Notes From Key West
Getting to Key West involves driving in a straight line, with water on each side (the GPS display will show a long line surrounded by blue), for almost three hours. For most of it, there’s only one lane in either direction, which means you’re often forced behind the same car for long stretches. I got stuck behind a dusty pickup with the following bumper sticker: Stand Up For America, Be American!
I thought about this sticker for almost 40 miles. What did it mean? Did it mean that in order to stand up for America you had to be from America? This point of view requires the belief that all problems can be fixed internally, and that no one from the outside has anything of value to add (which runs counter to the impact immigrants have had on the country). It also implies that ideas from the outside, having originated from somewhere foreign, are inherently worthless.
Or does it mean that in order to stand up for America, you have to act “American”, meaning you have to drop customs and beliefs and enact some sort of elusive American-ness (that I suspect involves SUVs, red meat and a fear of socialism). Also, what are you standing up to?
The dusty pickup signals left, then turns right. Why? “Because fuck you, that’s why,” I imagine the driver saying.
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The woman behind the counter at our hotel is blonde, freckled and deeply, unavoidably Russian. I say this because I half expect Yakoff Smirnoff to be providing her voice from a soundproof Hollywood studio. “You don’t want to ride bicycles. You should rent scooters,” she says. Our room isn’t ready. We walk to Duval Street.
At the Key West Key Lime Pie Company, another girl, also voiced by Smirnoff, extolls the virtues of local key limes. Did the USSR actually win the cold war? No, but she’s dead on about the key limes.
“This pie is fucking delicious,” I say to no one in particular.
“да,” she says.
Back at the hotel the freckled blonde has been replaced by another Soviet comrade.
“You should consider renting bicycles, scooters are dangerous,” he says with a thick accent.
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I suspect that the majority of guests at the Hemingway House have never read his books. I may be wrong, but my suspicions are aroused by a plump bottle blonde with the thickest southern drawl I’ve ever heard. “What movie did Hemingway direct?” she asks her husband. She has a list of “Key West Attractions” and checks Hemingway House off the moment they buy a ticket.
The tour guide at the house wears a sleeveless vest and looks like he’s going on safari. He sits off to the side with three other similarly dressed men, who all have the sleepy, nonchalant air of alcoholics used to hanging out on weekday afternoons. In that regard, they might actually be the only thing about this that remains true to Hemingway’s era: they look like characters from To Have and Have Not. I try to imagine each of them as hard-nosed bootleggers, but one of them has a t-shirt that says “The Man… The Legend” with arrows pointing to his face and crotch. It’s hard to picture him covered in blood, frantically dumping crates of contraband alcohol into the ocean.
The house is filled with six-toed cats (which the tour guide bribes with treats), old furniture, books and pictures of Hemingway fishing and hunting. We’re told that Papa often wrote standing up.
“Hemingway was a real man,” my wife says.
I have never hunted, held a gun or finished a novel – standing or otherwise. Hell, the only time I went deep sea fishing, I threw up. I am, at most, a quarter of a man.
(I spent the rest of the day weighing every decision against what I thought Papa would do.)
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There seems to be a defacto fashion style for middle-aged American men here, it involves: sandals or sneakers, shorts, a utility belt, a t-shirt (usually related to a college football team) and sunglasses resting on a baseball cap. They all look like mentally unstable fishermen.
“Maybe they are fishermen,” my wife says, pretending she didn’t hear the mentally unstable part. I’m dubious. Most of them seem like tourists, which is just frightening: it’s not tied to one geographic location.
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We watch the second half of the Milan-Barcelona soccer game at an Irish pub on Duval Street.
“Two more pints?” The waitress, from Dublin, asks. What would Papa do?
“Yes,” I say.
We’re sitting next to a couple from Napoli, an Asian Milan fan from San Jose, and a group of Croatian teenage boys, who shout with glee every time Messi touches the ball.
I don’t believe Hemingway would have ever experienced anything quite like this.
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There’s a barefoot man in Mallory Square who plays the guitar and sings. His skin is amber and leathery, tough with years of abusive, excessive sunshine. He sings All Along the Watchtower and sounds like someone who has had a tracheotomy. At song’s end, he laughs and says, “pretty good for a white boy.” I disagree but give him a quarter.
“Is that all?” he asks.
“You’re not so white,” I say to him. He laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. I am afraid.
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Just behind Mallory Square, there is a garden of busts depicting prominent Key West citizens. From Flagler to Simonton…you can get a good sense of the city’s history (and fashion trends) with a quick walk through faces of the past. Why don’t other cities erect something like this? It reminds me of the statues outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (the Portico degli Uffizi), except it’s much less overwhelming and confidence shredding (the one in Florence features Michelangelo, Dante, Galileo and motherfucking Benvenuto Cellino, the biggest badass of his era).
