega Psi Phi, an affirmation of friendship and brotherhood. In his letters to the consulate George had said that he had been chosen Omega Psi Phi Man of the Year. The vice-consul had obviously seen the letters. His name was Wyatt T. Johnson, and he had been an Omega at Lincoln University. The motto of Omega is "We are Omega Psi Phi until the day we die."
"How many friends have you got?" Johnson asked.
George, recognizing the secret formula from Omega, one of "The Pearls" of wisdom, gave the correct answer and showed his Omega tattoo. And he whispered, "I'm going to shake your Pearls," meaning that he was asking the man to do him a favor.
Johnson began visiting regularly. He brought George food that his wife had cooked, and the two Omegas sang fraternity songs and talked, and became friends. When this trust was established, George explained the favor he needed.
No case had ever been made against George. He had never been formally charged with any crime, no drugs had been found; there had been no trial, only the interrogation and torture; all that was on file was a signed confession that had been forced from him the night he was stretched. He had not been sentenced. He had made one attempt to escape, by offering a guard a drink spiked with Seconal. But the guard had urged George to join him, and that was George's undoing. In the morning both George and the guard were found asleep.
There was a judge who had the power to release George. Earlier in the year George had sent some money to this judge, but instead of passing it on, the judge's secretary had stolen it. George asked Wyatt T. Johnson to be present this time when he gave the judge's money to the secretary. George knew that no underling would dare to steal money that an American official had witnessed being handed over. Johnson agreed and the money changed hands.
"The secretary don't want to jam him, because he has to go to him to get his visa to the United States," George said. "The doors opened up, and they sang, I'm telling you. The brothers in the penitentiary sang that day. Oh, it was one of the most beautiful days, you know, and the doors flew open."
This was November 1974. In the period that George had been in prison I conceived the idea of taking a trip deliberately to write a travel book, and wrote it. Soon after George was arrested, I set out on a series of linked railway journeys from London to Tokyo and back. I had returned to London in a state of shock; nothing after that was ever the same in my marriage. I had gone too far, I had been away too long. By the time he was released, I had finished The Great Railway Bazaar.
"I was not supposed to leave the country until my release was confirmed," George said. "That meant somebody else wanted money. So I sneaked to the bus station and slipped out of Guayaquil, and went to Quito, and took a bus to the border, Tulcan. Took a taxi across, like I'm visiting for the day. And off I went."
By January 1975 George was back in Medford, after two years in an Ecuadorian jail and more travel. Apart from his wife, Tunie, with whom he was now reconciled, he told no one about the prison, only that he had been away. He got a job first as a substitute teacher, and then—never more effective than when writing a letter—writing proposals for grants on behalf of the Alma Lewis School of Fine Arts in Boston. Soon he was promoted to head accountant.
Jimmy Carter, in his presidential campaign, visited the school and spoke to George in September 1979. Discovering that George had been to Tuskegee, they talked about peanut farming. And in the foyer afterwards, just to make a point, "I stabbed him." That was the way he thought of it. Carter walked by him, and to prove that the Secret Service was inattentive, George reached out and touched him. If George's finger had been a knife, Carter would have been a dead man.
It was around this time that George began reading my books. He read The Black House, which had been published in 1974. He read The Great Railway Bazaar. He thought of getting in touch. He had stories. He wanted to tell me one especially from prison, about the black prisoner they called Cabeza Radio—Radio Head—because of his huge head; how after one Tuesday and the visita intima, he had walked out of the prison dressed as a woman, in clothes that had been smuggled in by a whore. And he had been caught and killed, and then his corpse, his dress soaked with blood, was brought back in a jeep and parked in a place where prisoners would see it and be suitably warned.
George inquired and found out that I was in London. George was wishing for a friend. "Because one day I came home for lunch and the moving van was there. She took the cat and the dog and everything. Goodbye, Tunie."
Now he was alone again.
"I decided to do my master's." He went to Atlanta, scene of so many sixties dramas—civil rights struggles, the SNCC convention, his drug bust. But now Atlanta represented law school; this time George lasted into his second year.
Dropping out was not the disaster it had been ten years earlier in Los Angeles. He was older, tempered by two years in an Ecuadorian prison; he had learned patience. How many times had his world turned upside down? A friend recommended him to the head dermatologist in a research unit at Morehouse College. "George can learn anything," the friend said. George was hired and ended up running a lab, setting up experiments and recording the results. His boss was Dr. Louis Sullivan, now the U.S. surgeon general. George's research involved testing sunscreens on white mice.
This job lasted into 1984. George had joined the Atlanta Track Club and was running again. "And I started chipping a little bit"—for a reason he cannot fathom, he began snorting cocaine. "Maybe I did it for the reason I did most things—that I feel I can do anything. I don't ask why. I don't realize that if I am not careful I will screw up real bad and sabotage my own shit."
The first sign of self-sabotage was that he started losing animals. He got sloppy. George would go to s
leep in the lab while the mice were being radiated, and he would end up cooking them. He could not explain all those dead mice. And so he was fired.
Feeling lost, he was drawn back to Tuskegee. He had strong memories of the place, of the civil rights struggle, of the singing and the friendships. He had considered it a place he could always return to. So he loaded a van and drove there, became a counselor, a dorm director and faculty member. He began running again.
Visiting Medford in the summer of 1987, George decided to stay. And that had its consequences. "I got back into the business, handling big weight"—kilos of cocaine. It had been years since he'd been in the drug business, and it seemed so simple now. He was making money again. He worked in a straight job and used it as a cover for selling drugs, and within a year he had resumed snorting cocaine.
"Dope cocaine took me," he said. "I've had it good, but I get weak. And then I end up sabotaging my own shit."
George was now using so heavily it made him physically ill, or at least seemed to. He decided to go to a detox center, but the problem with his health was not related to his use of drugs. He gave up drugs, he got clean, but he still felt ill. He was diagnosed as having tuberculosis—the result of the prison years in Ecuador. When he was released from the hospital in 1991, he wrote me the letter saying It's been a hellified trip.
I was inexpressibly grateful to George for his company and his good mood. At the end of a twenty-year marriage, it was hard for me to be alone all the time. A door had slammed, then silence. Only another estranged man can understand that exile. Families don't know what to say, and their eagerness to reassure with platitudes is the coldest comfort. No emptiness on earth can compare with the loss of love—and, after all that struggle and expense, the shameful hardship of being alone. Nothing mitigated my sense of misery, and when people—family members mostly—said it was for the best, I knew I had failed. George was monkish, resigned, unassailable, and still funny. It was a good thing that I had met him now. We were both alone—we offered each other sympathy, not advice. We took turns listening. No one else understood. Our talks were friendly and affirmative.