The crew is primitive and vicious looking and the captain is an old river toad who can’t understand why I’m here and doesn’t much care for it. His daughter is here too, but she is scraggy. I was dealing in a whorehouse last night but refused to pay and could not make my concepts understood. I convinced the lovely, but the chickenheaded madam held firm. Fuck them all. These latins are all whores in their own various ways—even the presidents. (The crew is silently watching me type; I can see them about six feet behind me out of the corner of my eye.) I created quite a stir demonstrating my telephoto lens and this letter machine should do the dinga. The zippo is old hat, of course, or I would use that too. It is a constant challenge to keep them off balance and wondering, instead of crouched for the kill.
A week ago I came over from Aruba on a fishing boat and spent three days with allegedly savage and fearsome indians. As it turned out, they were the best people I’ve met. Loíza Aldea is like Harlem compared to Guajira. They wear nothing but sashes around the waist and speak their own language, not Spanish. It is a smugglers’ port of entry and for three days we drank the best scotch and stayed drunk as loons. A wonderful time but there was no water and the food was unfit for dogs. I had to eat it anyway, for fear of insulting them. I was warned about that in Aruba. I was in Colombia four days before anyone saw my passport. That was in Barranquilla. and I had a bit of a hard time explaining how I got in. There is no law in Guajira, no customs, no immigration, no white men, no nothing but indians and whiskey. Barranquilla was a city, of course, too much like San Juan for my taste, but now we are heading into wild country again—with seven barges of beer. If I can make any friends in the crew I will try to have at the beer. Seven barges should yield enough for all. I have been swilling beer like a bastard—one dime a bottle, cigs 8 cents. I am down to 10 U.S. dollars but have developed a theory which will go down as Thompson’s Law of Travel Economics. To wit: full speed ahead and damn the cost; it will all come out in the wash.
I have just received a clipping of mine from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a long and pondering thing on Cuban exiles. (Christ, that monster beetle is back, gripping and sucking at the tablecloth, which is already covered with ants. I may have to kill it, but why bother.)
Am meeting decent people all along. A Dutch journalist in Aruba and two ivy-type English teachers in Barranquilla. They gave me the name of a Fulbright type in Bogotá, who will feel the full weight of my presence in eight days. Unless the June 10 Peru elections look to be bloody, I will stay in Bogotá two weeks or so, then proceed slowly to Ecuador and down the coast to Lima. I am moving more slowly than I thought and it is better for the oddities. I arrived on the South American coast with 12 U.S. dollars, and in Barran. with 11 dimes. (Great shit I was just stung on the neck by a bug twice the size of that beetle. Had to kill the bastard. I may not be able to keep up this typing—the light is bringing in the big ones.) They are all over me, look like scorpions. Jesus, eight days of this. You get what you pay for, I guess, and I ain’t paid. But it will grab me some original photos, if nothing else. Maybe malaria too. I am drinking water everywhere and praying against fever. There is a definite sense of the Congo here; we have left Barran. behind and the banks are lined with palms and other shaggy matter. I can see it when they swing the light. The captain is going to bed, locking his daughter’s door from the outside and eyeing me stonily. Maybe it is time to have at the cerveza. I will look up the mechanic, who has the grin of a drinker and arms like King Kong. The fucking bugs are on me in force. I can barely stand it. My balls for a sleeping pill. Or an air-conditioned cabin at $20 a night. There may be something to this tourism after all. Even the drinking water is hot now. I am sweating like an animal.