I wonder, though, what did the artist use to create these busts? Who decided what image to recreate?
I am about as photogenic as a hyena. I would hate for someone in my family to choose a picture from something like a Facebook photo album, and then have some other asshole create a bust from it.
Would Papa have used Facebook?
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A man on stage at Sloppy Joe’s is singing a song about his daddy’s balls. It’s called “My Daddy’s Balls”. The whole bar sings along to the second chorus, while a family at the front of the bar, with three small children, shrinks in terror. The man next to me actually points at them and laughs.
“Another pint?” The bartender asks us.
“Yes.”
It’s 3 pm and we’re completely wasted.
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“Where can I take you?” The cabbie asks us.
“Somewhere good to eat,” I blurt out.
“Hmm. You want something “good” or somewhere I’d go?” he asks, making the quotation mark signs in the air with his fingers. I have no idea what this means.
“Some place you’d go,” I say. Why not trust a local?
“Are you from here?” I ask.
“No. I’m from a small town outside Detroit,” he answers, gunning through traffic and never once turning the meter on.
“Um, why don’t we call that 5 dollars?” He says when we arrive.
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Conch Fritters are everywhere in Key West. Apart from the ubiquitous Key Lime Pie (We had three slices: Key West Key Lime Co, Kermit’s and Salute – the latter had a thick layer of meringue and was worse off for it), conch-anything is the most visible food offering. Which brings up a question: ”What the hell is a conch?” It sounds like it could be slang for vagina.
“It’s an escargot,” a waitress at Alonzo’s told us.
“I’ll have the lobster sandwich,” I told her.
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Roosters and wild chickens roam the streets of Key West. On the walk home, we count four. They strut around like they own the place, the arrogant cocks.
Coincidentally, I now know another answer to the joke, “why did the chicken cross the road?”
“To pick from a discarded slice of pizza in an empty plastic beer cup.”
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A black man rides down Duval on a tricycle equipped with hundreds of lights. Whenever he peddles, blazingly loud Cajun music erupts from speakers, cutting through everything on the street: the overflowing bars, drunk males, embarrassed wives, worried mothers, depressed fathers, idling cars, rumbling motorcycles and overdressed drag queens (who all seem to be handing out flyers).
He seems to have no real motivation, other than getting attention and making people happy: people of all ages stop what they’re doing when he rides by. They smile, bump his fist and dance.
Apparently, he does this every night.
Here’s a video of him (with a different song):
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When you hear a rooster at 6 in the morning, it’s easy to think you’re dreaming. When you hear five of them, it’s even easier to ask, “what in the fucking fuck is going on?”
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Memorial beach is quiet and almost desolate: it has white sand, wave-breaking rocks and a long pier that stretches out into the ocean. The only other person on the beach is a fat guy sitting in a beach chair. He’s facing the water and his positioning and demeanour can only be described as “like a fucking boss”.
A solitary picnic table sits in the middle of the beach. A rooster and a dog are using it to have something of a stand off. The dog seems to be asking, “what the hell are you?” while the rooster is more confrontational.
“Bitch, get away from my table,” I imagine him saying, although I may be projecting – this kind of setting lends itself to that.
At the foot of the pier, there is a memorial to citizens who have passed away from AIDS.
The names are seemingly endless, just like the ocean ahead.
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Higgs Beach is scenic and lively. It’s the kind of place that makes you ask yourself, “Why don’t I live here?”
Looking out onto the water, you start to imagine yourself living a kind of Hemingwayan existence, buying a great property and spending your days writing A Farewell to Arms. Or maybe you can live like one of his characters, fishing, bootlegging and generally living like a real man.
Of course now, the properties are expensive, forcing you to cover expenses by turning it into a guesthouse or hotel, another cog in the tourism industry swallowing the island. Still, even this doesn’t seem so bad, until you start imagining yourself ten or twenty years down the road, cleaning up after disgusting, drunken guests. We could always sell, you think, and then you realize that the only bidders would be wealthy Russians, who would offer half your asking price (because they know you’d take it).
You could almost see yourself buying a Stand Up for America, Be American! bumper sticker.
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Leaving Key West, there’s a sign telling you that ten people have been killed on US1 (the only road to get on and off the island) in 2011. As a reminder, crosses with names dot the highway, like signposts for mortality. After a certain point, you also see a Crocodile Crossing sign.
So, to sum up, if you make a mistake, you will die on the road. If you happen to survive that mistake, however, the crocs will finish you off.
I was tired and sleepy when we left, but these things have a way of waking you up.
What would Papa do?
He’d drive (and maybe kill a few crocs with his bare hands).
