The Turncoat Chronicles

The Turncoat Chronicles

Born a Long Way from Home

Michael Booth

Published by Michael Booth at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Michael Booth

Have you ever dreamed of

starting fresh in a new country?

This is a book by someone who

has done so, and has no regrets.

Busca la vida, que la muerte viene sola.

Seek life. Death comes on its own.

Spanish proverb

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

First published in The Dial (Chicago), November 1920

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

Robert Burns

To a Louse

Note: Most of the names in this book have been changed to protect the author.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – An Awakening

Chapter 2 – The Trans-Atlantic Time Machine

Chapter 3 – Patriotism as Pornography

Chapter 4 - A Friend on the Draft Board

Chapter 5 – Miners ‘n Muckers...

Chapter 6 – The Fascinating Englishwoman

Chapter 7 – Bitter Agendas at Home and Abroad

Chapter 8 – The Family, the Neighbors, the Killing

Chapter 9 - The Down-‘n-Dirty-Trans-España Bike Trip

Chapter 10 – We Want to Love You, America; Put Down That Gun

Chapter 11 – The Bullfight Pseudo Controversy

Chapter 12 - El Rapaz and Life in Our Village

Chapter 13 – Can It Get Any Worse?

Chapter 14 – From Al-Andalus to Europe in 2,300 Years

Chapter 15 – Granada’s Tribes and Tabernas

Chapter 16 - Time, Transition and the Golpe de Estado

Chapter 17 – The Road to September 11

Chapter 18 – Spain and the Olive, My Take on Spanish Cuisine

Chapter 19 - Gold Fever in a Granada Riverbed

Chapter 20 – Want to Say Goodbye U.S.A.? Say It Dispassionately

Afterword

This book is for Maureen, who understands.

Chapter 1 – An Awakening

It was a pristine December morning in a Spanish orange grove in 1968 when I stuck my head out of a green army-surplus sleeping bag and found myself surrounded by trees laden with plump ripe fruit. In the east two strips of blue crossed the horizon, one over the other, the bottom one sparkling and the top one streaked with pink-fringed clouds backlit by the rising sun. It was my first experience of the Mediterranean and I thought: This must be what Homer called ‘…the child of the morning, rosy-fingered Dawn…’ Climbing out of the sleeping bag, I pulled my boots on and attacked the oranges, peeling and devouring them until the flesh under my thumbnail smarted and the aroma of exploding orange peel filled the morning air. Yellow finches darted and twittered as the sun climbed up the sky, gently warming my orange grove. Truly, this was a far better place.

Where was I coming from? How did I get here? Why did I leave? What did I leave behind? What was Spain like in those days? What happened then? This is a story about an American boy arriving in a new country in search of a fresh start, about how this new country became his own, how it took him to its bosom, how endearingly poor it was then, how vastly it has changed over the years, and how it’s changed me. I want to tell you about its history and heroes, its people, its food, its wine, its transition to democracy and first-world living standards. I want to tell you about its gentle and savage customs, its language and its elegant sense of humor, about its best people and its worst.

To tell the truth, I can’t remember all the details of my arrival in Spain. It was the end of 1968, and a Swiss kid called René had given me a lift the previous day hitchhiking on the outskirts of Basle, where the evening before I had stretched my sleeping bag out on top of a pile of leaves in a city park and sunk in for the night. The next morning the Swiss burghers walking across the park had a good laugh when a dishevelled 25-year-old American hitchhiker appeared out of the pile of leaves.

René was in his early 20s, slender with what I suspected was his first attempt at a goatee. He wore round, wire-rimmed spectacles like a clockmaker, and had with him his big boxer, Schatzy, who had a flatulence problem. E as a delicate stomach, said René, more to justify his dog’s anti-social habits than to apologize for them, I thought. We crossed the French-Spanish border at La Junquera in his old brown coffin-shaped Peugeot sedan and immediately the sun came out, the first time I had seen it in three weeks. Rolling into Barcelona in the early evening, we went looking for a great restaurant quarter which we heard about from some Australian hitch hikers in Arles. We only knew that it was in the neighbourhood of the Barcelona harbor. When we got to a central-looking zone with a statue of a guy with a funny hat on a tall pillar, René spotted a police officer. He pulled the car over to the curb, suggesting I ask him the way to the port.

