UNITED STATES—Then it happened, as if by an act of contrition, after a sudden and almost truculent upsurge in discussion about Allied Fruit around the time of Max Elihu White’s death leap from the World Trade Towers, the company vanished. Late and departed chief of Allied Fruit, with the reputation for being highly moral, had not been all that he seemed to be. Max E. White had bribed members of Honduras’ governing junta. The brilliant salesman had calculated that, in their country’s hour of hurt, after all the devastation wrought by Hurricane Fifi, one and a quarter million dollars would go a long way toward persuading Honduras’ leaders to pull out of the banana cartel that had waged war on Allied Fruit.
He was blind to the crass and calculating slither and rustle of his baby plan.
“It was the way business is done on the Isthmus,” they used to say.
Max had heard this sentiment repeated so many times, it amounted to what wu wu New Agers would call a positive affirmation. It had trickled into his ear with frequency, it was a shrug, it was a grim admission and then in one cosmic moment, when waiting for the light to turn to cross Wall Street, on his way back from lunch. He knew what to do, Max had a seizure of insight. He, the famously upstanding man trained to be a rabbi, who found his true calling in business, where he was noticed for being emotional and human, on top of being profitable, where other CEOs were not. César Chavez publicly praised his generous spirit.
“Of course—a bribe!” And Mr. White started humming, “Here comes the bribe, here comes the bribe!” to cheer himself for the task. So here.
The era Max was going through, a time of running hot and cold, tears welling up over matters of life and death, as well as thunderous fears built on the death of a flea. Without going to a therapist (that simply wasn’t done) he profoundly sensed that it was the endless cycling and recycling of unsolved issues that brought many of us to the brink of lunacy. And Max knew, in his heart of hearts, that he wasn’t on the brink, he was well past the surburbs of lunacy and was fast approaching the city center.
It made his skin tingle on the nape of his neck when he thought of the attaché case. The Swiss bank account where the Central Americans could collect their largnappe (they would call it in New Orleans) and Max had so cleverly prepared for this moment—the moment, memento mori. His teeth tingled to think how cleverly he had thought it through. He had already done it once in a way that gave him beginner’s confidence; there was an earthquake in Nicaragua in the 1972. Here’s how Max was going to pull it off, disguised earthquake relief funds that would go right into Somoza family hands and not fall between the fingers.
On May 17 the New York rag of record exposed the bare facts:
The company was not being extorted, by Honduras, as White had alleged, rather it was extorting One of Honduras. Max E. White went to Tegucigalpa with a lowball offer of a few hundred thousand dollars.
One of the Senior Vice Presidents, Darryl Jackson, met in Miami with Foreign Relations Bennaton who demanded five million dollars to solve “the banana problem.” Ridiculous. He went on to take care of business and old Miami hand from the 1972 convention in Miami he attended to throw company support to the Nixon campaign. Honduras came around. The offer of 1.25 million and a 2.5 million payment promised. And a senior Allied Fruit vice president made sure that the first 1.25 was received by a Honduran diplomat. It was pure dollar diplomacy. A year before the tax per banana box was one dollar, which amounted to thirty million a year and that tax was down to thirty cents per box at the time Max White touched the sidewalk outside the World Trade Center.
The Honduras bribe provoked a storm of disapproval and moral disgust. Yet this passionate reaction didn’t come from its fervent enemies—Trotskyist students, polemicists and Latin American poets. Instead, the opprobrium came from Wall Street’s own, the brethren of Max E. White. Wall Street was outraged. The Allied Fruits, excuse me, United Brands took a nosedive. Had Max E. White not already been deceased due to his own dry dive from the 55th floor of the World Trade Centers, he would have killed himself again.
His widow, Rega, felt such turmoil in her skinny body. She wished Max Kaddish all over again. The tragedy of it. He didn’t trust her to tell what was weighing on him. God knows she had tried to coax it out of him.
“Max,” she said to the picture window that looked over Park Ave. “I forgive you.”
And an inappropriate afterthought immediately sounded in her brainpan; “Max, thank heaven you did it in your office in mid-town, and not in our apartment. There would have been hell to pay.”
Quickly followed by Max’s own voice (so clear it might’ve come from the maid’s quarters); “There is no hell in our faith. Gehinnom. A place of intense shame…”
“I don’t want to hear this now,” Rega cupped hands over her ears.
“Ever the rabbi,” Max said from that voicebox in the linen closet. “The gates of tehuva are always open, and not at some vague point in the future. It is available right now, in this present moment. Being out of alignment with G-d’s will is punishment enough.”
“Stop it, stop in,” Rega cried, “why are you torturing me so?”
Then there was silence. Taxi horns from the street below. And Rega was gripped by remorse and suddenly felt the solvent of Max’s words. Tshuva, here and now. She wept copiously over the dry Boston fern the maid had neglected.
The cry went up that Allied Fruit was up to its old shenanigans from quarters willing to look the other way in past times, the chilling effect was to drive AF out of the temple of lucre. It was as if a death squad from Allied’s old Central American region had “disappeared” it. Allied’s tendency to place commerce over freedom had done much to encourage death squad forays. Now events followed a familiar and predictable course when it comes to fallen empire. Quickly everyone stopped talking about the victim in anything but hushed whispers.
“Had the octopus ever been there” the voices asked. Allied Fruit Co. was expunged from human memory, banished from the Earth. The company that had had a fleet of 100 ships, a hundred thousand employees, and had over a million acres in Central America had vanished. More ephemeral than the pyramids, the monuments of their payroll offices and railroad stations remained to be overtaken by the cannibalistic verdance of the jungle to remain a little bit longer with the last stone stand of the Mayan remnants on their journey to erasure from the earth. Dark and bloody had been the journey of the innately humorous and flamboyantly phallic banana to America’s cereal bowls.
THE END
