Chickenhawk: Back in the World

When Frank and Barbie asked me about Vietnam, I said the Army really was like Catch-22 and told them about Mo’Fuck the mongoose who used to fly around with us and earned several air medals. Funny stuff. I didn’t want people, even friends, to think I was affected by Vietnam. You ever see a picture of John Wayne having problems after any of his wars?

I loved Almonaster la Real. Nothing about it reminded me of anything I’d ever seen before. The place was ancient—Frank showed me records of the village putting in their water system before 1490. The adobe walls of the white buildings were crusted thick with centuries of continuous whitewashing. The stones in many of the narrow streets were the same stones the Romans put there—the wonder of it: imagine, an actual Roman put that very stone right there. The houses were dimly lit with one or two fifteen-watt light bulbs because people had yet to become dependent on electricity. There were only a few televisions in the entire village of four hundred people, one of them at Bar Buenos Aires, where a crowd gathered every night to watch Mission Impossible and I Love Lucy in Spanish.

That first night, Frank took me to the Casino, a private club at the center of town, which, as far as I could tell, was open to anyone who had money for a drink unless the person was a Gypsy or a woman. He introduced me to the village’s busiest entrepreneur, Jose Garcia Romero (Pepe, for short), who operated two bars, the butane distributorship, and anything else that turned a profit; Pepe’s friend Crazy Marcus; Jose Maria (Maria Jose’s brother), who wanted to do construction work in Germany; Juan Picado, the stonemason; Pepe Hole-in-the-Head, who actually had a nickel-wide crater in his forehead from having a tumor removed; Fernando the incredibly naive teenager; Don Blas, the doctor who could read English but not speak it; and more. They invited me to eat some tapas of ancient ham (some hams are twenty years old or more; I actually ate some hundred-year-old ham that had crystallized) and drink some of the region’s favorite booze, aguardiente, which Frank told me (Frank translated for me because I speak Spanish worse than you do) meant “firewater.” Frank warned me about it, which only piqued my professional interest. Pepe poured some crystal-clear aguardiente halfway up a small glass and filled the rest with water. When he added water, the aguardiente turned milky white. The stuff tasted like licorice, and I really wanted bourbon, but bourbon was unknown here. After the first one, I slugged down the drinks as fast as they served them. Soon I was having fun. I got along fine with the people. They were impressed at how badly I spoke Spanish and how much I could drink. When Frank and I left, I was staggering drunk. When we got back to Frank’s place, I walked through his house, out onto the back veranda, and puked over the railing.

In a few weeks, my friends at Almonaster la Real learned to understand my version of Spanish. I could follow their conversations pretty well, but couldn’t say much back without a lot of pantomiming and multiple-choice guessing.

Frank and I went to the Casino every night. He was working on his doctoral dissertation, documenting everyday life in the village. I was just there trying to be a Spaniard. Pepe usually tended bar. Men would gather after dinner and swap gossip, brag of adulterous adventures, and spin stories.

Fernando the incredibly naive teenager came in one night and said “I just discovered something you won’t believe!” his face bright with wonder. We thought he’d discovered gold, found a diamond, won the lottery or something. He got everybody’s attention and explained to us his discovery: if you hold your dick just so, said Fernando, and then rub your hand up and down, like this, it will get real hard and then, if you keep doing it, you will feel a very wonderful feeling, he said, a feeling so good it’s impossible to describe! It will make your eyes pop! People looked around, the Spaniards shrugging at Frank and me, hoping we wouldn’t make generalizations of the Spanish based on Fernando, and then everybody burst out laughing. We bought Fernando drinks and said he’d discovered a mighty fine thing all right.

The villagers were also very fond of tricks, what I call after-dinner magic. Pepe had a trick. He would invite the crowd to arrange all the dominoes in the box on the bar in a legal array—only matching numbers touching each other—while he was out of the room. When someone shouted that we’d finished, he’d call out the beginning and ending domino faces of the chain. It was a terrific mind-reading routine, a simple trick that I never figured out until Pepe told me: he took one of the dominoes with him. The two faces of that piece would necessarily be the two ending faces of the domino chain we’d constructed because of the way domino sets are made.