And now for you. “Cabin empty in April” sounds like the knell of doom. (Another huge beetle, slapped at him but missed.) About the time to dig down for that checkbook, eh? (Everyone seems to be going to bed here—they will probably get me up at some unholy hour.) I got 2 hours last night, after being ejected from the whorehouse at 5:00. Tossing pesos around like beans. It is hard to believe they are real. This morning I rated 3 inches on the social page of the Barranquilla El Heraldo. All lies, but in Spanish and harmless. My mind is wandering; I can’t concentrate with these bugs. I keep seeing you running around there with a notebook, trying to drum up revolutions. Who in hell are you working for? Any money coming in? Still scratching after that nymphet? Is McGarr doing anything but eating and wandering around Berbers?15 He claims to be writing; I guess art is dead. Now the bugs are dying on the table and crawling into the ty-writer. I am trying to blow them out, but can’t. The lights keep dimming. I think the captain is fucking himself. Christ, my leg for a cool beer. 8 days of this. If I ever get to Bogotá, I may never leave. Got a forwarded letter from Hudson about five days ago and he is now the sole owner of the boat. Michael gave up the ghost. Harvey Sloane16 plans to finish and take off near the end of summer. He broached the possibility of my meeting him somewhere and signing on, also asked about you. I doubt that he got your letter, from what he said. Appeared to have no idea what you were doing or what plans. Nor do I, for that matter. Is it Africa after Spain? Hudson talked of having you join the crew, also Sandy. I am holding off any commitments till he gets the thing in the water and it floats. By summer’s end I intend to be in Rio and zeroing in on October elections there. God, these bugs. I think I have to quit.
A word about Aruba, since you asked. It is decent for a short stay, very expensive and probably a cheap easy destination from any European oil port. From Aruba to Europe it is $3–5 a day by freighter. I fell among hospitable people there and had a good stay, but would not like to try it unaided. Of course, I am paving a way for other vagrants. The names are on file. Write me c/o U.S. Embassy, Consular section, Lima, Peru, or the box in New York, which is more reliable since my plans are subject to violent sudden changes. OK.… The U.S. is looking better and better. A job may be the answer. Or the dole.
Hunter
TO PAUL SEMONIN:
After the tortuous journey down the Magdalena River, Thompson arrived in Bogotá exhausted and nearly broke.
June 6, 1962
Bogotá, Colombia
I am in Bogotá now, Semonin, and it is raining outside. I have just finished dinner in the dining room of the Imperial Hotel, and, due to that fact, am now writing in coat and tie. Like Thomas Mann. I am in the Imperial at 25 pesos a day, con comida [including food], and it is a moot question as to how and when I’ll get out. I can meet tomorrow’s bill, 75 pesos, but the next, on Monday, will come close to cleaning me out—and there are a good many miles to go before I rest. I am writing this letter because it has been drilled into my head that if I am going to write for money I cannot write a word that will mean a fucking thing in two weeks’ time. I have been accused, in fact, of submitting articles that read “like letters and essays,” which of course they were. Needless to say, they have not seen print. And I have not seen money: $20 in all—two long-worked pieces in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which is getting the bargain of the year. My mail has gone to the dogs, my photos are going nowhere, my bowels are racked with dysentery, my contacts speak no English, my countrymen want me deported, and my overall situation is a black X on a black wall. I have a suspicion that this is a good town, but I am damned if I know where to grab it. I have done everything I could to find a beery journalist, but there are none and that is a bad sign in any town. The people at the Embassy and the USIS [United States Information Services] are so full of shit that the stench floats down to the street and disrupts traffic. I think all the good Americans died in a riot somewhere that I have not yet heard about because there is no news here. For all I know the world is burning or Germany has started another war. But regardless of what is happening, nobody here either knows or cares. Local news is big, of course, one strike after another—students, busmen, bondsmen—forever striking, and it is all I can do to wander around in the mobs and get photos that nobody will ever use for anything except as a
n excuse to bill me for development fees. Sex is the main bug, of course, not the actual lack of humping as much as the lack of any possibility, a sexual deadness in the air that makes me feel I might be locked up for looking at women on the street. Even in San Juan there was a fine, lusty tension in the air, a meeting and gripping of eyes at every corner. Aruba had a bit of the same thing, and so did the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Ah, but not here—here we wear coats and ties at all times. This morning I was asked to leave the dining room for not dressing for breakfast. I refused, of course, and ate in a black, sullen silence which will undoubtedly be reported somehow to President Kennedy and my passport will be revoked. No matter where I go I am the only man in sight without a sportcoat and tie. In all the cafés, on every street, even the beggars dress. I am not kidding—the waiters in the dining room dress immediately after each meal and hang around the hotel in filthy suits—but with ties. And this is one of the cheapest hotels in town.
Being a free-lancer is impossible, of course; they are used to the $100-a-day types who fly in and out without the faintest idea of who the president is or what it means. These are the Alliance for Progress boys, deft technicians all. And then there are the social workers, vastly dedicated people who make a man feel degenerate if he can’t avoid a feeling that they are all phonies. It is like knocking the flag.