I screwed up my courage, rolled down the window, and said to him as clearly as I could, ¿Dónde está la puerta? He looked bemused, though not ill tempered. ¿Dónde está la puerta? ¿Cómo? replied the cop. René started laughing, which didn’t help. Convinced by now that the officer was hopelessly thick, I gave it one last try, louder this time: ¿DÓNDE ESTÁ LA PUERTA? The dim-witted cop just turned his palms upwards and shrugged his shoulders, as if he thought I was the retarded one. René pulled away gasping and shedding real tears. He could hardly drive. What’s so funny? I demanded. Nothing, he said, except you were asking him, ‘Where is the door?’

Despite my false start with the traffic cop, it didn’t take us long to find Barcelona’s Barrio Chino, which was actually just a stone’s throw from the statue on the pillar, who turned out to be Christopher Columbus. We walked into an attractive restaurant with a brick façade and a wood fire roasting chickens on spits at the entrance. An elderly waiter with a white napkin draped over his forearm greeted us with formal Old World cordiality and led us to a table. We ordered a paella and a bottle of red wine. That was René’s idea, as I had no idea of paella.

There was 45-minute wait for the Spanish rice, and in that time we finished the wine and ordered a second bottle. Neither René nor I had ever drunk much wine, but it was our first night in Spain and it called for a celebration. The saffron-yellow rice, beautifully adorned with mussels, fat shrimp with the heads on, tiny little clams on their shells, and strips of roasted red pepper, arrived steaming hot in the big double-handled flat pan it was cooked in. There was a lot, and before we were halfway through it we were obliged to order more red wine. Before it was over we had put away five bottles of the stuff, plus a few tiny little glasses of an ice-cold sticky sweet liquor which the waiter assured us was muy digestivo. So how did we make it from the center of Barcelona out to that orange grove at the edge of the Mediterranean 30 or 40 kilometres down the coast? I don’t know. You’d have to ask Swiss René. Though I’m pretty sure he can’t remember, either.

The departure point for this trip to Europe was Aspen, Colorado, where I had landed at the end of a hitch hiking trip around the western US. The Rockies, the first mountains for a lad from the mid-western flatlands, made a powerful impression on me, and I decided to find a job and hole up in Aspen for the winter. But my plans were soon changed. The first snow of the season had just fallen on the slopes when a forwarded letter arrived from an old college friend, suggesting we embark on our much postponed trip to Europe.

Ellis Pearson was a bright, engaging Jewish kid from upstate New York who, like a lot of students from the East, had come to study in Michigan on a lark. He played the guitar and had a lucid and agile mind. We were both interested in photography, books, and fast cars, and we became good friends. Ellis had just graduated from college, and had some time all for himself, as his girlfriend Margie, a 99-pound powerhouse, was spending a year in Afghanistan buying furs and hides for a New York leather company. A few days after receiving Ellis’s letter I caught a flight from Aspen to Denver, and another one from there to New York, where Ellis was waiting to take a cheap-and-cheerful Icelandic Airways flight to Europe. Little did he know he was providing the final nudge in a process which would change my life forever.

The Colorado flight in a little 12-seat, twin-engine plane was an experience, not only because I sat in the co-pilot’s seat and got to see the top of the Rockies close up, but also because I had the feeling my life was headed for a new beginning. We lifted off from the Aspen airport and in a few minutes touched down on a landing field which was just a green meadow high in the Rockies. Its only features were a little hangar and a fuel pump. The pilot taxied up beside the gas pump, slid open the plane’s Plexiglas side-curtain and said to the attendant: Fill’er up, and check the oil. That was quaint then, but today it seems to hark straight back to the Wright Brothers.

I had $500 in my pocket from working on an exploratory-drilling crew in Silverton and digging ditches in Aspen, and another $500 on the way from photographing an elk hunt there. That would finance a European stay of a few months. Though my real objective wasn’t a few months, it was five years, a goal which seemed wildly extravagant at the time.

The flight out of Kennedy Airport was full of portent. Not only were we going to attempt to cross the Atlantic in a turboprop DC-8, but we had no idea what to expect on the other side. This was unknown, powerful stuff for a small-town kid from Michigan. Was my former life behind me for good? Was my Nemesis waiting on the other side? Time would tell. In the meantime, I was feeling euphoric with a non-drug-related elation which I had never experienced before. I had given away all my worldly goods potlatch style, physically abandoned my mother country (and my mother), and was flying out into the Atlantic murk.

