The Cannibal Queen (7 page)
Walking back to the hotel after dark we find the streets full of people drinking beer from plastic cups. This still looks like the Bourbon Street crowd I remember from my youth—families on vacation, young couples glued to each other, teenagers out for a toot and an occasional knot of sailors in civilian clothes— but something is different. On the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter it hits me. The sound has changed.
Twenty years ago the background beat was jazz. Now it is rock music. Today the place has the look and feel and sound of North Beach in San Francisco.
David examines the window displays of the sexual paraphernalia shops and the transvestite show. He peers around the door touts of the girlie clubs for a glimpse of the naked females cavorting within. “Let’s go to see one of these shows,” he pleads after scrutinizing the eight-by-ten publicity photos posted outside a club with the proud name of The Orgy.
I shake my head.
“You ever been in one of these places?”
“Yeah. A time or two.”
“Well, let’s go.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not old enough.”
“How old do I have to be?”
“Older.”
W
E LEAVE
B
ATON
R
OUGE ON A TYPICALLY HAZY SUMMER MORNING
by climbing to 1,000 feet and flying eastward above the interstate. Those highway engineers did all the surveying years ago, so why reinvent the wheel?
The drone of the Lycoming is a pleasant accompaniment for singing or dreaming or contemplating the vicissitudes of life. It’s also a good background for flying.
I am flying up a storm when I spot a Cessna 152 at my 7 o’clock, at my altitude and also using the interstate to navigate eastward. Before long the Cessna pulls even about a hundred yards to my left. I wave wildly. The pair in the Cessna’s cockpit ignore me, if they see me at all. And they pull steadily away.
The ignominy of it! Passed by a spam can!
I slump lower in my seat and scan the gauges listlessly. Ah me. To find a flying machine slower than this one would be difficult today. Most slower machines have been enshrined in museums or left in weed patches to rust into oblivion. Occasionally some charitable soul hauled one of the rotted wrecks to the junkyard and put it out of its misery in a smelter. But most planes just surrendered atom by atom amid the weeds where fate had abandoned them.
The reason is economics. Keeping an aircraft airworthy is an expensive undertaking, as Orville and Wilbur quickly learned. Technical progress in aviation has been driven by the demand for quicker, more fuel-efficient machines, ones able to carry a greater payload at less cost. Obsolete aircraft that could no longer pay their way were usually abandoned without ceremony.
And this Stearman,
Cannibal Queen
, is obsolete, by any measure. The ubiquitous Cessna 152 also holds two people, but it is faster, uses less fuel, and is much cheaper to maintain. It lacks the vices inherent in the tail-wheel configuration and so is easier for primary flight students to master. And it lacks a soul.
The
Queen
has one.
I’m sure of it.
Test pilot Chuck Yeager once noted laconically, “An airplane is an airplane,” but Lordy, I hope there’s more to a great machine than that. Don’t the sweat, blood and tears of its creators count for anything? When steel and wood and aluminum become works of art, doesn’t that matter? What about all the men and women who strapped themselves into the cockpit and there tried to master the secrets of flight, to fulfill this species’ deepest yearnings? Surely all those hopes and dreams are somehow embodied in this inanimate thing. Surely.
David and I really didn’t need to stop at St. Elmo, Alabama, a little one-runway paved strip just south of Mobile. Perhaps it was the stench that infuriated David as we flew past the refineries at Pascagoula, Mississippi, or perhaps all the coffee I drank earlier that morning, but I didn’t think I could hold out another twenty minutes.
We swooped in to St. Elmo and taxied to the fuel pump; then I abandoned the plane in an undignified dash for the restroom. When I returned the plane was surrounded by a half dozen men and the girl from the desk. She helped David and me fuel while the men admired the plane.
They helped us push the
Queen
away from the pump, and with much waving David and I departed. We flew across Mobile Bay and alighted in Fairhope, Alabama. There we used the phone and called William E. Butterworth—Bill—who is better known under his nom de plume of W. E. B. Griffin as the author of the
Brotherhood of War
and
The Corps
series published by Putnam.
Bill answered the phone and readily accepted my invitation to go for a ride in the Stearman. But first he wanted to buy us lunch, which he did at the country club associated with the Marriott resort in which he lives at Clear Point.
