History of My Reading: Florida Fantasies

 

West Palm Beach--1970s postcard

When I abandoned my Cambridge apartment in late 1975 and arrived in my hometown of Greensburg, PA, I immediately regretted it. I felt I’d made a terrible mistake.

I quickly made a panicked call to Linda, the young woman I’d been seeing who lived on the floor above in my Cambridge building (discounting for her possible regret over youthful folly, I’ve disguised her name.) She assured me I could return, and that settled me for awhile.

But it turned out I wasn’t back for long, at least at that point. First came a car trip with Linda from the desultory north in February, down the gradually warming East Coast to Florida, where I’d never been. We stopped first in West Palm Beach to stay with her relatives, an older couple who had a ranch house in a slightly scrubby wooded area off Forest Hill Blvd.

Her direct relative was Jane, who had lived in Los Angeles in the thirties and forties, working in Hollywood and later, during the latter part of World War II, at one of the many aircraft plants that transformed southern California. Hers made bombers.

I’ve forgotten what she did in Hollywood—maybe the costume department-- but she worked on the 1935 classic “The Informer,” and knew John Garfield, Al Jolson and other stars. Carole Lombard was as “wild off-screen as on.” She recalled that the vibe between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall was so intense when they met while making To Have and Have Not that people all over the studio lot found a reason to visit the set and watch them together.

Eventually Jane met a young sailor there in Los Angeles and married him. When I met him, Jim was a movie model of an old salt: deep, very tanned wrinkles, thin to the point of seeming frail. He had the slightly haunted demeanor of someone who’d struggled with drink. But he was charming and funny, with a soft southern accent and courtesies. They lived in Florida mostly because he had a good job cooking on board ship for a wealthy shipbuilder.

Jane took a shine to me, and over shrimp at our farewell dinner at Frederick’s French Onion Soup restaurant in Palm Beach, she decided that my real name was John—John Severini. She noted that in every restaurant we ate—sometimes in the company of other of her friends-- the servers presented me with the bill. Before we left Jane gave me some old movie stills from her collection, because she felt I was someone who would appreciate them.

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in Palm Beach

Palm Beach was the older and far richer city, settled by millionaires in the 19^th century. It received new prominence in the early 1960s when President Kennedy used a family home there. Palm Beach is also the location of the now infamous Mar-a-Lago. There are fewer than 10,000 full-time residents even now.

Contrast that with West Palm, the poorer relation across the Intercoastal Waterway, with a population of 124,000. It was only 23,000 when we visited in 1976.

Even then, the divide between the rich and the rest was keenly felt. Everyone I met in West Palm didn’t really want to be there.

The only other memory I have of West Palm is a sunburn and its remedy. When I complained of the burn, Linda took me outside the house into some small nearby trees in sandy ground, and pointed out a number of plants growing among them. They were aloe plants. She removed some sticky substance, I rubbed it on and the mild burn was soon all but gone. This was years before aloe became so widespread in over the counter products.

From West Palm we drove down to Key West, the final leg being the strangest and straightest highway in America (US Highway 1), much of it over water. We pitched Linda’s tent at a fairly crowded and often raucous campground of mostly young travelers, but at least near enough to decent sanitary facilities.

1976 postcard

Key West is essentially an island at the southernmost tip of the East Coast, a famous 90 miles from Cuba (a figure often repeated during the Cuban Missile Crisis). Because of this location and remoteness, its first and furtive residents were reputed to be smugglers, pirates and bootleggers as well as those engaged in fishing and other legal pursuits, such as harvesting sponge, sea turtles and conch, the mollusk that remains a Key West identifier.

Eventually its weather and the fishing put it on the map. In 1946, President Harry Truman established his Little White House there. Over the years it was devastated several times by hurricanes.

Key West also became known for a tolerance that extended to interracial relationships and homosexuals not as welcome elsewhere in the US. By the 1930s it was attracting artists and particularly writers. Poet Elizabeth Bishop and most famously, fictionist Ernest Hemingway established residences there, as did dramatist Tennessee Williams a decade or so later.

