UNITED STATES—The loveliness of white skin—white as soap melting in the soap dish, it is gorgeous to see emerge from bedsheets, tender and unflawed, the color of fluorescent light. Here as we live in the dinginess of late capitalism, indeed the very twilight of capitalism.
Pinch your nose. And something happened before he knew it, Miller had hung up his angel wings, and was doing exactly what he said he would abstain from doing once he got into a position of wealth and power, ride in helicopters. Being that they have one single propeller and when the crap hits the fan, the copter plummets. Everybody knew that. But when the schedule gets crammed and the traffic on the ground gets heavy and slow, and it is the antithesis of rush, there is something ecstatic about bypassing it all, the sun casting the helicopters blades in a sweeping shadow across all the poor dweebs caught in that rush hour traffic.
White skin and daffodils. There is something new you like that you never knew you could like. And it’s a new world. . .
We are dust and wind, and Max E. White had been suspended all this time (it seemed years that he had been hovering) above Park Avenue, after loading his attaché that morning with very heavy books, by Herman Wouk and James Michener, and making it a battering ram to break a concise hole in the glass of his 44th floor office window in the Pan-Am Building. The wind was biting hard, it cupped him as a stone mattress, and he floated, Max E. White contemplated his fallen, limp body on the concrete.
There was an epidemic of head scratching, all of them, scratching their heads over your unfathomable jump, Max. In Riverside Cathedral Rabbi Rosen would ask rhetorically; how many pushed you, Max, to this last resort? There was the sense that he, the Rabbi, was too good for the cutthroat world of Wall Street. This sense of Max White’s ethical stature was burnished by his role in rushing aid to Nicaragua after the devastating 1972 earthquake, that buried churches and changed the streams of rivers.
You were clever and a salesman to the last. As dear Rega pointed out, it was narcissistic to hope for Secretary of State, and replace Kissinger. But you really did have a crack at getting an ambassadorship, probably in Costa Oro, since you were in good graces with the Nixon White House, thanks to some hefty campaign contributions. Some of that grace had to spill over into the Ford White House. But there’d been a paucity of grace in the leap up to February 3, 1975. A new disease struck the banana plantations two years before. The October War of ’73 in the Mideast took its toll on company fortunes. They set up OPEC, the oil cartel. Latin America set up its own cartel, UPEB, the Union of Banana Exporting Countries.
It was clear that cartels could be an effective way to achieve sovereignty by other means. UPEB sure put the squeeze on the fruit company. Then came Hurricane Fifi with biblical gale-force winds. In Nicaragua Anastasio Somoza, father, preceded Anatasio Somoza, son and there was another Anastasio Somoza in the wings to keep up the family monarchy. And the Somozas had been most obliging to put up two hundred men recruited and trained by the CIA—a band Bernie Lukasey, the Maquiavelli of Madison Avenue, called the “army of liberation.”
The “invasion,” led by a Guatemalan lieutenant in exile, Juan David Conde Castillo, was supported by a CIA air attack, the grand total of three aircraft painted colors of the Guatemala Air Force quickly achieved its end, and on 27 June a military junta took control of Guatemala. Conde Castillo was named president.
Then something happened. After a sudden violent upsurge in the dialog about Allied Fruit after Max E. White’s death leap from the Pan-Am Building, the company vanished. Known variously as la Compañía, El Pulpo (the Octopus), Tata Allai (a derivation of those who couldn’t pronounce Allied in English). The highly moral, late and deceased head of Allied Fruit, the most evolved of ten generations of rabbis, had not been all that he appeared to be. Max E. White . . .
To be continued…
