Canvas and Music

I couldn't sleep last night. It is dark so early now that I fall asleep on the couch, wake up, go to bed, then wake again at three or four in the morning. As I lay in the dark last night, I felt the big hollow emptiness surrounding me. Then I started to think, and thinking, of course, is no way to get back to sleep. After flopping around for some time, I got up and put on music, the stations I created in Pandora (if you don't know about this, you are missing something wonderful). I didn't go back to sleep, but thinking to music was much better than thinking in the cold darkness alone. Thinking to music, I realized, is like dreaming, your body and mind beginning to synch to the notes and rhythms. My thoughts were much more tolerable and the room was warmed. And just before daylight, I fell back to sleep.

Last night, before bed, I stepped outside to get some camera gear out of my trunk. I had stored a canvas backdrop there, and the odor of it was pleasant. Standing there, I got a chill and remembered spending so many nights like this on my sailboat.

I would go over in this weather and sleep alone in the small cabin. Outside there was the wind and the cold and the giant hollowness I felt between me and the stars. In the cabin below, there was only the cold. I would light a lantern and though it was impossible, it seemed to warm the cabin somewhat. I would get inside my down sleeping bag and read and drink until the words began to dance on the page. I would sleep under that great hollowness and dream strangely, big round dreams that did not seem close to me but separated by some great arc. I was lonesome and melancholy then in a way that seemed to have some promise of relief. I longed for my own true love. On the boat, life was not easy and there were things that could not be avoided, that had to be done. All comfort contracted to the inside of that bag, though the dreaming was far above on the long reach of that protracted radius.

That is what came back to me as I opened my trunk in the breezy cold. I wanted to get back inside where life was comfortable, but I also wanted to have the guts to stay outside where living takes more effort. There was a fire flickering in the fireplace, however, and good food and drink. I am afraid that I have become weak and addicted to the warmth.

The Real Key West

I've had a slew of visitors from a blog called The Real Key West in the past day, and a lot of requests for more stories. There are plenty, so OK, but the photos may not match. I'm running short.

In the 70's, Key West was a mythical place of liberation. On that small stamp of land, you felt free to do whatever you liked. My problem was a very common one. As Faulkner pointed out, most people don't know what they want. The island was a giant candy store of brightly colored morality andl codes. No hurry, choose.

The couple with the clothing business that I had met that night in the Bull had many friends on the island, some of them people they had known in Pittsburgh. They had come to live their lives away from the prying eyes of convention, and the ferocity with which they lived was something new and sensational to me. In college, the kids I had known were mostly middle class, and even their rebellions were slightly tame. Here, however, desire mingled with money and there were no savings accounts. One of their closest friends, John, repaired wooden boats. He was good at it, apparently, because people flew him all over the Caribbean to ply his trade. I was invited one night to go sailing on John's boat with a group people, a sunset cruise that included diving for lobsters, preparing them into a lobster salad which we consumed with champagne and whiskey. We anchored off Pine Island. Moonlight on the water, strange tales. John's girlfriend, Sissy, looked just like Connie Stevens. She had been a topless dancer and Jim had met her in the club. She was an awful drunk, but abuse had not yet worn away her beauty, and I was thrilled as only an unsophisticated boy can be, to sit next to her on the rail of the sailboat in such a, to me, foreign and romantic place. Suddenly, without hesitation, she pulled her bathing suit aside and began to pee into the water, all the while talking and laughing. This act remains significant for me whenever I think about that time and place. There was a complicated purity in everything that happened to me, nothing like home, outside the parameters of all my knowledge of the world, a strange mingling of the sacred and the profane.

The Real Key West

I've had a slough of visitors from a blog called The Real Key West in the past day, and a lot of requests for more stories. There are plenty, so OK, but the photos may not match. I'm running short.

I have too many stories to bring back in logical order, so I'll begin with this. It was the seventies. Look at the movies and the basketball players from that era. I, however, went to a gym, so a little of that went a long way. And I wore European-styled bikinis on the beach as many of the Key West locals did at that time, and many gays had come to the island by then. I was open minded about most things since I didn't seem to fit in with much of the south where redneck values ruled the day. But Key West was different and anything went.

