Days Of Wine And Rascals

240

The Days of Wine and Rascals

DAVID E. SCOTT

Copyright David E. Scott 2002

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-55349-130-9

Published by Books for Pleasure at Smashwords

A light-hearted romp through the hilarious misadventures of two naïve Canadians who open a bar-restaurant discotheque in a tiny mountain village of the European Co-Principality of Andorra.

NOTE

The people and places described in this book exist and the events took place as they are described.

The names of some of the people involved have been changed -- either because they would have preferred it that way -- or to save the legal profession much costly posturing.

DEDICATION

For the warm, trusting and welcoming Andorrans, but for whose unceasing forbearance none of these barely credible adventures in the World's Greatest Disneyland would ever have taken place.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue

Don’t Shake The Tonic

The Lady Clerk Had Balls

Hormey Takes Over

Bad O’Rourke

Pig and Bubbles

Bloody O’Rourke

An Agonizing Wait

Farewell To Phoneys

Hammerhead

Tarzan

Disciples of Bacchus

A Bosomful of Bubbly

Showmen, Smugglers and Swimmers

Benazet and the Sispony Fiesta

Used Bar For Sale

Four Thousand Drinks

Rusty Nails and Social Snails

Cops and Robbers

Piracy in the Pyrenees

All’s Well That Ends…

PROLOGUE

A hamlet with a population of 22 people, whose language they couldn't speak or understand, was an unlikely place for two young Canadians to try to learn the skills of developing a bar-restaurant-discotheque business with the unprepossessing name of Casa No-No.

When that hamlet was located high in the Pyrenees Mountains in the tiny European Co-principality of Andorra -- known only to stamp collectors and a few geography teachers -- it wasn't easy finding enough customers to pay the heating bills.

But find customers, they did:

*Hammerhead, the only local supporter of the bar until his family sent him away to take the cure, who believed the world was flat and who would never pay for the rounds for the house that he loved to order.

*Benazet, from a neighboring village, who fanatically supported Casa No-No to the extent of flagging down foreign tourists on Andorra's main highways and giving them printed invitations for a free drink at his local.

*Rupert, a Northern Irish remittance man who suffered tennis elbow from giving the finger to any and all French tourists he encountered on Andorra's highways.

*Rita, an Indian princess who was writing a gripping book in Morse Code titled How I survived death on a salt-free diet.

*Peter, a white South African who loved to collect firewood for nocturnal barbecues and always apologized for not having black skin.

*Tony, a Philipino honours biology graduate who only chewed ladies' leather boots under the restaurant tables after he'd had too much tequila.

*Bill, a California land speculator, who was so parsimonious he'd choke down the entire gift gallon of wine to ensure he'd get back the deposit on the bottle.

*And a supporting cast of dozens of wacky locals, residents and tourists from movie actors to boy scouts, from smugglers to cops, from dog-nappers to con artists, all drawn to the magnet of Casa No-No in The World's Greatest Disneyland.

CHAPTER 1

Don't shake the tonic

The jet of foaming tonic water caught the astonished Englishman full in the face. I'm awfully sorry! I blurted, jerking out a bar towel and upsetting the glass and double measure of gin into his lap.

I'm really terribly sorry, I said, handing him a dry towel and adding, perhaps unnecessarily, I'm not really a bartender; but at least I didn't break the glass. Here, let me have another try at that drink.

The man carefully removed his spectacles and found a dry spot for them on the bar. He licked tonic from his soggy moustache and said quietly, No, I didn't think you were a bartender; what I was trying to say was, don't shake the tonic! The man's wife had rushed over from the fireplace area and was dabbing at his lapels with a lace handkerchief. I busied myself mixing him a new gin and tonic and mopping up the bar in the most professional manner I could muster. This one's on me, I said, carefully placing the drink in front of him. Sorry the other one was on you. There was little point, I thought, in trying to explain that some of our mixes had to be shaken before serving and I had just violently shaken the wrong bottle.

He handed me the wet towel, smiled gamely and began wiping his spectacles with a pocket handkerchief. Nonsense, he said. Accidents will happen and I think it's jolly nice of you not to charge us for the first drink. Still, I couldn't imagine why on earth you were shaking that tonic! Not to worry though . . . have a drink with me.

Another typical off-season evening was getting underway at Casa No-No, our bar-restaurant in Aldosa, a hamlet in the European Co-Principality of Andorra, fifteen hundred metres above sea level in the wilds of the Pyrenees Mountains. I had all the time in the world to join the man with gin-soaked trousers in a drink and a chat. He had a full glass and so did his wife and daughter; the only other customers were a young Australian couple nursing their free beers in front of the log fire.

