Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Rum Diary > Status Update

(cont.) Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue -- and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum. Everybody I met acted as if they had just come back from a crucial screen test. And I was being paid a ridiculous salary to wander around and take it all in, to find out what was going on.

(cont.) I wanted to write all my friends and invite them down. I thought of Phil Rollins, breaking his ass in New York, chasing after stalled subways and gang-fights in Brooklyn; Duke Peterson, sitting in the White Horse and wondering what in hell to do next; Carl Browne in London, bitching about the climate and grubbing endlessly for assignments; Bill Minnish, drinking himself to death in Rome. I wanted to cable them all -- Come quick stop plenty of room in the rum barrel stop no work stop big money stop drink all day stop hump all night stop hurry it may not last.