Shell Game

Three identical black Mercedes limousines closely followed each other, carrying and concealing Chile’s former tyrant, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. Retired from dictating, Pinochet spent the mid-1990s cruising around Santiago in one of the three cars, a security measure should the convoy be attacked by one of his many enemies. I never doubted Pinochet was in one of the limos, even though he could have ordered the three cars to cris-cross the city while he holed up in his mansion.

For a week in 1994, from the 23rd floor of my luxury hotel room, I watched the three cars round the corner in stately procession, little Chilean flags fluttering on the hood, middle fingers to the country that pushed Pinochet out of power but could not punish him for state terrorism, corruption, and crimes against humanity. Highly polished, they were roving black mirrors, transforming the city into thousands of El Greco portraits with elongated figures in muted tones. “He’s inside one of them,” the young porter told me in Spanish, enveloping us in a cloud of Calvin Klein Obsession cologne, our shoulders touching as we looked down from my bedroom window. The limos were iridescent beetles scuttling past.

At age 29, I was an American temporarily living in England while preparing for a Christian missionary trip to South Central Africa that I would take with my wife, Laura, shortly after I completed this business trip in South America. The billionaire who funded our mission had his heart set on acquiring eight shortwave radio transmitters the US government gifted Pinochet in the 1980s to blast anti-Communist propaganda into the Communist world. From that same transmission site, my born-again boss would harness the transmitters’ power to broadcast pro-Christian messages into the former Soviet bloc. As the only person on staff who spoke Spanish, he dispatched me to negotiate the purchase of the transmitters, antennas, buildings, and broadcast licenses.

My grasp of the language was mediocre, but my gift of mimicry enabled me to sound fluent. Instead of learning the technical and business vocabulary I needed to facilitate negotiations, I beefed up my Spanish with sophisticated-sounding words like sutil (subtle) and penúltimo (penultimate), much like I butched myself up with suits, ties, and that wide-legged, ankle-on-knee sitting position that passed for manly in America. For the past twelve years, I had been pursuing heterosexuality and masculinity, believing God would eventually eradicate my sexual attraction to men.

For five of those years, I sat under the ministry of Brother Dave at a New York City Pentecostal church housed in the former Broadway Theater that once staged My Fair Lady and Jesus Christ Superstar. Brother Dave regularly preached that God punished unrepentant sinners with eternal torture in hell but longed to save drug dealers, murderous tyrants, and even homosexuals. By tyrants, he meant Adolf Hitler or Idi Amin. Brother Dave likely approved of Pinochet’s anti-communist stance and alliance with Reagan. When he mentioned homosexuals, I had no doubt he meant me. During three church services each week, I raised my hands in surrender and belted praise songs until my voice grew hoarse. Then, I headed down to the front and again dedicated my life to Jesus. Every morning, I stood imagining strapping on the whole armor of God as I asked God to grant me the ruthlessness to capture, torture, and destroy the rebel within me without becoming so weighed down that I would take my life.

On the third day in Chile, I left my hotel room wearing the boxy American suit Laura bought for me. I met the sellers in the lobby, Señor Armati, and his associate/driver/bodyguard, two Italians in tailored Italian suits. When Armati learned of my Italian surname, he kissed and embraced me like family.

They drove me two hours up to the transmission site hidden in the Andes, where eight identical rectangular transmitters stood alone inside a warehouse, four on each side, Cold War coffins. Outside, a curtain antenna towered over us, with fifty smaller antennas suspended in front of a reflective screen.

After I secured the deal, my boss, Ian, and his assistant, Nicole, with whom I later learned he was having an affair, arrived from the UK, and we celebrated the sale over steaks. I did not tell anyone I was a vegan, so along with all the other men in suits, I stabbed, sliced, and chewed bloody chunks of meat. During dessert, my boss asked me to translate some jokes he liked to tell. These were not funny in English and beyond my Spanish skills, so I narrated as best I could. At the appropriate time, I instructed the lawyers, the businessmen, and their assistants to laugh.   

Twelve years later, in 2006, after dozens of failed legal cases against him, Pinochet died of natural causes in his Santiago mansion. He never faced justice or apologized for the brutal torture and thousands of murders. Maybe he thought repentance was for sissies.

By 2006, I had come out gay and flaunted it. As they say in Spain, I was con plumas, with feathers, casting off the suffocating straight jacket and hetero-masculine facade that propped me up in a hostile world. I was at last naked and in my right mind, but why did it take me so long?

Why did I stubbornly cling to a belief system that oppressed me and demanded I oppress myself? After nearly twenty years of fighting against anything gay in me, why was it so easy to walk away from that world in one day in late 1998?

Tyrants may seem invisible, immovable, and untouchable, but a day comes when they are voted out of office, get deposed, or drop dead. In rare cases, they simply come to their senses.