Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

The last act. The chaplain’s assistant announced, “And now, ladies (a few female staff were present) and gentlemen—” he paused while an inmate drummer who had missed the cue started a drumroll, “the luscious, the vivacious, the beautiful—Coquette!” A single spotlight flashed on the stage. The band launched into a saucy bump-and-grind tune and into the spotlight leapt Ernest the black homosexual. I know I said they didn’t allow gay guys at Eglin, but I think they tolerated Ernest because he was just so damn open about it that nobody felt threatened. Ernest was always on. He was more effeminate than most women, and I’d seen him moan at guys he thought were attractive. The rednecks thought he was kind of bizarre, but they didn’t kill him—a testimony to Ernest’s charm.

Ernest did the best striptease act I’ve ever seen. He was wearing a mop for a wig and a costume of filmy cheesecloth. He whirled around with the music, swishing, tossing the veils into the crowd until he was down to a gold lame brief. It was so convincing, I forgot Ernest was a man. The crowd went wild.

Ernest won the talent show by a big margin.

I spent the summer of 1959 in Havana, living with a Cuban family. I saw Fidel Castro there and met Camilo Cienfuegos, a senior general under Castro whom Castro later had killed. I met General Cienfuegos by running past his armed guards when I saw his helicopter landing at the house he’d commandeered across the street from where I stayed. When I got close to the helicopter, I saw Cienfuegos first look surprised and then laugh. I was bounding, barefooted, across his huge yard with his armed guards in hot pursuit. He held up his hand and the guards dropped back. He walked up to me carrying a .45-caliber pistol he fitted with a stock and a long banana clip and asked me, in perfect English (he’d gone to school at the University of Miami), who I was.

I told him I was living with the Uriartes across the street, and I loved helicopters. He laughed and let me walk around and look at his chopper. Then he had one of his guards come over and take our picture together with my camera. After he left, the guards, who were called barbados, became my friends because I had shown such courage. For a boy, they said, I had the cojones of a man, which is a terrific compliment for an adolescent boy.

I knew Cubans, you see, and I liked Cubans, so it was a painful disappointment to me that they were the most unpopular ethnic group in Eglin.

These Cubans were mostly drug smugglers or money launderers, two of the more lucrative industries that have sprung up around the drug business our drug laws have created, and most of them had grown up in Miami. Some of them brought bizarre religious practices like Santeria that involved sacrificing especially trained white doves, and some of the poorer Cubans made sure there was a glass of water under their beds at night to ward off evil spirits. I’d seen none of this in Cuba. These habits added a threatening element to Cuban culture from the Anglos’ point of view. The real problem, though, as the Anglos in camp saw it, was simply that the Cubans were rude. Anglos are seldom rude, even if they are about to kill you. Cubans at Eglin were thought of as loud and pushy. In our crowded living conditions, the Cubans would often pack ten of their friends into one cube and have a noisy party over espresso and cookies. That produced much friction. Anyone making a complaint to them met with surly glares and loud advice on what sorts of things they might shove up their assholes.

There were few fights in Eglin because the penalty for fighting was that all participants in a fight were shipped off to higher-level prisons regardless of who started it. The one exception I knew about was one famous fight in Dorm Three just before I moved to Dorm Five. I didn’t see it but the story got around. A hillbilly from Tennessee, Sammy McGuire, had asked the three Cubans next to his bunk who were having a meeting after lights out if they minded terribly shutting the fuck up. The Cubans got mad and threatened to put the hillbilly’s lights out if he didn’t mind his own fucking business. This usually worked because, as I said, everybody goes to a real prison who’s in a fight, and Eglin is a camp full of wimps. But Sammy McGuire didn’t seem to be impressed. Since it was dark, no one could see the action, but the result was three injured Cubans, one of whom had to be treated at the infirmary.

To the Cubans’ credit, they refused to admit that there had been a fight, claiming they’d all fallen down in the shower. The prison officials, having no witnesses or confessions (after an all-night grilling), were forced to accept the story, but the inmates knew what happened. McGuire became a hero among the Anglos. Even the Cubans respected him.