As I have written elsewhere in this blog and on the F Blog, I met Tennessee Williams in New York City when he was doing a signing at a big bookstore on 5th Avenue. One day in Key West, going back to my room at the Southern Cross, I met him once again. He was in the company of two very attractive young boys, but he slowed to say hello. "Hello to you Mr. Williams," I replied. "I know you don't remember, but we met in Manhattan a couple of years ago." He didn't, of course, but he was very nice and spoke to me awhile (to the obvious consternation of his young companions who had marked me as rough trade, I think) in that most beautiful of southern voices. And soon enough, with a wave he was gone.

I took to eating lunches at a restaurant around the corner, one just a couple of shops down from Captain Tony's. I can't recall the name just now, but it had an aeronautical motif (if anyone remembers, please do write). There was a waiter that I came to know over the months that I visited. I hadn't been to Key West for about six months, and when I came back and had lunch at the restaurant, he asked me, "Where on earth have you been?" I told him that I had been working, of course, but it became apparent that he did not know I didn't live on the island. When I told him, he was quite surprised. He stayed at the table as I was having lunch late and no one else was in the restaurant, and he told me something quite personal. His parents, he said, did not know that he was gay, and he was going home to New York in a few weeks to visit. He said that he planned to tell them, and it concerned him greatly. It would be hard for them, he said. At the time, I thought that if I were gay, I would be so quite openly, so I did not appreciate the seriousness with which he relayed his dilemma. But about a month later, I received a letter from him at my home. It was a gloriously written letter full of emotion and reflection about telling his parents he was gay. I never saw him again to find out how the story had turned out, and I think about him more often than one might imagine and hope that his life turned out well.

Delmonico's was a gay disco, but my friends--lets call them Bruce and Barbara--liked to get coked up and go dancing there. We were there one night when suddenly I spied one of the most beautiful women on the planet. I watched her intently for awhile before it seemed that she spied me. I should have known something when she approached me and began to chat me up, but I was enamored of her and the night and my life, so there was no filter or hint of rational thinking. At some point, and I couldn't really say when, she introduced me to three of her friends, James and Steve and Panno. And then with grace and eagerness, she excused herself saying she would be right back. James and Steve were a couple and drifted off into their own conversation, and soon enough I was left to chat with Panno. Too slowly, I realized that my new girlfriend was not coming back, and so I said to my newest friend, "Look, you're a fun guy, and I'll stand here and talk with you and buy you drinks all night, but I have to tell you, I'm not gay, so if that is what you are thinking, I don't want to waste your time." Well, Panno was an alright guy and I did buy him a drink and we talked an laughed and got to be friends. It was a friendship that benefitted me more than him, I think, for he was a bartender and a generous man, and I often drank quite cheaply at the outdoor bar at a beach I often patronized. It was then that I learned two things, that gay beaches are often the most beautiful, and that that is where the most beautiful women are to be found. Panno and I remained friends for years, and when the boys would yell, "Tarzan, oh Tarzan," in there half-serious, half-mocking way, I would give an appreciative wave.

The mix of roughnecks and gays was quite unusual back then, but I never saw any trouble. There was money and beauty enough to go around.

Meetings and Taxes

A brief break from the Key West stories. Taxes tonight, a very early meeting tomorrow. There will be no time to write. The weather here turns cold again, the second time this autumn. Crisp reminders of other times.

I can't decide which version of this photo I want to use yet. You can be the judge. I'm not all that crazy about it, but I have not taken photographs for a long time now and am running out of pictures to post.

Key West--First Nights

After sunset, the huge lizards disappeared from the sidewalks. I'd walk the streets incessantly, up Simoneton past the post office and the bus station, past The Creamery crossing Roosevelt, to Logan's Lobster House standing on the edge of the Atlantic. There at the sea wall, standing and staring into the shipping lanes watching the lights of the boats passing by long enough for melancholy to begin to settle in. Then the walk down Whitehead, past Hemingway's house, swollen with unnamed emotions, past the Green Parrot, America's oldest (and cheapest) bar where the real loonies drank, past the giant banyan trees next to the first Trans World Airlines office, home of the first international flight from Key West to Havana, trying to memorize cross streets until I got to crooked maze around the aquarium and old navy station there on the Gulf, sitting again to listen to sound of the water rushing against the pilings, watching the masts of the sailboats bouncing on either side of the channel between Pine Island and Key West under the clear, dark sky, the stars and moonbeams, small dinghies slipping across the water portering people to and from the island, back and forth, back and forth on the changing tide.