About the only thing I remember about the flight is it was full of kids like us with knapsacks, on their way to Europe, and there was a girl who had smuggled her pet spider monkey aboard, hidden in her jacket. We had a brief layover in mid Atlantic, at Keflavik airport in Iceland, and soon after we were back in the air the pilot informed us over the intercom that the plane would land in Brussels due to bad weather in Luxembourg. That was a bit farther away from Frankfurt, our first destination, but we didn’t mind. It was all Europe.

We caught the airport bus into the center of Brussels, found a cheap, damp hotel, tried practicing our college French on the receptionist until he replied in perfect English, dropped our knapsacks, washed our faces and stepped out onto the streets of our first European city. There was a neighborhood soccer match going on in a field opposite the hotel, so we walked over to have a look. The first thing that caught my attention was a young man on a hillock on the west end of the field. Silhouetted against the setting sun, he was standing there in profile, tranquilly urinating in full view of everyone in the little stadium. His stream looked electrified, like an extremely thin, arching neon sign. Nobody seemed even to notice. Europe, it seemed, was different.

We were headed for Frankfurt to meet a friend. Mike (Fark) Farquarson, a big raw-boned German-American kid (His grandfather changed the family surname from Schmidt to Farquarson after World War I, in an effort to distance them from the Huns.) from Minnesota who was on active duty in the U.S. Army there, serving his last few months as part of an unlikely theater group which staged propaganda plays for American troops around Germany. Propaganda plays? You know, stage representations of the patriotic thing to do when the Viet Cong starts driving burning bamboo splinters under your fingernails. Mike had been in line to become a baseball pro but for a nasty knee injury, so instead he studied English literature at the University of Minnesota. When we met he was a chaplain’s assistant at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. It’s not that he was particularly religious, but he did know how to read. The invitation Mike extended to us in Frankfurt included barracks lodging and board, plus occasional bus tours around Germany, for as long as we liked. We didn’t intend to stay long, but it was thoughtful of him to welcome us in such a generous way.

We spent almost three weeks with Mike and his little troupe of players, doing what you do in the Army: drink beer, smoke dope, and show up at mealtimes. Occasionally the whole crew would get on a bus and go to some American base to mount their show, and we would go along for the ride. This included overnight stays and meals in typical German gasthauses, which tended to be invitingly oldy worldy, nicely carpeted and decorated with lots of carved wood and chintz fabrics. The first time we sat down to eat at one of those places a bevy of apronned waitresses in local costume welcomed us with big half-liter steins of beer for everyone. Fark leaned over to me and said, Be a little bit careful with that stuff, Mike. It’s stronger than the beer you’re used to.

Thanks for the warning, I said, but you don’t need to worry about me.

After an hour and a half of schnitzel and sausages, good laughs and maybe four or five of those big brown beers, I stood up to go to the toilet. I took three whole steps before an evil Technicolor flower burst in front of me in slow motion. Don’t worry about me, indeed. This was just the beginning. The boy from Michigan had a great deal to learn about life in Europe.

After three weeks, Ellis and I had yet to see the sun, and we were weary of barracks life. We itched to head south, so we decided to hitch down to Spain. Farquarson agreed to join us there when he got out of the army a few months later. This was early December of 1968. The United States had been waging open war in Vietnam since the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which took place on August 2, 1964. This alleged attack by the North Vietnamese navy on American ships was later found to be a lie, but too late to halt the onset of 11 years of brutal and unjust war against a tiny impoverished country. As it turned out, after decimating the Vietnamese people and devastating their country, the Americans lost that war. Surely they would learn their lesson from that experience, and never again embark on another such exercise in gratuitous brutality, stupidity and ruthlessness.

On the morning of our departure, Ellis and I split up so as to make hitching easier. We agreed the first one to arrive in Barcelona would go to the American Express office every day at noon till the other one showed up. I know that arrangement sounds antediluvian today, but it was in the days before cell phones.

So, a few days after leaving Frankfurt—the morning after the paella debauch—I managed to convince Swiss René to double back to Barcelona to pick up Ellis. When we arrived at the American Express office just before noon, there he was, looking quite proud of himself. We loaded his knapsack in the trunk and headed south. Ellis and I took turns sitting in the back seat with Schatzy, the boxer who farted.

