STORY BY JACK HAMILTON SIMONS
PHOTOS BY KAITLYN NELSON
Ocean bays that face westward inspire a strong fascination. My European ancestors left such anchorages to travel to the New World, and as a youth I found my way across the U.S. from Gary, Indiana, to Monterey, California. This city and its bay remain the dream of my green years.
From January to April 1966, I lived in Monterey at taxpayer expense while I roamed the coastline, visited the coffee shops, and enjoyed the city’s ambiance. At that time I earned my living as a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier—enrolled in a three-month Spanish course in the Defense Language Institute (DLI) at the Spanish-built Presidio of Monterey. I was destined for the 8th Special Forces Group in the Canal Zone of Panama.
The DLI occupied the highest hill in town, so we had the best view of the bay and city. Permanent citizens paid handsomely to live in small houses between us and the shore—houses surrounded by undersized yards and offering lesser views. In those winter months, we stood reveille inside a cloud bank. If the lower depths of Monterey suffered from fog, I couldn’t tell you—the murkiness on the hilltop created its own world of vague shapes and unknown spaces, wet surfaces and cool temperatures.
By 10 a.m. the sun and off-shore breezes disintegrated the gray universe and replaced it with sunshine and vistas of the blue bay. At night the city below bordered the water like a multi-colored bazaar. American writer O. Henry called New York City “Baghdad-on-the-Subway,” and I would call Monterey “Baghdad-by-the-Bay.”
I had no intention of working hard at learning Spanish. The rapidly mounting war in Vietnam guaranteed I would be there instead of Panama before the turn of the year. I had greater interests, which included a new Honda 305 Super Hawk motorcycle—all black and chrome, perfect for the local roads and Highway 1; a passion for chess, which led me to seek games all through the barracks and at the Sancho Panza coffeehouse near downtown that stocked large Spanish chess sets on its tables; and an all-night poker game every Thursday at the DLI in a sergeant’s room, played on a borrowed table covered by a stolen army blanket. Otherwise, I aggressively read Dostoyevsky and Hemingway, while “California Dreamin’”floated down the hallway of our dorm.
I abandoned Spanish when I left the classroom each afternoon and didn’t think of it again until I returned the next morning. I should apologize, but I won’t. My classmates were convinced that I would not be able to ask a Panamanian waitress for a glass of water in Spanish. Well, the taxpayers who paid for that glorious good time in Monterey should know that I graduated from the DLI course in the second rank, and I did order water in Spanish from a Panamanian waitress—on the first try.
Also, the Pentagon, which had first proposed that I spend the remainder of my enlistment serving in Panama, changed its mind after two months there and ordered me to Vietnam, assigned to the 5th Special Forces. Like Martha’s sister Mary in the Bible, I made the better choice by not studying Spanish at the DLI.
But let’s return to the wonderful time in Monterey.
I had a roommate named Bill Schuster, a West Coaster. Though vague on most details, I knew that he had worked as a stringer for The Sacramento Bee. I knew that he had attended the University of Colorado. I knew that he had dropped out of school—as had we all—and hit the road in an early-60s imitation of Jack Kerouac, carrying a backpack and thumbing his way across the West. He told me that he once stayed a whole week in Barstow, California, because he had found a bar with the best margaritas in the world. I had no idea where Barstow was or what it looked like, so I imagined a picturesque village amid redwood trees. Bill played the role of sophisticated man-of-the-world against my ignorance.
We became friends in the Special Forces Training Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and discovered a common interest in literature. I wished to pull myself out of the habit of reading the very basest of male fiction—”Doc Savage”novels and the like. Bill suggested I read “Crime and Punishment,” and for a significant period afterward he guided my reading.
Bill was soft-spoken, acne-scarred, and intelligent—fully a child of our generation (as I was not), and compared to me, worldly-wise. One day as we discussed the Kennedy clan, he discovered that I thought the wealthy automatically followed a moral code. He looked at me with complete shock, and said, “Jack, don’t you know that the wealthy are the most immoral class in America? Only the middle-class make any attempt at morality.”
Our first Friday night in Monterey, Bill suggested we go to Fisherman’s Wharf for supper. We walked downhill from the DLI on Franklin Street, turning left on Alvarado Street toward the Wharf. The Wharf hadn’t yet achieved its apotheosis of tourist kitsch and ATM machines, but it was clearly traveling that direction even then.
We found a restaurant on the right-hand side, not halfway down the Wharf. Its large dining room had picture windows side by side all along the wall, which allowed us to look down on the darkened tidal waters below. There a hulking sea lion rested on a tilted concrete slab. Though graceful in the water, the sea lion on its slab resembled a massive round blob with a small head. It raised that head and challenged whoever might hear with a loud gronk.
Wherever the “it” was that I pursued early in life, the scene provided by that restaurant seemed like a near-approach to the goal. “Tourist pretentious” I would learn to call such restaurants, but at that time I didn’t have much experience with restaurants beyond the Beauty Spot in Gary and Teibel’s in nearby Schererville, Indiana. At college, whatever cafés I visited had catered to students.
