Hammerhead

The characters in this story are Matt, Roy and yours truly.  The scene is Guantanamo Bay Cuba.  Matt is a Mexican-American from Texas.  Roy was from Worcester, Massachusetts and had a heavy New England accent.  He pronounced his home town "wousta".  Matt kept the books in the commissary and Roy was a butcher there.  I stocked shelves, drove a truck and operated a forklift.  The year is 1971.

Matt (with drink) and Roy at a Conch Race

The Gold Hill barracks sat oddly enough on a hill so half of its name is accurate.  If accuracy was the objective it would have been more appropriately called Dirt Hill.  Guantanamo sits on the southeast coast of Cuba and the base occupies both sides of the bay.  The bay is fed by the Guantanamo River and the bay dumps into the Atlantic Ocean.

View of Guantanamo Bay from Gold Hill Barracks

There are three main recreational activities in Gitmo, drinking, fishing, and adultery.  Sad to say this story only includes the first two.  All activities in Gitmo involve drinking.  Work involves drinking.  Sleep involves drinking.  Adultery requires drinking.  Fishing absolutely requires drinking.

My Gold Hill Barracks Bunk, Me with Scotch in Hand

Matt and I shared a room designed for four.  The picture above shows me on my bunk which is essentially one fourth of the entire room.  My open locker door is to the right.  On that door is my NAUI diving certificate and two (purposely blurred) Playboy pin-ups.  At the foot of my bed would be the door to the hallway and beyond that the empty bunk where some of this story takes place.

On this particular evening Matt and I made plans to rent a small boat from the Exchange and go fishing.  We got a supply of cold beer and rented a 12 foot boat with a small outboard.  We rented the fishing poles and bought some bait.  We navigated to the far side of the bay and began to fish.  Fishing was generally good here and we caught several small fish before long.  There was a center section below a seat plank that was used as a bait-well.  Sea water could be let into the bait-well and used to keep live bait.  We didn’t need that option so we just stored our catch there.

What we didn’t know was that the center bait-well leaked a bit so the blood from our recent catch was drizzling into the night water.  It didn’t take long before I hooked something big.  I had either hooked a large fish or a chunk of Cuban real estate.  Since it began to fight I guessed it was some form of seafood.  I told Matt to get the gaff ready.  The rented fishing tackle had one gazillion pound test on the reel so I could have landed Moby Dick.  Well, as luck would have it I didn’t land a great white whale. What Matt managed to gaff and pull flopping into the boat, was about a five or six foot hammerhead shark.  Realizing what he had just done our Navy boy from the deserts of Texas screamed in panic.  He threatened to go over the side if I didn’t get rid of this man-eater.

Matt was all the way up on the bow of the boat.  His hands were on the gunwale (top planking of the boat).  Our new arrival was doing his best to flip, flop and generally create panic for all aboard.  I got Matt's attention and pointed to one of his hands to show him why going over the side wouldn’t be such a good idea.  Just inches from his hand, and above the top of the gunwale, was the dorsal fin of a much bigger shark.  Given that we had at least ten inches of freeboard (distance from the top rail to the water line) this dorsal fin would be an indication that this particular shark was much larger than our boat. The movie Jaws was to be released four years after this incident, but I’m sure when Matt saw it, he remembered this night.

Hammerhead Shark

We didn't have to think twice.  The outboard took just a few pulls before it started.  We were quickly on our way home.  The now, small by comparison hammerhead, had settled down to just an occasional twitch and went to his reward somewhere before we reached the dock. 

Now, back on dry land and fortified with a little Dutch courage we consumed underway, we began the retelling of our encounter with the giant denizen of the deep.  We impressed the dock dwellers and I’m sure the shark that “got away” grew by several feet in the retelling.  I needed my Kodak moment with my hammerhead so we placed the shark across the hood of my 1963 Buick Skylark convertible and drove back to the Gold Hill barracks.

I climbed the stairs to the third floor to retrieve my camera.  While I was in our room I saw something that was not to be ignored.  I didn’t know what I was going to do with my new found knowledge, but I knew it was going to be big.

Downstairs we took picture after picture of the shark.  We had shark profiles, gaping shark, shark with Jack, shark with Matt, shark on the hood as an ornament, you get the picture…we sure did.

Then I asked Matt to grab one end of the shark and I led the way to the stairwell.  He asked why we were climbing up three flights of stairs with a dead shark.  I didn’t answer.  The questions continued until we got to our room.  Then Matt’s questions were answered in an instant as he asked another.  “You aren’t going to do what I think you are going to do?”  I just smiled.

Dead Hammerhead Shark

You see our friend Roy had been partaking of that other form of recreation, no not adultery.  He had come to visit and decided to wait.  He knew he was always welcome to our booze.  After all, alcohol was almost cheaper than water there.  A bottle of Smirnoff’s vodka was about a fifty cents. He had obviously enjoyed more than his share and had passed out on one of our spare bunks.

We pulled back the sheet to see Roy in his boxers.  We then quietly slipped the hammerhead in next to him.  We tucked in the sheet to keep them both cozy.  Matt and I moved to the other side of the room and began our own libation.  We waited a couple of hours in vain for Roy to wake up.  He must have been really plowed.  Eventually Matt and I went to bed.

Early the next morning the dawn broke and we were awakened to the terrified New England accented screams of Roy the butcher.  I awoke to see him on the floor at the foot of my bed twisted in the sheet, covered in fish slime, and locked in a loving embrace with the dead shark.  He was screaming and twisting and getting further entangled with the sheet.  I was quickly dressed and out the door with Matt on my heels and Roy’s screams fading into the hallway behind us.

Cuban Village with Cockfight Arena Foreground

Matt and I drove around for a while to kill time.  Eventually we went to one of the "off-limits" clubs on the base, this one in the "Cuban Village".  Cuban workers had moved to the base after the Castro take over and were set up in their own village.  They had a bar and restaurant that were off-limits to the GI's.  The picture above shows the area of the village with some cockfight participants in the foreground.  The village may have been off-limits for most but we worked with several Cubans that lived in the village.  We were regulars at their bar.  The fact that Matt spoke Spanish was a help.  We had lunch and cocktails.  Matt related in Spanish, our prior evening's adventure to some other bar patrons.  We eventually went back to the barracks to clean up the mess.  We swapped the mattress with one from another empty room and disposed of the sheets.  We deposited the now quite smelly hammerhead in a vacant field near the chow hall.  Bad smells emanating from the chow hall were commonplace.

Me Next to Field, aka Hammerhead Burial Ground

We avoided Roy for a few days to let him cool down.  When we finally met up again, things were fine.  Roy’s account was that, as an "old salt", he had spent many a night in some of the raunchiest whorehouses in the Philippines.  On more than one occasion he had found himself in bed with a woman who had looked much better the night before.  But, in his words, to drift slowly awake to such a foul odor and then look over at his bed partner to see just one eye looking back, he knew he had outdone himself and that he would probably need counseling.  Or in Roy’s case just some more alcohol.  He too had a new story to tell.

Typical Philippine Whorehouse