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To: rlmorel

Very interesting piece. I’ve never been aboard an aircraft carrier, but I have eaten at Los Caracoles! Fifty years ago this summer. Where’d the time go?


12 posted on 03/03/2023 4:10:54 PM PST by HartleyMBaldwin
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To: HartleyMBaldwin
My favorite port (After Mallorca, of course) was Barcelona...it was beautiful, and there were lots of bars and restaurants there.  My favorite restaurant was “Los Caracoles”...when you walked up to it, there were chickens on spits roasting in a recess in the stone wall just to the side of the door.  It was the first place I ever had calamari, before most people in this country who were not Italian had it!

I went there with the same group described below, and one of the first thing they brought out was two big platters heaped with golden yellow fried rings. They were perfect (I am sure one of the guys had the dish before and ordered it for us) and when offered to me, I refused. I thought they were onion rings, and I have a lifelong aversion to onions. When I told him, he said "No, no...not onion rings, this is calamari!" So I took one and nibbled it and I was hooked. After I got out of the Navy, and before you saw them routinely in restaurants, I tried over and over again, but...just could not get it right!  

However, this night described below did not happen at Los Caracoles. But it was in Barcelona.

I usually did not go ashore every single night...I wasn’t a “Liberty Hound”.  So, one night as we were anchored off Barcelona, I was just sitting in the shop late, writing letters, and the door opens.  In comes Naperski and his best friend, Bob Fairbanks.  They are drunker than skunks, and Ski is rattling on, nearly incoherently, about drinking out of urinals and wiping his face with toilet paper.  I had no idea what he was talking about, and Fairbanks kept saying “Don’t listen to him.  He’s crazy.  He has no idea what he is talking about...”  

Well, I could believe that.  They left and went to bed.  The next morning, they came down to the shop and convinced a group of us to go back with them to this restaurant.  They just had to go there again, they said nobody would believe them if we didn’t.  So that night, eight of us got on a liberty launch and went into town.  Myself, Heath, Toothless Ingram, Dan Grote, Steve Naperski, Bob Fairbanks, John Outcelt and Tom Hammond.  

Once ashore, Fairbanks and Naperski admitted they were so inebriated the night before, they had no idea where this place was, or what it was called.  We couldn’t believe it!  But they insisted that it would be easy to recognize, so we hopped into two taxis, and had the guys drive us around Barcelona.  Up and down the streets we went, peering out the windows.  We drove for 45 minutes, and finally, the cab driver pulled over, turned around and basically said “What the hell are you boys doing?”  None of us spoke Spanish, and he spoke no English, so....we tried everything to get the point across to him.  Making motions with our hands to mouth to eat, and Ski made a motion like smashing something with a hammer while saying “BOOM BOOM”, and the guys face just lights up.  He says “AAAAAhhhhhhhhhh...” and turned around and drove us right to this place and stopped in front of it.  

We walk inside, and to the left is a bar, and further ahead, a bunch of tables.  There is paper, trash, food and broken glass on the floor.  I take this all in, and say to myself “This ain’t right...”  and suddenly,

there is a deafening “BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM”!  I cringe and look to my left, behind the bar, and this guy (dressed in what appears to my untrained eye to be Lederhosen,  shorts, suspenders, etc. ) has a HUGE wooden mallet with a short handle on it.

The head of the mallet appeared to be at least a solid foot diameter on the face, and was a least two feet long.  Basically, it looked like a piece cut out of a tree trunk!  He had the mallet with both hands, and was pounding it on the bar with all of his might.  The whole bar and wall behind it shook...crockery, glasses and cups fell off the shelves onto the floor and shattered.  

There were rolls of toilet paper being dispensed from hangers installed up near the ceiling.  When customers wanted a napkin, they just reached over and grabbed some toilet paper.  After using it, they would simply throw it on the floor.  Nobody said anything to us and pointedly ignored us, so we found a table and sat down.  We sat there for about 15 minutes, wondering what we needed to do to get something to eat and drink, and this old withered, bald guy, wearing the Lederhosen, just walks up to us and looks at us with his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his toes.  

