The Moth (8 page)

I am now in the van, we’re on our way to the bullfight, and I’m sitting next to my manager, Mr. Señor Ernest Hemingway.

And he says to me, “You know, this is my first time as a matador manager, and I’m rather nervous. How about you?” At that moment the van is going by the bullring, and outside the edges of the bullring is a poster bigger than this room. At the top it says “Mano a mano Dominguín versus Ordóñez” and underneath, “Sobresaliente, El Pecas.”

Now, I want to tell you what a
sobresaliente
is. It’s a substitute sword, and this matador, who’s the third matador, only goes in the ring if the other two have been blasted off the face of the sand, either by a goring or some other calamity.

We go under the stands now. We’re prepared for the
pasello
. You’ve all seen in the movies the
pasello
, where everybody goes across the sand—the horses and the matadors and everybody else. I’m standing there with these two great matadors. They have fixed my ceremonial cape so it’s exactly right.

And Antonio says to me, “Listen, be careful when we walk the
pasello
over to the judges’ stand where the
presidente
is, follow me exactly because of what happened when the matador, Letri, took young Count Teba in as his
sobresaliente
as a joke.
But Count Teba was a little bit wobbly, and the warden spotted him. They arrested him, and he spent a week in jail.”

And I thought,
Now’s the time to run.

But off we went. The horses first, then the two matadors, then El Pecas, and then the rest of them. Walking from there over to the president’s box felt like four miles. I did everything I could to be just like Antonio, and I guess I pulled it off. I didn’t wind up in jail. We doffed our hats to the president. I went into the
callejon
, which is the little alley between the wooden
barrera
and the first row of seats.

My manager is standing there. He says, “You know, there’s something I forgot to tell you.”

By the way, I’ll tell you one thing he told me in that wagon, that I glossed over, but you should know.

I said to him, “When I get to the ring, I’m not conversant with what a matador does. Give me some advice, you’re my manager!”

He says, “You only have to do three things. Number one: look tragic. The bullfighters are very serious, so you should look like you’re serious.”

I said, “Have you looked at me?”

He says, “Number two: when you get to the ring, people are watching you. Don’t lean on anything; it’s ugly for the suit. And number three: if the photographers come towards you, put your right foot forward—it’s sexier.”

So there’s my manager, who now says to me, “There’s something I forgot to tell you. There’s a fourth thing, and that is that you have to show yourself to this crowd. The
sobresaliente
always must make his presence known.”

Whatever blood was left unfrozen, froze.

At this point Dominguín had already fought the first bull.
Ordóñez got the second bull. He did a couple of cape works with him, and then he fixed him, so the bull was motionless. Then Antonio walked over to the
barrera
and motioned to me.

I came out. I doffed my hat to the crowd, and I was ready to leave, my cape was over my arm.

The fixed bull decided not to be fixed. If you can imagine yourself on a railroad track, and there’s a locomotive coming right at you, that was that bull.

Ordóñez said to me, “Pecas, don’t move!”

Don’t move? I was frozen stiff.

As the bull approached us and got within striking distance, Ordóñez, who was to my right, swiped his cape, pulled him away, and did a
faena
. And the
sobresaliente
, whose cape had slipped down, pulled it up. I guess the crowd thought I was making a pass. At any rate, I stiff-legged out of there, and that was my only experience in the ring.

Antonio was terrific with the last bull, his third bull. It was a
faena
like nobody had ever seen. The crowd went crazy. They waved their white handkerchiefs to influence the judges. And the judges gave him the ultimate award—both ears of the bull, the tail, and a hoof. And they also demanded a tour.

So now we do a tour of the ring, and Antonio comes out and brings me with him. So El Pecas, the
sobresaliente
, is now going to make a triumphal tour of the ring with this great matador. The aficionados in Spain are very appreciative of a great performance, and they throw all manner of things to the matador—cigars, bottles full of wine, tiaras, shoes, hats, money, shawls, decorated fans, and so forth.

So this cornucopia is falling down on us, and Antonio says, “Pecas, pick up the ladies’ shoes, nothing else. My men will get the rest.”

So I’m following him, and I’m picking up ladies’ shoes. Now, if you’ve got a tight jacket on, and you can’t really get your arms around, and your pants are so tight they feel like you’re going to fall over every time you bend down, picking up ladies’ shoes is not easy. And also, it’s not very fulfilling. Not for a matador. So we circle the ring, and my arms are full of ladies’ shoes.

We finish, and as is often customary, a group of men came out and they lifted Antonio up onto their shoulders, and they paraded him out to the streets to the hotel, and the band followed them. And left alone, in the center of the ring, was the
sobresaliente
with his arms full of shoes. I didn’t know I could move as fast as I did to get back to that van as it was pulling out.

I got back to the hotel, and I went to Antonio’s suite, and Antonio said, “Hey, Pecas! You were wonderful. Just throw them on the bed.” So I dump the shoes on the bed.

He said, “Come on, the wine is flowing, and we’ve got tapas!”

I went over. I had a glass of wine. Ernest was enjoying himself.

There was a knock on the door, and Antonio said, “Pecas, you get that.”

I open it up and there is the most gorgeous señorita you’ve ever seen. She’s in stocking feet; she’s holding one shoe.

She says, “I come for my other shoe.” She selects her shoe, and I put it on her dainty foot. And Antonio and Ernest come over and invite her for wine.

So we were all having wine and tapas, when there’s another knock on the door, and another knock on the door, and another knock on the door. And in they came. They reclaimed their shoes; they joined the party. It was wonderful. It was a marvelous party. They stayed until the wee hours.