Everybody is working terribly hard on some Worthwhile Project, and for some queer reason it is depressing. They are hauling the indians out of mud huts and putting them in huts made of concrete blocks—then hiring $100-a-day photographers to take pictures of the progress. They have imported ping-pong and the Twist to combat the Red Menace, and an unsalaried cynic with no coat or tie might just as well slink off to some bistro and masturbate in a back booth.
Needless to say, my plans are changing with each passing week. Now I am ready to move on to Peru, write a few shitty things from there, then dash across the mountains to Rio, where, if nothing else, there is at least an English-language newspaper. Bone writes, for that matter, that he is pushing for a job in Rio, the same one that was tentatively offered to me several months ago. Editing some kind of Chamber of Commerce magazine. My reply to that will probably blackball me forever in Rio, just as other letters have made me friends elsewhere. Just what I will do for money in Rio is one of those questions that I’d rather not consider. Or Peru, for that matter. Or anywhere else. Sandy reports that the agent still has not read the novel, after six weeks. It will take him six minutes, I think, to skim 15 pages and toss it aside as the work of a crank. I think the Mad Bomber had a point and I am beginning to understand my mystic attachment to my guns. If I had one now I would feel a lot better. Either I am going mad or there is a definite conspiracy afoot in the world, a conspiracy of fatness and blindness, backed up by a sinister mindless kind of reasoning that is only necessary to justify what is already a fact and what will always be a fact. But there is no sense rambling on like this at a time when I am beginning to doubt my own sanity. Maybe if I could burst into the streets speaking perfect Spanish I might find something sane, but I seriously doubt it. Whatever I am looking for here is not generally wrapped in words, which these people are full of. The students held a protest meeting on the steps of the presidential palace tonight and it looked like all those shouting photos of Castro, and probably sounded the same too. They are a gutsy lot at times, as a good many news pictures here will illustrate. The cops are what give me the creeps; to look at them in the jackboots is bad enough, but to see photos of them firing wildly into mobs of students is a bit unreal. Running them into corners and piling up bodies three deep—this has happened often enough to make me feel nervous even standing near a demonstration. Most of it, of course, took place several years back, and Colombia is supposed to be coming to its senses again. But yesterday in Barranquilla the army tackled a student protest march with clubs and gas, and it was only because the students fled that nobody was shot.
I am going to miss the Peruvian elections due to poverty, and undoubtedly there will be enough killing and violence there to make me a rich man in mob-photo circles. But I will have to read about it with my fucking dictionary, then hump around the streets waiting for Time to tell me what happened. The only way to grasp these things is to settle in somewhere and find out what is going on before the noise starts, so that you at least know which way to run. For that reason I am thinking seriously of making tracks to Brazil and getting hip on the October elections so that by the time they happen I won’t be lost in the mud. After that, god knows. Two months of steady, penny-pinching travel has worn me down a bit, and there is at least two months more before I get to Rio, even at the earliest. And if I get there and find they don’t believe in humping, that will be it. I will one way or another make it back to the Magnum country and lay in a stock of beer-makings, there to bitch and grumble in comparative peace for as long as I can stand it. Hudson’s boat is a definite possibility, but it will be fall before he knows anything definite. I think I said this in my last boat-letter (god that was an awful trip) and there is no reason to bat it around again. I can’t face another sheet of paper so I’ll quit here, imploring you to give some notice as to your plans and movements. Also a bit of what it is like living in Madrid. Details, you know. Those are the big things. Yeah.
Hunter
TO AL PODELL, ARGOSY:
Constantly photographing images of Latin American life, Thompson pitched some photojournalism pieces to the editor of Argosy.
June 26, 1962
Cali, Colombia
Al Podell:
I can’t remember if I wrote to say the boat-crossing shots were pretty bland and not much in your line. That’s what PIX17 said, anyway.
Two more possibilities here. Let me know as soon as you can if you think you can use either one.