Then it would be late enough to walk up Duval, to the clump of bars there in the sudden light--Sloppy Joe's, Captain Tony's, The Bull and Whistle. The first bands were playing at Tony's, and I'd order a drink at the bar, watching and thinking and watching, waiting to be watched. Later, at the Bull, where the music and people spilled onto the sidewalk from the giant windows. A girl I'd seen earlier in the day, a gypsy, I thought, dark, thick curls pulled into a bandana, big gold hoops piercing her dark brown earlobes. I learn she is not a gypsy but a young Jewish princess, a student at the University of Miami. She wants to stay with me for the night. A week later, when I go home, I will receive beautiful letters from her for a short time. Another woman at the bar says hello and buys me a drink. She is from Pittsburgh and lives in Key West. She owns a shop, a clothing store. A bit later, a tall, leading man walks in, a scar running the length of his crooked jaw. He wears pantaloons and a pirates kerchief, I think. He, too, is from Pittsburgh. He, too, owns a clothing store. They live together and will shape my life in Key West for years to come. Although they are only a few years older than I, they are decades more experienced. They have graduate degrees from Penn State and come from privileged lives. They will provide my first and most profound lessons in excess.

Later, the gypsy comes to the small darkness of my room. I am nervous and concerned and whisper queries about birth control. She is already wearing her diaphragm, she says. The sacred and the profane. Romance withers. We do not make love that night.

Perhaps that is why she writes.

Key West--First Sunsets

Days giving way to nights. Late afternoons were hot, too hot for anything but getting wet. The tradition of Sunset began at the dock on the western end of Simonton Street where locals gathered to drink and swim. Guitars and flutes and drums and harmonicas, people shedding their clothes to swim and then to dance. They seemed a tribe to me, participating in some secret ancient ritual, the smoking and drinking and chanting and nudity swelling to some obscure sensation of life for me. There I stood among the naked revelers, a neophyte, a chrysalis emerging.

Key West--First Days

The Southern Cross was a beat hotel for sure, but most of the town was, too. The rooms were small and barren, the beds sagging and covered with tattered bed spreads, the floor covered with an ancient, cheap carpet to hide the sagging floorboards beneath. The air conditioner coils would freeze up with ice so that it no longer cooled. I learned to chip the ice away, but it didn't help for long. The hotel was full of characters who would sit out on the upper floor balcony and drink while watching the passing parade below. The rooms themselves were pretty much storage and sleeping lockers. Life in Key West was lived outside.

The hotel was run by a crusty Norwegian (as I remember--maybe he was Swedish) by whom you had to pass to enter the hotel. He would glare at you to make you think he was doing you a big favor by renting you the room and as a warning that if you violated some unknown code of behavior, you'd be out on your ass in a second.

There was no cable t.v or radio in Key West then, and there was only the single road in and out of town, the road still narrow then so that driving across the bridges into oncoming traffic was a bit of an adventure. In Key West, you could truly feel isolated. But the island was small and concentrated, so it did not take long to learn your way around, not long to begin to know people, not long to be known. The town had a distinct culture that was not like anything that was not the Keys. The town was virtually without air conditioning, so people took advantage of the cool morning air by sleeping late. Most stores did not open until noon-ish. As I was an early riser, I seemed to have the island to myself.

I ate a breakfast of Cuban coffee and toasted Cuban bread every day at the same small restaurant. Cuban coffee is espresso with steamed milk and a pinch of salt. The salt was optional, a holdover from the days before electricity. When the milk would begin to sour, a pinch of salt would hide the flavor. Cuban bread was unlike other breads in that it had double the sugar. If I was really hungry, I would order some fried eggs, too. As I ate, I'd watch the patrons--all locals--and eavesdrop on their conversations. I found that at that time of the morning, I was the only one paying with cash. All the locals kept an account that they settled up from time to time in a lump sum. Though I knew it wouldn't happen, I wanted to be able to run a tab, too. Somehow, I thought, I would be transported. I would be validated.

