The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America Read online

  We have a phrase for this kind of behavior, one that was just coming into parlance in the early 1960s—acting the “ugly American.” It’s a term that derives from a 1958 novel by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, a moral fable about arrogance, entitlement, and willful ineptitude among American diplomats and businessmen, and about how their actions were losing us the Cold War in a fictional Asian country called Sarkhan. The embassy crowd in Sarkhan is blithe and somewhat boorish. Most foreign service officers are indifferent to the culture, unable to speak the language, and more concerned with schmoozing the cocktail circuit than listening to the concerns of their host nation. Fraternizing with the locals is discouraged, and the superiority of American ideas is sacrosanct. There’s no telling whether Thompson read The Ugly American before coming to South America, but he could hardly have been unaware of it. The book was a phenomenon that spent seventy-eight weeks on the bestseller list and prompted a national conversation about the role of the US diplomatic corps. Senator John F. Kennedy had mailed a copy to all his legislative colleagues. Thompson would have made it home in 1963 just in time to catch the Marlon Brando adaptation in theaters.

  What’s more, The Ugly American itself came on the heels of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, another bestseller revolving around expatriate American antiheroes and the consequences of their hubris. Published in 1956, The Quiet American painted a different picture, this one of a true believer—“not one of those noisy bastards,” as the book’s British narrator explains, but an earnest young aid worker in Vietnam, so convinced of his essential rightness that it blinds him to collateral damage. (Thompson later praised the book, saying it “gave the Vietnam experience a whole new meaning.”) The back-to-back success of these books was no accident. Both were published near the zenith of the Cold War containment era, when the battle for hearts and minds was raging fiercely and the question of how America represented itself abroad was a hot one. Sure, we’d been traipsing the globe for some two hundred years already, but only in the decade before Thompson’s visit had it become a matter of policy that Americans make a good impression while we were out there. Television and the dawning jet age were just giving many Americans their first glimpse of what “out there” even looked like. At the same time, the Cold War was prompting a mass realization that American identity was shaped as much by our actions abroad as by our aspirations at home.

  Of course, Cali wasn’t the first place that Thompson had encountered the “ugly American” mentality. He’d seen his share of crass American profiteers two years earlier in Puerto Rico, and his unpublished manuscript for The Rum Diary actually borrowed themes from Greene. More recently, in Bogotá, he’d written off other American journalists and the embassy’s “Alliance for Progress boys” as clueless hacks, in it only for show. “They are hauling the indians out of mud huts and putting them in huts made of concrete blocks,” he wrote, “then hiring $100-a-day photographers to take pictures of the progress.… I think all the good Americans died in a riot somewhere.”

  But in the closing lines of “Anti-Gringo Winds,” Thompson seems to acknowledge how easy it was to drift into this mind-set of cavalier self-importance. “Now, looking back on that man with the golf club,” he wrote, “it is easy to see him as a fool and beast. But I recall quite well how normal it seemed at the time, and how surprised I would have been if any of the dozen people on the terrace had jumped up to protest.”

  What Americans were realizing about their national identity, Thompson was coming to realize about individuals—namely, that who we are away from home is a powerful indicator of who we are really, a window into our fundamental character. If I’m honest, my own suspicion of this was partly why I’d wanted to come to South America. I imagine the same was true for Thompson, coming up in the era of ugly and quiet Americans. As I sipped a beer in one of Cali’s riverfront cafés, I could almost picture him sitting at the next table over, staring up thoughtfully at the high-rises and asking himself the same question running through my mind: What kind of American am I going to be?

  Without any particular task to accomplish in Cali, I spent most of my time just walking around, eating chorizo from street carts and searching for a glimpse of the city as Thompson might have seen it. Fifty years ago, Cali was just a quarter of its current size, and I found old photos in bookstores that made it look manicured and idyllic, like one giant retirement community. I got a weird blast from the past as I walked by a small art fair, where portraits of John F. Kennedy seemed only slightly less popular than representations of Christ. One of the canvases showed the president seated with Jackie, staring nobly at something off and to the left, in the manner of a senior class photo. Kennedy was such a presence during Thompson’s tour of South America—his policies shaping the continent even as Thompson traveled it—and I was tickled to encounter him here. When I asked the artist why JFK, she just smiled at me and shrugged.

