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Books are like women. Reading a good book you feel like you could spend
the rest of your life enjoying its company; a bad one, you just want to
smother it with gasoline, light a match, and throw in the rest of the whole
damn box just to get away from the agonizing pain that you went through
during that wasted time of your life you know you’ll never get back.
‘The Rum Diary’ by the late Hunter S. Thompson
is an interesting story about rum, friends, whores,
money, beer, rum, cops, ice, jails, rum, sand, beatings,
swims, heat, and rum. The book almost persuades you
to have a drink while reading it as if the pages are contagious alcoholics
pushing a glass in your direction. I’ll have to read it again in the near future
to remember what all actually went on.
The book takes place in San Juan. In the first few pages you may think to
yourself, “I’d like to do that. Just get up and go to some small rock in the
middle of the ocean to drink warm booze, walk around in shorts and flip
flops, and get a sun tan while meeting extremely strange drunkards from
around the world.” But by the time you’re in the middle of the story and
everyone is getting beaten by the local policia and hauled off to a third world
country prison you start to think, “Maybe I’ll just stay in my comfortable little
house in my comfortable little town and just not use ice in the next drink I
make.” I’ll use my childish imagination on the front porch in the soon to be
coming hot as hell summer sun as I kick off my flip flops and yell obscenities
at the neighbors' dogs rather than little, dark, drunk, violent bendejos.
‘The Rum Diary’ is an early novel of Thompson’s.
It also contains partly true experiences by the author
when he was working at the San Juan Daily News in his
early thirties. The main character’s name is Paul Kemp,
and if anyone knows anything about Thompson, they
know that he wrote mainly about events that supposedly
happened to him. Unlike the other articles and books the man wrote, this
story was more realistic than others with incredible stories about psychedelic
drug binges with a hint of ether, although, like I said, this one has quite a bit
more alcohol content.
Some don’t like or don’t want to accept the brilliant writings of Thompson
because they don’t like “drug humor.” Personally, I think humor is humor
and I like it. Some folks just wouldn’t know a good time if it was sitting on
their face and wiggling while long, braided hair tickled their balls.
Nonetheless, the book was worth a good seven years on my woman scale,
rather than that last piece of shit I read that I gave four
months.
Jeremy Tyson
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