Scimitars: Tasting Wine in Monterey
by J. Hamilton
Ocean bays that face westward onto open seas exercise a strong fascination. My ancestors left such bays to travel to the New World, and as a youth I found my way across the country to Monterey Bay. The bay and its city opened before me like a vision. It was also a step in a long journey that led me farther and farther west, until I didn’t want to go west anymore and turned back on my steps, returning to the heartlands. Now, after long years, I’ve drifted back to gaze again from an eastern shore upon the limitless western ocean.
Monterey, California and its bay remain the dream of my green youth. From January to April in 1966, I lived there at taxpayer expense while I roamed the coastline, visited the coffee shops, and enjoyed its ambiance. At that time I earned my living as a Special Forces soldier — enrolled in a three-month Spanish course in the Defense Language Institute (DLI) at the Presidio of Monterey, and destined for 8th Special Forces 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. Between us and the bay, permanent citizens paid to live in small houses between us and the shore — houses surrounded by undersized yards and offering lesser views.
I had no intention of working hard at Spanish, because the rapidly mounting war guaranteed I would be in Vietnam before the turn of the year. I had greater interests, which included a new Honda 305 Superhawk motorcycle — all black and chrome, perfect for the local roads and Highway 1 south of Monterey; a passion for chess, which led me to seek games all through the barracks and at the Sancho Panza coffee house near downtown that stocked large Spanish chess sets on its tables; an all-night poker game every Thursday in a sergeant’s room, played on a stolen table covered by a stolen army blanket; and aggressively reading Dostoyevsky and Hemingway.
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. Along with many students of this world, going all the way back to those who sat under Socrates, I will confess that I set my own boundaries — studied my own curriculum, if you prefer. And I had a wonderful time.
My classmates were convinced that I could not ask a Panamanian waitress for a glass of water. 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 from the 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 and ordered me to spend the rest of my enlistment in Vietnam assigned to 5th Special Forces. Like Martha’s sister, Mary, in the Bible, I had made the better choice by not studying Spanish at the DLI.
But let’s return to the wonderful time in Monterey.
The Spanish built their forts or presidios on the highest hill, and so was the presidio of Monterey. At that time of year this meant 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 hill top created its own world of vague shapes and unknown spaces, wet surfaces and cool temperatures. By ten o’clock 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 — O. Henry called New York City “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” and I would call Monterey “Bagdad-by-the-Bay.”
Youth, besides vitality, health, innocence, and hope, often possesses luck. Our luck had been to score highest on the army language test, which, like a magician’s rabbit, pulled Monterey out of the hat. Otherwise, we would have joined our comrades in the 7th, cross-trained in another Special Forces skill and flown to Vietnam at an earlier date.
I had a roommate named Bill Schuster, a West Coaster. 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 Special Forces Training Group at Fort Bragg, 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 — to a higher level. Bill suggested I read Crime and Punishment and for a significant period afterward guided my reading. He was soft-spoken, acne-scarred, and intelligent — a full-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 were moral in behavior. 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 exterior walls, allowing us to look down on the darkened tidal waters below. There a hulking sea lion rested on a tilted concrete slab. 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-like bark.
Wherever the ‘it’ was that we all pursued in life, the scene provided by that restaurant seemed like a near approach to the goal.
With more experience, I have come to the conclusion that high-traffic tourist restaurants start out new and shiny, then pass downward toward disintegrating seediness, forever eroded by continual traffic, the wear and tear of thousands of rear ends on the chairs, and elbows on the table — scratched glitter and cracked friezes — in this case a glass panel of embedded fish. Waitresses at such restaurants must need the job, but may represent a lot of want or much need — ours, carrying over-sized menus, smiled when she came to the table.
Tourist pretentious I would learn to call such restaurants, but at the time I didn’t have much experience with any restaurants beyond the Beauty Spot in Gary, Indiana, and Teibel’s in nearby Schererville. At college, whatever cafes I visited had catered to students. This restaurant specialized in seafood, and apart from the breaded shrimp that girls in high school ordered when they 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. The fresh-caught catfish wasn’t on the menu.
“What should we order?” I asked, staring at an impossible number of fishy choices.
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 the new-model young women pouring onto the West Coast found irresistible. “Try the abalone steak,” he said. “It’s a shell fish 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.”
Anticipation of joy is another gift that youth bestows upon its possessors. At that moment, Bill and I lived in expectation that this would be a great evening. I have lived many years since that night and whatever meals remain for me have likely already been eaten; whatever wine, already drunk; whatever love, already known — the great remaining unknown is death. It may be more joyful than all that has gone before, but right now, I have trouble believing that.
The waitress returned, again bestowing upon 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 re-studying 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 a friend in the 8th grade 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 Waiters 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, though, followed a bus boy with a stand and ice bucket. Today, the waiter will open the wine at the table, pour a small amount for whomever ordered the wine, take a pause for approval, and pour for the table — but you may have to ask for the ice bucket, and the waiter will often return to the table with a chilled metal tube.
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.
Today, the Abalone is an endangered species and no longer readily available to tourists — thus the world of our youth passes away. But not the collective experience of wine.
Bill and I shared that bottle of Chablis a lifetime ago, but we shared something else that the 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” is a phrase from the Psalms, and ‘glad’ — bright, shining, glorious in the Old English — is the best word.
My wife has been my companion and friend for more than forty years, and from the time we courted to this day, we share in this gladness as often as propriety and life’s demands will allow.
I returned from Vietnam a sergeant from 5th Special Forces in August, 1967. I weighed forty pounds less that day than I did when Bill and I had our evening on Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey. The Oakland Bay 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 two Special Forces sergeants kissing in the middle of the Oakland Bay terminal, and I don’t care. Bill looked as haggard as I am sure I did, but I was glad that day.
