Haiti, Goodbye

They are Leading a blind Haitian onto the plane. He is the blindest man I've ever seen. The kind of blind in which the eyes remain open and staring, two giant socketed holes with dead TV screens in them. He might have been branded. Or he was struck blind, from seeing something terrible. There is a tiny satchel of flesh below one socket that looks as if it might contain his old sight, all folded up and tucked away. Now they are taking him back to Haiti. Perhaps back to the thing that struck him blind. His blindness is enormous. Is he going to stand opposite that terrifying thing and not see it with that same enormity?

• • •

Port-au-Prince.... I have been away for 13 years. The only difference is that the welcoming band is hooked up to electronic amps. I am almost through the airport security net when an inspector spots a small Y-shaped handgrip in my carrying case. He doesn't like the looks of it. Suddenly, there are eight men with guns around me. I tell them it's for strengthening your grip and I demonstrate by knocking off a quick 75 with my right hand, 60 with my left. Not a smile in the crowd. They just don't like the looks of it. What are they (continued on page 172) Haiti, Goodbye (continued from page 169) thinking--that I'm going to take over the country with a handgrip? Go down to the president's palace, wave the grip at the palace guard and say, "All right, nobody make a move"? They let me go, but they are still not convinced. Not really.

• • •

Oloffson's.... Giant tropical salad of a hotel with a little chocolate mousse on the side. A very rich brew. House of Flowers, Casablanca, House of Blue Leaves, Serendipity and the Coney Island Fun House. If it were a cake, you could handle only a few bites a day. I once told an actor who was annoying me that he had too much charm. He told me it was the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to him. Oloffson's is just on the edge. Just a little more charm and it goes sinking into the mud. I'll say this for it. There is no place in the world quite like it. I am put in the Mick Jagger Suite. It is next to the Barry Goldwater Suite. I look at the hotel brochure and find myself wedged between Sir John Gielgud and Lord Snowden as one of the many luminaries who have been here. Since I have never stayed at the hotel before, this opens up a credibility gap as to Sir John and Lord Snowden. Either that or it is the voodoo at work, calling me from the mainland. They must have known I would be here someday, so they simply included me in the literature.

A girl bounces into the hotel, full of energy, heavy with metallic jewelry. She is the entire Village Voice rolled into one. Interests: folk art, shell collecting, cultural bike rides, pottery. She has recently enrolled in a course called Communications An Impetus to Change, offered by the Smithsonian Institution. And she has just come from a small Haitian village where she has recorded the voices of children in a Baptist church. She whips into the lobby, plays some Bach on the piano and switches briskly to selections from Annie Get Your Gun. Comes back and hurls some rock specimens onto a table, also a little petrified wood. There is something missing. She says she is studying pre-Columbian art on the side. That's what was missing. I don't usually do this, but I take it upon myself to suggest that she pare herself down a bit, simplify her life. She looks at me and says, "You're a very attractive man."

• • •

I am joined at dinner by a sugar-beet C.P.A., an American accountant who counts Haitian beets for a sugar company. We talk about Haiti. He says he doesn't know if there has been progress. When "Baby Doc" Duvalier visited Cap Haitien to dedicate a plaque, 50 locals had to be put in jail for the duration of the visit. I reach for the butter and he winces. He advices me not to touch the dairy products, not unless I want "the Haitian jollies." I skip on to the main course and I am about to dig in to the squash when he shrugs and says, "Your funeral." Vegetables are out, too. When I reach for some cold mango, he says, "I hope you've brought along twenty or thirty changes of underwear." I was quite ill the last time I visited Haiti, 13 years back, so even though my appetite is savage, I wind up eating bread and drinking wine. I am about to put a little salt on the bread when he says, "Oops." Salt is out, too. I find out later that he is a fellow with a sensitive stomach who gets sick all over the world. The next day I dig in--salt, butter, squash, mango, mountain goat, the works. Nothing happens. I feel fine.

• • •

The last time I was in Haiti, I was with my wife. Now I'm alone. I notice that when you are alone and seem to be enjoying your own company, it makes people uncomfortable. Everyone wants to help you and get you to join in. Less than perfect couples want to get at your secret. You can't fake this alone business. You have to want to be alone for it to work. On that last trip, people wore pistols on the hip and the hotel owner traveled about in an armored car. I saw my first serious roadblock, not the state-trooper kind but one that said it was possible to get killed. Two people hanging on a hook, as a warning for the villagers. I don't know if I saw that hook or read about it or dreamed it. I honestly don't know. Haiti is that kind of place. Poverty is a word that doesn't apply. Poverty is civilized. This is beyond poverty. It has a smell to it that coats your skin and lingers for years.