Bill is in his early sixties and has made his living for almost forty years as a writer. He is the author of over 140 books written under fourteen pen names, adopted, according to his wife, because the libraries would only buy one William E. Butterworth book a year.
At lunch he tells us anecdotes of his early writing days and his latest trip to New York for the big thumb-your-nose-at-the-rest-of-the-publishing-world party that Phyllis Grann, Putnam’s president and CEO, threw for her best-selling scribblers. He and Tom Clancy had lunch with Robert Gottlieb, who is also my agent, and Bill tells me about that. All in all, he concludes, he had a great time and he’s glad he went.
Then he launches into a discussion of his upcoming duck-hunting expedition to Uruguay. “It’s one of the few places left in the world,” he says, “that doesn’t have signs saying ‘Welcome American Tourists’ and ‘Thank You for Not Smoking.’ ”
Back at the Butterworth home after lunch, Mrs. Butterworth, who has the flu, presents David with three of Bill’s books and one of her own, for she is a writer too and a recognized expert on calligraphy.
A pilot who hasn’t flown in years, Bill has trouble maintaining altitude in the Stearman. He persists in placing the nose too low even though I am coaching him on the intercom, which is truly lousy. Electronic wizardry is not yet up to the challenge of making a decent intercom for an open-cockpit aircraft. This is Bill’s first ride in one and the newness of the sensations overrides his rusty piloting instincts. Finally I take the controls and do pirouettes a thousand feet above his house, then take him sightseeing along the east side of the bay.
Bill Butterworth is the writer so many of us aspire to be, a man who earned a living doing what he wanted to do. He is an original character, opinionated, self-confident, sure of himself. I bid him good-bye wondering if I have enough of that fire to sustain a career. Oh well, time will tell.
Flying on to Pensacola, Dave and I find the clouds are getting lower and the visibility deteriorating, a typical summer afternoon on the gulf coast. In these climes mornings are the time to fly, the earlier the better.
We cross directly over Saufley Field, the field where I learned to fly, and I point it out to David. The airplanes are all gone now, moved to the main Naval Air Station—“mainside”—and the old runways have been crisscrossed by new ones, so almost the whole square mile is paved. I went out there last year for a look-see during a Pensacola visit and was stunned to see the abandoned hangars and the empty parking mats with weeds growing up through the cracks. Today from the air we can’t see the weeds.
Approach gives us a right base approach to runway 16 at Pensacola Regional. We swoop in and I manage a beautiful landing, the main wheels kissing just an instant before the tail. One of the old hands at the St. Francis fly-in recommended this as his preferred technique, but I can rarely do it this well. More practice—I need more practice.
We park at the FBO and fuel the plane with the help of two college students who are in awe of the big biplane. They provide rags for me to wipe the oil off the front of the fuselage and a screwdriver for David and me to remove the hubcaps so we can get at the inflation valves on the main tires. David has been complaining that the right main tire is low, and he is right. It has about ten pounds of air in it. After some sweating on the hot concrete, we manage to get the hub plates off both wheels and fill them to 35 PSI.
With the job done he tells me that my shirt is filthy with oil and sweat. I wipe my oily, greasy hands on my jeans and use a sleeve to swab my forehead. Then I grin at him. One of the first lessons I learned in this town is that flying is a sweaty business not for the fastidious. That is one of the things I like about it.
Inside the FBO the desk lady makes phone calls to every rental car agency in town and informs us there are no wheels to be had. A big whing-ding of World War II vets is down at the civic center. Then she tries the hotels. The civic center Hilton is full, but on her third call she finds us a room at a Holiday Inn at one of the malls.
The motel even sends a van, which turns out to be driven by a college student who tells us he is going to move to Denver. He’s been all over the east coast, he says, and is ready for The West. I nod my understanding. I joined the Navy to get out of West Virginia, so I know how he feels. The worst mistake a young person can make is to whittle down his dreams to fit the size of his hometown.
After a dip in the motel pool, David and I trot across the parking lot to the mall and take in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner. The previews of coming attractions give me a jolt. Sandwiched in between the trailers on a Danny DeVito comedy and a cop shoot-’em-up is a farce about naval aviation. The logo is a direct rip-off of the
Flight of the Intruder
movie triangle artwork, which was taken directly from the Vietnam-era Intruder patches that still adorn the leather flight jackets of A-6 pilots and bombardiers. Did my book start this? I sigh as I listen to this Pensacola Navy crowd guffaw at the foolishness on the screen.