And the next day, the photographer for
LIFE
magazine who
had been with us and taken pictures of the day before, he came with his prints. And there was a big eight-by-ten of a beaming El Pecas with the two great matadors of the world on his right and left.

And Ernest came over and said, “Ah, that’s wonderful, Hotch, you found your true profession.”

I said, “Just a minute, it may be wonderful to you, but look at the front of their pants, those significant humps, and then look at the insignificant thing that I have!”

He said, “How many handkerchiefs did you use?”

I said, “Handkerchiefs! You’re my manager, you didn’t tell me to use handkerchiefs.”

He said, “Well you’ve been to a lot of bullfights with me, didn’t you see that all these matadors have nice humps in the front of their pants?”

And I said, “The subject never interested me until now!”

He said, “All right, look, I can make it up. Antonio has his next fight in Ronda. He wants you to be there as his
sobresaliente
again. And this time, we’ll make a level playing field out of it.”

I said, “How?”

He said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.”

And then he paid me one of the greatest compliments I ever got, he said, “While they’re dressing, they’ll be using two handkerchiefs, but Pecas, you only need one.”

¡Olé!

A. E. Hotchner
is the author of nineteen books and numerous plays for Broadway and television. He became a close friend of Paul Newman’s after Paul starred in Hotchner’s film,
Adventures of a Young Man
. As a lark, with a bottle of Newman’s salad dressing,
they co-founded Newman’s Own, Inc., which has donated close to $400 million to charity, all the profits from its line of foods. Aaron Edward Hotchner was born and raised in St. Louis, where he earned a law degree from Washington University. In 1942, he left the practice of law to enter the Air Force, where he attained the rank of major. After the war, he became an editor and writer in New York, where he edited a novel written by Ernest Hemingway. For the next fourteen years, until Hemingway’s death, they remained solid friends. Hotchner’s memoir
Papa Hemingway
, an international best seller, is an account of that friendship. Hotchner also adapted many of Hemingway’s stories and novels for the theater, film, and television. In addition to their food business, Hotchner and Newman founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children with cancer and other life-threatening diseases; there are now sister camps throughout the United States and the rest of the world. Hotchner’s evocative memoir about growing up in St. Louis during the Great Depression,
King of the Hill,
was made into a movie in 1993, the screenplay adapted and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

DAMIEN ECHOLS

W
hen I first arrived on death row, the guards decided they were gonna welcome me to the neighborhood. So they took me to the part of the prison they call “the Hole.” It’s a very small, very dark, filthy part of the prison that’s in complete isolation. And for the next eighteen days they beat the hell out of me. They used to come in at about twelve, one o’clock in the morning, and they would chain me to the bars of the cell and beat me with nightsticks. They beat me so bad at one point that I started to piss blood. I still wake up at night sometimes now dreaming that I’m pissing blood again.

They starved me. They tortured me.

Eventually word of what they were doing started to leak out into the rest of the prison. Other prisoners started to hear about it. So they went to a deacon from the Catholic Church, who used to come to prison to bring Catholic inmates Communion, and they told him what was going on. And he went to the warden’s office, and he told the warden, “I know what you’re doing to this guy. I know you’re killing him. And if it doesn’t stop, I’m going to go public.”

So that night they took me out of the Hole and put me back in a regular prison cell. The other prisoners told me later that they had expected to see me carried out in a body bag any day. And I think the only reason they didn’t murder me is because they realized they were being watched.

When I was a kid, my family was incredibly poor, beyond dirt-poor. When we did finally move into a trailer park with running water and electricity, we thought we were really moving up in the world. I used to take refuge in books and music. Reading became a sanctuary for me. It allowed me to escape the world I lived in for a little while. I’d read Stephen King novels over and over, listen to music like Iron Maiden. I started dressing in black all the time because it was like a security blanket for me. It made me feel a little safer in an unsafe and scary world. I didn’t have many friends; in fact, my only real friend was this skinny blond kid with a mullet named Jason Baldwin, and Jason was with me the night I was arrested.

It was me, Jason, my sister, and my girlfriend sitting in the house, in the living room watching movies, when the cops started beating on the door. Hammering on it. And when I opened the door, they were pointing guns at me. They swarmed into the house like ants. They stampeded over everything and pawed through every single possession my family owned. They put me and Jason in handcuffs, threw us into the backs of cop cars, and took us to jail.

I spent all night in a cell about the size of a closet. I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom, wasn’t given so much as a drink of water. Every so often a cop would come in and ask me if I had anything to tell him, or if I was ready to make my confession yet. This went on all night, until the next day, when we were given an arraignment hearing. At this hearing the judge tells
me that I’m being charged with three counts of capital murder. That I’m being accused of killing three children as part of a satanic sacrifice. He says someone has confessed, but he refuses to read the confession in the courtroom. Instead, I am put in a broom closet somewhere in the back of the jail and given a transcript of this confession.

I’m only eighteen years old, and I’m in complete and absolute shock and trauma. I’m suffering from sleep deprivation. My life has just been destroyed. But even reading this thing, I could see that there was something wrong with it. It made no sense. It was like some sort of bizarre patchwork Frankenstein thing that they had stitched together. Turns out that they had picked up a mentally handicapped kid in our neighborhood and coerced him into making a confession, and then he was led to implicate Jason and me. Nothing in this confession made any sense whatsoever, but it didn’t matter to them. I was put in a cell, and I kept thinking,
Surely someone’s gonna step in and put a stop to this. Surely, someone is gonna rectify the situation. They can’t put you on trial and prove you’ve done something you haven’t done.
It seemed to me that science would say that’s impossible.