“We lunched upstairs at Botin´s. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. She never ate much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.” .“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” .“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
This morning I awakened to a series of photos on Facebook that took me back a long, long way.
A friend is touring Europe with a posse of ladies of a certain age, and posted a photo diary of her wanderings around Madrid.
One cluster of shots brought an instant gustatory memory of a sangria soaked night that began at Botin, the oldest continuously operated restaurant in the world. Of course I didn't know that at the time, and had never made it all the way through The Sun Also Rises to encounter the passage above, with which Hemingway ends that depressing tome.
We'd left Virginia the day before, bound for Cairo West Air Base, Egypt, with a stopover at Torrejon Air Base, just outside of Madrid. It was my first ever trip to Europe, and first transatlantic crossing at the controls of an Eagle. The trip would've been right around this time of year in 1989. I had just turned twenty-five a few months before.
Our day began with the Langley flight line mess hall opening early, around 3 a.m., to load us up with steak and eggs, the thinking being that we'd need all that protein for the eight or so hours we'd be fidgeting around on an ejection seat as a dozen of us and four tankers flew over the pond. We took off in pitch darkness and flew up the Atlantic coast, past New York City off the port side, then meeting our tankers as we arced east and over the ocean at Cape Cod. Each of us ran across the boom to take on a couple thousand pounds and make sure the aerial refueling systems were working--best not to discover a problem somewhere well out to sea.
I recall thinking my retinas were going to melt as the sun rose somewhere south of Newfoundland, and we had no choice but to fly straight into it and wait for the brilliance to ascend out of our direct line of sight. And the emptiness, the vast emptiness that emerged on all sides; I'd never felt so small, and so isolated. Every thump of a valve opening or closing, or flutter in the fuel flows, left me nervously pondering what would happen out here, still thousands of miles from either the Canadian coast or the Azores, with no prospect of limping the jet down onto a runway somewhere.
But I had little time to ponder that possibility--as the youngest guy in my four ship, I had a specific set of duties meant to pass the time and humiliate me, all at once. First, there was the pile of Penthouse magazines stacked neatly on the left side console. The junior wingman was expected to thumb to the Forum, and read the most salacious letters over the radio to the delight of everyone in the formation. "I never thought something like this could happen to me . . ." they seemed all to begin, then proceeding to describe in some detail a coupling with a sexy television repair lady or some such.
Worse yet was the requirement that I sing. For those outside the fighter pilot world, it may come as a surprise that we sang a lot, a tradition dating back to the First World War. There were songs about hilarious ways to die flying in combat, about necrophilia, about a man with a set of testicles that were "stately and round, like the dome of St. Paul's". And we were expected to know a cross-section of the songbook by heart.
"Time for a song, Donk," came the call from Cujo over the back radio. Sh*t. Here goes.
And so I sang, mask filling with coffee breath, until someone mercifully asked me to stop.
Finally we came upon the Spanish coast just north of Portugal, a thin line of green and brown that emerged from late afternoon haze. The rolling hills and red tile roofs as we descended into TJ felt familiar--this could've been anywhere in southern California.
Exhausted yet ebullient, we were shuttled over to the VOQ to shower and change into our civvies, then made our way to the O Club (I called it the "zero club" when telling stories with P this weekend, a term she'd never heard). A future state attorney general and I joined our squadron commander, Karbo, who'd been a rodeo clown before going to pilot training and demonstrating an amazing gift for flying while otherwise remaining a complete Philistine, for steaks and beer. Karbo, now fairly lubricated, wanted to ask the young bucks at the table for sex advice. We demurred, pushing the mashed potatoes around on our plates and keeping the wait staff hustling to the table with more beer.
Which led to still more beer in the O Club bar. The brew of choice back then at Torrejon was San Miguel, a Filipino lager that at the time was stabilized for export with a healthy dose of formaldehyde, or so we were told. We all drank many, many San Miguels that night. Well, not all of us--a few showed good judgment and turned in early, a transgression that would not go unpunished in that long-gone fighter pilot world of the 1980s. Karbo, now deeply in his cups, convinced the folks at the front desk of the Qs that he needed a master key for a "bed check"--he was the squadron commander, after all. Dragging behind an ice bucket full of San Miguels from the club, a gathering mob of us tip-toed down the hall, Karbo pulling his index finger over his lips and channeling his inner Elmer Fudd.
