Republican Party Reptile(55)

The Summerland itself sits bracketed by the bombed ruins of another resort and by a principal Amal checkpoint. At the checkpoint the wrong kind of beachgoer can be pulled out of his car and taken away and shot. Beirut is a sort of Janus-faced monument to the entire history of man. He will endure, but what a shithead.

Anyway, drugs are cheap, about $50 a gram for cocaine. Some friends and I sniffed piles of it and emptied the minibars in two hotel rooms. About midnight it seemed like a good idea to go out. Street fighting had been desultory. We could probably make it to a nightclub.

ABC News had its headquarters at the Summerland. We stopped to say hello. It was “day 15,” as they say in hostage crises, and everybody was settling in. We all figured the thing would be good for at least a month, maybe three. We stood around yammering wisely about Arab intransigence and how time has no meaning in the East. Then somebody, I think it was Chris Harper, ABC’s Rome bureau chief, stepped out onto a balcony and stepped right back in looking like he’d caught the family dog playing the cello.

Directly below us on the wide flagstone terrace by the double-Olympic-size pool were thirty-two American hostages. The Amal had brought them to the Summerland for dinner.

Let me tell you, they looked terrible. I don’t mean they looked abused. They just looked like American tourists do everywhere—elastic-waisted loaf-around slacks, T-shirts with dim slogans and embarrassing place names, waffle-soled sandals worn with socks. These people had been thrust into a dramatic situation with vast international implications and, frankly, they weren’t dressed for it.

I think history deserves at least rumpled linen suits and sweat-stained panama hats. And what’s a possible world war without something to drink? But Amal is very opposed to that sort of thing. Instead everybody stood around for about two hours munching snacks and sipping fruit juice while waiters got a giant banquet table ready.

It was a Rotary Club men’s breakfast in the middle of the night at Club Med with guns—sort of. The hostages looked confused. The more so since some reporters knew some Amal guards and were chatting them up. You could hear tourist minds clicking over—“Oh, God, they’re all in it together.” Which, in a sense, is true, but it’s the kind of insight that makes for really tedious New York Times op-ed-page pieces on the role of the media.

The captive dinner guests, poor devils, were a bit wooden and formal at first. They had the eggshell walk and stiff solemn movements that come from long-accumulated fear. At least everyone on the terrace knew how they felt. You can’t spend time in this part of the earth and not be familiar with the indissoluble cold softball beneath the diaphragm, the slow hyperventilation, the runny feeling in the bowels and wet flesh creepiness along the limbs. It sucks.

Maybe for this reason everybody behaved himself. There was no blast of camera lights or lewd thrust of microphones from the reporters. The hostages didn’t whimper for mercy or ask the President to A-bomb us all. The Amal guards were casual, propping their guns against the stone planters and gathering in little groups to smoke cigarettes. They let their charges wander around the courtyard unescorted and amble down to the beach.

ABC had three telephone lines held permanently open to the United States, and the engineers wired one into a poolside phone so everybody could call his folks.

I wish I could say it was fascinating. One hostage began giving me a complete inside story of what had gone on since they’d been removed from the plane. I was scribbling madly on a napkin. “You’ve all been in communication with each other, then?” I said. “No,” said the hostage, “I heard this on BBC World News.”

Ridley Moon said he wanted a stiff drink. Victor Amburgy had had dysentery and had lost so much weight he was falling out of his pants. Kurt Carlson told me his younger brother, Bun, is the drummer for Cheap Trick. Jack McCarty said he and some of the others had been working up notes for a Hostage Handbook “Bring Toilet Paper” was one chapter heading. A little forehead-sized pillow is another good idea, he said, and told me how at one point when they were still on the plane they’d been forced to keep their heads between their knees for six hours. “I’d stopped smoking before this happened,” said Kurt Carlson. Great events are something like doughnuts for all that’s right at the center of them.

And so the reluctant houseguests went home with their hosts, though not before an Amal guard brought one guy back because he hadn’t had a chance to phone home. Could we—journalists and hostages together—have overpowered the slack and outnumbered Amal guards? Could we have mounted fire from the Summerland’s ramparts, phoned the Sixth Fleet and held out until rescue choppers arrived? It would be a marketable movie premise. Nothing like real guns to show how lousy popular art is.