The Rum Diary: A Novel

The Rum Diary The Long Lost Novel by Hunter S. Thompson eVersion 4.0 / Notes at EOF Back Cover Blurbs Begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, The Rum Diary is an outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's bestselling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels. "A great and an unexpected joy. . . reveals a young Hunter Thompson brimming with talent." -THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER "The tools Hunter S. Thompson would use in the years ahead -- bizarre wit, mockery without end, redundant excess, supreme self-confidence, the narrative of the wounded meritorious ego, and the idiopathic anger of the righteous outlaw -- were all there in his precocious imagination in San Juan. There, too were the beginnings of his future as a masterful prose stylist." -- William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed ''The Rum Diary shows a side of human nature that is ugly and wrong. But it is a world that Hunter Thompson knows in the nerves of his neck. This is a brilliant tribal study and a bone in the throat of all decent people." -- Jimmy Buffett SCHIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION Simon & Schuster Inc. Rockefeller Center 1250 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 1998 by Gonzo International Corp. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1999 SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work. Map copyright © 1998 by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp ISBN 0-684-85521-6 0-684-85647-6 (Pbk) 5 To Heidi Opheim, Marysue Rued and Dana Kennedy My rider of the bright eyes, What happened you yesterday? I thought you in my heart, When I bought your fine clothes, A man the world could not slay. -- Dark Eileen O'Connell, 1773 San Juan, Winter of 1958 In the early Fifties, when San Juan first became a tourist town, an ex-jockey named Al Arbonito built a bar in the patio behind his house on Calle O'Leary. He called it Al's Backyard and hung a sign above his doorway on the street, with an arrow pointing between two ramshackle buildings to the patio in back. At first he served nothing but beer, at twenty cents a bottle, and rum, at a dime a shot or fifteen cents with ice. After several months he began serving hamburgers, which he made himself. It was a pleasant place to drink, especially in the mornings when the sun was still cool and the salt mist came up from the ocean to give the air a crisp, healthy smell that for a few early hours would hold its own against the steaming, sweaty heat that clamps San Juan at noon and remains until long after sundown. It was good in the evenings, too, but not so cool. Sometimes there would be a breeze and Al's would usually catch it because of the fine location -- at the very top of Calle O'Leary hill, so high that if the patio had windows you could look down on t