That evening before bed I remembered Bill Butterworth’s remark about how much he enjoyed the big publishing blowout in New York, and I recalled the one I got invited to several years ago. It was Doubleday’s ninetieth anniversary party and they held it in the ballroom of a swanky hotel on Fifth Avenue, just north of the southeast corner of Central Park. I wore one of my Denver oil-company-lawyer suits and my best tie.
All of Doubleday’s heavy hitters were there. The booze was free and there were bushels of shrimp and crab legs and even caviar. I didn’t know a soul except Nancy Evans, who was then the president of Doubleday, and David Gernert, my editor. Of course they knew everybody and had to mix and mingle.
I got a double scotch since the price was right and sat on one of the railings overlooking the entrance. I was perched there when Bill Cosby arrived in a blue jogging suit, two-piece. Must have set him back at least fifty bucks, but what the hey, he could afford it. He looked at me and I looked at him and then he recognized somebody and started talking to them. I spotted a woman with a truly awesome cleavage and started staring.
Then Jackie Onassis, Doubleday’s best-known editor, arrived. Every eye in the place went to her. She is the only true celebrity I know of—she doesn’t have to hire a publicist or call the reporters when she’s in Aspen to try to get her name in the papers. She doesn’t have to sing, dance, write, act, or do the Carson show. And until the day she dies every living soul who sees her will gawk. I did.
Mrs. O stayed for ten minutes or so as the television cameras ground and the crowd milled around her, then when I turned my head to look for a waiter bearing another scotch, she vanished. Everyone was craning to see where she went but she made her exit slick as a pickpocket. Later I heard she had been escorted there by a man. He’s the most anonymous guy on the planet. Nobody saw him.
I went over to the TV guys and watched them twiddle knobs and check lights. One of the cameramen and I mingled socially. “You here with the party?” he asked finally.
“Security.”
“Oh.”
“You see anybody pocketing the silverware, you let me know.”
When I left I saw actress Betty White waiting alone on the sidewalk for a limo or taxi. I said, “Hi.”
She said, “Hi.”
She’s a nice lady.
Pensacola, Florida, is one of my favorite cities. Here the dreams begin. When I first saw it in the summer of 1966, a month before my twentieth birthday, it was a small, sleepy southern town and my stay did not promise to be a good one. I arrived at the local airport at the end of my very first long trip on an airplane with a small suitcase and a set of mimeographed orders to report the following afternoon at 4
P.M.
to Aviation Officers Candidate School (AOCS) at the Naval Air Station. The admirals had concluded that the Vietnam War might be long and bloody and trained pilots might become scarce, so they had resolved to increase the supply. I was to be a small morsel of their cannon fodder, although from my vantage point the Navy’s need for pilots looked like an opportunity to learn to fly and fulfill my military obligation. If I lived through it, fine. If I didn’t, well … the grim reaper was still a long way away and who could say how a man’s life would run?
I took a taxi from the airport, the first taxi ride of my life, and had the driver drop me in front of the biggest hotel in town—indeed, the only hotel in town. The San Carlos is gone now but in its day it was a beaut—six or seven stories, lots of velvet drapes and leather chairs and all in all, one hell of a fine place for a youngster who had just completed his sophomore year of college and was out adventuring for the first time.
I had read the orders word for word and made careful note of the hour of my required arrival. Instinctively I knew that it would be not wise to arrive early. After a fitful night’s sleep, I spent the next morning wandering the streets of Pensacola and looking at the trains in the yard and glancing through the windows of the sailors’ bars. It was hot that late June day in the deep south, with the heat rising in shimmering waves from the streets and a humidity that was truly oppressive to anyone not accustomed to it. Situated right on the Gulf of Mexico, Pensacola had its full share of humidity but was spared some of the heat that makes towns a hundred miles inland smoldering hells in late summer. But Pensacola was without doubt a southern town, full of loafers and farmers in bib overalls piloting pickup trucks. What it had that most towns didn’t were sailors and airplanes out at the base, but these weren’t very noticeable my first morning.