Robert Frost & W. Stevens in Key West

Others in this period made extended visits, sometimes annually. Wallace Stevens is a notable example. The eminently respectable poet who walked to his office every day as a vice-president in one of the major insurance companies in Hartford, Connecticut, and grappled with metaphysical questions in his poems, had a number of drunken episodes in Key West that have entered historical gossip. As a regular visitor Stevens graciously welcomed Robert Frost on his first trip, but after a few too many at a cocktail party, argued incoherently with him at dinner, somewhat scandalizing his fellow New England poet.

On another occasion, Stevens worked himself into an inebriated rage and challenged Ernest Hemingway to a fight, drunkenly swung and missed, then landed a blow that broke his hand. Though Stevens was larger, Hemingway was younger and more skilled. He knocked Stevens into a mud puddle. (Both participants corroborated the basics of this story.)

Beyond indulging in bad behavior away from prying eyes, Key West also inspired Stevens’ poetry, notably the long poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” (not meant ironically, except maybe privately) that literary writer Jay Parini ranked second on his list of the ten best American poems. Both effects—inspiration and inebriation-- recurred among a later generation of writers who began appearing in Key West in the early 1970s.

Guy De Valdene, Tom McGuane with
Richard Brautigan in foreground:
Key West early 1970s

Though Tennessee Williams was still around, Truman Capote visited often, and other writers such as Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America) and playwright James Kirkwood (1976 Pulitzer Prize winner for A Chorus Line) were on the scene at times, the core group was comprised of fishing writer and memoirist Guy De Valedene, novelist Tom McGuane and his close friend from college days at Michigan State, poet and fictionist Jim Harrison. They were there for the fishing (as Hemingway had been) and magical waters as well as the spicy anarchy of the Key West scene.

“It was an island totally devoid of rules of behavior,” Harrison recalled in his memoir Off To The Side, “a tropical island fueled by sunlight, dope, and booze, as far from Kansas as you could ever get in America.”

These three writers were also close friends with an itinerant local musician, Jimmy Buffett. Together they were so embedded in the Key West life that both Buffett and McGuane met future wives at the Chartroom Bar.  McGuane’s choice was Buffett’s sister.

By the time I visited in 1976, I’d read just one slim volume of Harrison’s poems, and McGuane’s 1973 eye-opening novel Ninety-Two in the Shade, a National Book Award nominee set in Key West. (I’ve always remembered—or maybe misremembered—that in its pages someone observes that the great American law is that it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.) I didn’t know of their ongoing connection to Key West. But I was aware of Jimmy Buffett as the reigning spirit of the place.

Jimmy Buffett is his Key West  bar band days

He was just becoming nationally known: his breakout album “Havana Daydreamin’ had just come out weeks before, but its first single was on the radio, and I loved it. “Woman Going Crazy on Caroline Street” had such resonant lines as “she listens to the jukebox for her answers,” and “she slides her dapper legs from beneath the table/as if to reveal some kind of treat” (“dapper legs” is classic) and that haunting chorus: “There’s a woman going crazy on Caroline Street/ stopping every man that she does meet/saying if you be gentle, if you be sweet/I’ll show you my place on Caroline Street.”

We didn’t see any of these notables (and likely wouldn’t have known it if we had) but by 1976 the era was already fading. Tourism was starting to swamp the place (its population then was under 8,000; now it’s 23,000) and we heard complaints about invasions from New York. I saw some of that once when I peeked into the compound surrounding the only chain hotel in the small central area, between the Coast Guard dock and Duval Street: there were hundreds of pale northerners intent on rapid tanning, packed into the area around the pool as densely as a Manhattan subway, or a Coney Island beach.

There was so much marijuana being smuggled in, Harrison recalled, that it was virtually free, but in the late 70s the cocaine trade invaded, with cartels and serious violence. The innocence was gone, the writers were getting older (and better known), and so that scene faded.