As Swiss René was driving all the way to Morocco, on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar in North Africa, the three of us continued together for nearly the full length of Spain’s Mediterranean coast, down through the provinces of Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Castellón, Alicante, Murcia, Almería, Granada and Málaga. This was before Spain’s autopistas, and the two-lane coast road meandered lazily through towns and villages, making for a much more interesting drive. The coastlines of the northernmost provinces, the most advanced in the business of tourism, seemed like ghost towns at that time of year, made up of rows of empty sea-front apartment buildings. The more backward southern provinces took a few more years to reach that level of progress.

Ellis and I didn’t know where we were heading. Basically we were just looking for a pleasant place to stop. It’s a strange situation for young people: no destination, no obligations, no schedule, no supervision, no house, no car, no mother, no father, and no girlfriend. We were back to basics. We had a bit of money and we had time. We had aspirations, but it wasn’t quite clear to what. And we were in a country where we didn’t even speak the language. We were mute, illiterate immigrants. It felt like adventure, and it tasted like opportunity, but what was immediately clear was that there was a lot of work to be done in order to give form to the project. The most beautiful part was the Spanish setting and that it was up to us alone.

This was the beginning of a process which lasted years, and is not over yet. I arrived knowing nothing, to a place where everything was alien. Then, little by little, I began to learn, to adapt, to integrate, and to enjoy. My ideas start changing, my schemes to fragment. As time went by all my chapters had to be rewritten and renumbered. Many of my previous attitudes were sloughed off like old snakeskin, and new awareness and values incorporated. A few years down the line there came a point when I realized I would never be going home again, that I was home. With that realization came a whole new set of joys and challenges.This wasn’t a sidebar to life. It was life itself.

By the time we got as far as the province of Málaga, there wasn’t that much of the Mediterranean coast left before it terminated at the Straits of Gibraltar, where René was to catch the boat for Morocco. A decision was forcing itself upon us. Then we pulled into the market plaza of a coastal village called Nerja (pronounced Nair-ha). The place announced itself a couple of kilometres before we arrived with its carefully cultivated farm plots tended by campesinos who could be seen mornings and evenings riding their donkeys and mules along the roadside. These lovingly worked garden plots which surrounded the village on three sides were not only beautiful and ever changing, but they lent a soothing Zen-like quality to the landscape. This was tierra alegre, happy land, in a subtropical climate which permitted up to three plantings a year of garden crops, as well as fruit trees, bananas and sugar cane, grain and legumes. In the higher, drier sections of the land were olive and almond groves. The almond trees blossomed in January, turning the mild winder landscape lacy white.

The farmer and fisher folk of the Spanish south coast were self sufficient in almost everything, with a few exceptions such as coffee and chocolate. Chocolate was accorded almost reverential treatment, never to be eaten without bread. To do so was considered degeneracy, a motive for punishing children. Their regimen of fresh fish, olive oil, legumes and home-grown fruit and vegetables was later to be known as the Mediterranean diet, and became all the rage in advanced western countries. By the time this phenomenon took hold abroad, however, a great part of the Spanish diet had veered off in the direction of sticky sliced bread, frozen pizzas, and hamburgers, washed down with liberal amounts of Coca Cola.

By the mid sixties Nerja was already on the Spanish tourist map in a modest way, due to a discovery made in 1959 by a group of local schoolboys. They were hunting bats on the hillside above the neighboring village of Maro when they stumbled across what would later be called la Cueva de Nerja, a fabulous cave with important archeological artefacts from Paleolithic times. In the early 1960s it was equipped to accommodate orchestral and ballet events and to this day hosts an annual summer music and dance festival.

Our first night in the town we slept underneath the Balcony of Europe, a belvedere cantilevered over the Mediterranean from the middle of the town. In the morning we took stock. Would we be well served by a fishing and agricultural village of some 6,000 souls, with kilometers of beaches, narrow cobbled streets, sparkling whitewashed houses, deeply dark-eyed girls and eight-peseta (12-cent) liters of wine, served up from plump botas made out of whole goatskins? We decided we would. We bid goodbye and good luck to Swiss René and started looking for a place to stay.