  “Era un buen hombre,” she said, as if it were self-evident. “Todos les gusta.” He was a good man. Everyone likes him. I didn’t ask why there weren’t any portraits of Eisenhower, Johnson, or Nixon.

  I spent an afternoon trying to get up into one of the rooftop gardens crowning the many apartment towers. I was hoping I could soak up some of the colossus perspective and cold isolation that Thompson had attributed to the Britisher and his guests. If you’re looking for a concrete manifestation of the distance between rich and poor, a high-rise penthouse is hard to beat—especially in an urban South American landscape, where movement and noise on the ground simply never cease. A penthouse in Colombia, I imagine, is equal parts castle, keep, and sensory deprivation chamber.

  But every high-rise in Cali, it turns out, has large and intimidating guards, and none of them want to let a perspiring gringo with a backpack wander freely through their property. Under a brutal midday sun, I crisscrossed the downtown, cajoling to the extent that my crappy Spanish allowed, offering to pay a “fee” directly to the doorman, even playing the clueless tourist and trying to breeze right on through. No dice. After a few hours of fruitless inquiries, I was too sweaty for anyone to take me seriously, and I threw in the towel.

  The one appointment I did make in Cali was for a short tour of the city’s exquisite country club. Thompson had mentioned it while describing the violence encroaching on the city, telling an editor that things were getting “so bad … nobody goes to the big country club on the edge of town after dark.” I thought I’d try to get a look at the place and maybe hear what it was like back when the bandoleros roamed the countryside.

  My first move at the Club Campestre de Cali, though, was to embarrass myself with an inadvertent “ugly American” moment of my own. An assistant at the club had written to me earlier in the week, telling me to ask for Sr. Juan Manuel Gonzales, the club’s head groundskeeper. But for weeks I’d had Colombian politics on the brain, and the current president of Colombia (Uribe’s former defense minister and handpicked replacement) is the very similarly named Juan Manuel Santos. Like an idiot, that was the name I had scribbled into my notebook. I was a little edgy when I walked up to the gate, as I always am when I have to be professional in Spanish. So when I started talking to the buttoned-down matron in the booth, I simply read the name straight out of my notebook: Oh, hi there. I have an appointment at noon to see Juan Manuel Santos.

  The attendant looked at me, puzzled, like I’d just requested a tee time with Che Guevara and Jesus Christ. She asked me to repeat myself several times, which only flustered me further. “I made the appointment by e-mail earlier this week,” I stammered. “I’m just here to meet for a while with Juan Manuel Santos. I think he’s in charge of golf.”

  I sounded not only like an idiot gringo, but probably a rube on top of it. Imagine your stereotypical small-town hayseed who storms up to a country club in Massachusetts and demands to see George W. Bush or Barack Obama—because this is where rich and powerful people hang out, right?

  “The only Juan Manuel Santos I know, sir, is the president,” she
said to me very, very slowly. But it still wasn’t clicking. I figured she meant the president of the country club. OK then, I thought. That was more of a higher-up than I’d expected to give me a tour, but hey, that was the name in my notebook. So I doubled down on the stupidity and told her yes ma’am, that’s the guy. I’m here to see the president.

  Needless to say, the whole thing took a few minutes to sort out, and once I realized my mistake, I was so embarrassed that I lost control of my Spanish altogether. As the exasperated woman finally ushered me inside, it was all I could do to pathetically mutter, Discúlpame, soy tonto. I’m very sorry. I am an idiot.

