Miller Time

UNITED STATES—“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” said the wholesome apple-cheeked man in whose meteoric ascent to power Sam the Man Delaney had been murmured to have had a hand. Once upon a time in Louisiana there was a man named Willy Long, and he was a man for the times. It was a Depression, harsh times, and people were...

UNITED STATES—Marcos had tried the city. A new world opened up to him with the fancy check from the Chamelecón Fruit Co. Bodies of wide-hipped women, whisky and playing cards. In the name of whisky, fleshpots and the ace of spades—they were the unholy trinity that brought Marcos down. The jackdaws cawing on the telegraph wire in the luminous...

UNITED STATES—There stood Sam in the snazzy, well-tailored clothes from New York, that were the outsize sartorial expression of a man who gets all the loot and has had enough of all the khaki and shirtsleeve decades. He made a concerted effort not to use the words kvetch, for complaint. But in the end was so crass, this little...

UNITED STATES—Sam Delaney must not have been a businessman at heart. As a class they are often encouraged to be psychopaths at the extreme, married to lucre alone, “success” serves to foster what our time would term psychopathic tendencies, to pillage, exploit, and plunder. After another pivotal encounter with the Bhagavad Gita conjured a soul who lives in a...

UNITED STATES—The landowners in Bananaland, who had sold out and then made a bonanza, they too would be on a train, not immune to the allure and magnet of the camps. The American scribbler and embezzler (alias) O. Henry slapped the name Banana Republic. No wonder he was an embezzler when you are in the United States of Dollars...

UNITED STATES—Sam Delaney was an ingratiating presence, and he had a big fine office building (at 12 stories you could do a lot of damage by stepping off the top, but nobody ever did in that steamy, comforting town where the atmosphere clung like amniotic fluid that surrounds a fetus, and it kept people from making that long step)....

UNITED STATES—February 3, 1975...7:53 a.m. EST. I’ve hurled myself at approximate 8 a.m. this Monday into the smutty white void. The speed of the vertical plummet is petrifying, scraping hard against by skin comically kneaded by the muscular wind. My black fedora floated off and is bouncing around the gibbous clouds. I who still answer to the name Max...

UNITED STATES—There had been a boiling point reached the day before when Yglesias was digging out a trench for a new irrigation canal with a steam shovel. They had been in the banana forest when they heard a huge explosion, it could have been one of the Americans dynamiting fish, and it could have just as easily been an...

UNITED STATES—It was hushed in the long barracks at night in the Valle de Sula where Juana and Antonio had met up, of all places. The whoosh-whoosh of dead tired souls prevailed, punctuated by a sneeze or dry cough. Near the river frogs said ribbit-ribbit and there was the implacable hum of mosquitoes flying, flying, mad, incessant that tormented...

UNITED STATES—I hear a lot of things as a reporter. Never know where the next story is coming from, ya know. Joe Holly once described himself as a common man who had no liking for war whatsoever, but when he got into where the shooting was, he just couldn’t get enough of it. It was a new “game” he...