A few Haitians have whatever money there is. They are schooled in France and send their children there. One of them had whipped us through a village at 100 miles an hour. If someone happened to get caught on the fenders ... well.... There aren't a million stories out there. There is just one--and a grim tale it is. All that flesh. You have the feeling you can order up a dozen ten-year-olds through room service--six boys, six girls, two with a limp--and they will be served with a frozen daiquiri and hors d'oeuvres. I've been there. This time I'll stay at the hotel and get some sun. That ferocious Haitian sun. I'll stay at the pool and let the island come to me. It does.

At the pool, the most perfectly matched couple I have ever seen. They are slender, small-boned and French. Everything they do is in sync. They swim with an immaculate rhythm and put on suntan lotion that way, too. He is the male version of her and she is the female version of him. When they look at each other, it must be like staring into a mirror, one that adjusts for gender. Is it possible they are brother and sister? I don't think so, but I am not ruling that out. Did they find each other after a long, grueling search or did they luck into this arrangement? I would like to have the answer to that one. You don't want to ask them questions, somehow. It might throw them off the beat. They dry off, after a swim, and sit on a chaise longue, arranging themselves like book ends. This is what the word couple must mean. I have an idea of what their lovemaking must be like. I would like to see it, but I am not sure I could take too much of it. It must be pretty and also masturbatory. It would upset me a bit if I found out that either one had a lover. But I would not be surprised. There would have to be a need to get an atonal note in the picture, to break that perfect rhythm.

• • •

Three middle-aged ladies from Ohio. They take up a great deal of room at the pool, mostly because of their equipment. Aspirin bottles, containers of milk, headache powders. It takes me longer than it should to realize that this is drunk equipment. The ladies are on a drunk tour. They are not modestly and discreetly tipsy but plastered, ossified, blasted out of their skulls. In the broiling sun. That is what they have come all the way down to Haiti for. They are sad, but they are also desperately unattractive. It gives you a hangover just to look at them. Squinting through swollen lids, a once-pretty one announces that she would love to be taken to a "bawdyhouse." I don't pick up on this. When I don't, she says I have "charisma." I still don't pick up. Instead, I concoct a story about practicing abstinence. I think this works the wrong way. It adds to my charisma.

• • •

A young sales executive tries to organize a bare-ass swimming party at midnight. The ladies dig down deep and come up with some shyness. He hits the bare-ass phrase very hard. The great leap forward in sexual understanding has passed him by. He is stuck in the Fifties. With bare-ass. I wait for him to organize a panty raid. I'm sure that's next. Later, I find out he has taken the Ohio ladies to Madam Evelyn's, where the whores, shaky in their geography, have serenaded the foursome with Tennessee Waltz. On reflection, it seems a very kind thing for him to have done.

Late in the afternoon, a couple swims toward me: the young man has cheerful blue eyes and a gold ring in his ear. The girl is compact, Arabic. I do a quick reading and take them for a couple from a New York suburb. He is in children's wear but would like to be known as a fellow with freaky tastes. The gold earring. It is almost fun when I find out how wrong I am. The fellow is a famed Sixties radical whose voice once went booming (continued on page 214) Haiti, Goodbye(continued from page 172) round the world. Some say that he, and others like him, mobilized the nation's conscience and ultimately closed down the war. I don't disagree. The girl is a Gestalt psychologist. She introduces herself and says she is insecure in Haiti. "My reputation usually precedes me." It's a big, slow, fat Wilbur Wood special, but I don't swing. She is likable and I have towering respect for the radical. The beard is gone, but the eyes remain wild, messianic. I don't like the way he swims. He seems to be restless, shifting around for a new and exciting position. He is a bit like a rock star whose backup men have scattered, whose fame has slipped away. He says he is going down to the palace and knock on the gate and ask to see young Duvalier. I respectfully suggest that he not do that. "They don't know about guerrilla theater here. They don't know about put-ons."

We shift to Watergate. "The people who hate Nixon are really having a field day," he says. Is that the way he's going to go? He's going to start loving Nixon? I pick that one right off. It won't work. It won't send his voice booming round the world a second time. He needs something else.

• • •

Enter the Greek. Chiseled face, magnificent beard, eyes blazing with Freedom, Liberty, Conscience. He's a walking coin. I find out quickly that much of this is Freedom to push his own welfare, taking Liberties with other men's wives. The Greek says he is an artist, a citizen of the world. He tells me he once had a little trouble in Spain. At a bar, he was overheard shouting that he would like to shit in Franco's mouth. They threw him out. I can see he's in the wrong country now. For his style. He lowers his voice, chuckles and says that in Haiti, the current technique is to put you in jail and change your name and then forget about you. You have never existed. I can see that the Greek is going to be a great deal of trouble. I turn out to be right.

