Lotterman thinks I’m a Demogorgon, he would say. You know what that is? Look it up — no wonder he doesn’t like me.
One night at Al’s he told me he was writing a book, called The Inevitability of a Strange World. He took it very seriously. It’s the kind of book a Demogorgon would write, he said. Full of shit and terror — I’ve selected the most horrible things I could imagine — the hero is a flesh eater disguised as a priest — cannibalism fascinates me — once down at the jail they beat a drunk until he almost died — I asked one of the cops if I could eat a chunk of his leg before they killed him. . . He laughed. The swine threw me out — hit me with a club. He laughed again. I would have eaten it — why shouldn’t I? There’s nothing sacred about human flesh — it’s meat like everything else — would you deny that?
No, I said. Why should I deny it?
It was one of the few times I talked to him that I could understand what he said. Most of the time he was incoherent. Lotterman was forever threatening to fire him, but we were so understaffed that he couldn’t afford to let anyone go. When Moberg spent a few days in the hospital after his beating at the hands of the strikers, Lotterman had hopes that he might straighten out. But when he came back to work he was more erratic than before.
At times I wondered which would be the first to go — Moberg, or the News. The paper gave every appearance of being on its last legs. Circulation was falling off and we were losing advertising so steadily that I didn’t see how Lotterman could hold out. He had borrowed heavily to get the paper going, and according to Sanderson, it had never made a nickel.
I kept hoping for an influx of new blood, but Lotterman had become so wary of wineheads that he rejected every reply to his ads. I’ve got to be careful, he explained. One more pervert and we’re finished.
I feared he couldn’t afford to pay any more salaries, but one day a man named Schwartz appeared in the office, saying he had just been thrown out of Venezuela, and Lotterman hired him immediately. To everyone’s surprise he turned out to be competent. After a few weeks he was doing all the work that Tyrrell had done.
This took a lot of the strain off Lotterman, but it didn’t do much for the paper. We went from twenty-four pages down to sixteen, and finally to twelve. The outlook was so bleak that people began saying El Diario had the News’s obituary set in type and ready to go.
I felt no loyalty to the paper, but it was good to have a salary while I fished for something larger. The idea that the News might fold began to worry me and I wondered why San Juan, with all its new prosperity, couldn’t support such a small thing as an English-language newspaper. The News was no prize-winner, but it was at least readable.
A large part of the trouble was Lotterman. He was capable enough, in a purely mechanical way, but he had put himself in an untenable position. As an admitted ex-communist, he was under constant pressure to prove how much he’d reformed. At that time the U.S. State Department was calling Puerto Rico America’s advertisement in the Caribbean — living proof that capitalism can work in Latin America. The people who had come there to do the proving saw themselves as heroes and missionaries, bringing the holy message of Free Enterprise to the downtrodden jibaros. They hated commies like they hated sin, and the fact that an ex-Red was publishing a paper in their town did not make them happy.
Lotterman simply couldn’t cope with it. He went out of his way to attack anything that smelled even faintly of the political Left, because he knew he’d be crucified if he didn’t. On the other hand, he was a slave to the freewheeling Commonwealth government, whose U.S. subsidies were not only supporting half the new industry on the island, but were paying for most of the News advertising as well. It was a nasty bind — not just for Lotterman, but for a good many others. In order to make money they had to deal with the government, but to deal with the government was to condone creeping socialism — which was not exactly compatible with their missionary work.