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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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