• • •

That night, the radical and the Gestalt psychologist run into the hotel, excited. They report that a sea of Haitians has just converged on a woman who beat up her baby and now wants to eat it. Is the crowd going to eat her before she eats the baby? No one is sure. I have dinner with the radical and his girlfriend. I tell them I'd like to read a piece telling what happened to the Sixties radicals. What happened to the movement. My new friend says terrific, he'll write it. I tell him that's not the one I want to read. It would have to be written by an outsider. Someone with cold eyes. The main course is pigeon. The radical feels there is something wrong with eating a bird like that. A peaceful bird like a pigeon. "It doesn't want to be eaten." But while he is saying that, he is eating the pigeon. I don't think he ought to be doing that. What you do, I think, if you don't want to eat the pigeon is send it back and order a cheese-burger. Or you eat the pigeon and be quiet. You don't say the pigeon doesn't want to be eaten while you're eating it. I come to an easy and cozy conclusion and I don't like myself for it, but I am stuck with it: That's what happened to the movement. Some of the guys ate the pigeon.

Later, the radical rips off a New York Times from the casino and gives it to me. It's a lovely thing for him to do--the paper is virtually impossible to find on the island--and even though it isn't much to him, he knows how important the "print media" is to me. I'm even sorrier about the pigeon hypothesis, but I believe it and I can't drop it.

• • •

I gamble for a while alongside some Syrians. I have a naïve belief that people gamble according to their national styles. The Syrians are supercautious at the blackjack table. A Syrian has a 12, sees the dealer's picture staring him in the face, he doesn't draw. He holds on to what he's got, afraid of what may be up ahead. This style forces me to be a little more reckless than I am normally. I pull to 16s, start pulling to soft 17s. Under his breath, one Syrian mumbles, each time I draw, "Ouvert, ouvert." The cock-sucker is rooting for me to go bust. This makes me even more reckless. I feel like drawing to 18s and 19s. Maybe that's the Syrian business style. Get you infuriated so that you move away from your normal pattern. You break your neck and the Syrian is there to pick up the pieces.

• • •

Coming back to the hotel, at four in the morning, I see thickets of people playing a board game under a sour light. The driver says they are "the ones who never sleep." I tell him they must sleep sometime. Never, he says. Then they must die young. No, he says, they never sleep and they die in their 80s and 90s.

• • •

The owner of the hotel and his wife arrive from Key West. I've always wondered how an American could stay in this country for long periods of time. The owners miss Chinese food and that is one reason they travel to the mainland. I watch the hotel owner in action. He has a gruff, cigar-smoking Vegas style and his work involves dealing with an endless procession of Haitian officials, high and low, who appear before him with their hands out. Each time this happens, the hotel owner looks startled, outraged, and shouts, "Pourquoi?" He fixes each solicitor with a long, menacing stare, but no one gets stared down. No one goes away and the hands remain extended. He reaches into a cigar box and, with more menace, hands over a Haitian bill, as if to say, "Don't try that again." But they do try it again. All he has done is slow down the process a bit. The bills are of meager denomination, but they must add up. That's his work. Handouts all day long and Lord Snowden in the evening. He can't possibly be in this for the money.

• • •

I am told of a towering gangland figure who came through with two body-guards. It upset him that there was no air conditioner in his room. The hotel owner said he knew of a fine hotel down the road where the visitors could have three clean suites, each with its own air conditioner, spanking new. He started to make a call and the racket leader said, "We stay here." For a week, through record-breaking heat, the bodyguards never removed their jackets. After several days, the head man said his men would prepare a spaghetti dinner for the guests, who were to assemble at the pool at six o'clock, two hours before the regular dinner hour. The owner had to roam the island, hunting down spaghetti-sauce ingredients. None of the guests assembled at the appointed hour and the sauce did not work out. Toward the end of his stay, the gangster put an arm around the hotel owner and said, "I have a plan to take all the goat's milk in Haiti and ship it to the States to make mozzarella cheese. We will be partners." The owner wondered about the starving Haitian children, who need this milk. "You don't understand," the racket man said. "I have a plan in which we take all this goat's milk and what we do is ship it to the States to make mozzarella cheese. You and I will be partners."

"Now I understand," said the owner.

• • •

"Bitch."

"Pig."

"Chauvinist dude."

