Maniac Drifter

by Laura Marello

  Gabriel Paradise had installed his television in the Land Ho, so the Cosmo’s restaurant workers could rush in and watch the CBS Evening News when Dan Rather gave his “Temple of the Jaguars Report.” Cosmo had brought his own TV into the front dining room of the restaurant, because the customers wanted to watch the news. All the bars and restaurants in town had their TVs tuned to the CBS Evening News for the Temple of the Jaguars Report. The bars were getting more and more crowded every day, as people got hooked on the story and wanted to hear his report. The Happy Hour business was booming. It seemed the entire nation was addicted to the daily updates, and the CBS Evening News ratings were skyrocketing.

  Everyone in Provincetown had watched the very first broadcast, when Dan Rather had read Harper’s statement. The locals had been waiting for the broadcast for 24 hours, ever since an anonymous caller had tipped off the Provincetown Express. Gabe and I were relieved, since we wanted everyone to watch the broadcast, but did not want me to be revealed as the Informant.

  The delivery had come off without a hitch. Harper’s art dealer contacted Gabe and me when the Federal agents took possession of the crates. Gabe drove me to the CBS offices in midtown Manhattan; somehow I convinced the front desk of the urgency and secrecy of the information, and I had been granted an audience with Dan Rather himself. I could not believe it.

  Now I was the Informant. I was the Anonymous Source who had informed CBS News etc., etc. I tried not to smile whenever I heard Mr. Rather use that expression. All the television viewers, in Provincetown and around the nation, and sometimes in magazine and newspaper editorials on the story, were calling the informant Deep Throat after the informant in the Watergate Scandal. Deep Throat’s identity had never been revealed, even though the government had asked journalists over and over through the years to reveal their sources, had their papers, tapes and filed subpoenaed, held them in contempt of court, and even thrown them in jail. But nobody in the Federal Government had asked Dan Rather to identify his informant. Everybody said Dan would never reveal his sources. He was the American Journalist of the Hour, like Cronkite during Vietnam, like Woodard and Bernstein during Watergate, like I.F. Stone and Walter Lippmann in their day. He was a National Hero.

  On the very first broadcast, Dan Rather had read Harper’s letter on the national news. It had started out, Dear Mr. Dan Rather, and had gone on to explain that Harper was a painter who showed his work frequently in Manhattan, and had recently gone into business as an art dealer who specialized in Ancient Art, rare or precious art objects from ancient cultures in Africa, Egypt, Greece, Asia, Oceania, Central and South America. The reaction in Provincetown was: “Since when did he become an art dealer?” And: “Where’s Oceania?”

  The letter went on to say that Harper had made a trip to Nicaragua the previous winter, and during his stay there had purchased the moveable remains of a recently excavated Classic Mayan temple called The Temple of the Jaguars. The objects included: stone stela depicting the ruler-deities Jaguar Snake, Bird Jaguar, Shield Jaguar and other god impersonators; door lintels — limestone relief carving depicting visionary and penitential rites including bloodletting, rites of fertility and mythical events, rattlesnakes swallowing human skeletons; a serpent mask doorway that had teeth lining the sill, fangs protruding from the jambs, and the serpent’s nose and eyes above — (the doorway was the serpent’s gullet, and a line of human heads decorated the cornice); a jaguar throne made of painted red stone inlaid with jade; an illustrated screenfold manuscript, similar to the ones displayed in Paris, Dresden and Madrid, on paper made from wild fig bark and sealed with lime coating, depicting the passage into the underworld of the twin deities of the Popol Vuh; clay and stone figurines (including replicas of the fertility god Xipe Totec, earth Goddess Catlicue, figures representing the prankster-spirit chanenques; a representation of Tlacolteotl, Goddess of Dirt, stegapygous figures; shell, spider and turtle shell men; a spider monkey dancing on a human head, and other figures); painted clay pottery mixed with volcanic ash, and painted with orange or white slip, depicting bat gods, desert foxes, and the three headed crocodile deity; a detailed plan of the designs on the hieroglyphic stairway leading to the Temple of the Jaguars, the general layout of the buildings around the temple including the Steam Bath, Ball Court, Pyramid of the Magician, House of the Governor, High Priest’s Grave, Skull Platform, Castille, Mercado and Akab Dzib, and a complete outline of the Jaguar Mural; full round free-standing stucco portrait heads; jade carvings; effigy pendants of condors, pumas, armadillos, lobsters and monsters with crocodile heads on human bodies; funerary masks made from pottery, basalt, onyx, jadeite and obsidian; small hematite mirrors; stone vessels made in the shape of a hyena, and an organ cactus, killer whale, coyote; effigy vessels depicting iguanas, crustaceans, and molluscs.