After breakfast, I would go to the Atlantic side of the Island to watch the early morning pass. The Reach was a. . . well, I'm not sure what it was. You could eat and drink on a sandy beach. Beside it was a long dock that reached out into the ocean, a cabana on its furthest end. It was the place where locals came to wile away some part of the morning. Women went topless and were brown all over. As the sun entered the western sky, I would move across the island to the new resort, The Pier House, that sat on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. This was a place to spend money. It was built by a local, David Wolkowsky, and served to help relieve those who had accumulated too much illegal money. The Chart Room was a small interior bar where you could sit next to Hunter Thompson, Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Tennessee Williams, Jimmy Buffet, Russell Chatham. . . just about anyone, really. Outside was a beautifully constructed white sand beach surrounded by a bar and swimming pool and an expensive restaurant built over the water.

I had no money, so I ate my dinners at El Cacique, sitting at the counter, ordering fried snapper just off the boat and finishing with one of their seriously crazy homemade ice creams like passion fruit or mango. I was enchanted by the radio playing Key West's only station, a sonorous mix of music from the forties and weather updates. Everything seemed like the movie "Key Largo."

And those were my first days. I didn't know anything yet. Time passed watching ships drift by on the horizon, smelling the breeze sweet with brine and sour with rot, walking by the giant hibiscus over broken sidewalks, staring, mouth ajar, glad that I had come this far, all the way to the end of the world.

Lost

I just tried to write a narrative of my first trip to Key West, but it was all hurried and jumbled and bad. Thank god for the delete button. I will try it again later when I have time. It was March 1976, and I had just finished up my road trip after college. I was used to traveling roughly and cheaply, and Key West had great appeal. I picked up hitch hikers on the way down, a boy and a girl. They had just gotten married and were in the navy. I stayed with them that night, a hideous night in an un-air conditioned room on a plastic couch surrounded by drug-crazed sailors who partied until dawn. In the morning, sick with fatigue and a lack of beauty, I was ready to go home. By luck, however, I stumbled into the old part of town, found an $8 room at the Southern Cross Hotel, and my luck turned. I will try to tell it later. It was a crazy time.

Captain Tony, R.I.P

It's happened again. I opened the paper on Sunday morning and found I had missed a big fund raiser for breast cancer at the local nudist colony. Jesus, I would have taken my camera to that. The fates are against me. I'm doomed.

I just found out Captain Tony died. My friend went to Key West this weekend and was part of the wake. Tony was in his nineties. Not bad for a guy who lived like that. I used to hang out in Key West a lot in the '70s and early '80s. I have many stories to tell about Captain Tony's bar. Too many for this post. I went to Key West just after college for the first time. College had been hippie times, all drugs and sex and ideology. I majored in ideology, but I saw the other. Key West was something different. There was an edge to it, dangerous and weird. The town was just undergoing its first batch of gentrification. Gays were giving the town an aesthetic renovation. Drug dealers were providing the money. There were great bars and restaurants and everything was still cowboy cheap. So much to tell, too much. I was in Captain Tony's one hot summer's night. Some great band was playing and people were dancing and drinking and sweating and there under those dim lights in the smoke and gloom, women began to undress, and then the whole place was like an opium dream, me plump with desire and possibility. Thump, thump, thump, boom, boom, boom. Some driving song you felt down low, a growling, hungry thing. "I will move here," I thought in my wildness, "I will live here and be happy."

I didn't, and I'll never know why. I made many friends in town, and I was always able to sit and talk to Captain Tony. He was a good guy who liked to tell stories. His life was his favorite one. They made a movie about him. I was there during some of the shooting. I was cast as an extra but couldn't stay long enough. Much to regret.

In one of his unsuccessful bids for Mayor (which he won later on), he told me, "I'll run this town like I run my bar. If I don't like you, you're out of here!" He was a nice, ornery fellow, both bigger and smaller than life.

