Navy Blue

I went to Vieques about 15 years ago to cover a guy named Carmelo Matta, who was occupying some land he insisted went back in his family for several generations. Coincidentally Carmelo died a week or so ago, and I found myself thinking about the fire-burning hangers-on who huddled around the side of a hill with a view of the Navy bombing range. It turns out they've recently opened up the roads to the beaches the Navy was hoarding and has now turned into an Ecological Resources Conservation Zone. Surfing the narrow, rutted roads with La Laura, we found ourselves outside the gates of what seem to be the old barracks, or at least what I imagine to be via childhood Gomer Pyle reruns.

Vieques has an old school feeling when you slink around its dry, dark, dreamy foliage with cactus growing along the way. Loping around in a 15-year-0ld Mitsubishi Montero caressing its lumpy terrain was a great change of pace from SJ area metropolitana traffic, where during rush hour a parade of SUV's back in to the road in front of you heedlessly. But apart from a laid-back bodega and an astonishing cuchifrito joint across from the entrance to Sun Bay Beach, we went through almost two days without hearing so much as a word in Español. Now that the Navy is gone, the replacement energy remains gringo, from New Yawk, from the Midwest, etc., and you get the feeling few of these visitors have any idea how this island and the Big One were practically turned upside-down by the nationalist fervor of the late '90s. Al Sharpton sharing a jail cell with Bronx beep Adolfo Carrión.

So you gingerly probe the cool crystalline waters, and take a walk around the bay, until you encounter the jagged rock outcroppings that fling themselves toward the water as if to protect the beach from unnecessary whatever. The rocks allow you to feel the reality of the beach, to feel the sharp hardness underneath, the island's closet skeleton. And when finally you get to a clearing, you find that the rocks, the coral, the mollusks, and the seaweed suggest shapes, symbols, that can be rearranged into an offering to....the goddess of absent-minded genius. There in the shadows, where everyone could see but no one could, you can taste the memory of salty flesh, sand-filled tresses all about you as the trees howl the song of a midwinter wind.

El Gonzo


Hunter was undoubtedly a big influence on me, particularly the classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I attempted to emulate at age 19 during a trip across the Arizona desert. It's possible that the follow-up, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail was an even better book in the way that it chronicled the final dissolution of naive '60s radical political thought. I'm not even going to get into the episode where Oscar Zeta Acosta sued Hunter over his alleged stealing of the idea behind gonzo journalism, nor fret about Thompson's unhealthy love for firearms, something that obviously figured into his premature and pointless death. Nor am I going to complain about the at best condescending, if not frankly racist portrayal of Puerto Ricans in
The Rum Diary, a book that Benicio del Toro was involved in turning into a movie that has seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. I'll just say that when Hunter came to my school on a speaking tour, and some friends waited around on the side of the stage to offer him a chance at a brief ether binge, he refused nervously. I guess he had a good reason for that.


Yeah I went to see the Gates. It was at once moving, ecstatic, and wondrous, and painfully silly. The orange was kind of cool. The masses of tourists and Upper East Siders I could have done without. But the bizarrely insecure reaction of some pundits really bugs me--how anti-intellectual do you have to be these days in America? New York? How anti-intellectual do you have to be as part of the intelligentsia? The thing is just fun. It's a bunch of orange fabric, and it makes you think about light, and shape, and being on a camino. I'm kind of bummed it's coming down already.