Happy Hare, the Promo Sapiens Part 3

(Click on at the bottom of this page for HH Parts 1 and 2)

Well, boys and girls, if you will remember last week’s exciting adventure, I had returned to San Diego from the Midwest after seven years’ absence. My aim was to be aimless. I did not need to return to radio to massage my ego. I had done everything except fly to the moon, so I began casting about for new experiences. Finding none after a futile nine months search, I answered the siren call of radio and returned to KCBQ. The “Q” had been #1 when I left and was now #5.. I would like to leave it dangling that the slump of KCBQ was due to my leaving but the truth is that this happens as a natural condition of radio. My sophisticated reader will nod in agreement and save me a paragraph.

Fast forward to my donning a signal orange fighter pilot coveralls and a classic Air Force fleece lined leather jacket with all of the Miramar Naval Air Station squadron patches, loaned to me by Captain “Hap” Chandler, the C.O. My basic gear was Spartan: Two dozen miniature San Diego 200th anniversary commemorative bronze mission bells in a small suit case, and three pairs of shorts, three pairs of socks and shaving gear.

In order to set an official world record, I had to depart from San Francisco, fly to London, to Moscow, to Tokyo, then return to San Francisco in 43+ hours. Doing this, I was in the Guinness Book, a great shtick for getting me going again in San Diego.

There was a gala send-off by friends at San Fran, yet my wife Carol held onto me like we were in that foggy airport scene in the movie “Casablanca” where Rick bids farewell to a heart broken Ilsa. I resisted telling Carol, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” She gave me a lingering kiss and a smothering embrace. Like Rick, I did turn and walk off into the fog. The San Francisco fog.

Although my boss did not buy a first class ticket, Pan Am was alerted to my quest and put me up front. The passenger on the seat next to me nodded and turned away in deep concentration toward a large map on his lap that looked startlingly familiar: the unique relationship of the land to a river that ran alongside it, the shape of the harbor that had been etched in my memory for years. Finally, unable to contain myself, I blurted out,” Isn’t that a map of Abadan?”

He almost jumped out of his seat and looked at me like I had just shot him. There was no legend on the map that identified it as Abadan, Persia (now Iran). In a panic, he folded the map, and stuffed it into this brief case. But the damage was done, It was Abadan, alright. What are the odds?

“How” he stammered, “Did you know?” When I was 17,” I explained, “I shipped out of Galveston and went to Abadan several times. I was a helmsman on a T-2 tanker and that is a map of Abadan.” I remembered it because the barefooted but otherwise resplendently uniformed pilot who jumped aboard few miles short of the port supplied me with an Abadan navigational map each time I steered the giant ship up the Shatt Al Arab river to this cesspool of a city.

Abadan was shaped like no other in the world. A lop sided triangle with rounded corners, and with a crisscross of open gutters that comprised its sewage system. The Shatt Al Arab flowed on the west side of the city, where all the ships docked in a long line of wharves.

I tried to calm him down.  “I’m Hare. I have a morning radio show in San Diego and I apologize if I upset you. Your map brings back a lot of memories. Can I take a look?” : He reluctantly took it out of his brief case and handed it over. This was not the Abadan I knew. This was a colorful map rendered by the Frank Lloyd Wright Institute, depicting a magical place with bounteous parks, huge reflection pools, dazzling mosques, and with the open gutters now underground as in a modern city.

I looked toward him and he answered my unspoken question. “I am the president of an oil pipeline company,” he said, “and this is our gift to the Shah for the generous support he has shown my company.” Then he paused and eyeballed me. “Please keep this to yourself. It is a highly secret project.” I promised him on one condition: that I could have a copy of the map. He reluctantly handed it to me to clinch the deal.

I stared incredulously at the map, mentally overlaying his dreamscape of an opulent Abadan with my nightmare of the Abadan I recalled I had been warned by the skipper not to go into the Bazaar area after dark The smiling obsequious man who will sell you a watch in the daytime is the same man who will kill you for the shoes on your feet at night.

Stark memories flooded my mind. like post traumatic shock of the time years ago. when I was retuning late to the ship and a gang of shrieking thugs exploded. out of the shadows behind me, closing fast. There had to be a couple of dozen of them.

I took off like a Texas jackrabbit. I was a skinny Galveston boy in those days and a fast runner fueled by a massive burst of adrenaline coursing through my body. No one was gaining on me but I was running out of room. A block. ahead of me was the wharf, about 20 feet above the river. I raced to the edge of the wharf and without breaking stride. dove in, surfaced and began swimming like a sped up film.

Now, the mob was standing on the wharf bellowing out cries of rage and then it got worse: some of them had guns and began firing into the water. Bullets whizzed past my head like angry hornets. I was terrified that even one fateful bullet would rip into my flesh and send me sinking into the fetid waters of the Shatt Al Arab river.

Then, a miracle happened. I now heard gun fire from two sides. The crackling pops from the wharf and now from. a heavy machine gun firing from the bow of a large gun boat that was spraying above the heads of these crazies,. The boat with a deep- throated engine glided closer. Then I heard a voice shouting through a bull horn in Farsi, apparently telling the men on shore to run away or be killed. .They stopped firing and fled. Looking up to the boat, I could make out a British flag on the fantail. .The blinding glare of a spotlight focused on me from a few yards away. Then, I heard a distinctly British accent telling me to hold on and that they were coming to pick me up.

Hauled out of the water, I struggled on the deck to stand on rubbery legs.. They gently sat me down and covered me with a blanket and one said. “We are British Navy , lad, and you are f---in’ lucky we came along.” They docked and took me to a bedroom at the British Seamen’s Hall where I collapsed till the next morning, then was taken back to the ship.

Now, snuggling into the soft leather seat of the London-bound jet, I tucked the map into my suitcase and sank into a peaceful nap, knowing that when I returned to the show in San Diego, I was going to have a gripping ratings-making story to tell .The framed map of the Disneyesque Abadan, the Shah’s aborted gift, still hangs in my den, the Abadan that would never be.