Don’t drink in Sicily.
Being on an Aircraft Carrier means you rarely pull into a
port, pier-side. But the whole ship was grateful to find out that on the island
of Sicily, Italy in the port city of Palermo, there was a bay deep enough to
accommodate our ship. We also got these great little port briefs via our closed
circuit TVs, which gave us the dos and don’ts of each country. One of the
don’ts in Sicily was that since they all drink from a young age, no minimum
there, they don’t look at a drunk person as drunk, because they don’t abuse it
like we do since it isn’t a big deal to them. It’s like water to them because
their water system is so bad on the island that no one drinks from the public
water supply. (Makes you wonder why we make folks wait until 21 to drink, huh?)
Sicily looks at drunks as INSANE and if they arrest you for acting
drunk, (that’s a misnomer, you aren’t acting drunk, you ARE drunk) they will
throw you in a rubber room for mentally insane people for evaluation, not jail.
So they warned us not to do what we usually do on shore leave while in Sicily,
um… REPEATEDLY. Did we heed them thar warnings? Read on to see.
Well, for the first time ever in my journeys, I walked off
the ship onto foreign soil. No whale boat or overloaded ferry rides to deal
with. Yeah!
The shore leave bunch for the day was Bob, Red and myself.
We KNEW we were going to do some drinking, so since it was mid-morning
we decided to fill up on some spaghetti. We walk into the nearest open
restaurant and begin our pointing. We did that a lot overseas as we didn’t even
try to learn their language. One wonders why they sometimes didn’t like us.
Not. They loved our money. Anyway we point at the noodles and then look for the
sauce. Where’s the sauce? We didn’t see any red looking sauce anywhere. So, one
of us played charades and made the motion of ladling something over a plate.
Ah, that broke the language barrier. They smiled and put something that looked
like the inside of a chicken pot pie over each plate of our noodles and handed
it to us even as we tried to say nooo, it’s not red!. It had peas, carrots,
corn, peppers and maybe some kind of meat in it, all in a white sauce.
Whatever. We point to the wall of wine bottles and they open one and place it
on the table. We twirled the noodles and sauce and take a bite. What the heck
is this? First off, the sauce looked funny to begin with, secondly it was cold,
and thirdly we hadn’t had enough wine to not care yet. We laughed and tried to
get them to heat it up, to no avail. So, we gulped some if it down, finished
off two bottles of wine in the process and gave them some of their funny money.
Lira. (Their 2000 lira paper bill was worth 50 cent at the time) You felt rich
carrying around the wad of money but it really wasn’t getting you much. $20 was
₤40,000 Lira.
We walked into a little sidewalk market/shop where I
was on a mission to get a female friend of mine from high school some small
Lladro figurines as requested. Sure enough I found some. I bought three, 4 inch
tall cherub looking figurines and had them wrapped tightly in a big wad of
newspaper and I stuck them under my arm. Off we go.
Now I must relate to you that in other countries, the
regulations on alcohol percentage by volume is not controlled like it is in
America. So, sometimes you would get a bottle of wine and you could finish the
whole thing off by yourself and feel nothing, whereby prompting you to buy a
different one next time. Other times you would be a drink or two into a bottle
and you knew you pointed to a good one. We had grown used to getting these
imperial gallon bottles of wine that had a half wicker base on them and a nice
thumb hook on the neck so you could carry it around and drink it like a
moon-shine drinking Hillbilly. (Oh, by the way, drinking in public there was
just fine, as long as you had a brown paper bag around your bottle). We didn’t
see any of our favorite bottles in that restaurant so we had gotten something
else. (The attached pictures show the wine bottles in the middle of the tables
with the wicker base that we used to always buy)
We must have gotten some really good wine, because we
decided we needed more liquor, rather early in our journey, even for us. It is
already getting fuzzy in my memories at this point. Sicily had these liquor…
kiosks, I guess you would call them and they were everywhere. This one we went
in looked to be about 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep with wooden Barrels of
liquor in the front being used as tables, a single bar separating you from the
back wall where there was nothing but shelves of liquor up to the ceiling. Of
course we pointed to a top shelf bottle and a ladder was brought out to
retrieve the dusty bottle. We laid out a pile of Lira and smiled. There
were 3 real old local men sitting on the side watching us and smiling back at
us, so when the barkeep put 3 shot glasses on the counter for us, we figured we
got something other than wine. What the heck, we each took a shot. Then we
decide we needed to give the old guys a shot. They gladly accepted and we all
played charades, laughed, clinked shots, toasted in fake funny language and
patted each other on the backs until that bottle was gone. Then we got another
one from the top shelf. Killed it quickly too. Ok, 6 men, two bottles of
something, you figure out how much we had. I picked up my bundle of figurines,
stuck them under my arm and we left that little kiosk rather wobbly. On to the
next one. I mean really, what is there to see in Sicily?
We came upon another liquor place and again pointed to the
top shelf and again got a bottle of something that was not wine. There were
again 3 old guys sitting there and we poured them each a drink until THAT
bottle was gone. Now, I know you are thinking exactly what I am. Probably the
same 3 guys and the same kiosk. But like I said it was getting fuzzy in my mind
long before we even left the 1st place. But these kiosks were
everywhere and all the old guys looked the same. It is getting even fuzzier
now. So we kill that bottle, I grab my bundle of figurines and off we go. Hey,
where did I get this cool Sicilian golfer style looking hat? Red said I stole
it from an old guy and that is why we are running. Really? Whatever. Gotta pee.
Now, it would have made sense to find a tree or something
but we decided that a parking lot full of cars would block us from the busy
street we were on and no one would see us. We did not care at this point
anyway.
