Status Updates From Rum Diary

There were more than a hundred boats, everything from tiny harbor sloops to huge schooners, and their naked spars swayed lazily against a background of green hills and a blue Caribbean sky.

I sat there a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness.

I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.

My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.

Christ, travel articles. How low can a man fall?

You have that fugitive look, he said. A man on the run.

I knew I was coming to a point where I would have to make up my mind about Puerto Rico. I had been here three months and it seemed like three weeks.

The patio was crowded, so we sat inside at the snack bar. All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding -- shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self- conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike.

After only a few hours of sleep, I was awakened by a great shout. It was Sala, sprung up as if from a nightmare. Mother of balls! he yelled. The car! The vultures!