My companion, Wendy, was busy preparing salads and vegetables in the kitchen, gambling on my ability to ease enough drinks into the guests so they'd stay to eat, if only in self-defense. Not that a typical evening at Casa No-No involved squirting tonic water at tourists and then filling them with enough liquor so they'd stay to eat. We were trying to earn a living by operating our bar and restaurant along business-like lines.

Unfortunately the sum of our joint catering management experience was a waitress job Wendy had held one summer in the restaurant of a small Ontario town when she was a teenager.

Our shoestring operation boasted none of the usual professional trappings like designer menus, table cloths or one of those dinner-jacketed waiters that many European restaurants use to distract the diner from noticing stale breads or the calamities of an inept chef.

Nor did we have an enormous clientele. Most tourists seem to believe there is safety in numbers when it comes to foreign restaurants. We were unable to offer them any assurance along those lines because when we first opened in the off-season, an exceptionally good night saw only half a dozen brave souls tackling their grilled pork chops or char-broiled half chickens at the fireside tables. And those six diners had likely been lured to Casa No-No by the promise of a free drink offered on a printed card we had stuck under the windshield wiper of their car earlier that day in the capital town.

We had learned that if tourists thus inveigled to Aldosa ordered a third drink, they generally stayed for dinner; if they stayed for dinner our figures for that evening were usually in the black.

Since we operated on that well-stretched shoestring basis, we had found it crucial to involve our guests in conversations until they had either drunk away their reservations about dining at our restaurant, or until it was too late for them to eat anywhere else. Not that there was anything wrong with the food we served, or the prices at which we sold it. Our facilities just didn't happen to appeal to all who came to look them over, and the offer of the free drink of your choice with no strings attached automatically put some potential diners on guard.

So I focused my attention on the pink and grey Englishman who was drying out satisfactorily and starting to take a deeper interest in both his gin and tonic and his surroundings. His questions about Andorra were typical of those tourists who have read any of a number of booklets brimming with misinformation about the place and its people. On his third drink, he switched from asking about Andorra to enquiring how a young Canadian weekly newspaper publisher and his considerably younger female companion came to be operating a bar-restaurant in a mountain hamlet in Andorra.

I don't mean to pry, of course, he said, doing just that and also inviting me to refill my beer mug, but, it does seem rather strange and I'm sure your reasons must be most interesting. Through his fourth and fifth gins, I gave him some of the background and treated him to a few of the Casa No-No vignettes we'd accumulated. He laughed uproariously at some and just shook his balding head in utter disbelief at others.

His nondescript wife had ordered herself another sherry during one of the yarns and then marched her proper tweeds back to the fireside where she wasn't contributing her fair share to the quiet conversation between the Australians and her daughter. I knew the family would stay for dinner and guessed the woman would be disgruntled because our menu did not include fish and chips.

After an account of the time we had tried to roast a 162-pound pig over the wood fire, my listener became quite earnest. You really ought to do a book on this place, you know, he said. Some of the things you've told me have been . . . well, I just don't know; fantastically entertaining, certainly, but some of them quite unbelievable, really. But, then that's the problem, I suppose, isn't it? I mean, who would believe it?

His question didn't need a reply and to break the ensuing silence I poured myself a beer and offered him another free gin, still feeling badly about his moist shirt-front. Recalling business, I segued our solitary menu after the free gin and was rewarded by the man calling his wife and daughter over to make their dinner selections. We were able to chat a bit more before some locals came in and required both bar service and personal attention.

There was little opportunity for more conversation with the Englishman because the bar did get quite busy that night. He paid his bill just after midnight; the family thanked us for their dinner and the evening, and even the wife made favorable comment on the salad and broiled chicken she'd had instead of fish and chips.

Really is a pity if you don't do a book on this place, was the Englishman's parting remark. It could bring you in a good bit of business, too.

It was several years before I recalled with a chuckle the pleasant old chap mopping tonic off his regimental tie and later urging me to share the anecdotes of Casa No-No.

I decided the most logical place to start was at the beginning . . .

CHAPTER 2

The lady clerk had balls!

Many foreigners living in Andorra liked to joke they had come to the place for a quick look around and ended up living there more or less permanently. That's precisely what happened in our case. We believed two days would be plenty of time to leisurely explore a country of only 464 square kilometres, particularly since most of those square kilometres were almost vertical mountainsides and there were only two main roads.

