by Michael Ledwith

March 20, 2023

We would go to San Sebastian, stay at the Hotel Niza, swim in the warm clear water of the bay, go to our room and shower, take a nap. Then meet Wayne, Ane, Miguel Angel Miranda (the handsomest man in the world…eyes bluer than Paul Newman’s), and Joseba Elizondo at a bar in the Parte Viejo.

Visit favorite bars and have pintxos with cold beer. Select what we wanted from plates filled with chorizo, gambas, and pollo fastened on slices of fresh bread by toothpicks.

The waiter would count the toothpicks left on the bar and announce the ‘dolorosa’.

Walk out into the evening and to another bar, entering to shouts of recognition and ribald greetings. Someone would hand Miguel a guitar and he would play while Joseba  sang gypsy songs of love and loss.

After midnight, dinner outside on La Concha doing movie dialogue, talking about books, arguing about rock and roll.

One summer’s day we drove up into the mountains above San Sebastian to have lunch with Ane’s aunt who was married to the man with the biggest nose in the world.

On the drive Wayne told a story about reporting to rookie camp with the Boston Celtics after he was drafted out of Jacksonville  University. He had led the nation in scoring for part of his senior year until he broke his ankle. He was a 6’5” guard, could pump what would now be three pointers as if he was practicing blinking, and was quick.

The first day of rookie camp, he said, he was crushed by virtually every Black player in camp.

His college conference was mostly segregated and he rarely played against Black guys.

The Black players at the Celtics camp were a half a foot shorter, could take him to the hoop at will, dunk on him, and block his go to shot routinely.

John Havlicek told him after that first practice that selling insurance wasn’t a bad life.

He lasted two days, saw the handwriting on the wall, and went to Spain as a player coach for the San Sebastian professional basketball team.

Did translations as a side job, married Ane Ansa, a beautiful Basque girl, and started writing a novel.

We pulled up to her uncle’s farmhouse. Thick stone walls, cool inside, exposed wooden beams in the ceilings of every room, stone floors with thick rugs, a kitchen the size of the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel, a dining room that could easily sit fifty, chairs so heavy that you sat where they were, no sidling up or back, or side to side.

The uncle’s nose was the size of your elbow if your thumb was pointed at your shoulder and you looked down at it. Jimmy Durante’s was a pimple compared to it.

I sat next to the grandmother. Ancient. A faint white mustache. Blue eyes like Miguel’s. Wearing elbow length white gloves. Otherwise, dressed all in black.

One husband killed in the La Guerra Civil. The second dead two years.

A widow in mourning.

But, coquettish, and jolly.

She poked and prodded me. Pinching the muscle of my left thigh. Trying to get her pointer finger and thumb around my wrist and showing that they didn’t meet to the table. Making remarks during the examination that made the Basques laugh.

The Americans had no idea what she was saying, but could guess. I tried to slide my chair away from her hands with no luck,

Ane told us later that she was saying I was strong like a Basque. That I was handsome like an American film star, and asked were we were spending the night?

She would, she said, like to sneak into my bedroom that night, because I couldn’t be happy with such a skinny wife.

We ate alubias rojas, with breaded fried pigs’ ears.

Glasses of cold beer, local red wine.

As the beer hit, I thought I saw pigs running around outside the window with bandaged ears like Dobermans.

After lunch, we hiked up into the mountains to visit an Etruscan tomb.

We stopped after a while and sat in the shade of a large oak tree, taking it all in. We could see into France, and the river, and the ocean. We drank white wine and smoked a joint Ane had rolled from hashish she had bought from some Egyptian sailors marooned when their cargo ship broke down outside Fuenterabbia.

Wayne laughed as he choked from a hit, and said, Christy, when I came back to the table at the Bar Basque last night with fresh beers, I forgot to tell you that the two young bartenders were asking about you. They had seen you at the beach.

Were you an American? Yes. Were you wearing a blue bathing suit. Yes. Did I know you well? Yes.

She is very beautiful. Yes.

They wanted to make sure you’d be on the beach again tomorrow.

No, I told them, we would be in Biarritz. Her husband wanted to go surfing.

Perfect, they cried, we’ll take the bus, girls are topless in Biarritz!

We began to hike again. Through the trees, stopping at the stones that were the graves of a forgotten Etruscan family who had farmed the same land two thousand years before.

We walked out of the grove, and I decided to take a photo of such a perfect day, in such a perfect place, with people I loved.

I had bought an Olympus 35mm camera just before we left Chicago.

It was the first compact 35mm SLR made. My brother Greg and I had bought them the same week. Buying an Olympus, like buying Klipsch speakers, or a Garrard turntable, driving a BMW, were the first things that uber hip stylish couples did to show their hipness, and success.

Next would be original art, turquoise jewelry, staying at the Jerome, and being known at Tramp.

I cried out: Wayne! Christy! Stop right there. I want to take your picture.

Ane, was up ahead, climbing much faster than we.

Hiking these mountains was something she had done since childhood.

Christy protested. She hated having her picture taken. She had modeled a bit in New York and it wasn’t pleasant, she said.

Wayne, having been in love with Christy since high school, stopped where he was, looked back at me, and said, take it.

– – He once was in Paris and told of sitting outside in a café and suddenly smelling Kiehl’s Musk. The perfume that Christy wore. He leapt up, knocking over the table. The glass of wine, the ashtray, the packet of Gauloise, his ink bottle, his Mont Blanc flying. His leather-bound note book landing under a fat Frenchman’s legs. He called out, Christy!, looking around wildly. He didn’t see her. Picked a direction and shouldered his way through the crowds, hoping to track her down like a bloodhound. No one wore Kiehl’s in this world except Christy Tate, he said. But, nothing. Cigarette smells. Soap smells. Guerlain, body odor.

He was in France. He walked back to the café, heartbroken. Could it have been her?- –

I took a quick shot.

Not framed. They were standing too far apart, a chance shot.

No thought. No idea of how it would turn out in the days of actual cameras, actual film, and waiting until back in the States to develop the photos.

The photo is below.

There have been many great photos taken of Christy. But, none more stylish and beautiful. Or more Christy Tate.

There has never been a better photo of Wayne. He does look like a movie star or a guy you’d love to trade stories with at the Cannes Film Festival.

Wayne gone. The novel never written. The staccato, hoarse from smoking a million Ducados, editorial comments coming from the kitchen in his San Sebastian apartment, as he argued with the morning papers, gone. Shooting pool at the A-Frame, winning $200 from a guy just out of Raiford, .45 tucked in the small of his back. Gone forever.

Christy’s jacket still hanging in her closet. A friend recently telling me that he’d had dinner with Julie Christie once in London and she had worn the same jacket.

Her look and style and beauty and character caught forever in a chance photo taken on a hillside above San Sebastian after lunch with the man with the biggest nose in the world.

The best photo I ever took.

-30-

Frequent contributor Michael Ledwith is a former bag boy at Winn-Dixie, who worked on the Apollo Program one summer in college. A former U.S. Army officer, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona and saw Baryshnikov dance ’Giselle’ at the Auditorium Theater.  Surfer. Rock and roll radio in Chicago. Shareholder, Christopher’s American Grill, London. Father. Movie lover—favorite dialogue: “I say he never loved the emperor.”