Jim Harrison & McGuane, some years later

McGuane retreated to Montana, his highest fame behind him but with enduring new writing, while Harrison would create a body of work over the next several decades that to me seems likely to grow in recognition, a major American writer of his generation. And Jimmy Buffett soon became internationally famous, acquiring a perennially loyal following and almost mythic dimensions below the flavor of the week radar, and becoming a billionaire along the way, as well as—to the astonishment of his old literary buddies—a best-selling author, topping both fiction and nonfiction lists.

Meanwhile, cocaine was already such a big problem that Florida had set up an “Operation Conch” that yielded more than 20 arrests. But while we were in Key West, the big news was that a former City Attorney who’d been busted for delivering cocaine was exonerated, when a snitch finally admitted he lied. He’d also been the source for other arrests. Of the City Attorney, a state law enforcement spokesperson deadpanned, “He was set up. He was framed.” Where was Hemingway when we needed him?

There were probably scattered photos on barroom walls of the 1970s writers but the conspicuous monuments belonged to Hemingway. His spacious house on Whitehead Street was a registered national historic landmark, and at the time, number 18 on the list of 48 Sites To See in Key West.

Hemingway & Pauline 1927

In 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer in Paris, the journalist daughter of a wealthy American. For the birth of their first child, Pauline wanted to return to the United States. Key West may have been suggested as a residence by the writer and Hemingway hunting and fishing companion, John Dos Passos. Pauline’s uncle bought them this house, and they moved there early in the 1930s.

Key West was then as much Cuban as American, and Hemingway may have first visited it from Havana. The English speakers were mostly railroaders, fishermen and descendants of New England sailors. Several Native tribes had been the first inhabitants, and in the mid-19th century Key West became a haven for fugitive slaves. By then it was a major salt supplier, and civil war in Cuba brought Cuban tobacco factories. For a few years Key West was the richest and largest settlement in Florida. Key West cigars were still part of the local economy when Hemingway arrived, though the 1930s Great Depression hit hard, as suggested by his novel To Have and Have Not.

My own history with Hemingway began while he was still alive, and I saw his photo spread that accompanied his novel The Old Man and the Sea, first published in the pages of Life Magazine. I even recall reading it there, though it is unlikely since it was 1952 and I was 6 years old. It became an immense best-seller and led directly to his Nobel Prize in 1954. But whenever it was, I’m sure this was the first of his work I read.

I had some later Hemingway binges, including reading his stories lying mostly naked for days in a tiny room in Berkeley, covered in wet baking soda—a hippie remedy for a bad case of poison oak—while eating Oreo cookies and drinking cheap California white wine from the grocery next door. In 1976 my latest binge had been just a few years before in Cambridge, after I read his just published posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. (Though Jim Harrison had Key West and Upper Michigan rivers in common with Hemingway, and was sometimes lamely and lazily compared with him, he professed not to like most of his work. One of the exceptions was that novel.)

I also knew Hemingway’s classic Paris Review interview, with its reverent if also earthy treatment of the writing vocation. Though in college I’d preferred Scott Fitzgerald, he had still been the figure of the writer I’d grown up with.

Hemingway House tour, evidently during Covid

We took the $1 tour of his Key West house, where whatever quiet observation let alone hushed awe I might have applied was mostly shattered by the company of noisy tourists. I couldn’t even concentrate on his writing studio, being distracted by the young blond in shorts and platform shoes walking in front of me, but I did note the writing tablet and pencil on the desk, and the balled up paper on the floor, just the kind of absurd and inauthentic touch that characterizes modern tourism. I also noted that our tour guide had much more to say about Pauline’s decorative choices, which probably was appropriate.

But Hemingway, in his thirties, really did write there. I recently re-read A Farewell To Arms which he finished there, when I was researching the far northern Italian front in World War I for my Severini Saga, because my grandfather had been there. So had Hemingway briefly, though earlier than the actual war events in his novel. He also wrote To Have and Have Not in that Key West house, which I dipped into more recently, but found pretty much unreadable. It’s also much different from the Bogart and Bacall (and John Huston) movie.

