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.