On the second day, a kilometre or so past the end of one of those roads to a place with the fascinating name of Super Pal, the car broke down. I had thought we could negotiate the sheep track far enough to get a spectacular view into the next valley. We were just below twenty-four-hundred metres and partway through a snowdrift when the fuel pump conked out.

Although the car was up to the headlights in snow -- the drift had concealed a large depression -- it was a bright, warm day in May and we had the convertible top down. My companion was contentedly working on her tan instead of shrill variations of I told you this wasn't a road -- which is why she was travelling with me in the first place.

I was trying to translate the car owner's manual from Italian, not having noticed that the other side of the booklet was in English. Since the tool kit consisted of a wheel wrench and one Phillips screwdriver, I didn't think the accuracy of my translation was critical anyway. And even if I could fix the damned fuel pump, we still had no shovel to chip away the packed wedge of icy snow on which the car's underpinnings rested.

Hello there, do you speak English? Do you want a push? It was a middle-aged man in a fluorescent chartreuse jogging outfit and cerulean-colored running shoes.

As Frank and Joan drove us down from the mountain top in their rental car, he said he had been a bit surprised to come across a sports car with Ontario licence plates half-buried in a snowdrift on an Andorran mountaintop. He said he and Joan were from Washington State and had been doing Europe for several months. He said he tried to jog a couple of miles every day regardless of where they were; Joan preferred to sit in the car with a novel while he got his daily rush of adrenalin.

There was a Fiat dealership beside their hotel in Andorra's capital town and Frank dropped us there after extracting our promise to join them later for a drink in the lobby bar of their hotel. The Americans said that after three weeks in Spain they were desperate to have conversation with people they could understand. They hoped we might all have dinner that evening in a new restaurant they had heard about where American-style hamburgers were available.

Our car was ready by noon the next day. The fuel pump had been replaced, the run-in oil had been drained and regular oil installed and the car had been washed and waxed. The owner of the Fiat dealership had charged for only the towing, the fuel pump and the oil change.

I have cleaned the car, he lectured in cultured French, because this is a very rare model even I have never seen before. But it is a Fiat. It was disgracefully dirty and I would not want anyone to think such a lovely Fiat was leaving my garage in this disgusting condition. You do not have to pay for the cleaning of the car if you do not wish. But if you will be staying in my country, please keep the car clean.

And then he added, I have put a litre of oil in the trunk. It was apparent you had never checked the level of the oil. I don't know how far is 5,000 miles but the car still contained the oil it is supposed to have for only the first 1,000 kilometres. You should check the oil level frequently and add oil whenever it is needed. I have not charged you for this oil either since using it will help you not to break down around here again.

His incredible pride in the Fiat product made me wonder whether his tow truck operator had lurked in the mountains the previous afternoon until darkness had fallen, so few would notice the mustard-yellow Fiat being towed into town. Or whether my car had been concealed in some sort of automotive body bag before it was hauled off the mountain top. In any event, I thought it prudent not to enquire about the possibility of a manufacturer's warranty covering the defective fuel pump.

So began a forced relationship with Andorra's Fiat dealer, a kinship like that of bitter estranged parents periodically required to meet in the best interests of their only offspring, a child being ruined by the parent with custody rights. The uneasy liaison tottered through three years without ever gaining a single degree of warmth. It ended with the man in tears and refusing my cheque for a brand new Fiat Sport Spyder to replace the original which had been badly wrinkled in a head-on crash.

He actually wrung his hands like the stereotypical distressed damsel in a silent film melodrama while pleading with me to take my money down the street to the Peugeot dealer. He can get you a yellow sports convertible probably by tomorrow, the wretched man promised. I will not sell you any Fiat.

The reason Andorra's Fiat dealer had never seen a Fiat Sport Spyder 124 model was that it was a car designed for the North American market and not available in Europe. Another good reason was that Andorra is a duty-free country. People come to Andorra to get great deals on new cars; rarely is anyone dumb enough to import a car to Andorra on which they have already paid taxes in another country.

I had bought the car the previous December as a Christmas present for my wife. She didn't like the color yellow and hated cars with gear shifts; her Christmas present was the color of a bulldozer and had a five-speed manually-operated transmission.

The beautiful young blonde who didn't harangue me after I drove the yellow Fiat into the snowdrift, wasn't my wife. Her name was Wendy and she was somebody else's wife. And that was another reason we quietly settled into Andorra, which had no extradition treaties with any other countries.

I met Wendy when she came to work for my weekly newspaper in Canada the previous autumn, but how we ended up in Andorra together wasn't quite as tacky as it might sound.