We all staggered around a while and it was evidently a
residential area and Red found a wall to lean on and throw up. You could tell
we had spaghetti, as it slowly slid down the wall right next to him. Poor Red,
he kept saying, “I’m not a drinker, I’m a smoker.” Bob and I held ours a bit
longer. But after we each released our lunches we meandered into a farmers
market of sorts in the middle of a large courtyard. It’s really, really fuzzy
here but evidently Red decided he wanted an orange and he took one from a cart
and came over to where Bob and I were to eat it. It must have been good because
he went back to get another one. Unfortunately for him he grabbed this one from
the bottom of the stack. So Bob and I were standing a couple of yards away and
we hear a commotion, so we turn around to see Red running toward us followed by
a man with a broom and all the oranges are rolling around behind him. Red runs
by us yelling, “RUN!!” We thought that was a good idea too.
Now up to that point my memory tells me it was
daylight. But the next slice of memory I can recall, it seems to be dark and I
am being hounded by a bunch of kids. Usually you just throw some change around
and they act like ravage dogs to each other and leave you alone as you slip
into a bar or restaurant. Now I can only remember flashes of images at this
point. I realize I am holding a 2000 Lira bank note up in the air and I am
yelling for a Senioritis. Like 50 cents would be getting me a date. I
remember telling these kids to go away but they were all, sort of shoving me
into an alley. I hear the stupid wail of the Italian police siren go by so
maybe the kids were warning me of the cops. Whatever, nice place to pee again,
thank you very much. Hmm, now all I can remember is thinking, where are Red and
Bob? They are not in the picture now. How far did I run and why am I still
running?
The next memory I have is of me laying down and it feels like
I am on a carnival ride. There is this stupid siren blaring. De-do, de-do,
de-do. I open my eyes and I realize that I am in the back seat of a Sicilian
police car. I sit up but I am so drunk that when they take a corner, I am
unable to keep my balance as I have one arm in my pocket that has the bundle of
figurines under it and I am sliding around from side to side in the back seat,
getting banged around. They seem to be going pretty fast. I see that there are
two police officers in the front seat with nice hats on and one is on the
radio, and he is blabbering something in Italian, but I do catch, “Americano”.
He turns around as he is talking and has a funny look on his face as I hear him
say it again as that horrible siren blares. Oh boy, this is not going to
be good. Then it fades to black.
I wake up and notice I am walking. Yeah, no cop car. I am
walking upright but I am stumbling a bit as my left hand is still in my pocket
holding the figurines under my arm. I then notice a loud sound and see a real
bright light. I really didn’t know what that could be. I am probably dead, the
light is God, but what is that loud noise all about. As I block the light with
my right hand I come to the realization that I am walking on railroad tracks
and there is a freakin’ train coming toward me and it is blowing its horn. I
almost froze, but I somehow fell to the right and rolled down what was about a
20 foot embankment. I lay there long after the train had rumbled past. My eyes
were open and my life was now slowing back down, as it had just flashed by me
and I guess I was catching up to reality. I was lying next to a fence and I did
not even care about the dog that was right on the other side of the fence I had
rolled against, going crazy with his barking and growling. I think I am
alive.
I had to gather my senses. Let’s make a check list.
Got my life, the figurines, and my wallet. Check. Ok. What don’t I have? No
Bob, no Red, no idea of how I got onto the railroad tracks and no way of
knowing how to get back to the port. But no police, thank God. Upon
reflection, over the many years since, I am pretty sure the police took me to
the outskirts of town and thought it would be real funny to just leave me
there, you know, to walk it off. Gotta love them Sicilians. Could have been
worse I guess, had I not woken up BEFORE the train got there. This was the
drunkest I had ever been and I have never been that drunk since. Um, probably.
So, I stand up. I know I must leave the area of the barking
dog. I can barely keep my balance though as I meander off. I had to climb back
up the bank to get back to the tracks as that seemed like the only way to go. I
just keep walking but it is all I can do to not fall asleep whenever I fall
down which is very often. I walk/swerve/stagger, for what seems like
forever and now I am falling down often on my left arm, without pulling my hand
out of my pocket, about every 20 feet. I have no idea how long it took but the
tracks came up to a cross street with a sidewalk. I head down the sidewalk and
fall down a few times. It didn’t hurt as much on the wooden tracks as the
cement. Then, out of nowhere, a young boy comes up to me and warns me that I
better stop falling down because there are shore patrols over there. Thanks to
him I now know I am close to the base. I again gather all my rubbery muscles
together and walk a ways behind the shore patrols until I see the base gate. I
made it. Now to find the ship. Ok, that should be easy since it’s an Aircraft
Carrier.
I see it!! There it is. Over yonder. I head for the
after-brow when all of a sudden I hear my name being called. Evidently, a bunch
of guys from my shop have been sent out to look for me. This is what they told
me as they helped me back to the ship.
They said that Red had gotten back about 4 hours ago and he
was belligerent, throwing up and crying, plus all he could say was that Jay is
dead. Then Bob got back 2 hours later and he was belligerent and all he could
say was, Jay is dead, police took him. So they sent some guys out to look for
me out in town but gave up and had decided to come back to the ship when they
saw me.
I was so elated to see those guys, so happy to be alive and
not in some rubber room for the mentally insane. When I got back to the shop,
both Red and Bob gave me a slobbering bro-hug and the relief on their faces was
genuine. They don’t remember much either, but maybe Bob will have some
additional snippets to relate after he reads this.
Well finally…I got the chance to take my hand out of
my pocket and undo the bundle of figurines. They were pretty much crunched up
by now but I did manage to keep one piece of one, just to put it on the shelf
in my Navy collection, and when someone asks me about that “broken thing”, I
can tell this story.
All I know is, Don’t drink in Sicily.
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