I have a photo of hims somewhere, and photos of me there, but I don't have time to find them now. I'll come back and replace this silly picture one day when I find what I'm looking for.

I just found out Rust Hills, the Fiction Editor for Esquire, died, too. I met Rust and his wife, the writer Joy Williams, in Key West. I have a story to tell about that, too. Much happened in Key West. So much to tell.

The Road to Hell

"They are all just piling on." He was looking down at the ground, shaking his head.

"Who?"

"It seems like everybody. It is just an avalanche. Once things start going wrong, it is like a damn has burst. Yesterday I went to the track to take a run. There was a group of guys just finishing up a soccer game. I was getting ready to stretch when I heard a voice yell, 'Get a haircut.' I turned around expecting to see somebody I knew, but I didn't recognize this fellow. I looked at him and half smiled, giving myself a minute to conjure him up in my memory, but that wasn't happening. He was short and thick and dark and confident. And he had a shaved head. So I said, 'Do I know you?' and he said 'No,' so I said, 'Oh, OK, Fuck You.' He smiled and rubbed his head to show me he was kidding. I don't know. The other day, a college kid stopped in the middle of the street to talk to a blonde in another car. I sat there for a minute, then I pulled my car in front of his so he couldn't go anywhere. I was just starting to get out when the girl pulled away, so I backed up to let him pull along side. He said, 'Dude,' and I said 'Dude what?' and he said 'C'mon,' and I said 'Get the fuck out of the street,' and he drove away. He was good looking and unconcerned and having fun and I just wanted to beat him. But as soon as he drove away, of course, I felt like an idiot."

"Dude," I said, chuckling. "Maybe you need to get a dog. I had a dog forever and she kept me good company."

"I don't want a dog," he said. "They're too much trouble."

"Get a stuffed dog, then. As Bill tells Jake in The Sun Also Rises, 'the road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.'"

"No, it's nobody's fault. I'm just fucked."

She was a good dog. Made me semi-famous. I'll tell more about that sometime.

Chemicals and Circumstance

"I think there is something wrong with the women who are attracted to me."

He did have a history.

""I know it's true. Why else would they want to go out with me? Especially as I get older? I don't have money or a nice car. There isn't really much to recommend me."

I didn't want to go down this road with him, but I was having trouble finding a turnout.

"They've been awfully pretty," I told him, hoping to diffuse the inevitable.

"That's what I mean. Why would they want to go out with me? Something happened to them somewhere along the line."

I thought something unprintable.

"I know what you're thinking," he said. "None of them were getting schtupped by their daddies."

"As far as you know."

"Right! And I know. Their fathers were powerful, exceptional men except for the one who got Baker Acted. She didn't have a father at all. No, it is something else. It is chemical."

"Absolutely," I agreed, though he had contradicted himself. I think all things are. The Human Genome Project gave us that. They'll find more. By and large, we can't help who we are. It is all Chemistry and Circumstance.

Hope and Cry

(Photo by Aliaksandr Veledzimovich)

Hope springs eternal. So they say. Obama, audacity, and all of that. We've gone through an election of hope. The French existentialist have a lot to say about it. Man's Fate. Man's Hope. Malraux got the titles. Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" speaks to it more directly.

I heard from Sasha a while back (of Kate and Sasha--The Ballad). He and Kate were finished. She was not seeing him any longer and he was contemplating moving to another country. He writes:

"I fall in love without answer. Waiting Kate and HOPE HOPE and CRY."

And later:

"So try to start new life in new city with Kate in my heart. The story never end she is only 18 and I hope and belive."

Hope and Cry. There's a title. As I sit here pondering all this, I keep wondering if Hope is born of Desire, or vice-versa? I will have to work this out.

591 Photography

Opening November 9 - you are invited

On November 9, just click on here and go to Ulf Fågelhammar's (i.e. Mr. Urbano) new photo website. Ulf is one of the fellows responsible for putting my essays on F Blog. He is an awfully swell guy and a great curator. This site should be exciting.


(Photo by Ulf Fågelhammar)

Get Normed or Get Out

"There are moments of glory and hope," he says. "But it leads to an eventual hangover. Life is too damned hard for permanent victory."