The staff of my weekly newspaper was a team. We all had our jobs to do and we all helped each other as we were able. Only the front office staff had fixed hours; the rest of us came and went as required with nobody checking on the hours worked. It was not unusual for half a dozen of us to work for 24 or 36 hours straight on days leading up to the press deadline, particularly if we were following a few good, breaking news stories.

Although there was a bar in the back room and a refrigerator stocked with beer and mix, we'd often take a break at a Chinese restaurant just down the street from the newspaper office. Wendy wasn't much of a drinker so she always came on those breaks during which I learned more about her over the banana splits she adored. I thought she was the most gorgeous young lady I had ever met. She had long, blonde hair, a warm and friendly smile and big green eyes.

Her laugh was a wonderful, carefree bray, rather like that of actress Goldie Hawn -- when Goldie was much younger. Unlike Goldie, however, Wendy had an hourglass figure and there was room for lots of sand in the hourglass. She was 19 years old and married.

I was 32 years old, 50 pounds overweight and also married. Besides our dedication to the newspaper, the only other thing Wendy and I had in common, it seemed, was unhappy marriages. My marriage eventually deteriorated to the point where I decided I'd just go and live somewhere in Europe for a while. I'd hire a competent editor to run my newspaper and let my wife know where she could mail the occasional dividend cheque when I ran out of whatever cash I would take with me. Divorce could be discussed later from a safe distance, through lawyers.

That Tuesday night after the others had returned to the newspaper office from our supper break at the restaurant, I told Wendy this was the last banana split I'd be buying her and the last chat we'd likely ever have. I said I was leaving the next day to get my thoughts together and write a novel, probably in Spain. I thanked her for the fun company and all the extra hours she had given to the newspaper with no thought of overtime pay. I told her I hoped her situation would improve soon because life's too short not to be happy.

When she quietly said, Take me with you, I just didn't believe what I'd heard. What possible interest could this lovely bright youngster have in someone of my age, and bulk? She explained with the kind of honesty I had come to expect -- an honesty with no embellishment, including tact -- any place would be better than where I am now; just promise me that if we don't get along you'll pay my way home to my parents from wherever we wind up.

On Wednesdays most of the newspaper staff delivered bundles of newspapers around our circulation area. We'd cash in around noon and then start making up for the long nights most of us had spent producing that week's edition.

That was when, after leaving notes for our respective spouses, Wendy and I would quietly leave town for good . . . and for better or for worse. I came to the office that morning with a suitcase in which my wife had thrown a couple of changes of clothing. She thought I was making another trip to eastern Ontario to close the deal on another newspaper whose purchase I had been negotiating for months. I had already made a number of trips there and prepared a projection for my bank. The bank had accepted my proposal and told me I could draw the money whenever it was needed.

I had slept only minutes the previous night. One does not lightly walk out on a wife of almost seven years, two adorable children and an estate which the bank manager had calculated the previous week would be worth $1 million on paper within five years.

And then there was Wendy. And her husband. Would he sue for alienation of affection -- even though he had apparently done most of the alienating? I finally solved that issue to my satisfaction: I would not take Wendy away from her husband or the town. But if she wanted to meet me out of town, we would leave Canada together from there.

Her big green eyes sought mine the moment I walked into the office Wednesday morning and I hustled her out to the restaurant to tell her the change of plan. If she still wanted to join me, she was to leave her husband a letter of explanation, pack one small bag of clothes and personal things and meet me at the brink of Niagara Falls at 1 p.m. My brand new metallic green Lincoln Continental would be easy to spot; if she wasn't there I would understand and take off on my own. If she was going to Niagara Falls she could take one of my company cars and I'd arrange to have it picked up later.

But Mr. Scott, if we're going to Europe, wouldn't it make more sense to take a European car? Wendy asked, innocently establishing that just about every intelligent decision in which I would subsequently be involved, would be of her design. Look for the yellow Fiat, I told her, but think this through carefully. If you're not at the Falls by 1 p.m. I understand and good luck to you.

I shook up a number of people that morning. The first stop was my lawyer's office where I had him draw up power of attorney for my accountant, whose office was in the same building. The lawyer called the accountant to his office and both tried to dissuade me from what they perceived as lunacy.

When the accountant had power of attorney, I instructed him to contact my bank and arrange for the transfer of a sizeable chunk of Canadian and U.S. cash to their Niagara Falls branch. Later that morning I would identify myself to that bank manager with my passport and pick up the cash which I requested be wrapped in a plain paper bag.