He looked at me with complete shock, and said, “Jack, don’t you know that the wealthy are the most immoral class in America? Only the middle-class make any attempt at morality.”
This Monterey restaurant specialized in seafood. Apart from the breaded shrimp that girls in high school ordered when we took them out, and the occasional fish caught from a stream—including a fresh-caught catfish my granddad rolled in corn meal and fried in an iron skillet alongside a red-banked creek in Oklahoma—I hadn’t a clue.
“What should we order?” I asked, staring at an impossible number of fishy choices on the oversized menu brought by a smiling waitress.
Bill looked up from his own study of the menu, his thick glasses flashing in the light. My tutor had a great smile, a gentle spirit, and spoke with a cultured voice, which new-model young women, who were pouring onto the West Coast in the 60s, found irresistible. “Try the abalone steak,” he said. “It’s a shellfish they harvest right here along the coast.”
“What does it taste like?”
He made a gesture that might have matured into a shrug, but the shrug died when he smiled. “I’m not going to tell you it tastes like chicken. You will like it, though.”
Our waitress came to take our order, again showing us a pleasing smile. She did not flirt and neither did we, but still, a woman near our age who smiled at us and acted interested in our needs, no matter how visible the cash nexus that connected us, added to the pleasure of the evening.
“We ought to order a bottle of wine,” Bill said.
“What wine?”
Bill played his part well as the sophisticate, cocking his head and restudying the menu like he was some aged Gallic vintner faced with a difficult decision. He smiled over the top of the menu: “Let’s have Chablis.”
“What’s Chablis?”
“A dry white wine,” Bill said.
Given its comparative rarity, even today, a young man might be forgiven for asking the question: “What’s Chablis?” In 1966 I shared my ignorance of wine with most Americans. What I remember from the grocery stores were gallon jugs of wine I associate with the name Gallo. The parents of an eighth-grade friend kept a bottle of Mogen David in the kitchen. And college sophomores would sometimes invade my dorm room swooning over a German wine called Blue Nun. I had never tasted wine.
We ordered the abalone steak and Chablis. In 1966 servers didn’t observe the wine ceremony practiced today. So the waitress carried the opened bottle to the table and poured both of our glasses. Behind her followed a busboy with a stand and ice bucket.
The Chablis had a not unpleasant, slightly metallic taste—something completely new to me. It was a taste that practice might make delicious. After all, wine is a total experience, different from most foods. Chocolate, for instance, tastes fine on the tongue, but does nothing more for the eater from that point on—except help exceed the calorie goal for the day, perhaps trouble the digestion, and if one is already overweight and caught in the act of eating chocolate, provide a fine photo op for passing paparazzi.
Wine, though, passes the tongue and diffuses through the system producing what? It’s not pixie dust; one can’t fly (though one night in Panama, high on LSD, Bill would tell us all he could fly). A warm glow? The dying embers of a fire glow, and fireflies glow after their fashion. No, it’s much more. A shared joy, perhaps? Something along those lines. Bill and I fell to laughing and talking while we awaited the different parts of our meal.
The abalone arrived looking for all the world like West Texas chicken-fried steak: a flat, pounded, breaded entrée the size of an omelet. It was also a revelation. It didn’t taste like chicken. It tasted like abalone steak, one of the most pleasant tastes I have experienced. And I survive as one of the privileged, because from that night in January through March, I had an abalone steak every Friday night, along with a bottle of Chablis, always shared with a friend.
Bill and I shared that bottle of Chablis a lifetime ago, but we shared something else that wine offers: a sense of joy and well-being, a relaxation from the toil of life, a muting of the trials to come. “I gave you the wine to make you glad” says the Psalm, and “glad”—”bright, shining, glorious” in the Old English—is the best word.
Bill and I shared that bottle of Chablis a lifetime ago, but we shared something else that wine offers: a sense of joy and well-being, a relaxation from the toil of life, a muting of the trials to come.
I returned from Vietnam as a sergeant in the 5th Special Forces in August 1967, landing in Oakland, east of San Francisco. I weighed 40 pounds less that day than I did when Bill and I had our evening on Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey.
The Oakland airport terminals are larger than any basketball arena you have ever seen or attended. I stood in the middle of the terminal surrounded by thousands of returning veterans. Someone came up behind me and kissed me on the neck. It was Bill. I have no idea what thousands of returning soldiers may have thought of one Special Forces sergeant kissing another in the middle of the Oakland terminal, and I didn’t care.
In Vietnam I had no joy and drank no wine. It would be a long time before I experienced either again. But knowing Bill and I were alive was a good beginning.
Jack Hamilton Simons joined the U.S. Army’s airborne infantry despite having severe acrophobia. He went on to serve with the 5th Special Forces in Vietnam. Later he would become a pastor, graduate with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and earn a Ph.D. in English. After several decades teaching university writing workshops (when he wasn't playing viola or practicing his tennis swing), Jack retired with his wife of more than 50 years to Phoenix, Arizona, where they enjoy playing snooker with an ever-expanding brood of grandchildren. He has two books of fiction forthcoming, a novella set in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam conflict and a supernatural adventure novel set in 1960s Texas. He also writes a weekly essay on Substack.