On the Far Shore of the Drug War, Stay Afloat With the Uzi Man

The fun began on my flight from Ecuador, when I happened to be sandwiched between two friendly men whose manner had a seasoned quality. When informed that I was stopping in Bogota to make speeches for a couple of days, they looked reflective.

“Oh, well,” one said finally. “You might be all right if they give you enough guards.”

Already, in Santiago, I had been informed that I couldn’t expect to be accepted socially in the best Colombian circles until I had been kidnaped twice. A single pro forma kidnaping opened few doors.

The day before my arrival about a dozen diplomats had started the long climb to acceptability by getting themselves snatched. The insurgents seemed to be testy because Colombia’s president had taken a trip to Europe. Cheered by their success with the diplomats, they quickly made off with a television newswoman and a couple more reporters.

My personal Uzi man was small and quick. Like my driver (also small and quick), he wore the anxious look of one whose duty it was to get blasted first. In no time, under the Uzi man’s tutelage, the prosaic act of getting into the back seat of a car was transformed into a kind of pas de deux. As I exited the door of the hotel, he flowed toward the car; as I stepped off the curb, he opened the door; before my bottom hit the car seat, he had depressed the lock and was shutting the door, sealing me behind the bulletproof glass.

My Uzi man had a fine sense of the socially apposite, too; he declined to take his Uzi into the Bogota Book Fair, passing me on to a couple of pistoleros.

On the way in from the airport, my attention had been directed to a list of security instructions. The heading that I liked best was “It’s a sin to be surprised.” One was advised to vary one’s routes and patterns. But I was going to be there only a few days; I worried that I might not be able to establish a pattern in time to vary it.

A pattern that I didn’t bother to vary was that of barricading my door at night with my room-service cart. The hotel might indeed be owned by the Colombian military, as I was told, but that didn’t keep most of the patrons from darting from their rooms like mice, hoping to make it to the elevators without being nabbed.

Gunshots popped several times during my first night; when I inquired about them the next day, I was assured that what I’d heard was meaningless gunfire--gunfire empty of any political content. “Just people shooting their guns,” I was told. As a resident of Texas, a fully armed state, I could relate to that.

More ambiguous was the business of traffic jams. My security instructions warned against simulated road blockages. In these simulated traffic jams the kidnapers can merely walk from car to car and take their pick, like shoppers in a market--or, if they’re not in a shopping mood, they can whiz past on a motorcycle and shoot you in the left ear. The warning to look out for motorcyclists approaching from the left rear was quite emphatic. Ever the skeptic, I found myself wondering about the likelihood of these motorcyclists varying their patterns. Maybe they’d like to go for the right ear once in awhile.

In any case I soon found myself studying traffic with a level of concentration that I usually summon only for the study of structuralist texts. Life in Bogota is essentially one traffic jam after another, and my rather minimalist instruction sheet didn’t explain how you could tell a real jam from a simulated one. Sandwiched hopelessly between a stalled school bus and a honking garbage truck, one’s eye soon picks up subtle details--such as that the garbage truck isn’t bothering to pick up the abundant selection of garbage on the sidewalks. This leads to Thomistic considerations, like how many insurgents can fit into a garbage truck.

Such considerations were not lost on the driver or the Uzi man, either; both grew extremely restive in these traffic jams. Under the circumstances, the security sheet’s airy suggestion that one’s car be used as a “guided missile, a steel cocoon and a mobile foxhole” smacked of mockery. One man’s cocoon could be another man’s coffin, one man’s foxhole another man’s grave.

It may be going too far to say that one can get used to anything, but one can obviously get used to a great deal. Before 24 hours had passed, my Uzi man and I were relaxed and in sync. I had even managed to control my penchant for lingering on the sidewalk after a speech, discussing the latest trends in deconstructionism with eager students.

In fact, after studying my Uzi man’s skillful work for a while, I conceived of the perfect movie. It would be called “Uzi Man,” and it would star (of course) Sylvester Stallone, the Uzi man’s Uzi man, whose task it would be to protect a fabulously beautiful Andean princess (Brooke Shields) from the toadlike attentions of the leader of the Medellin cartel (Danny De Vito). Genius is in the details, of course, but I will just hint that before the movie is over the insurgents manage to snatch the Reagans’ astrologer, the Free World is reeling into chaos, but all comes out right in the end: Thanks to a stern scorched-cocoa policy on the part of Uzi Man, South America is depopulated and the drug problem solved.

Come to me, Sly.