When we were there in late February 1976, Key West was coping with water shortages from a recent drought and an economic recession, but was also experiencing a record year for tourism. Some businesses were shuttered while other areas were rebuilding.

2017 photo by Judd McCrain

Presiding over the Duval Street area of bars and restaurants was Sloppy Joe’s, famous as a Hemingway hangout from the 1930s. Among the resident memorabilia was his birth certificate mounted on the wall.

I remember it as akin to an open air market, with shuttered sides open to the sun-white streets in two directions, though it still managed to be dark inside. The jukebox was formidable: everything from the Eagles to Glenn Miller, Harry Belafonte’s calypso period, and of course Jimmy Buffett. In the men’s room I spotted and copied grafitti expressing what could be the Key West ethic: “Where would we be if everybody did what they were told…”

Sloppy Joe’s was still under its original ownership then (Sloppy Joe himself, reputed to be the model for the barkeep in To Have and Have Not, or his family.) Later management began the annual Hemingway Festival, which includes a lookalike contest yielding unappetizing crowds of bulky men with florid white beards.

At nearby El Cacique Restaurant I ate my first plates of Cuban-style black beans and yellow rice, and my first slices of homemade Key Lime pie. I don’t remember that we made it to Crazy Ophelia’s Cafe on Duval, if indeed it was still there, but in 1972 Jimmy Buffett often played at this counterculture haven—it’s where he first sang “Margaritaville,” his signature song, just after writing the final verse on his way to the gig.

I might mention that at this point in my life—in fact, for most of it—I constitutionally could not maintain a decent relationship with the world unless I played a little guitar or piano every day. So I traveled with my guitar and took every opportunity on every open piano I encountered. And I encountered one at a bar in Key West. I’d been happily playing my blues runs when the owner approached and offered me a job playing there regularly.

He didn’t mention terms but considering that Jimmy Buffett played at a local bar for years for nothing more than free beer and tips, I’d assume they were similar. However I quickly demurred, saying I was just passing through, and got out of there quickly, before he noticed that I could play only variations on the same three and four chord patterns in different keys. Still, it was a memorable occasion (even though it took resurrecting the old notebook to remind me): my one and only job offer as a piano player came in fabled Key West.

1970s Key West

The evening would commence with a gathering down at the Coast Guard dock to watch the sun drop into the ocean, Key West being the only place on the East Coast where this phenomenon occurs. When the orange ball dipped below the horizon and then suddenly disappeared, the crowd would applaud. It was such a well-known custom that food vendors assembled at the entrance, with the occasional street performers. Apparently in later years this has become much more elaborate, and much more for the tourists.

Then we might sample the night life before returning to the campgrounds, which in a notebook I described as our “suntanned tenement.”

On our way back north we stopped for a few hours at Walt Disney World in Orlando, my first and only visit. At that time just the Magic Kingdom area was open, and it was only five years old. But already the Disney convenience/control ethos was evident, beginning with the signs on the highway approaching the park directing visitors to tune to a certain AM radio frequency for instructions, and including the parking lots and sections named after Disney characters.

My recollections begin in the same vein as those from my day at the New York World’s Fair in 1965: blinding heat reflected off concrete, and long lines for everything. The “attractions” we selected were fair to middling (but then, we weren’t the target market), and while Space Mountain added complete darkness to the roller coaster experience, I recall still preferring the coasters at Kennywood in Pittsburgh.

The exception was Pirates of the Caribbean (a replica of the one at Disneyland in California, built at popular demand and opened only in 1973.) It started with another winding slow ride in a boat in inches of water with narrow walls around us, past displays more elaborate but otherwise little different from ordinary carnival haunted houses. But then it suddenly opened up, and we were afloat on a large expanse of dark water, heading towards an apparently full sized pirate ship, with cannonballs splashing and some sort of battle going on. It was an actual magical moment, especially for me as it was unexpected.