I wasn't sure if he was talking about the election or something else. More likely, he had conflated things. I didn't want to get into it with him.

"Sure. You bet."

"Don't patronize me," he said. "You sound like Palin."

"I'm not patronizing you. What you say is true. Who would argue with that? It's almost a truism. I like what Bukowski said about it all. It's how well you walk through the fire."

"Bukowski's dead and all that kind of weirdness is laid to rest. It's a new world now. The old weirdness is just weird."

I had to agree with that. I find myself staggered by it at times. Things change quickly rather than slowly. He had made his point.

"Yes, it's true. Adapt or die, I guess. There's a tide of social norming going on, or probably a tidal wave of it. The old "'love it or leave it' has been replaced. 'Get normed or get out.'"

I still didn't know what he was trying to say. Or maybe I did know all too well.

The weather breaks. The sky is blue.

More People

(photo from a friend's family album)

The U.S.A. just had an increase in population. There will be more people than ever before. They've been here, but you couldn't see them. Each of us will have to be sharper, for there will be more competition. We will have to be braver, hardier. There will be more ideas, more ideologies. And don't count out the greedheads. They aren't dead, just wounded, and they are dangerous.

Maybe Turkey will elect a Kurd, Russia a Georgian, France an Algerian, Isreal a . . . .


The road can be long, dusty and rough.

Election Day

The time has changed. Darkness falls early now. We live by rhythms. Mine has been disrupted. I wake too early. I eat too late.

I will go to the poll and vote now under the gray November sky. Change is in the offing. What will all the junkies do after the votes are counted, the results in place? It has been a long haul. The emotional letdown will be greater than after the Super Bowl.

I am as leaden as this sky. My rhythm is off. They shouldn't fuck with time.

Quiet and Waiting

Damp, gray November, "a time of quiet and waiting." Tired old world. I walk carefully. "Do no harm," I say to myself. Keep a lookout. In the misty rain, I see herons, cranes, storks, and ducks picking around a swampy creek, a neighborhood wetland. A sudden splash. The water comes to life. I want to walk in eternal time, I think to myself, through the recurring seasons, to smell this slick grass in the gray light without the din of events. Elections. Holidays. I am tired. It is "a time of quiet and waiting."

(quote from John Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums.")

Something Mellow for a Sunday Afternoon

Mark Kozelek. Sun Kil Moon. "Lost Verses".

All's Hallow

If you needed evidence that people need something to take them away from themselves, last night should have been it. I gave in, put on a mask, and went to a party. I knew before I went. I've seen it all before many, many times. But people have always had the need. How many festival days were there in the middle ages? Royalty loved to dress up. I suggested, after reading a review of "George Being George" in the New York Times, that costumes were for orgies. That didn't go over well. Seems, though, that Plimpton attended a monthly orgy in Manhattan. There was a costume room and he liked to dress as a monk. Yes, it appears people like to switch identities from time to time.

I met George Plimpton at the Kennedy Library in Boston. It was the Hemingway First Fiction awards ceremony. I was invited, I think, due to a paper I had delivered at a Hemingway conference in Havana. That is the reason I could think of, anyway.  My dissertation director was just finishing a book on Updike and told me "to tell John hello." Great. Updike was talking to Plimpton, Patrick Hemingway, Annie Proulx, Caroline Kennedy, and others when I said, "Hello Mr. Updike. So and so told me to give you his regards when I saw you." Updike is a very tall man, and he suddenly drew himself up to his greatest height, looked down his terribly long nose at me as if I smelled, and turned on his heels. I had simply been removed from his vision. I was only upset because I was certain that Caroline Kennedy liked me (not knowing that she had JUST gotten married), and I thought that this was going to queer the deal. Suddenly, Plimpton, who was also very tall, put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Don't be upset. John's an asshole to everybody." He and I talked for a long while about a book I thought I wanted to put together about him and Peter Matthiessen and the others who made up the Tall Young Men in Paris in the 1950s. Plimpton liked the idea, but like most things in my life, I never brought it to fruition.

Plimpton told me several sexual stories about Updike, but he didn't mention the orgies in Manhattan. Good Old George.