After a couple of nights in a guest house, we rented an apartment in a new building on the edge of town. It was pretty pedestrian stuff, looking more like the New Jersey than the Spanish coast, but it would do for starters. We were among the first inhabitants in a new six-story building called La Conbessa. It was standard turista fare in those days: thin walls, a tiny kitchen, living/dining room, two bedrooms, a balcony overlooking a pockmarked volcanic landscape at the edge of town, and all mod cons, including a tiled bath with bidet. Ellis and I were fascinated by the bidet. Wasn’t this some sort of arcane French sexual accessory? We were baffled as to what to do with it, but as it was essentially just a bowl which you could fill with water, and we were short of bowls, we used it for washing lettuce and soaking garbanzos.

La Conbessa apartments were located on a bluff over the kilometre-long Burriana Beach, opposite a little hotel/restaurant operation by the same name, Apartamentos Burriana, run by a young Englishman, Clive, and his wife, Maureen. Their two tow-headed children, a boy and girl ages five and seven, were tutored by a South African woman, the wife of an Irish novelist, perhaps the only writer in the whole town who actually wrote, at least the only one who published anything. Clive was an affable host and barman who could tell jokes and whip up a proper English breakfast in a jiffy: eggs, sausages, fried tomatoes and mushrooms and fried bread. He also did that pinnacle of traditional British cuisine: beans on toast. Maureen was a good cook in about five nationalities, and a person possessed of a special charm and warmth. She was sweet and easy to look at and to listen to, with her captivating Manchester accent. I confess I’m a pushover for a girl who says soil instead of dirt and tipper lorry for dump truck. She was also a painter.

Ellis and I took to straying across the street for the occasional breakfast, coffee or glass of wine. As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones. Half the men in the town dropped by the restaurant regularly. There were the local señoritos, with their slick black hair forming oily ringlets at the back, as well as tradesmen, fishermen, and a fair representation of the town’s foreign contingent which numbered around a hundred. She handled them all with perfect aplomb, always maintaining her distance, demurely pretending not to notice their heavy breathing and thinly veiled innuendos.

The only one who wasn’t moving on her was me. Objective enough to recognize that I, your basic dope-smoking, hitch-hiking hippy, had nothing to offer her, I just sat back and enjoyed her occasional company during mornings at the bar when business was slow. Before long we became friends and laughed a lot together. Once we did a duet making mayonnaise in the kitchen, she beating the egg yolks with a wire whisk, I slowly pouring olive oil into the bowl.

By the time Mike Farquarson got out of the army and came down to live with Ellis and me, we had rented the bottom floor of a big old village house on the cobble-stoned Calle Carabeo. My room had a cave-like arched ceiling. The rent was cheap because the rear of the house faced the back side of the cine de verano outdoor cinema and in summertime there was no way one could go to sleep before 1:00 a.m. Many nights we simply surrendered and went to the movies. I suspect that is the origin of my devotion to the Spanish summer cinema, one of the country’s most delightful solutions for hot summer nights.

All of this happened more than 40 years ago. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. The Spanish say, Ha llovido… It has rained… Here I sit, four decades later, in this converted goat shed with an olive-wood fire at my back and an old grey cat who never steps on the keyboard, wondering about you, dear reader. You are fundamental to this project. Who are you? What are you like? Whom do you admire, what do you regret? Do you love animals? Are you a biker, a feminist, a self deluder, or all three? Are you an eager beaver, a calculator, or a wise woman? Did you stop reading newspapers years ago because they were too depressing? What moves you, what awakens your indignation? What do you aspire to? How do you propose to achieve it? Did you ever fantasize leaving your country and beginning again somewhere else?

I have some plain truths for my American ex compatriates that even their best friend won’t tell them. Not that their country’s deodorant is failing. Worse. For many people around the world its cynicism and rapine in other people’s countries has put it in the company of rogue states. And their own indifference and complicity places part of the responsibility squarely on their own shoulders. I include myself in this shared guilt, as I devoted 19 misdirected months of my life to the Viet Nam war effort. Booth’s Law of Collective Responsibility maintains we’re all guilty.

What’s the point of trying to reach those who don’t want to know? The Americans themselves have demonstrated the futility of trying to change other people’s hearts and minds. On the other hand, why bother preaching to the choir? Maybe it’s in the vain hope of making a difference. Remember St. John? You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. It’s difficult to know the truth in the United States these days. Maybe someone should have one more go at clarifying the issues. It’s presumptuous to think that someone should