My last stop that morning was to double back to the house and spend a few precious minutes with my unsuspecting son and daughter. It wasn't going to be easy to leave them behind, but I had given our shambles of a family life many agonized hours of thought. I believed that what I was doing was in the best interests of all concerned.

I realized everybody would assume Wendy was The Other Woman, but that was their problem. Honi soit qui mal y pense, and all that jazz; if I was abandoning a wife and two kiddies I might just as well be seen to be running off with somebody else's child bride. Wendy wasn't from the area so her family, at least, would be spared the fallout of some of the choicest scandal to hit the town for some time.

The cash wasn't waiting at the bank in a paper bag. And while television actors can count a briefcase full of cash in 25 seconds, the reality is that it takes more like 20 minutes when a bank manager insists you count each bill while he breathes heavily over your shoulder causing you to lose count several times. So I was late arriving at the Falls where Wendy nervously waited in one of my company cars, wondering whether I had changed my mind or just left without her.

On the drive to Toronto I convinced her to stop calling me Mr. Scott. My friend was waiting for our meeting at the Toronto Press Club but Wendy couldn't join us because she was under the age of 21.

It was a very short meeting. I won't do anything that will contribute to splitting up the marriage of a friend, harrumphed my friend when I offered him the editor's chair of my newspaper at twice the salary he was then earning doing a similar job for a newspaper chain. I told him I was leaving regardless, but he was adamant. The newspaper staff would just have to find their own way, I decided. My die was cast.

Our next stop was the passport office in Ottawa to get a passport for Wendy. We used the mailing address of a friend in New Brunswick and telephoned him to expect the envelope, which miraculously was there when we arrived a few days later.

With the help of another friend in Halifax, we got the car aboard a ship to Le Havre in France. We never received a satisfactory explanation for why the car went instead to Southampton, England. That little detour meant we had to spend several extra weeks in France until it finally arrived.

April in Paris probably sounds exotic to those who haven't had to suffer through the unique rudeness, arrogance and professional incivility of many citizens of France. We were delighted when the car finally reached Le Havre and we could leave.

The car had been stripped. Gone were the dictionaries to the languages of Europe we had thoughtfully bought, my fly fishing equipment, a brand new typewriter and a number of Leica camera lenses. The French police assured us it would be a waste of our time, and theirs, to fill out forms reporting the theft. The crime had obviously happened in Canada or England, they argued, and they would do nothing other than file the report.

My Canadian insurance company ruled the theft must have taken place on the high seas where they weren't liable. The English insurance company from whom I had purchased comprehensive coverage for Europe before the car arrived, said the thefts must have taken place in Canada before their policy took effect and they were not liable.

In high good humor we headed for Spain, having decided to spend a couple of days en route in Andorra.

Between France and Spain there's a blip on the maps of Europe in the Pyrenees Mountains. If your eyesight is good you can make out the words Co-Principality of Andorra, or often, just Andorra.

When we arrived, the Lilliputian country had a population of about 21,000 people, only 6,500 of whom were Andorrans. More than 12,000 were Spaniards who had fled the wrath of General Francisco Franco, the dictator who controlled Spain after the Civil War. There were about 2,000 French and the balance was a polyglot mix with perhaps 250 English-speaking people from a wide variety of countries.

Andorra has been independent and almost continuously at peace with the world since the Twelfth Century. The most popular and consistent explanation for the place is that it was created in the year 784 by the son of Charlemagne, Luis the Pious, after the people of the valleys had helped him fight the Moors. A document which the Andorrans claim is Charlemagne's proclamation, is kept behind six locks in the House of the Valleys in the capital town, Andorra la Vella, or Old Andorra. It is written in Latin, dated AD 784, and signed and sealed by Charlemagne.

It reads in part: By the grace of God, the Omnipotent King and of Jesus Christ our Savior, Emperor Charles (The Great), and his son, King Louis (The Debonair, or the Pious), expelled, by divine mercy, the pagan populace of the region of Spain known by the name of Barcelona. We have found a small valley by the name of Andorra, not far from the lands of Toulouse, which also had been sacked and ravaged by the accursed infidels. We decided to send peasants for farmers there to establish themselves, to build houses, to work the land and live of their work. We ceded to them for the future all the lands incorporated within the limits of the small valley of Andorra.

Scholars who have examined Andorra's charter say the document is a shameless forgery and that its language is of the eleventh century. These claims don't concern the Andorrans. They proudly fly their flag of three vertical bars of blue, yellow and red -- a compromise between the French tri-colour and the blood and sand flag of Spain -- and sing their national anthem which contains the