The Rum Diary
The Rum Diary
The Long Lost Novel
by Hunter S. Thompson
To Heidi Opheim, Marysue Rued and Dana Kennedy
My rider of the bright eyes,
What happened you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart,
When I bought your fine clothes,
A man the world could not slay.
— Dark Eileen O’Connell, 1773
San Juan, Winter of 1958
In the early Fifties, when San Juan first became a tourist town, an ex-jockey named Al Arbonito built a bar in the patio behind his house on Calle O’Leary. He called it Al’s Backyard and hung a sign above his doorway on the street, with an arrow pointing between two ramshackle buildings to the patio in back. At first he served nothing but beer, at twenty cents a bottle, and rum, at a dime a shot or fifteen cents with ice. After several months he began serving hamburgers, which he made himself.
It was a pleasant place to drink, especially in the mornings when the sun was still cool and the salt mist came up from the ocean to give the air a crisp, healthy smell that for a few early hours would hold its own against the steaming, sweaty heat that clamps San Juan at noon and remains until long after sundown.
It was good in the evenings, too, but not so cool. Sometimes there would be a breeze and Al’s would usually catch it because of the fine location — at the very top of Calle O’Leary hill, so high that if the patio had windows you could look down on the whole city. But there is a thick wall around the patio, and all you can see is the sky and a few plantain trees.
As time passed, Al bought a new cash register, then he bought wood umbrella-tables for the patio; and finally moved his family out of the house on Calle O’Leary, out in the suburbs to a new urban-izacion near the airport. He hired a large negro named Sweep, who washed the dishes and carried hamburgers and eventually learned to cook.
He turned his old living room into a small piano bar, and got a pianist from Miami, a thin, sad-faced man called Nelson Otto. The piano was midway between the cocktail lounge and the patio. It was an old baby-grand, painted light grey and covered with special shellac to keep the salt air from ruining the finish — and seven nights a week, through all twelve months of the endless Caribbean summer, Nelson Otto sat down at the keyboard to mingle his sweat with the weary chords of his music.
At the Tourist Bureau they talk about the cooling trade winds that caress the shores of Puerto Rico every day and night of the year — but Nelson Otto was a man the trade winds never seemed to touch. Hour after muggy hour, through a tired repertoire of blues and sentimental ballads, the sweat dripped from his chin and soaked the armpits of his flowered cotton sportshirts. He cursed the goddamn shitting heat with such violence and such hatred that it sometimes ruined the atmosphere of the place, and people would get up and walk down the street to the Flamboyan Lounge, where a bottle of beer cost sixty cents and a sirloin steak was three-fifty.
When an ex-communist named Lotterman came down from Florida to start the San Juan Daily News, Al’s Backyard became the English-language press club, because none of the drifters and the dreamers who came to work for Lotterman’s new paper could afford the high-price New York bars that were springing up all over the city like a rash of neon toadstools. The day-shift reporters and deskmen straggled in about seven, and the night-shift types — sports people, proofreaders and make-up men — usually arrived en masse around midnight. Once in a while someone had a date, but on any normal night a girl in Al’s Backyard was a rare and erotic sight. White girls were not plentiful in San Juan, and most of them were either tourists, hustlers or airline stewardesses. It was not surprising that they preferred the casinos or the terrace bar at the Hilton.