“The park is always crowded on Sunday.”
Ferdinand Marcos said that last Sunday afternoon in Manila. He spoke in measured tones, they say, as he paced around on his balcony and shrugged now and then for the TV cameras, with the air of a man who never really liked Sundays, anyway—or parks either, for that matter.
Ferdinand was never one of those guys you saw kicking the soccer ball around in Rizal Park on Sunday afternoons. He was busy all the time, even on The Lord’s Day.
Politics. Always politics. If it wasn’t brunch with the man from Krupp, it was phone calls from Singapore and complaints about the latest shipment of fat young boys for the Cabinet meetings, or the price of bullets in Belgium.
Sundays were never easy for the Marcos family, but this last one had a life all its own. Rizal Park was not just crowded that day: It was jammed shoulder to shoulder, sidewalk to sidewalk for what looked like two or three solid blocks in every direction, maybe a half-million people—and they were all calling for Ferdinand Marcos’ head.
Bad business in the Philippines. By midnight on Saturday, Marcos had lost control of the army, and rogue generals were calling mutinous news conferences . . . and by Sunday, the jig was up. Only the dealing remained, and presidential licenses for the nation’s dog-racing tracks have not been renewed this year.
Ferdinand is big in the greyhound business—$2 million or $3 million a year, just for shaking hands on the portico with any sweating roundeyed fixer who would front all the dogs—and then a quick autograph on the contract, washing his hands of the details, or leaving it all with Imelda. His wife was good at business.
She will get along well with Michele Duvalier, the sleek and extravagant wife of the doomed Baby Doc, when they finally get settled into their digs on Vesco Island, where we should have put the shah.
We need a home for these people, when they go belly up and start looking around on short notice for a place where they can act like they did in the Old Days, and mingle endlessly with their own kind.
It is a hideous thought—a small and stateless island with no extradition treaties, where all the neighbors are guilty and no crime is seen as too heinous.
People like Marcos and Duvalier and Idi Amin will be there—Bebe Rebozo and D. B. Cooper—living together in some kind of monstrous Tangier-style harmony and locked away forever, with plenty of whiskey and servants, from the cares of the outside world.
Meanwhile, we are going to see some very tangible human episodes on the TV news out of Manila in the next few days. There will be examples of extreme behavior on both sides. . . . But Phil Habib has done his work well; Ferdinand will be off to Vesco Island before the next full moon.
Take my word for it—and please forward official receipts for the brown bag of expense money that I sent back, which was mainly a matter of discipline.
As for Haiti, there is no word yet from Mick Jagger and no rooms at the Great Ollufson Hotel—at least not until Mick arrives, and in the meantime I have people to see in Miami. These things will come together in due time.
Yesterday a blizzard filled The Dish with two tons of wet snow. I had to clear it by myself with a small broom.
A film crew recorded my struggle; and Nazi Jay, the tenant, came out of his house to mock me, as I staggered around in the snowdrifts.
He has no rights to the Big Eye, no possible way to wire in. It would split and diminish my signal. . . .
And we could do that, like The Boss used to say—but It Would Be Wrong. There is no point in scanning the skies with anything less than the finest and most sensitive equipment.
Last night I pulled in a hazy black and white signal that was not even listed. It was an old Jim Morrison concert, or maybe a pirated video. These things are never made clear.
The Bird scans 22 satellites from West to East, six or eight seconds apart—maybe 200 channels full of old movies and Jesus freaks and raw network news feeds from places like WXYZ in Detroit, along with NASA transmissions from Houston and 40-year-old stag films out of Mexico City.
There is too much lame garbage—far more than a sane man can stand. With the right kind of equipment—or even the wrong kind, and a fine hand on the knobs—you can pick up the collected speeches of Henry Kissinger, a censored version of Deep Throat, and 101 Famous Games of the Harlem Globetrotters. There is no end to it: all day and all night, in some kind of relentless auto-reverse that never sleeps.
But you don’t get a lot of Jim Morrison. That is what we call a Special— straight black-and-white footage of Crazy Jim on stage in the old days, with a voice like Fred Neal’s and eyes smarter than James Dean’s and a band that could walk with the King, or anybody else. There were some nights when The Doors were the best band in the world.
Morrison understood this, and it haunted him all his life. On some nights he was noisy and lewd, and on others he just practiced—but every once in a while he would get it into his head to go out and dance with the big boys, and on a night like that he was more than special. Jim Morrison could play music with anybody.
One of these days we will get around to naming names for the real rock ’n’ roll Hall of Fame—in that nervous right now realm beyond Elvis and Chuck Berry and Little Richard—and the talk will turn to names like Bob and Mick, and to tunes like Morrison Hotel.
Play it sometime. Crank it all the way up on one of those huge obsolete wire-burning MacIntosh amps and 80 custom-built speakers. Then stand back somewhere on the mainbeams of a big log house and feel the music come up through your femurs . . . ho, ho. . . . and after that you can always say, for sure, that you once knew what it was like to hear men play rock ’n’ roll music.
February 24, 1986