1) I just looked at a bunch of contacts that are about the goriest goddamn things I’ve ever seen. There is a hell of a problem here in Colombia with what they call Rural Violence. This means that out in the countryside there are a good many people who pass the time of day whacking off their neighbor’s heads with machetes. They also have an interesting trick called the Corte de Flanella, which they accomplish by cutting the throat and jerking out the tongue. Lots of other kicks too—like ambushing army patrols with submachine guns. I’ve done a lot of talking about it here and am pretty well up on the background. I also have access to these rotten photos. They are ones taken by local press photogs after the massacres. Severed heads, pregnant women cut open and cats stuffed into their wombs, long lines of mutilated bodies on the ground, dead soldiers in heaps, etc. I think it beats the hell out of The Monster of Lake Balawaca and that stuff, because this is real as hell. Cali is the center of the violence area. It has been going on for 12 years, but calmed down a bit during the regime of dictator Rojas Pinilla. Now it is getting worse. So bad, for instance, that nobody goes to the big country club on the edge of town after dark. I came over the mountains in a taxi from Bogotá, right through the center of the bad area, and people here have yet to get over it. I came at night. They have got me so much on edge that I am buying a pistol, because I do a hell of a lot of wandering around at night, against all sane advice. The Colonel in charge of the Cali garrison told me the bandeleros, as they are called here, are all communists bent on taking over the country. He says his men are simply outgunned. The bandits, he says, get a steady supply of Red arms from Panama and Ecuador. There is probably some truth to this, and if it keeps up there is no doubt that the Reds stand to gain by it and will certainly help it along. What it now amounts to is a bloodthirsty nucleus for a guerrilla army, and all it needs to make it a real threat is a Castro-type leader. The men and the guns are there, just waiting. People in Cali are upset as hell over it and blame the army for not being tough enough. Some say the army is not trained to fight guerrillas, which is true. This is an old problem, of course; witness the U.S. difficulties in SE Asia. Another thing worrying people here is the presence of another guerrilla army (small) in the moun
tains on the other side of the country near Venezuela. That one is definitely Castroist, but so far they have not raised much hell. Again, it is a thing that could suddenly explode with the right help.
Anyway, that’s the idea. If it interests you let me know c/o the U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador. In the meantime I am gathering dope for a small piece on the thing for the National Observer, which is buying enough of my stuff to keep me moving. So I will have the info and I can get all the photos you can stand. I will catch a batch of possibilities and if it interests you I’ll have the photog here send them along to you in NY. But let me know as soon as you can. I will, for enough money, go out after photos of the actual bandeleros, but if I do anything like this it will have to be on an assignment basis. Nobody here will do it and I would have to go with an army patrol that would stand a better than even chance of getting ambushed. So I leave that aspect of it for you to ponder. There are plenty of shots of past massacres, but not many of massacres in progress. None, in fact. Anyway, let me know what you need to make up a good photo feature. The writing will be no problem, as I already have plenty of dope.
2) Another and far less risky idea is a feature on South American whorehouses, which are patronized here like bars are patronized in NY. I got some shots in a house in Barranquilla, and as far as I know the contacts are either at PIX or Motal Lab. That would be just a beginning, but it will give you an idea. I have more shots from Cali, better stuff I think, and will undoubtedly get more as I move down south. Cali, by the way, is famous for its pretty girls, but you would have to see to believe. Walking the streets here can drive a man up the wall in ten minutes. It is virtually impossible for me to get any work done and I am half-mad from trying. Some of the whores will knock your eyes out. Most of the bachelors I have met here (all of them, in fact) have their whorehouses, their “Numbers” (supposedly “nice girls” or “senoritas,” who sneak out for a quick hump at night), and their Contrabandista, who supplies whiskey and cigarettes. Most of them also have special taxi drivers, for all-purpose work. The peg would be the wholly different sexual climate, with a vast gulf between nice girls and whores, and virtually no middle ground. None for public consumption, that is. As always, there are a lot of sneakers. Yet even then the line is still drawn. Once a girl moves over the hump, so to speak, she is socially done for and might just as well move into a whorehouse if the word ever gets out, because marriage is out. Unless she marries a pimp. All this tends to make whorehouses socially acceptable; the logic being that as long as the good girls are kept locked up, the others can do what they damn well please. And, as in all Latin countries, the sexual code for men is totally apart from that of the women.
Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 Page 44