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By Root 691 0

most of them slightly older and much more experienced than I was at seventeen. Sitting each morning in the college dining facility and later the neighborhood bar with eight or ten of these women at a time, I’d learned, painfully at times, that women have nothing to learn from men in the bad behavior department, particularly when they travel in packs. They drank more than I did. They talked about stuff that made even me blush. They rated the sexual performance of the previous night’s conquests on a scale of one to ten, and carved up the class of incoming freshmen ahead of time – drawing circles around their faces in the Welcome to Vassar pamphlet introducing the new fish – like gangsters dividing up building contracts.

I was afraid. Very afraid.

When I showed up at the cooking school, a whole posse of women was waiting for me: Luis’s daughters Virginia and Visi (also a chef), and three friends, their faces brimming with mischief. I’d compounded the danger factor by bringing along my wife, Nancy, a woman with her own limitless potential for causing mayhem, and I knew, just knew, that the all-male adventure the night before was a trip to Disneyland compared to what was in store for me now. There’s an expression in Spain that translates as ‘a little bit – often,’ a phrase usually invoked before setting out on a poteo – what we might call a ‘bar crawl.’ Essentially, the way a poteo works is this: You bounce around from one tapas joint to another, eating what they call pinchos (the local term for tapas) and drinking txacoli, red wine, in measured amounts. Drop in, eat what’s great – and only what’s great – at each particular bar, then move on.

We had the TV crew lurking ahead and behind us as we set out through the streets of the parte vieja, and I was keeping a sharp, worried eye on Nancy, who hated the idea of making a television show, hated being near a camera, and had already taken a serious dislike to the producer for keeping me busy most of the day shooting ‘B-roll,’ meaning scenery, shots of me walking around and pretending I was thinking deep thoughts, while she stewed, neglected, in a hotel room. If the producer elbowed her out of a wide shot one more time, I knew, she was going to sock him in the neck. I’d seen her use that punch before – on a too-friendly woman at a sailors’ bar in the Caribbean. She’d leaned behind me, drawn back, and walloped a much larger woman two stools down, straight in the carotid. The woman went down like a sack of lentils. I didn’t want to see that again. I made out Matthew, the producer, walking backward in the darkness and decided there would be no contest. Nancy could take him with one arm behind her back. Besides, she already had allies. She was now commiserating with Virginia and Visi and their friends behind me. I could hear them all laughing, the other women immediately sympathizing. If things degenerated into senseless violence, I’d just walk away and leave Matthew to his fate. Besides, I was still pissed about the Jerry Lewis incident.

The girls – that’s how they referred to themselves – were all sharp, attractive, fiercely independent women in their mid to late thirties, happily single and totally unneurotic about sex. When a camera guy, making casual conversation, asked one of the friends if she liked to dance, she shrugged and said, ‘I like to fuck’ – not an invitation, by the way, just a casual statement of fact. I felt, in spite of the lingering potential for violence, reasonably comfortable and among friends. These women acted like . . . well, cooks.

It takes experience to navigate the tapas bars of San Sebastián the way we did that night. Temptation is everywhere. It’s hard not to gorge too early, fill up too soon, miss the really good stuff later in a haze of alcohol. The first place was a good example: Ganbara, a small semicircular bar with no seats and room for about twenty people standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Laid out in a breathtaking display on clean white marble was the most maddeningly enticing spread of bounty: snow-white anchovies glistening in olive oil, grilled