ICE STATION ZEBRA

He watched that movie 150 – ONE HUNDRED FIFTY – times; UNBELIEVABLE.  He did it during his voluntary long reclusions and he used to play it loud because of his hearing impediment; hours and hours of screen and darkness.

I am not particularly fond of this film myself and my aim is not to find out why he liked it that much. I am just going to consider that liking as another of this many eccentricities, though I should  rather say “obsessions” instead and God knows this man had quite a few of them.

He died aged 70 and, during the autopsy, his body could finally reveal all the sufferings both of them had endured.

He was 1.90 tall and 42 kilos. His body was covered with scarves and old burns. The man was completely undernourished, his rotten teeth had fallen, his nails were extremely long and so were his hair, but the most spine-chilling thing was that he had five broken needles in the flesh of his arms.

This poor, old corpse was Mr. Howard Hughes, the tycoon, the billionaire, the aviator, the playboy, the patriotic military contractor, the man who had made Las Vegas bloomed, the technical and financial genius.

His autopsy revealed that, due to his air crashes, his brain had suffered various damages and that the burn scarves that covered his body had caused him terrible pains for the rest of his life. According to medicine experts very few people in this word would be able to stand those specific sufferings without going crazy. Now, we might have a slight idea about what this man had to go through.

In his early life, Howard was a tall, gorgeous and very wealthy man. He was in fact the richest man in the United States. Despite that he was extremely shy, thus seemingly arrogant sometimes, he was a womanizer and women were seduced just with a simple look at him.

But ladies were not his passion: flying and speed were the two things he liked above all: the two things that made him feel at ease and light.

He owned everything to be happy, everything to live a wonderful and easy going life, as according to his own words he could buy any men in this world as everybody had a price.

Flying was his passion; in 1946, while testing a new plane, he had a tremendous crash which almost killed him. He managed to pull himself out of the cockpit but was seriously injured: crushed collar bone, multiple crushed ribs, crushed chest with collapsed left lung shifting his heart to the right side of his chest cavity, and numerous third degree burns – in fact he survived 30 years more than expected by the doctors -. But the pain was hard to endure, so no wonder that he became addicted to pain killers such as codeine and valium, though he kept that secret.

Obviously the excessive use of those medicines increased his “eccentricities”; nowadays he would have been diagnosed with OCD – obsessive compulsive disorders – and would have been treated with efficient and adequate medicines which would have given him a good quality life – but that was not the case by then and people kept considering him a screwball.

Those disorders increased with the pass of time and he spent long periods of reclusion in a dark room, naked, sitting in a white leather armchair, with a pink towel covering his genitals. The chair was placed in the middle of the room which was the “germ free zone” for him.

His aides were not allowed to look at him, or to talk to him though they could answer him, and there in the darkness, he watched movies endlessly, surrounded by loads of Kleenex boxes which he arranged incessantly, over and over again.

He would not even leave the room to wash himself; he stayed in the dark, relieving himself in jars and containers, neglecting his personal hygiene, cutting his hair and trimming his nails once a year. His chronic pain was so terrible that the simple action of washing his teeth was painful, so he simply ended by avoiding it…

Finally, he passed away in 1975, writing the words END OF THE STORY to his myth, from a chronic renal failure probably caused by an excessive long period of drugs and lack of cares.

I can’t help feeling tenderness toward that amazing man, toward the man who could buy anybody and everything in his life but who was unable to find a place to buy him “a health”.