The world's most complicated fag comes running down to the pool. He has long flowing hair and a Chinese mustache and goatee. He is a grape-picking-Maoist-liberated-activist-radicalized fag who makes a living in show business. It's difficult to know where to start with him. He has just had a big fight with his roommate. He feels they have no business living in such luxury and wants them to stay in a thatched hut with underprivileged Haitians. The roommate appears. He is a media man who loves the sun. He has dyed black hair, heavily barbered. No way you're going to get this fellow into a thatched hut. The complicated fellow is in a constant state of pique, but I (continued on page 226)Haiti, Goodbye (continued from page 214) notice that they stay at the hotel. To my knowledge, they never make it to that thatched hut.

• • •

The Greek has been losing his friends. He seemed to have a great many at first, but they are dropping away. He looks at me with a certain longing. He holds his upper abdomen a lot and I find out he has an ulcer condition that's in high gear. He has fainted a few times and there is a girl at the hospital who gives him shots to keep the ulcer under control. It isn't really under control. He is not supposed to do this, of course, but he drinks brandy around the clock and smokes six packs of cigarettes a day. He says to me: "I have a story to tell you, but I can't tell it while I'm in this country." I tell him not to say he's got a story but that he can't tell it. That's no use to anyone. It's called jerking someone off. He lets that go down. And I have a feeling I'll be hearing from him again.

I am in Haiti for a rest, but I am not much of a rester. As soon as I feel rested, I'm finished resting. I can't imagine doing any resting for the future. I have to get away from the hotel and look around. I buy a Haitian primitive painting and I am delighted to learn that the artist is 82. I look at some cameras. There is a great to-do about a new Minolta that can take pictures around corners. They can't understand why I don't want one. "You'll get a Watergate," one says. I head for a place called Kenscoff, in the mountains, stop off for a bite and wind up having the most magnificent meal of the trip. Or any trip. It costs $20 just to get to this restaurant and I appear to be the only customer of the day. Possibly the month. It is not an ideal location for a gourmet restaurant and I deduce that the host is a poor planner.

I never get to Kenscoff. I do make it to Duvalier's grave. I've heard that ten men with submachine guns guard it night and day. It is inlaid with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gem stones. The crypt is neat, handsomely marbled, smaller than those of other dead Haitians. A little vacation home. Of the ten guards, five are military slick, the other five are sleepy and sit on chairs, dozing, with guns in their laps. I worry about these sleepy ones. There is an eternal fire in front of the crypt and I flirt with the notion of lighting my cigar on it, but I don't proceed to do so. This is a good caper situation. Steve McQueen and a small band ripping off Duvalier's grave. On second thought, it's not that good. On the way back, each time we stop for a light, cripples and blind people are presented to me by their children or friends, as though for comment. As each one is shoved forward, the presenter steps to the side with a flourish, as if to say, "What do you think of that?" We pass a square where there is a giant picture of the dead Duvalier and a banner that says, L'idole des Peuples. I recall an argument at the hotel in which a Haitian insisted that the banner said, "Duvalier, hero of the people." He was incorrect.

• • •

I've had enough. It is Thursday and I plan to leave Friday. The Greek is up to eight packs of cigarettes a day and is drinking shots of rum along with his brandy and black coffee. As I understand it, this is poor ulcer therapy. He is living under a very real cloud, but I notice that he has managed to pick off the wife of a vacationing Midwestern ecologist. He has made a loud public announcement to this effect at the pool, describing the seduction in detail. So he is not the world's most attractive fellow; but in spite of this, I don't like to see him in such condition. He takes me aside and attempts to tell me his story. Before he begins, he gestures toward a man in an open-collared sport shirt who is sitting ten steps away, on a barstool. I realize that he goes with the Greek. Whenever the Greek moves, this fellow follows him, ten steps away. No sunglasses. No apparent weapon in his slacks. This is the new Haiti. Except that he is always there.

The Greek whispers his story to me. When he is finished, I wait to be enveloped by a sense of outrage. This does not happen. Here is his story:

A group of wealthy Haitians hired him to give "order, structure and technique" to Haitian art. His way of going about it was to start a kind of commune, bringing together ten of the country's most promising artists and, in some cases, their wives and girlfriends. They lived with the Greek, ate with him, slept at his house and used his equipment. The arrangement was that the art produced would stay within the group, until five years had passed, at which time some thought would be given to its commercial use. And there would be a division of the profits. The Haitians turned up one day with a lawyer (someone with a badge that said Lawyer) and said they wanted their work returned, they were backing out. The Greek said, "Take it," and stepped out onto the terrace, wondering how they were going to take 40 percent of each canvas. The artists took 250 canvases, slashed a painting of the Greek's and took the supplies he had brought to the country. While they were doing this, the Greek's adopted ten-year-old Haitian son bit one of the artists on the knee and then fainted. A day later, the Greek discovered that $5000 in cash, hidden in his underwear, was gone, too. He called an official in the government, who told him to leave Haiti as quickly as possible. He asked the owner of the hotel what to do and received the same advice. When he made arrangements to leave the country, he found that his papers were "not in order."

