LIFE IMITATES ART

-->

Jimmy Buffett and Herman Wouk

Bibles of all colors and flavors abound. In the Virgin Islands the bible is Don’t Stop the Carnival, written by Herman Wouk, in 1965. Paperman, a middle-aged New York publicist, retires early from the rat race to operate a hotel on Amerigo, a fictitious Caribbean island that suspiciously resembles Hassel Island, located in the harbor of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, where Wouk once worked.

Like all Continentals fresh off the airplane, Paperman is clearly out of his depth. In the islands, it’s not so much what you don’t know. Instead, it’s when you realize the utter irrelevance what you do know. Water still runs downhill, but not happily or with the same enthusiasm. Paperman wasn’t the first to experience it.

In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt appointed William Hastie to the United States District Court of the Virgin Islands, making him America’s first African-American Federal judge. A magna cum laude graduate of Amherst and Harvard Law graduate, Hastie was eminently qualified for the new post, except that when the Admiral of the Ocean Sea named the archipelago on the feast day of St. Ursula, she of the eleven thousand virgin martyrs, no St. Tennessee could be found in the canon, a definite vocational handicap in the Antilles.

In one of those small-world coincidences, I became friends with Hastie’s long-ago clerk—also Harvard Law, who worked in the Minnesota Attorney’s office and served as a Minneapolis councilman. In 1946, Harry Truman appointed Hastie Territorial Governor of the United States Virgin Islands, making him the first African-American governor of the territory.

During his tenure, the islands, purchased from Denmark, in 1916, were in the process of updating the electric grid from direct current to alternating current. No one was happy, and Hastie couldn’t understand why. Finally, a West Indian on his staff pulled him aside, reputedly telling him the people preferred DC, Danish Current, to AC, American Current.

Despite dodging and weaving West Indian attitudes, Paperman took a lot of shots before learning to roll with the punches. The punches weren't all from West Indians. The real world also intruded. In order to get the attention of the of the captain who skippered the barge that ferried fresh water from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas, Paperman needed a real-world solution to ensure he could get his hotel's cistern filled before the barge emptied all its water on St. Thomas. A female employee standing on his dock with her skirt raised proved effective.

The raised skirt worked for Paperman, but the cistern did not. Filled with fresh water, the aged cistern collapsed under the pressure. Easy to see how Paperman’s difficulties were laughable, especially when they weren’t happening to you.

Almost twenty-five years later, when I arrived, water was still barged over from Puerto Rico. Likely, it was the same barge, now condemned. After each shipment was unloaded, the Daily News printed a warning on how many minutes that particular shipment of water had to be boiled before it was potable. Water was precious those days. Public housing only got water during a few specified hours per day.

Desalinization plants were built on the three major US islands during my tenure. On St. John, they goofed up. Instead of taking the water directly from the ocean, they pumped it from a saltwater well. The salinity was seven times saltier than the sea, pretty much destroying the machinery. Years later, in one of life’s small ironies, my best buddy from college provided the island fresh water from a reverse osmosis system packed into a forty-foot container.

Before moving to the Virgin Islands, I read Don’t Stop the Carnival, never imagining myself in Paperman’s shoes. I figured that if I worked hard and kept my nose clean, things would work out. I wasn’t looking to get rich. You go to Hong Kong for that. I looked for an authentic life in paradise. The Economist categorized St. Johnians as lotus-eaters. What could go wrong.

The first thing to go wrong was Hurricane Hugo, a Category 5 storm. I boarded up the house I was working on for owners who lived in the Twin Cities—a job that provided housing in an adjacent building. Then, remembering the tail end of a typhoon I experienced in Vietnam—no dry clothes for days—I threw all my clothes into the washing machine, figuring to let them ride out the storm in the clothes dryer. About a half hour later, at high noon, WAPA, the Water And Power Authority, pulled the plug on the island. You don’t feel particularly bright when you blunder, but you feel downright stupid when you outsmart yourself.