  Harper had said in his statement that he had purchased the pieces from the Temple of the Jaguars from the Nicaraguan government, after having agreed to certain terms. The terms were that a replica of the temple would be erected to house the art objects and artifacts, that all the art objects would be housed in the temple replica, that no objects would be sold or distributed separately. It was also stipulated that Harper Martin himself would recreate the great Jaguar Mural, similar to the twelve-wall mural that covered three rooms in the famous Bonampak Temple in Guatemala. The Nicaraguan government agreed that the purchaser of the temple art objects would not be obliged to recreate the pyramid that supported the temple, nor the series of shafts, vaults, tombs, and crypts inside the pyramid, but a diagram of the pyramid, and a sketch of the surrounding buildings, should be made available to the visitors of the temple replica.

  The statement went on to say that Harper had purchased the temple art objects with a down payment of IBM computers, which were shipped to Nicaragua by private boat from California, in order to avoid possible federal intervention through U.S. Customs Inspection. Here, Dan interrupted his reading to explain that since we were aiding rebels fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the U.S.A. had instituted trade sanctions against Nicaragua, and U.S. citizens were not allowed any commerce with them. The statement went on to say that Harper had paid the balance of the purchase price upon receipt of the merchandise in Provincetown.

  After purchasing the temple art objects, Harper shipped the artifacts to Provincetown, again avoiding U.S. Customs for the same reasons, and stored the artifacts in Province­town until his dealer in Manhattan sold them to the new J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California. The Getty Museum purchased the art objects for an undisclosed price, and agreed to the terms of sale set forth by the Nicaraguan government. The Getty Foundation planned to erect the Temple replica on the site of the new museum, in the Malibu hills just outside of Los Angeles, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

  Harper’s statement said he was willing and able to pay all import taxes to the Federal Government, provide them with a complete accounting of all art objects purchased, pay any necessary fines or serve any necessary jail terms for customs violations, if the Federal Government would agree to two conditions: 1. to release the confiscated merchandise (crates containing the figurines) to the Getty Museum so the terms of sale could be honored; and, 2. to agree not to prosecute any associates in the sale, including the art dealer, boat crews, investors of Maniac Drifter Inc., informants, or representatives of the Getty Museum.

  Harper’s letter finished by declaring that none of the shippers or investors had any knowledge of the nature of the operation, nor did the Art Dealer or Getty Museum have any knowledge of the U.S. Trade or Customs violations. He went on to say that he had avoided Customs because he knew that the political relations between the United States and Nicaraguan governments were not friendly, understood we had a trade embargo against that country, and feared the U.S. Government would confiscate the art objects and prevent the sale.

  When Dan Rather had finished reading the letter, he thanked his television viewers for listening, and promised to have more information about the Temple of the
Jaguars story in his next broadcast. “And that’s the CBS News for Wednesday, July 10, 1985. I’m Dan Rather. Goodnight.” The camera pulled back, showing the newsroom, the tickertape noise erupted, and you could see Dan Rather looking thoughtful and earnest, as he folded up Harper’s letter.

  The broadcasts over the next few days had focused on various aspects of the temple and U.S.-Nicaraguan relations. CBS reporters visited the Getty Museum, and filmed the opening of the crates they did possess, showing glimpses of the serpent mask doorframes, some painted pottery, a stucco head. CBS graphics experts provided artists’ renderings of what the Temple of the Jaguars might look like if recreated on the Getty Museum site in Malibu, and what it might have looked like during the Late Classic Mayan Period.