"Be vewy, vewy quiet. I'm hunting wabbits."
When we came upon a room occupied by a snoring aviator, Karbo unlocked the door and we all rushed into the darkness to "wall" the victim. Again for the non-fighter crowd, "walling" involves several of the brothers grabbing the foot of the bed and abruptly lifting it to the wall behind the headboard, leaving the stunned sleeper upside-down and wedged between wall and mattress. With each performance of the ceremony, we concluded by handing the now wide-awake target a beer, and insisting he join us as the growing mob worked its way down the hall turning over beds. I have no idea how the last of the five-or-so guys we walled that night was still awake at that point, what with all the ruckus.
Finally we ran out of beer and adrenaline, or at least I did, and turned in for the night. A few of the guys went to the base bowling alley, where they were ejected by the SPs for attempting to bowl without balls by running and sliding down the lane to knock over the pins with their skulls.
And oh, how those skulls throbbed the next morning. All that formaldehyde had partially embalmed us, it seemed. I never recall being as hungover as I and everyone else felt the next day.
But we were twenty-five and there were things to see. A couple taxi vans brought us down into town, dropping us off in the Madrid city center. Bull insisted we find a McDonald's, thinking it might make him feel less horrible. The rest of us had a better idea, and wandered into a bar on the square for a couple pitchers of sangria. The bars there all have a theme, and soon we figured out this one celebrated bullfights in which the bull won the day; the walls were adorned with photos of matadors being gored by giant beasts with colorful spears hanging out of their backs. It was all a little jarring.
But Madrid--my word, what a beautiful city! I'd never been to Europe, and had never seen a city of several million folks so stately and low rise and walkable. I remember pondering my post-Air Force vocational options when we ran into a flight crew for Air Iberia at a cafe--the captain was an American, ex-military, who flew back-and-forth between Madrid and JFK, with homes in both places. Wouldn't that be something?
We took photos of each other in front of Franco-era gaudy monuments to fascism, spent some time admiring the art at the Prado (As trenchantly summarized by Karbo that day, "A building full of paintings of fat naked women eating fruit"), and admired the facades of government buildings that spoke of the grandeur of Spain's era of empire, even as we were surprised by the curiously empty streets that afternoon. The Spanish like their naps.
The highlight of the evening was a six p.m. reservation for the whole crew at Botin. One of the older guys (as in maybe 35 or so) had been to Madrid before, and raved about the roast suckling pig they served there. We were all-in.
The dining room was empty at six--Spaniards don't take to the streets until well after eight, and the restaurants fill around nine.
So we had the place to ourselves as the waiters brought more pitchers of sangria and the stars of the show, the crispy-skinned piglets served whole on a platter.
My buddy Rev, the William F. Buckley conservative of the crew, was rendered speechless by the feast, a noteworthy event in itself. I worried I wouldn't be able to down an entire piglet, but I needn't have been concerned--I was twenty-five, after all.
Afterward we wandered down to the tascas, bars carved into hillside cliffs, each with their own slate of sangria and tapas. The night ended at some point, but I can't say exactly how or when.
The next morning arrived almost as bleary-eyed as its predecessor, but this time we were forced to pull it together for our flight south past Sicily, then across the Med to Alexandria and up the Nile to Cairo. That's another story for another day, I guess.
Since then almost that entire crew went to war together. Karbo, Rev, and Hoss are dead, the first two of Gulf War illnesses of some sort. Hoss flew into the side of a mountain. Few of the guys from that trip made the reunions in the years that followed, until I also quit going because of the MAGA politics that's infected the retired officer corps like a cancer. So those memories sat well-buried until this morning's encounter with pictures of Spanish tile and roast suckling pigs brought me back to another time.
Tonight I'll re-don our costumes from this past weekend's anesthesia group Halloween party, pour a glass of something to stave off the cold, and park in a lawn chair out front to hand out candy to the neighborhood kids with my beloved Peg. A life that young man with the receding hairline and dreams of bigger things could never have imagined.
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