But we did not leave sadly, or at least I didn’t. Something about the manipulation and replication, the artificial fantasy of the place bothered me. It was an extension of what was done to the Hemingway house. I imagined that same writing room, complete with the phony crumpled balls of paper on the floor, but with an animatronic Hemingway writing at the desk, turning slowly to smile at us behind the rope border and intoning one of his pithy sayings, like “Good writing is true writing,” and turning back to move his lifeless hand over the page.

Possibly such a display would not have him repeat his most famous line from that Paris Review interview: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”

The one memory I retain about our drive back up the East Coast is located in Georgia. We were on Interstate 85, and I wanted to eat something other than the usual burger, something southern I hadn’t had before. So we stopped at Katherine’s Kitchen for ham and biscuits. But the meal was handed to us in a limp cardboard box by a nervous older woman standing under a handprinted menu, fast-food style. She evidently was trying to go with the flow, which to her meant becoming a cut-rate McDonalds of the South.

President Harry Truman in Key West

My notebooks record disproportionately little of my actual experiences on this trip, along with a lot of the usual bits of ideas for freelance articles I might propose, and stray phrases that might be of things I overheard (“Shalom, y’all”) or seen (The Slice of Life Pizza, the Margaret Truman Launderette) or maybe it was stuff I made up.

But I also recorded observations that suggest I was starting to see the Highway as a place in itself, more or less the same everywhere, with the same food, the same music on the radio, television news, newspapers, and the same faux history and regionalism (I recorded another restaurant advertising southern home cooking that was served on plastic fake pewter.) It was only in going back through these notes and memories that I realized how this trip may have influenced the point of view and subjects of much of my writing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s.

But before all that started I had a long, strange and personally important interlude as a writer and editor at a fledgling alternative weekly in Washington, DC. Be with us next time for: Get Me Rewrite!

No News and No Evidence

 The news?  There is no news.  There are announcement of intentions that are reversed the next day.  There are court cases that never quite get decided or enforced.  There are fires up there, floods and storms down there. There is continuing vicious destruction and harm, cruelty and lawless violence. There is chaos.  Nothing new about that.

There are variations on the themes. This Chaos administration is now routinely referred to as authoritarian.  But what is not said often enough is that it is the most racist regime in a western country since Nazi Germany.  

That racism is now being extended from brown people to Asians, specifically Chinese.  Here in far northern California, in a history that the Chaos regime is actively demanding be suppressed, the racism of the past, first visited on Native American peoples, was extended to Chinese workers.  When they were no longer needed (and even when they were), almost every person of Chinese birth or extraction was herded onto boats and sent away.  This may well be part of why this section of California is conspicuous for its few Asians.

Democrats failed to nip this resurgent if veiled racism in the bud during the presidential campaign.  They allowed Chaos to make his wild charges without substantive questioning.  Laughing at him clearly wasn't enough.

He said then--and continues to say today--that immigrants are vicious criminals, that other countries opened their prisons and sent their worst here, especially murderers, rapists and violent thieves.  Nobody angrily called him on this.  Nobody demanded the evidence: what countries?  What prisons? What criminals?  Where are the convictions, the statistics, the studies, the reports, the court cases, the names that would justify such outrageous charges?

So when it is finally revealed that the Chaos cabal knew that most of the immigrants it sent to the El Salvador concentration camp had no criminal record, nobody notices.  It's not really news.

Now they add that those wily Asians are spies, instruments of a foreign power. Again without even examples, let alone evidence.

If Chaos had been questioned then, there would at least be a record now, an honorable assertion of what's behind the rule of law, which is evidence.  In today's algorithmic based discourse, doing that once would likely not be enough, but matching the drumbeat of hysterical racism with pointed questioning and demand for real evidence would at least be an honorable fight.  

For most of my adult life this would have routinely happened.  Maybe it did happen more than I know and wasn't widely reported.  If so, that's a failure worth isolating and naming as well.