  Reporters travelled to Nicaragua, to report on the new government since Somoza, and the U.S.-backed Contra rebellion. They showed the Nicaraguan government agencies learning to use their new computers with the help of American volunteers. Archaeologists and Mayan specialists were called in to explain the background and history of the artifacts in the possession of the Getty Museum, and to speculate on the nature of the figurines confiscated by the U.S. Government. Representatives of the governments in Guatemala and Honduras issued statements that the Nicaraguan temple was a hoax, that the Mayans never ventured as far south as Nicaragua, and that Harper Martin and the Getty Museum had been duped into selling Nicaragua computers and giving them millions in American dollars. Another broadcast showed how visits to the existing Getty Museum in Malibu had quadrupled even though the Temple of the Jaguars would not be finished for at least a month and the art objects could not be exhibited until the temple replica was complete, in keeping with the terms of purchase.

  Dan concluded by saying that Harper Martin was still at large. His subpoena was still out for questioning regarding U.S. Customs violations. The Federal government had not responded to Harper’s statement, and refused to comment. Then Dan promised to have a complete update on the government position as soon as it was forthcoming, complete coverage of Benefit Week in Provincetown, and a profile of Harper Martin in upcoming reports. Gabe and I were getting along much better since our trip to New York. Gabe forgave me for the nights when I slept with Getz, and Joe, and the night I had driven Mary to Boston. Since he had driven me to New York we had not been apart. Now it was Monday, and the week of benefit parties, races, tournaments, fashion shows and cabarets for the Harper Martin Defense Fund was about to begin.

  ***

  The bouncer for the Harper Martin Defense Fund Benefit Costume Ball at the White Sands was dressed as a giant squid. The costume consisted of a flesh colored leotard with lavender blotches on it. The tentacles emerged at his shoulders — big, stuffed arms made of the same pinkish fabric and painted with blotches, like a rag doll gone berserk. He wore a hood over his head, with bug eyes made of balls that were covered with silver glitter and stuck out from the hood, and in his hand, hidden under the tentacles, he held a squirt gun that let loose an indigo fluid.

  I walked into the party singing “Romance Without Finance is a Nuisance.” I was dressed very simply in a pair of beige chinos, a white tailored shirt, black string tie, leather jacket, black socks and wing tips, with my long blond hair swept up into my fedora. I swaggered around talking like the Continental Op, and coughed on an unfiltered Camel cigarette. I went up to the bar where Uncle Sam, dressed in a top hat adorned with American flag, blue tails, a white shirt, and red and white striped pants, was talking to a seven-foot tall cardboard replica of the Empire State Building, with all its windows etched in, and the tapered top of the building lovingly rendered so it narrowed slowly to a point. “I wanted to come as a phallic symbol,” the Empire State Building was telling Uncle Sam, “so my friend said to me: Why not the Empire State Building? Don’t you think it was a good idea?”

  “You should get together with this guy,” Uncle Sam said, pointing at the bartender, who was dressed as King Kong. “All you need now is Faye Wray.”

  I ordered a club soda with lime from King Kong and turned around to look at the dance floor. A lithe young woman dressed as a Turkish belly dancer took up most of the space. Guys in white togas with wreaths around their heads were also out on the dance floor, some men from the Rescue Squad and volunteer fire department had arrived wearing their uniforms. The Three Muses, men dressed in powder blue silk strapless dresses, with white veils and feathered headdresses, were performing a ring dance, waving their gold wands in the air. A transvestite was dressed up like Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, in a black backless V-neck body suit with black tights, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels.

  Some of the people were dressed up in Aztec and Mayan outfits, probably influenced by Dan Rather’s CBS Special Report on Pre-Columbian Art — An Overview that aired the week before as part of the series for the Temple of the Jaguars Story. One guy was dressed like Catlicue, the decapitated Aztec earth goddess, with a necklace of rattlesnake heads around his skirt, and a double cobra mask over his head. Some people wore falcon headdresses and killer whale headdresses, like the Nazca’s wore. In his CBS Special Report on Pre-Columbian Art, Dan Rather had explained that these costumes were part of an imitative magic. If a warrior painted his eyes with falcon markings, his vision would be as sharp as a falcon’s. If a fisherman wore the symbols of a serrated mouth and dorsal fin of the killer whale, he would be as swift as the whale. The costumes allowed the warrior or fisherman to take on the special qualities of these animals, who were also believed to be gods.

