Cadaques, a town on the Costa Brava, near were I was stationed.
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BROTHERS THREE
It just seems to me that just about everywhere I was stationed, there
seemed to be three guys who hung out together with one another more than
with anyone else. I remember an incident in Spain when one of my friends
tried to calm me down when I thought I had lost a ring my girlfriend had
given me.
We were in the snack bar on the ground floor of the Bar Pan Am on
Barcelona's Ramblas when I discovered that I was no longer wearing the
ring, Unfortunately, I was wearing a snootful, and became quite agitated
at the loss of the ring. The counterman got smart with me and suddenly
found himself hoisted over the counter, with my friend, Rosie, climbing
up my back trying to get me to put him down. 'Pappy' Fontaine, the third
member of our triumvirate – nicknamed 'Pappy' because he was an ancient
old man of thirty-something – wasn't present, so Dave was stuck with
trying to restrain me by himself. For some reason, nobody seemed to want
to help him.
The upshot of it was that Rosie did get me to release the counterman
relatively unharmed. Fortunately for all concerned, he hadn't tried to
put up a fight, so I just shook him a few times without really harming
him and finally put him down. Once I let the guy go, Rosie hastily
dragged me off. Later, when he got me to a room and I pulled my sweater
off over my head, the ring fell on the floor. I had apparently taken it
off for some reason and tried to put it in my shirt pocket, missed, and
it fell down to a fold in the sweater at my waist, or it had come out of
my pocket when I was playing upsy-daisy with the counterman, and gotten
caught in the folds of the sweater.
At any rate, Rosie, or Dave – his name is Roosevelt David – said when
the ring fell out, that was the second time he considered slugging me.
The first time was when he thought I was going to throttle the
counterman and we'd both wind up in one of Franco's juzgados charged
with murder. He didn't hit me because he was worried he wouldn't knock
me out and I'd really get pissed. Rosie had boxed Golden Gloves, but he
was smaller than I, and he was afraid I was too angry to go down from
one punch. He didn't want to get into a fistfight with me.
Pappy, when he heard about it, thought the whole thing was hilarious, as
did Isabel, who had given me the notorious ring in the first place. It
was a heavy gold ring with the silhouette of a Roman centurion embossed
in black onyx for a setting. She said our gold jewelry was cheap because
it was lighter in color and heft than the gold the Spaniards used for
their jewelry. I no longer remember what the difference in karat weight
was. She couldn't believe I had lost my temper over a misplaced ring.
Rosie had been frantic because he had known me for a couple of years,
and he too, had never really seen me that angry before about anything. It shook
him up when I suddenly became so agitated.
Pappy, Dave, and I also embarked on a tour of Spain, and had a fine time
until we ran out of money and had to cut our vacation short and return
to the site. This is what I was talking about a while ago when I said it
was to a visitor's benefit to learn the language of a country he was
planning to spend a considerable amount of time in. All three of us
could speak Spanish fairly well, and we were free to move about the
country on our own without guides.
Here's 'Pappy' Fontaine and me with a friendly young Spanish airman
outside the mess hall on Mount Pani. I look quite the unruffled
gentleman, don't I? The Spanish airman looks like a member of the Junior
Luftwaffe. Their uniforms were modeled after that of the Germans, who
had helped Franco during the Spanish Civil War. I believe their current
uniforms look more like those of the U.S. Air Force.
Rosie is the guy standing on the left in the group of three, with the
San Miguel beer in his right hand. The young man on the right holding
the bottle of Bacardi rum is William A. McLaughlin, III, who had a great
tenor singing voice. Mac was trip; he figured those famed Latin Lovers
didn't have a thing on him. The guy standing in the middle is a Native
American, whose name and tribe I've forgotten.
©Copyright June 1, 2007 by Thurman P. Woodfork
This piece was prompted by the poem,
Brothers Three |