  A few minutes later, I climbed into a golf cart with Juan Manuel Gonzales himself, who laughed so hard at the story, he had to pull over. Gonzales turned out to be as gracious a host as I could have asked for. A slight guy with a mustache and an easygoing manner, he’d been working for the club for thirty-one years, and he sent two boys to college doing it. He was obviously proud of the place, and with good reason. It’s stunning—spacious and impeccably landscaped, encircled by a blue-green stream and dotted with perfectly pruned bamboos and palms. Gonzales drove me around for over an hour, showing off bunkers and doglegs, state-of-the-art stables, and even a complex of tennis courts that was right then hosting a televised international tournament. He got particularly excited about the wildlife, urging me to snap pictures of herons and egrets, then scouring the fairways until we found an iguana and a pair of dog-sized tailless squirrels called guatines.

  “So, what does it take to become a member here?” I asked, after we’d stopped at the ninth green for some lemonade.

  “Not much,” Gonzales said. “A form, a background check, and plata”—literally, “silver,” a favorite slang term for money—“mucha plata.”

  “And what about gringos? Can they become members?”

  “Oh, of course,” he said with a nod. “We have a lot of gringos. Many, many gringos.”

  Two men, toting their own bags, walked onto the teeing ground of the neighboring eighth hole. We watched as they lined up their drives.

  “And golf is the most popular sport here?”

  “No, definitely not.” Gonzales shook his head. “Well, maybe for the gringos. Otherwise it’s fútbol, then tennis and chaza.” Chaza, he said, was a Colombian paddle game like tennis, but played without a net. “Golf, you know—that’s only for the elite.”

  I smiled, embarrassed but not surprised to hear him so casually equate the gringos with the elite. We looked over at the eighth green to see one of the men teeing off. He had a good drive, releasing his swing with a graceful swish that sent the ball out low across the fairway.

  Thompson’s British golfer probably spent some time out here, I thought. Assuming he was real, anyway. In one of Thompson’s biographies, I’d read a quote from his former editor at the National Observer, speculating that the lede to “Anti-Gringo Winds” had, in fact, been embellished. It seemed a bit too perfect, the editor said, the bourgeois Brit launching golf balls into the slums. It’s not as if the paper could have done a lot of fact-checking, and Thompson did eventually acquire a reputation for blending fact with fiction. True or not, though, it is indeed a perfect image.

  What is it about a golf swing, I wondered, that implies such casual conquest? Surely we have a whole host of cultural associations with the sport—it’s the game of the elite, as Gonzales said, but there’s more to it than that. While Gonzales and I watched the second golfer tee off, I thought about the way that golf delivers violence in such an elegant and controlled package. Supposing for a minute that Thompson did make up the incident on the penthouse balcony. He couldn’t have used an American kid batting fly balls or a tennis pro working on her backhand. The first is equally “gringo,” the second very aristocratic, but both actions are too overtly aggressive, too forceful and abrupt. The best golfer can drive a ball three hundred yards with a motion as subtle and fluid as any tai chi maneuver. And Thompson needed that imagery to capture the sort of person who could sow violence so nonchalantly—the detached oppressor in his high-rise tower, dapper in a coat and tie.

  What about the more manifest violence, I remembered to ask Gonzales, the banditry toward the end of La Violencia? He was just a child then, but he seemed to have a handle on the country club’s eighty-year history, and the club, he said, had never really been in danger.

  “Most of that happened out in the country,” he reminded me. “Things in the city were very different. More tranquilo.”

  Sure, I said, but Cali was so much smaller back then. Wasn’t the country club sort of on the edge of the city? He thought about that for a while.

  “I suppose it was,” he said, and then he paused again. “Well, anyway, inside the club, I’m sure it was always quite safe.”

  A few yards away, an iguana clambered up a nearby palm. A scatter of polite applause drifted over from the tennis courts. Gonzales and I finished our lemonade as we watched the golfers make their approach.

  The Normandie Exclusivo sits on a steep hill just north of Cali’s downtown, the slope of which is already crowded with elegant and vaguely modernist apartment towers. Or anyway, the Normandie Exclusivo will sit on it, once the construction is completed. On the day that I showed up, the hilltop was a mess of sky-high scaffolding, construction equipment, dirt tracks, and one genuinely stunning model penthouse overlooking the sprawl below.