It was a blue-sky, sunshine afternoon. The hurricane was still hours away, but I’d succeeded in accomplishing exactly what I’d hoped to avoid: my clothes were soaking in a tub of water. I buttoned up the wood shutters on the building I was living in. About three pm, it started to drizzle—the sky doesn’t turn black like it does in the Midwest, just gray. While I sat a couple hundred feet up on the mountainside, under the covered portion of my deck and waited, I watched a big old sailboat enter the harbor. A restored Chevy panel wagon from the late ‘40s or early ‘50s sat on its deck. The hundred-and-ten-foot Great Lakes Pilot Schooner built in Thunder Bay (my neck of the woods), in 1899, was to play a key role in Greater Trouble in the Lesser Antilles and Low Jinks on the High Seas.

I didn’t know a soul on the island, so I was surprised when one of my few neighbors stopped by and asked if I wanted to spend the night in the concrete cistern of a house he was building. Our tiny neighborhood, Little Plantation, had attained notoriety, our steep access road, specifically. Several accidents had occurred—one, fatal. I declined the invitation, not imagining anything less comfortable than spending the night in a concrete cistern.

The hurricane that was supposed to hit at five pm hung around St. Croix, toppling trees and knocking down concrete-block buildings. It was after midnight when I felt and heard the explosion. I jumped out of bed and headed for the bathroom, which shared a wall with the concrete cistern. My flashlight revealed whitecaps in the toilet bowl. On the lowest level, I couldn’t be sure what was left of the building overhead. There was no way I was going to look. I did hear a lot of furniture moving around.

I ended up applauding my decision to load up the washing machine before the storm. My clothes were about all I owned that didn’t go littering the mountainside when the roof on my neighbor’s guesthouse blasted through my bedroom wall (a bedroom I abandoned for the storm) and blew out the patio doors on the adjacent wall.

The next day, after I collected my stuff from the mountainside, my neighbor helped board up the damaged wall. I waited for the power to come on, sweeping out a three-inch-deep pile of leaves and debris on the floors, admiring minuscule shards of glass imbedded in the cypress wall paneling that sparkled in sunlight—glass that had once been windows. The effect was walls of diamond dust.

Boats littered the shoreline in the bay below. One was a seventy-foot ketch. A couple of days later, a tug and barge showed up. Using the barge’s crane, the captain plucked the seaworthy boats from shore. The ketch sat in a sling most of the day (half the money—we speculated five grand—got the boat in a sling, the other half floated it). As soon as the ketch was floated, which was at dusk, the man and his young son snatched another five boats from the shore and lined them up on the barge’s floodlit deck, so the owners could repair them overnight. The derelicts still littered the shore when the captain pulled out the next morning.

Downed trees blocked roads. I don’t know how much rain fell. My device only measured the first foot. Enough fell that it destabilized soil in the road cuts, toppling more trees and sending rocks tumbling onto the roads. Sandy beaches were strewn with rotting succulents and cacti, as if Gallagher had smashed watermelons. A lot of homeless critters—termites, bees, and rats—wanted to share my digs, but that’s a long story. FYI: rats are a lot smarter than you think, and they pass on information to the next generation.

What did I do? I waited for the power to come on. It was a long wait. Almost three months. We did have a little power during the day, thanks to a kind-hearted soul who donated a generator that was set up nearby and wired into that part of the grid where the conductors conducted. I still have the T-shirt: MOFPC—My Own Fucking Power Company.

What did I do next? I got a job working at a beachside restaurant a couple miles down the road. The operator, a road builder (specializing in jungle roads) had run the place with his girlfriend. She had split weeks before. His cook never showed after the storm. Searchers found his cottage duct-taped tight from the inside, windows and doors, but he was gone. Some weeks later, when an opportunity from the World Bank came along to build a road in Borneo, he inquired if I was interested in taking over his lease. It had almost ten years to run, so I agreed. During our negotiations, he queried whether I’d read Don’t Stop the Carnival. I said I had. He asked what I’d thought of it. I said I laughed. He suggested I read it again. When I did, he quizzed me a second time. I told him I cried. We shook hands to cement our deal.

