My Top 10 unforgettable experiences, Part II
The Fourth of July, Mayan ruins, Key West, Jimmy Buffett, Tijuana and tequila...who could ask for more?
In this sequel we find out how Don Corleone came to power and Fredo takes one in the back of the head. Wait a minute…that’s Godfather Part II which I just watched again for the sixth time and it was still awesome.
Let’s get back on track.
Last week I promised to name my top 10 unforgettable experiences, but only posted five so even with my math skills I’m pretty sure I owe you five more stories.
Starting with…
Fourth of July at the Canadian Embassy
One year the political cartoonist held their convention in Washington, D.C. and some of the Canadian cartoonists invited some of the American cartoonists to come to the Canadian Embassy for their Fourth of July party so we crashed it and the Canadians didn’t seem to mind or if they did were too polite to say so.
We wound up on the Embassy roof watching fireworks being shot off over the Capitol building while drinking someone else’s booze and which is a pretty awesome way to celebrate the Fourth.
I brought along two of my kids – Michael and Paul – and when I recently asked Michael what he remembered about that night he reminded me this happened in 2007 and Alan Greenspan was there standing by the roof’s railing and if Michael had known about the economic crash just around the corner, he might have given Al a shove.
Chichen Itza plane ride
Back before travel agents became an endangered species one of them convinced me and my wife nominee to honeymoon in Cozumel, an island just off the coast of Mexico.
When we arrived at the airport there were guys in military uniforms carrying machine guns to greet us. I thought maybe we had shown up just in time for an overthrow of the government, but it turned out some drug runners had accidentally run their boat aground, escaped and were somewhere on the island being hunted by guys with automatic weapons.
Awesome set of circumstances for a honeymoon.
Then I found out we could take a tour of the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, but it would require a plane flight to the mainland. When we showed up for that trip, the plane appeared to be the same one used by Ingrid Bergman to leave Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.
The crew consisted of a pilot, a stewardess (whose main job was handing out 7-ups and barf bags) and a teenage kid who pushed a set of stairs up to the side of the plane.
At one point we were bouncing around over the jungle when I heard someone say, “Chew look lovely today” – it was the pilot who appeared to be Cesar Romero’s half-brother, busy hitting on a couple of female tourists.
If you’re currently thinking, “Who the hell was flying the plane?” we think alike. I looked down the aisle to the open cockpit door and it was the kid.
Clearly, we survived, but I will never book another honeymoon trip with the Indiana Jones Travel Agency again.
Captain Tony’s movie
There’s a bar in Key West called Captain Tony’s Saloon and it used to be owned by a guy named Tony Tarracino. It’s located in the building that was the original Sloppy Joe’s and a bunch of celebrities who have hung out at Tony’s have their names painted on bar stools.
It’s also the place Jimmy Buffett got his start.
I met Tony and we hit it off and he invited me and my wife to come back the next morning before the bar opened to watch his movie, Assignment: Kill Castro which Wikipedia says is about a mercenary tavern owner who becomes involved in a plot to kill Fidel Castro which considering the title, you might have seen coming.
Tony was played by Stuart Whitman. This is Tony…
And this is Stuart Whitman…
The resemblance is striking, isn’t it?
After watching one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in which the bad guy gets his head crushed by an irritable sea turtle, Tony told me the movie was based on fact and I was trying to decide just how full of shit Mr. Tarracino actually was.
That’s when a guy walked in the bar, yelled “Capt. Tony!!!” while hugging him and then the guy proceeded to tell me how his boat caught on fire and Tony swam over from another boat with a rope in his teeth to save him.
Further research reveals Tony left New Jersey after cheating the Mob on some race results and the Mob beat his ass and left him for dead in the Newark city dump which is a pretty good reason for relocating. Tony was married four times, had 13 kids and the last one was born when Tony was 70 years old.
Jimmy Buffett wrote a song about Tony called Last Mango in Paris and when I met Jimmy – a moment that should probably be on this list – and told him about my private viewing of Tony’s movie, Jimmy laughed and said, “So you’ve seen Attack of the Killer Turtles, huh?”
Now here’s a video of Jimmy singing Last Mango in Paris:
So whichever parts of Tony’s life were fact or fiction, I think you gotta say that was a life fully-lived and I was lucky to share a few hours of it.
The 2015 World Series
In 2010 the Kansas City Star asked if I wanted to cover the Royals and the answer was yes; turned out my timing was perfect.
The core of players that would win the World Series in 2015 showed up in Kansas City in 2011: Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, Salvador Perez and Danny Duffy – and if I’m forgetting anybody, my bad.
But the point remains: I was there when those guys showed up and I watched them go from a bunch of kids to World Series Champions.
The night the Royals won the Series I was in New York and went down to the clubhouse afterwards.
The rest of the reporters got their quotes and went back to the press box to write their stories, but I didn’t have to write until the next day. I was about to leave the clubhouse and then thought, “Where the hell am I going?” and decided to hang out and watch the party.