So the story does not outrage me. I have seen the Greek in action. It's possible the deal he made with the Haitians was highway robbery. Taking your wife or girlfriend to live in the Greek's house is not intelligent. His predicament is hardly a cause célèbre and the Greek is not Central Casting in the hero department. Still, heroes are in short supply these days. And I don't like the biting episode. I don't think they should have taken the $5000. Once again, it's not the Dreyfus case, but I don't like the shadow assigned to him. I don't think the should advise him to leave the country and then not let him out. The ulcer, the terror in his face are unmistakable. it's not pretty to watch. The Greek says he will go to the airport with me the next day, pretending that everything is all right. I picture a scene in which I'm let through the gate and the Greek is seized, screaming for help. What do I do then? I'm not looking forward to it.

The Greek is amazing. In the middle of this squeeze play, his eyes socketed with both ulcer pain and the fear of Haitian prisons, he takes time out for a nude swim with the ecologist's wife. Before he jumps into the pool, he covers his genitals. I call him on that. Generally, he is having some trouble being sexy. He says he's been told not to go near the airport on Friday. To stay where he is. In Haiti. So I don't have to worry about that airport scene.

The Greek takes me to his villa and shows me his paintings. They are being put onto rolls, some of which will be handed over to the "bare-ass" salesman, for sale in the States. The Greek is working very quickly. He is proud of some giant surrealist canvases; they seem derivative to me. There is a group he did in Paris, in the early Sixties, that are marvelous, soulful, long-legged girls with great exploding thighs. The Greek has repudiated these. I take a swim at the hotel and when I am finished, I notice that my contact lenses are missing. I've put them in their container, in the same place, six nights in a row, and now they are gone. Any other place in the world, I would dismiss the possibility that someone has been fucking around. But we're in Haiti. The Greek is very hot. And I'm the only one who goes near him. So I get infuriated and I am impossible to deal with until I leave. That night, the Greek knocks on my door, puffing at a cigarette as if it's his life line, and asks me if I'd like to take the Ohio ladies to the whorehouse. I tell him I don't want to do that. And that isn't all I tell him.

• • •

I am happy to be leaving. I say goodbye to a few people at the pool and then I come to the Greek. A good question to ask is how come they are persecuting him. He is not a political type. What good is it going to do? The Greek answers this for me. He says he has used his last trump card, a friend in high Haitian circles, who has promised to come to the hotel and square things for him. But the friend never shows up. And he can't be reached on the phone. "Maybe he got lost in traffic," I suggest.

The Greek says: "I don't understand the man. I know his wife. I know his mistress. We all made love together. I made beautiful love to his mistress." So I guess the answer lies in this area. The Greek asks me to give him a book. I hand over my copy of The Digger's Game, which I liked a lot and wanted to keep. He gives me a "soul" handshake, which I have trouble dealing with. He asks for my number in the States and says I should wait a few days and if I don't hear from him--blow the whistle. I'm not sure I have a whistle to blow. I try to leave, but he won't let go of my hand. I have a great deal of trouble getting away from him.

I go to the airport with the salesman. In the car, I wonder aloud if the Greek is going to get out. He is a Greek citizen, but I don't imagine the colonels are going to be eager to help. The salesman taps me on the shoulder and gestures toward the driver. I get the idea and I am quiet. I am very happy when the wheels of the plane leave the ground.

• • •

I wait until the weekend goes by. Then Monday and Tuesday. Late Tuesday, I get a call from Paris. Collect. It's the Greek. He has gotten out, traveled through Guadeloupe and then on to France. What he did was go to the airport as though everything were in order. A Haitian official lectured him there, saying, "Maybe you'll conduct yourself properly in the future," then ducking over and whispering, "It's two hundred in cash to leave." The Greek paid up. He said it was marvelous once again to be breathing the clean air of freedom and would I please talk up his surrealist canvases in art circles, so that he could sell them for huge prices.

• • •

Long before the Greek calls, I decide not to go back to Haiti. It is not exactly a moral judgment. People from the land of Watergate don't get to make those for a while. It's just that I've been there twice. I know what's there. And at the moment, it's not for me.