  I saw a flyer for the Normandie Exclusivo the day after visiting the country club while wandering around again, trying to schmooze my way to the top of someone’s apartment tower. It was stapled to a telephone pole in a neighborhood already crowded with new construction. A Privileged View in Every Room, it said, with an arrow pointing up the hill. Model Now Open!

  I walked up the hill and into the Normandie Exclusivo’s temporary office, where a steely associate named Maria greeted me with barely concealed skepticism. I can’t blame her. I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans that hadn’t been washed since Bogotá. I couldn’t remember my last shave, and an afternoon of walking had me sweaty and disheveled. She offered me a glass of water. Maria was a pantsuited fifty-something who was more sharp than pretty, with deep facial lines that were actually rather flattering in a town full of creepily Botoxed brows. Right then her features were particularly creased, because she was staring at me dubiously, her hands on her hips. She looked, unfortunately for me, like a woman who did not lightly suffer fools.

  But Maria’s attitude brightened considerably when I explained that my retiree parents were considering relocating to Colombia, and that I was certain they would love to see photographs of a potential new condo.

  “Mostly, they’ve been looking in Bogotá,” I lied. “But you know how it is there. So dreary, and everyone’s always wearing a coat and tie.”

  Maria agreed politely and grabbed some literature from off her desk. Gesturing at a scale model beneath a glass case, she gave me a brief pitch about all the marvelous amenities the Normandie Exclusivo would include—swimming pools, rooftop terraces, ample parking. Then we walked over to the model penthouse for a room-by-room tour. And that was that. After two sweaty days of supplication, all it took to get access to a Cali penthouse was playing the rich gringo.

  For the next half hour, Maria shadowed me around the gorgeous air-conditioned apartment, nodding patiently at my ridiculous observations, which were all the more inane on account of my grade-school Spanish: “These windows have much sun.” “That lamp is very tall.” It was an unquestionably nice place, with vivid white walls, clean angles, plenty of light, and some splashy modern furniture. Kind of like living in an art gallery between exhibits, I thought. When I pictured myself lounging in the living room with my rich and imaginary gringo parents, the grit and noise of downtown Cali felt very far away.

  “Our owners are the best people in all of the city,” Maria said. “Business leaders, politicians, even some celebrities.”

  “And gringos?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” she assured me, “we have
many gringos!”

  We walked through some sliding glass doors onto an open-air terrace. It had a three-stool, stainless-steel bar and a wall-mounted wine rack. The view took in the green hills west of town, the largest of which is topped with an open-armed statue of Christ. For a moment, I sensed what the place might have felt like for Thompson, how a wide, elegant veranda like this must have seemed a world away from the shouting students in Bogotá, the coarse crewmen on the Magdalena, and, God knows, the tie-clad Wayuu slugging Scotch and chirrinchi back in Guajira. I could definitely see how, on a sunny day up here, with the right company and a drink in your hand, all the people below might just cease to exist.

  Maria and I walked back into the living room, and I turned to face the outside, taking in the whole terrace. “Take a picture of it,” she told me, and I did. Then I tried to envision the golfer, the upward arc of his swing and the long, level trajectory of a ball disappearing into the city.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Gringolandia

  The North American presence in South America is one of the most emotional political questions on the continent.

  —National Observer, August 19, 1963

  I

  Looking around at statues in South America, it’s hard not to think that the United States is kind of dropping the ball on statues. In cities like Bogotá and Quito, seemingly every street corner showcases some kind of dramatic granite monument, soaring memorials to middling politicians and battles too obscure to warrant mention on Wikipedia. Neither is this phenomenon limited to the cities. Even your most podunk Andean hamlet has at least two Virgins and a Bolívar. By contrast, I could only think of three public statues back in Missoula, Montana, and two of those were of bears.