July 16, 2004
Notes from Underground
I like Key West. I do. There is no place like it. I get the Pull the Plug pangs whenever I'm there. Cash out and move down.
I won't do that, of course. I can't do that. For starters, the school system blows. For furthers, there are very few opportunities for gainful employment. That scenario would devolve into my girls sporting more ink than Rod Steiger in The Illustrated Man out of sheer ennui. No, Key West is a pipe dream, or, more correctly, a place in time for the dispossessed, and the prepossessed. A place for single people. Gay or straight. Hard drinking beach bum and flaming faggot alike can find a home, a niche, there. Not for kids, though. The only couples that seem to thrive are the gays with a decent B&B with a loyal clientele, and that, at least, civilizes the place, marginalizes the street-pissers.
Here is an example: there is a fellow that juggles knives on Mallory Square of an evening at sunset. Has a low wire act as well. This man has been at this for thirty years. I have pictures of him juggling the same knives from my honeymoon in 1979. For you girls from Attapulgus that's twenty-five years. That is a career, people. A long, hard career of hats full of dollar bills. He told me he's hanging up the knives in a couple of years. His footwork on the wire is getting suspect. He has no prospects after that. That's what I'm talking about.
There are thriving businesses in KW, of course, besides the B&B's, but it is mostly a closed shop. Even my knife juggler only gets 3 days a week on the pier. Too much competition. Key West is a well-marketed concept, with built-in vagrants. I suspect not a few of them are placed on church steps by some girl with the Tourist Bureau. One must get one's money's worth, of course.
The deep-sea fishing was great. The dolphin were reluctant, and I did not land a world-class blue marlin, but the season wanes, and there is something fantastic about being thirty miles out in the Florida Straits, a third of the way to Cuba, with the ballyhoo bait skipping on the surface, the flying fish skimming above it, a cold beer in hand.
That's hard work, too. There are more captains than boats, more boats than boatslips. The cappy I had works Costa Rica half the year, then ping-pongs three vessels in the Keys. Such is life. Mates, of course, good mates, are always in demand. It is unsavory hard work, and the current lot are drifters with little skill. There was a time a good striker was a man of determinate grit and perserverance, and would stay a decade with a skipper. Mine was great. He is of the old ways, though. Now any drunk proclaims himself a mate, until he is fired in a trip or two for incompetence.
One final note on the West: Hemingway Days is coming up, and all the fat Kenny Rogers looking Ernest wannabes will be angling (hah!) for the Lookalike Trophy. Listen, shitheads: Hemingway left Key West and moved to Cuba in 1939. He was in his early forties. Had dark hair and a moustache. He didn't grow the beard until he moved to Ketchum, Idaho in the fifties. Snow country. So when you knuckleheads parade around in your snowski resort turtleneck cableknit sweaters in 98 degree weather, with a face full of fur, sweating your everloving asses off, think: do I have any fucking idea what I'm supposed to be imitating?