We looked at him then at each other, then back at him.  He looked at us.  We all shrugged our shoulders and one of us said “Cerveza?”  at which he turned on his heels and walked away without a word.  This was very strange.  Another guy walks over with his arms full of beer mugs, and throws them on the table!  We scrambled to catch them, but several slid off the table and broke on the floor.  

We grabbed our mugs, thinking “Okay, what now” when the old guy comes back over with an enameled chamber pot, and puts it down on the table.  It is full of beer, and we dumbly stare at the guy.  He reaches over, grabs a mug, and dips it in the chamber pot of beer, scooping out a mug full.  At that, we all burst into laughter, then scoop our mugs in and begin drinking.

 

And so it starts.  We drank and drank chamber pot after chamber pot of beer.  Then, the old guy came back over to the table and just stood there looking at us.  We looked at him then at each other, then back at him.  He looked at us.  We all shrugged our shoulders in bewilderment.  The guy had one hand behind his back, and pulled it out, and there was half of an onion.  Food?  Yes, we would like food...could we get some bread as well...”Pan?”  The little withered bald guy in Lederhosen turned on his heels and walked away.  

Suddenly,  a wheel of bread, thrown from the other side of the restaurant, came winging at our table like some huge, oversized golden-brown frisbee!  We missed it, and just as we looked at each other to say “What the...”  another wheel came winging to our table!  We caught that one, and the next one that arrived a second or two later.  I have no memory of eating anything.  Things got a little fuzzy after that.

  Then, one of the guys who worked there came to our table and began shouting in Spanish, while he gesticulated with this...er...device in his other hand.  It looked suspiciously like a douche (as if I had any idea what the hell that was at the time...but Toothless Ingram (who had to have all of his teeth pulled on the cruise for some reason) stated his certainty of that identification. In the picture below, you can see one of these crazy people who worked there drinking from this contraption!

 

We’re gonna drink out of a douche?  Is that safe?  

Well, we were drunk enough at that point that drinking out of the toilet itself might have seemed like a good idea.  The guy holding the “device” looked at us, and with the patience of a teacher educating slow students, stuck the tube in his mouth and took a big swallow as if to say “See?  Nothing to it!”  Well, he used that to dispense beer to us as if  he were using a fire extinguisher.

 Pretty soon, there were two or three of these things being passed around...my recollection after that time frame is a bit fuzzy.  I remember eating chicken and throwing the bones over my shoulder.  I also remember a fire starting on the floor at the table next to us, all that crumpled up toilet paper on the floor must have been ripe for a spark, but one of the Lederhosen wearing guys simple walked over and dumped a chamber pot of beer on it to extinguish it.  

Throughout it all, there seemed to be and incessant BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM as one or another of the staff would take a turn with the huge mallet.  

There were occasional wheels of bread that flew through our midst, I think, but I cannot be sure.  At one point, a young lady at another table wearing a denim top surrendered it to the staff, who modeled it for us.  

I have no recollection of seeing that woman without it.  I remember the woman was there with two guys, and I think it was their table that had the fire.  

Soon, all three of the guys who ran the place were drinking  with us.  I do not believe there was much service going on other than these guys hauling the beer dispenser devices to any patrons who happened to be there, which at that time was doubtful.  I believe we were the only ones there.

 

The next thing I remember is standing outside the place in a line, facing the entrance.  As the guys lowered the protective grating on the entrance and crouched underneath it to exit, we all turned around and mooned them.  They began shouting in Spanish, and whizzing in the gutter!  This whole thing was like a hallucination.   At that point, a cab showed up, and Ski jumped up and stood on the hood of the cab, while the driver yelled out the window at him.  

That was the last thing I remembered that night.  As long as I live, I will never forget that night.  The name of the establishment is lost to me, if anyone reading this knows of it, I would appreciate the information.  Someone told me later it was very popular with the college crowd.  

  So, I am grateful for the time I spent in the Navy.  I couldn’t have purchased a better education about life. And that night sure was an education!

43 posted on 03/03/2023 8:45:09 PM PST by rlmorel ("If you think tough men are dangerous, just wait until you see what weak men are capable of." JBP)
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