Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (87 page)

I took it away from him. “That’s enough,” I said. “He got what he deserved.”

“Not yet,” he muttered, sitting back down on the stool. “Hugo is a cheater. He’s been cheating me for years.”

I helped Hugo to his feet, but he jerked away and spit at me. “You polo bastards!” he snarled. “Your time is coming!”

I whipped him on the face with a fanlike motion that left welts all over his head, then I shoved him away toward the kitchen.

“Good show,” said Harriman. “That’s more like it. That was very fast work.” He smiled and reached out to shake my hand. It was a graceful gesture, almost formal, as if to salute us both for doing the right thing. I understood and grasped his hand strongly in mine. I felt good about things. We were off to a good start, and I felt a new kind of attitude stirring in me—a Polo Attitude—and I knew we would soon find some action.

It came sooner than I thought. The minute Bill Clinton’s face came on TV, Harriman went wild. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “Not again! . . . I can’t stand the sight of this skunk. He reminds me of Mussolini.”

The president was somewhere in the White House, speaking nervously into the cameras at a live press conference. He was explaining his position on Haiti, which again caused an outburst from Harriman.

“Blow it out your ass!” he shouted. “You vulgar little bastard!” He shook his fist at the screen and moaned loudly.

I was shocked. There was an angry screech in his voice, and I was glad I hadn’t given his weapon back to him. “Get a grip on yourself,” I said sharply. “Be quiet! What the fuck is wrong with you?” It was the most violent reaction I’d ever seen to a living politician.

Harriman quickly regained his composure, but I was leery of him. I have had my own savage reactions to President Clinton—and usually for good reason—but never anywhere near the way Harriman acted. It was like he’d been stung by a wasp. I quickly put my arm around him and sat him down. He was trembling with anger, and I wasn’t sure he recognized me. I had told him earlier that my name was “Ben. Ben Franklin.” But that was only after he’d introduced himself as Averell Harriman.

What the hell? I thought. Fair is fair, especially here in the lobby of this goddamn creepy hotel full of high-strung polo pimps from Palm Beach and Argentina. The U.S. Open is the event of the year in the world of polo, and special rules applied. Half the crowd was traveling on false passports, but nobody cared. Even the horses were brought in illegally and put in false quarantine. It was safe to assume that anybody you met in this macho zirconium atmosphere was working at least one scam. Many were sleazy—this was, after all, a convention of horse traders—but a few were quite stylish.

I considered myself lucky to have stumbled on something no more dangerous than a skillful Averell Harriman impersonator instead of something much worse. Many people come to the Open and get cheated out of their life savings in the blink of an eye. Everything you see in this place is for sale, from fast horses and beautiful women to cheap whiskey and fat young boys.

My man Harriman was a real find in this crowd. He was good company, and he was obviously plugged in to the right people. He was brazenly
weird, and I admired him for it. He was good at his work. It takes a magic kind of gall to aggressively impersonate a dead man on his own turf, especially a former governor of New York State eight years after his death. It was heavy.

My only problem with Harriman was his temper. I was still shaken by his behavior at the sight of the president on TV, and I felt I should speak with him about it. I was afraid he would get us arrested.

“You can’t do that anymore,” I told him. “We’re both on thin ice here. You can’t be threatening the president in public. We can’t get away with it.”

He nodded stiffly. “It’s none of your goddamn business,” he said. “He’s been fucking my wife for many years.”

“What?” I said. “Goddamn you! Stop saying that weird shit. People are watching us.”

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Calm down, son,” he said. “You’re a little jumpy today.” He put an arm around me. “Don’t worry, old sport,” he said. “I own this place. These people work for me.”

I nodded wisely, as if I’d known it all along and didn’t want to embarrass him. But in truth, he was beginning to make me uneasy. He had too many irons in the fire. I had known from the start that he was a very suave hustler, but I had no problem with that . . . He was a decent sort, not without the odd moral blind spot, and I liked his morbid sense of humor. I was not entirely comfortable with his hair-trigger temper or his frequent jealous rages against the president for fucking his wife, but in my line of work, these things go with the territory. I have worked with the criminally insane all my life. These are my people, but I usually try to keep them at arm’s length. It is better that way.

Harriman, on the other hand, was a very valuable source of information no matter how crazy he was. He was my man on the Island.

My man Harriman had style. I could trust him, and I felt he trusted me.

He enjoyed his reputation as an aggressively eccentric personality, and he told bizarre stories about what the hotel was like in the good old days—when mysterious fires would engulf the lobby from time to time, and prominent social figures were beaten to death in the hallways with polo mallets or found at the bottom of wells with their heads cut off. “I remember one Sunday we played a whole chukker with a small human
skull that Tommy Hitchcock found in the bushes behind his stables. We had a good laugh until somebody said it might be the Lindbergh baby,” he said wistfully. “But they were never able to identify it because we had bashed all its teeth out.”

“That’s rich,” I said, but neither one of us laughed. Harriman called for more whiskey and changed the subject. “You know, I got this hotel for almost nothing,” he said. “The previous owner, Mr. Hines, died horribly. The family sold out and moved to Hawaii because somebody told them there were no rats there.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Hawaii is overrun with rats.” I noticed the bartender staring at us, but Harriman continued.

