USS MULLINNIX DD-944
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Monevideo, Uruguay 1959
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Excerpt from "The Last Gun Ship - History of USS Mullinnix DD-944"
A Historical Novel By Frank A. Wood
Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay, the second smallest country in South America. Located on the Rio de la Plata in the southern part of the country, the city was founded around 1680 by the Spanish. Uruguay was established over a century later, in 1828, as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil. Montevideo is known for its picturesque architecture, impressive buildings, white sandy beaches and beach-resorts.
Montevideo has always been a navy town. Following fierce fighting with the British during the Battle of the River Plate on December 13, 1939, the commander of the German battleship Admiral Graf Spee sailed into the port of Montevideo, a neutral port during WWII, and sunk his ship to avoid risking his crew. The deed was more than the stalwart Captain Langsdorff could endure, and he took his own life 2 days later.
In search of appropriate watering holes, the crew was greeted by Plaza Independencia. Here, they explored the Ciudad Vieja, or Old City, with its colonial Spanish, Italian and Art Deco structures packed in along narrow streets. Some toured Museo Histórico Nacional, a unique collection of four buildings located in Ciudad Vieja, once homes to national heroes. The crew quickly learned that on weekends the Old City became a vast antique market offering fine silver, jewelry and art. But this was only Wednesday. As luck would have it they’d also discovered that the Mercado del Puerto, the city's port market, was the area that was packed with restaurants, clubs, and bars. It was ideal with small restaurants serving seafood and traditional parrillada (beef platters), a festive atmosphere replete with street vendors and musicians, and numerous bars that kept the city alive well after dark.
Montevideo had its share of hot tango clubs - magnets to the crew. Sultry and sexy, tango music captured the essence of Latin culture. The famous "La Cumparsita" tango was first played by the Roberto Firpo orchestra in the city in 1917. An important element of tango is sex, particularly female since it was originally a lascivious, erotic dance that could only be danced in a bordello and only by prostitutes. Tango was offered as a way of entertaining patrons before or after a sexual encounter. There was that intimate contact of two bodies almost plastered together that gave tango an erotic quality as well as a form of power and domination over the woman which was characteristic of the machismo that prevailed at the turn of the century. The tango lyrics are an important element as well as they provide the means of expression for the various emotions, hopes, disappointments, dreams, memories, anxieties, love and philosophy of life the music portrays.
The Muxmen found a night life that was an uninterrupted succession of visits to these tango dens, casinos, sophisticated night clubs that offer floor shows, high society parties, and clubs open until dawn.
Then there was the Brooklyn Club.
A sanctuary of sorts were sexuality, in women's terms, was practiced openly. The patrons represented a subverted slice of the city's culture. Small but vocal, they stood for an ideology of erotic discourse - such as sexual desire, the body, and bodily violence - and utilized them to challenge the dominant, traditional norms of women's sexual behavior.
Members of the crew were first drawn into the Brooklyn Club by the obvious ratio of women-to-men, slanted heavily in the favor of sailors. A blue and pink neon sign in the shape of a martini glass and a reclining nude inside it was stenciled against the blackened wall behind the bar. Floored in black and white marble squares, the place gave of the aura of an obscene life-size chess set with body-filled cane-backed chairs and drink-laden hand carved hardwood tables as the playing pieces. The female bartender, obviously from English speaking decent, sported a t-shirt that said: "I'm the fucking bartender. You got a problem with that?"
She was very slender. Not beautiful, but tall and gracefully erect. Her short dark hair, sculpted tight to her head like a Hollywood film star's. Her long straight nose and darkened lids enlarged and dramatized her smoky grey eyes. But then she smiled at them. A gash of red in the center of her face expanded into a horrible smile of anticipated sex. She was missing so many teeth her tongue looked like it was in prison.
Gulping, SM3 Brent Jones looked at his running mate QM3 Brandan Halloway and said, "Do you think she's easy or sleazy?"
Halloway answered, "What's the difference?"
Smiling, Jones replied, "The makeup mainly!"
They found an empty table. The music from the stage, by now almost animal in ferocity, vibrated back to the drinkers at the oaken bar. Under soft neon lighting the crew witnessed acts of self-violence and self-destruction, some staged some not. With eyes riveted and mouths open in fly-catcher mode, they watch as women flagellated themselves, some even cutting themselves and shaving their heads. Spell bound, in part by the way they were ignored by those around them and on stage, that were mesmerized by performances of lesbian relationships and masturbation. The males in the audience were only left with images as the eroticism was articulated as a search and celebration of sex-role differentiation.
The participants were showing that the erotic is not external but deeply subjective and ambiguous, and it is open to many possible interpretations, from a violent and vulgar sexuality to sensual and tender.
Jones, Halloway, and the rest were spell bound and cemented in their chairs. They had never experienced anything like this. Eroticism that validated women's erotic desires, their sexual identities and erotic imagination. Homosexual female desire that was linked to an international movement for the rights of women. The Mullinnix sailors were not capable of understanding the erotic imagination of women and the expression of female sexuality nor the recognition of the linkage between eroticism, self-knowledge, power, and the undertones of domination.
They sat, willingly, through performances of art, linguistics and narrative experimentation. They were witness to women showing men's need for women to achieve a complete formation of their own identity while suggesting that women have finally liberated themselves from men.
Here, in this place, of all places, a hand full of Mullinnix sailors witnessed the birth of what would become the 1960s sexual revolution in the United States.
As the sun broke on 21 March, the Mullinnix was the setting for another series of diplomats and dignitaries. The US Ambassador to Uruguay and Uruguay Minister of Foreign Affairs came on board for an informal tour of ship. This was followed by a luncheon for the Uruguayan Minister of Defense, Commander Uruguayan Operating Group #1, and Inspector General of Uruguayan Navy, hosted by the US Ambassador to Uruguay.
To be continued...
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