Oscar Wilde said that life imitates art more than art imitates life. About that, as about many other things, Wilde was absolutely correct.

The business was a success from day one. The owner—who lived next door, raised goats and drove a taxi—got a monthly rent payment plus a percentage of the gross sales. She was shitting in high clover, but insisted on cutting off her nose to spite her face. Unhappy with her previous tenant for splitting up with his girlfriend (after he assured me he and the landlord were great friends), she took me to court.

President Reagan appointed my attorney to the federal bench. Despite being African-American, she wasn’t a Virgin Islander. Unlike Hastie, she never got through the door to her office. One of her underlings sat in the courtroom with me while my landlord held the lease up to the light and pronounced it a forgery. The judge almost fell out of his chair. I saw it as a good sign. Was I ever mistaken. I’d have been better off hiring an obeahmon than a lawyer. The trial lasted the entire day, interrupted by other cases. The judge was a reasonable man, but his reasonableness was limited to giving me several months to exit the premises instead of the several hours my landlord demanded.

On my last day of business, I threw a party. Several long-term residents claimed it set a new high-water mark. We ate up all the food and drank up all the booze. What didn’t get consumed went home with the guests. I gave one West Indian couple the barstools they courted on. Some women got premoistened T-shirts. Meanwhile, the landlord sat under a nearby sea grape tree, chanting and shaking the bones—not a physical exercise, but working the obeah.

The exercise didn’t work well for her. Her next tenant didn’t last, and the building stood empty for months at a time. She likely made more money in a month or two from me than she did in the next several years. Me, I found a job managing another bar and restaurant closer to home. It was a new operation, but the owners were not suited to operating it. A sign in the kitchen proclaimed: “No Eating Allowed.” When employees started bringing their own food from home, the sign changed: “No Chewing Allowed.” The owner simply was not going to allow employees to eat the restaurant’s food or their own food on her dime, never mind that she refused to give them lunch breaks.

Paperman struggled to get his world under control. It took him a while, but step by step he succeeded in constructing a life in the islands. It took me a while, too, but I succeeded in the same way. Just when he seemed to achieve immunity from the carnival, two senseless deaths among his acquaintances sent Paperman packing for New York.

One of my waitresses was diagnosed with cancer. We decided to throw a party at the restaurant and raise some money for her. Booze. Live entertainment. Hors de’oeuvres. A friend sold a calendar of near-naked girls he had filmed underwater, donating the proceeds. A big deal. Then came the phone call. An irregular patron, rumored to sell drugs, looking for his girlfriend.

Admittedly, the guy was a jerk, at least a jerk toward me. On the occasions I forgot to serve his Cuba Libre without a lime wedge, he’d toss the lime at me. His girlfriend was with another man. He told her that if she didn’t come home, he would kill himself. She didn’t and he did.

Across the bay, at another bar and restaurant, which had closed early because of our shindig, the body of my dishwasher was found the next morning, a bullet in his head. Due to the suicide on the other side of the island, the police were not prompt in arriving. It is difficult to open your business with a corpse blocking the entry.

Unlike Paperman, I got both deaths on the same day. Like Paperman learned, death does, as John Donne pointed out, diminish one. The bell always tolls for thee. What’s funny about your life imitating art is that you can realize it as it’s happening, but you can’t really do anything about it. It’s sort of like a recurring dream. You live through it, realize it’s a dream, but you go to bed the next night and it’s déjà vu all over again.

Police did not solve the dishwasher’s murder.

The one-hundred-two-year-old Wouk published Sailor and Fiddler, his last novel (according to him), at age one hundred. He is acclaimed for The Caine Mutiny, Youngblood Hawke, Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. In 1997, he collaborated with Jimmy Buffett to create a musical based on Don’t Stop the Carnival.