“That was how he died,” he said. “The papers called it a drowning, but I knew better.” He paused and nodded darkly. “He was murdered—murdered by rats, huge pack rats, the kind with those long hairy arms and claws like a cat.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “How did it happen?”

“Rats lived in the rafters above the swimming pool,” he said. “Mr. Hines liked to swim laps at night for exercise.” He paused again, and I saw that his hands were shaking.

“The poor son of a bitch,” he said. “He never had a chance. A swarm of those filthy, hairy things fell out of the rafters and landed right on top of him in the water—he was covered with half-dead rats when they found him. They were clinging to every part of his body they could get their claws or their teeth into, just trying to stay alive.”

“Jesus!” I said. “No wonder you torched the hotel.”

He nodded, then stood up, and we parted. I went upstairs and took a long hot shower.

III

Polo people are very polite as a rule, and most of them seemed to like me. But they are wary of strangers, and most of our talk had to do with field conditions and horseshoes and other barnyard subjects that bored me into a stupor. I tried to get close to the horses, but when I went to the barns at night, I couldn’t get any closer than the bushes across from
the stables at the old Hitchcock estate, where the Australian team was quartered. They were feverish brutes, drinking heavily, and their patron was Kerry Packer, the richest man in Australia.

They were favored to win the whole thing when they got here, and people cheered when they strutted through the lobby. Then disaster struck: they lost three straight games, eliminating themselves and causing Packer to flee the country in a cloud of grief and shame. People were shocked, but it was not that unusual. “Patrons always flee and abandon their teams when they lose,” explained our host, Al Bianco. “It costs about a million dollars just to enter this tournament, and they go all to pieces when they get humiliated.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” said tournament director Peter Rizzo. “They’re full of false pride, and they got whipped. It’s a terrible fate for a warrior.”

Polo is not as complex as it looks, but it is every bit as dangerous. Anything that involves people riding horses at top speed and charging into each other while swinging mallets is going to be a problem for a certain percentage of participants. Broken arms and legs are common, along with dead backs and shattered eyeballs. This is not like golf or Churchill Downs or the Tennessee Walking Horse championship. Polo is a very loud, very fast contact sport, and the people who play it well are blue-chip athletes.

There are about 150 of these, however, and therein lies the problem.

The Aspen vs. Redlegs game was on Sunday, and it sucked: slow polo on a messy field, made worse by rain, heat, and a disappointing spectator turnout. The crowd of two hundred or so was a mix of horse traders, hunchbacks, and marginal types looking for Ralph Lauren. Shelby Sadler was there with two acid-crazed assistants from
Polo Magazine
. She introduced them as the Helpless Girls. They both laughed and showed me their tits . . . Just then, Joey Buttafuoco walked by, wearing a cheap imitation-linen suit that began falling apart when the rain started. My homeboys won 9–7, but nobody seemed to care. The Gracida brothers carried the attack, scoring eight of the team’s nine goals. Polo is not a spectator sport, because nobody likes to watch it.

After the game I drove over to the stabling area, hoping to find some action. I was giddy from my string of gambling victories, and I wanted to
buy something. People were friendly to me, but I could see that I made them uncomfortable. The whole concept of journalism is foreign to the polo world, but I went out of my way to act charming.

I was looking for my old friend Memo Gracida Sr., who once gave me refuge in Mexico. In the polo world he is a ranking legend; he sits on the right hand of God—the lewd and lovely Belinda. But nobody in the stables had ever heard of him. They knew nothing. Omertà. The code of silence. That is the way of polo.

It was long after dark when I finally got back to the hotel, where a huge party was under way. The lobby was full of teenage girls in low-cut formal dresses. “Who are these people?” I asked the manager.

“We have Jews and Koreans tonight,” he said proudly. “It’s a bar mitzvah on the mezzanine and a Korean wedding in the ballroom.” Then he pulled me closer and whispered, “The little girls will be getting drunk pretty soon, so watch yourself.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean by
that
?”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “When they get juiced up, they start wandering all over the hotel and knockin’ on doors.” He stared wistfully at a group of bare-shouldered young beauties across the lobby. “It worries me. Terrible things have happened in this hotel.”

“I know,” I said. “And they’ll happen again. You can’t stop it.”

He hung his head, then smacked his fists together. “I know,” he said quietly. “Thank God I don’t have any daughters.”

“You’re right,” I said. “They’re out of control. They’re
evil
.” Then I gave him a $50 bill and hurried away to the elevator.

Tobias was already in the room, sorting through a pile of messages. “George Stephanopoulos called,” he said. “He’s not going to the ball. He says he’s too nervous.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “He has nothing to worry about—except maybe Deborah Couples.” Of course, I was speaking about the most famous woman in polo, and the only female patron.

Just then the phone rang. Tobias picked it up, then cursed and slammed it down. “Stephanopoulos again,” he muttered. “What the hell’s wrong with him?”

“He is drunk,” I said. “He’s been making an ass of himself.”

Tobias laughed. “Well, get ready,” he said. “He’s down in the lobby, fooling around with those girls. He’ll be here in a minute.”

“Oh, God!” I moaned. “Don’t answer the door.”

I picked up the telephone and called the manager, who knew me by name. “There’s a pervert down there,” I said. “A wiry little Greek named George. He’s already sold two of those little girls you’re so worried about. Get after him!”