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.