When I finally left the clubhouse in the wee hours of the morning, Chris Young – a player I liked to talk to because he was smart and did his best to make me smarter – gave me a hug.
Chris is 6’ 10” and I ain’t so my face ended up in the middle of his champagne-soaked T-shirt and I later said it was like hugging your dad if your dad smelled like Cristal and cigars.
Got to the subway platform around 3 AM and rode back to my hotel with a guy who turned out to be Luke Hochevar’s college coach. Luke had called his coach that morning and told him if he could get to New York that night, there would be two tickets waiting for him.
Don’t know if you remember, but the game went 12 innings and Luke was the winning pitcher.
Now how cool is that?
A night on the town in Tijuana
This one definitely makes my top 10 unforgettable experiences, but the story – which includes a mariachi band, death threats, waterboarding, a fire extinguisher fight and fried tripe – is too complicated to tell in just a few paragraphs.
It deserves its own posting and that will happen very soon.
Stay tuned.
All Star Game, 1978
I got a ticket to the All Star game. My seat was near homeplate, 2 rows from the top of the stadium. I didn't care.
The guy who had the seat next to me was an old black man from Chicago. He'd been coming to All Star games since 1940 in St. Louis and hadn't missed one since. He said his name was Houston. His eyes were soft, yellowed, and veined and the creases in his hands were deep. He moved slowly and deliberately. I was mesmerized. He leaned forward and untied his shoes, taking them off one at a time and sliding them under his seat. Leaning forward a bit more, he took some old leather slippers out of his pocket, one stuffed inside the other and folded in half. He dropped them on the ground, and slipped his feet in. Then he took his cap off, folded it precisely and set it on his knee while he replaced it with an old White Sox cap he'd pulled from another pocket.
He saw them All.
Flying to Cabo
Somewhere in the early 80s, I managed to convince our General Manager that the San Diego hotel where we worked was doing so well, his executive committee deserved a weekend south of the border. It’d be almost free if we used the friend-of-the-hotel’s boat that was wintering in Cabo, for sleeping as well as fishing. (HINDSIGHT: I underestimated the variety of gastroenterological interactions my fellow less Mexico-versed execs would cycle through during the course of the weekend and completely failed to consider the lack of circulation in the pointy end of a boat. Not to mix stories, but a favorite quote from the first America’s Cup San Diego hosted begs to be mentioned here. There had been a gaping rip in a sewage pipeline a few miles out in the ocean, smack dab in the middle of the race course and it was pouring out raw sewage at a horrific rate, making San Diego’s America’s Cup “where the effluent meets the affluent.” Maybe the quote wasn’t worth it after all.)
Leg One: Tijuana to La Paz on an Aeromexico DC 10. Passing the open door cockpit, I wondered about those colorful icon figures standing on the dash. The plane fired up, and just before the door to the cockpit closed, I saw the pilot and the copilot (both very young, yes) cross themselves and then take those figures down.
“Stewardess, can I get a shot and a Tecate?”
Landing in La Paz, all I could see was desert. The plane banked hard, smashing my cheek to the window where I swear I saw small rodents and reptiles scurrying as the plane’s wing tip threatened to slice them. We hit the very short runway and those pilots slammed on the breaks so hard the whole cabin was thrust forward hard against their seatbelts. Pretty sure it left some marks. When the plane came to a stop, all of us in the cabin broke into spontaneous and sincere applause.
Once we were in the tiny La Paz airport, an official informed us that the little prop job that would eventually take us and a couple of live chickens to Cabo had just had “a new engine attached” and they wanted to take it for a test flight to which we enthusiastically all replied, “Dos mas tequilas por favore!”
By now our HR director, an Eagle Scout of a fellow who, fully in the spirit of the weekend and against his usual habit, had downed his 5th shot and was doing some mighty fine cartwheels in the waiting room. We watched as he head-over-heels’d his way through the rows of molded plastic chairs, having the time of his life. A couple of us noticed our plane land and waited to be advised. The HR guy was now sitting, eyes at half-mast, with a 3” line of viscous drool connecting the center of his lower lip to the logo on his company t-shirt. And that was it for the weekend. Eagle Scout out.
An official informed us they hadn’t liked that first test flight and were going to try again which was A-OK with us. I wondered briefly where the other group of Americans on their way to Cabo had got to but couldn’t blame anyone for getting out of the way of our cirque de Sauza HR director. We were stuck at the La Paz airport for another few hours but eventually made it to Cabo. At dinner we happened to see the other American party who confessed that they had no tickets or reservations but had bribed the airline who gave them our plane which, when you think about it, is preferable to traveling on a plane with live chickens AND a sketchy engine.
After that, the best thing that happened was wearing that hot leather vest that clips to the reel with matching bellybutton, and the 50 pound dorado I caught. (The chickens were lovely.)