“So he does,” said Brian Keyes, trying not to appear dumbfounded by what he saw. In print.
With a studio photo. Under a headline that said: Wiley Returns.
18
Nassau—The worst thing about visiting the Bahamas is Americans like me. The hotels are lousy with us.
Americans with terrible manners.
Americans who talk like the rest of the world is deaf.
And dress like the rest of the world is blind.
I come here seeking solitude, an oasis for recuperation, and all I get is a jackhammer sinus headache that won’t go away. From Bay Street to the baccarat salons there’s no escaping this foul plague of tourists.
In Florida we’ve grown accustomed to their noisome behavior (and tolerate it, as avarice dictates we must) but there is something obscene about witnessing its infliction upon the people of a foreign country.
Frankly, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
Perhaps it’s basic pioneer spirit that compels Americans each vacation season to evacuate their hometowns and explore new lands. Fine. But how do you justify fluorescent Bermuda shorts? Or E.T. beach sandals? What gives us the right to so offend the rest of civilization?
Ah, but look who’s talking.
The other day I tried windsurfing, an absurd sport that requires one to balance perilously on a banana-shaped piece of fiberglass while steering the seas with a flimsy canvas sheet.
Windsurfing lessons in the Bahamas cost $45, a bargain for vacationing yahoos who firmly believe that the more dangerous an enterprise, the more you should pay for it. And for a thirty-seven-year-old degenerate in my addled condition, windsurfing is fraught with exciting little dangers: lacerations, compound fractures, groin pulls, spinal paralysis—not to mention toxic jellyfish, killer sharks, sea urchins, and sting rays.
Windsurfing probably is not as dangerous as, say, flying a slow U-2 over Cuba, but there isn’t a jock pilot in the whole damn Air Force who’s ever had to worry about losing his swimtrunks (and self esteem) before a beachload of gawking, tittering, shrimp-skinned tourists.
Which is what happened to me at high noon yesterday when I was blindsided by a thunderous breaker.
My Bahamian windsurfing instructor, Rudy, had every right to laugh; it was a stupendous moon job.
After my spill (and near-drowning), I loudly accused him of supplying faulty equipment. Replied Rudy: “De only ‘quip-ment dat fawlty, mon, is you drunken old body.”
He was right. You can’t surf with a bottle of Myers’s under your arm. Stupid bloody tourist.
Wiley Returns.
“How could you print that crap?” Brian Keyes demanded.
“Calm down,” said Cab Mulcahy, “and close the door.”
But Keyes could not be calm, not with Wiley’s elongated face leering from the pages of the Miami Sun. That the newspaper would revive his column was beyond belief, a monstrous gag. Wiley had the gun, and Mulcahy had just handed him the bullets, gift-wrapped.
“Cab, you don’t know what you’re getting into.”
“I’m afraid I do.” Mulcahy looked chagrined. “Skip’s involved with these terrorists, isn’t he?”
“He’s not just involved, Cab, he’s running the whole damn show. He’s the Number One Nacho.”
“You’re certain, Brian?”
“Absolutely.”
The editor closed his eyes. “How bad?”
“Imagine General Patton on acid.”
“I see.”
They sat in morose silence, pretending to gaze out Mulcahy’s office window. On Biscayne Bay the waves had turned to slate under pickets of bruised thunderclouds, advancing from the east. It was probably raining like hell in the Bahamas.
“He called yesterday from Nassau,” Mulcahy began. “Said he was feeling better. No more visceral rage, he said; back to big-league journalism. He sent the column by telex—totally harmless, no preaching, no politics. You’ve got to admit, it’s good for a chuckle. I told Skip we’d run it after he came back to Florida and we had a long talk, to which he replied: ‘In due time.’ “
“So you published the damn thing anyway.”
“I was outvoted,” Mulcahy said.
“By whom?”
“By the only one who matters.”
“Cardoza?” Keyes asked.
Cardoza was the publisher.
“The prince himself,” Mulcahy said. “Two weeks is a long time without your clean-up hitter, Brian. I told him Skip was still under the weather, suffering from exhaustion, the whole nine yards. But Cardoza read the column and said Skip sure didn’t write like he was exhausted so we might as well print the column. And that was it, end of argument. Listen, we were getting a lot of mail, a lot, including some cancellations. You would’ve thought we yanked Doonesbury or Peanuts.”