  A sleek, muscled boy was out on the dance floor, skateboarding in circles and pirouettes around the Turkish Belly Dancer. He was shirtless, with the top two buttons of his fatigue pants undone, and he wore a huge paper maché mask of the Extra Terrestrial over his head. The ET mask looked exactly like the character in the Lucas-Spielberg movie: with its bug eyes, brown wrinkled skin, receding chin and baleful, puppy-dog expression.

  A person wearing a Fox head and another person wearing an Alligator head sat down on either side of me. “How was the Dyke Dinner?” the Alligator said. It was Nichole’s voice.

  Nichole was Cosmo’s daughter. She was a painter at Days Studio and a friend of mine. She had gotten me a job at Cosmo’s restaurant. But she was mad at me for three reasons:

  First, I had taken our mutual friend Whitney, who was also a painter, to Paradiso’s to hear Christianne sing. Whitney met a silver-haired lesbian there named Elaine, who looked like Lauren Bacall. Now they were lovers.

  Second, I had driven my friend Mary, who was also a lesbian and a bartender at Paradiso’s, to Boston to see her mother, who was dying of cancer. Nichole was a local. The locals didn’t like the gays.

  Third, Nichole had taken up with a married carpenter named Frank, and her father Cosmo disapproved. Nichole thought I took her father’s side in the argument.

  “So how was the Dyke Dinner?” Nichole repeated.

  “Elaine Barry made the best paella I ever tasted.”

  “Did you see Harper make his Great Escape from the Souza’s cupola to the helicopter, under the watchful eye of three thousand people?”

  “I saw it from the street.”

  “I thought it was a little staged myself,” she said through the Alligator head. “Elaine and Whitney must have thought there was an earthquake.”

  “I didn’t see them around; maybe they were at Paradiso’s.”

  “Figures,” she said. “You didn’t go with them? That’s a relief. How’s your lesbian?”

  “She’s not mine and she’s in Boston,” I said.

  “So you’re here slumming it with the underage boys, the faggots, the Harper Martin cult and the new Pre-Columbian fashion craze, huh?”

  “It may be the biggest thing since the post-apocalyptic Mad Max clothes,” I said.

  “I hear Pierre Cardin is coming out with a Temple of the Jaguars Collection for this fall. There’s a fashion preview in Paris in a few days.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Exactly.
It’s cult of personality: the President’s jelly­bean craze, Beatle-mania, The Sufferings of Young Werther.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Frank said through his fox mask. Four gay men walked by them, dressed as owl man, crab man, spider man, and turtle-shell man respectively, as had been described in the CBS Special Report.

  “The gays weren’t into this Pre-Columbian paraphernalia until Dan Rather had to tell them that the Mohicans painted pictures of masturbation, sodomy, and people strapped to their beds onto their pottery,” Nichole said.

  “Did he really say that, on national television?” I said.

  “He was delicate,” she said. “He said they might have conveyed the concepts of divine inspiration, afflatus and possession. It was in Harper’s statement, part of the temple artifacts.”

  “Look,” Frank said, “more people dressed up like Harper Martin.” He pointed to the bar and dance floor. The two guys by the bar, talking to King Kong, had on the requisite chinos, leather jackets string ties and fedoras. The guy at the edge of the dance floor was wearing a brown fedora, a safari shirt, blue jeans, boots, and held a whip in his hands.

  “That one by the dance floor isn’t Harper Martin,” I said. “That one is Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones in The Temple of Doom.”

  Whitney and Elaine were standing at the door, talking to the Giant Squid. Whitney was dressed as a cat burglar, in black tights, and tunic, a black mask, high top tennis shoes, a coiled rope and a sack thrown over her shoulder. Elaine was dressed as Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, in a 1940s Coco Chanel tailored suit with wide lapels, padded shoulders and oversized buttons, and carrying a black patent leather handbag. Whitney was admiring the Giant Squid, inspecting his tentacles, and running her fingers along the lavender blotches. Whitney loved colors. Elaine took a pack of Player’s from her patent leather bag and lit one. She looked around, saw me, and lifted her cigarette to me. Whitney noticed too, waved, and they started over.