I found a motel made of cinder blocks and checked in. I got a good rate. Then I went down to a gas station store and bought what candles, water, and food were left. When I returned to my room I flicked the TV to the storm report and watched the almost-a-hurricane head our way. It never developed into more than a gale with eighty-mile-an-hour gusts. It passed over us in the night, dumping a foot of rain and blowing down the weak trees. The greatest damage was done to the tourist industry. The vacationers had fled. Of course, it didn't help that the TV stations played
Key Largo
on one channel and a documentary on the “Great Hurricane of 1935” on the other. That hurricane had killed over eight hundred people who were fleeing by rescue train when a twelve-foot surge of water, whipped up by two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, swamped the passenger cars and took them all away. When the bodies were finally collected, they were burned in tall pyres like Hindus on the Ganges. And when the rescuers ran out of driftwood, they buried the rest in mass graves.
In the morning, when I emerged from my room, the locals were out and about cleaning up the mess, and a few drunken tourists were still celebrating their victory over nature. But the rest had fled and left the place to me. Right away I started making my rounds. First, I went to Ernest Hemingway's house. He had killed himself on my birthday. My tenth birthday. He took a shotgun, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled
the trigger with his toe. My dad had read
The Old Man and the Sea
to me because it was a fishing story.
“I'd have shot myself, too,” he said after reading the obituary in the paper, “if it took me that long to catch a fish.”
Hemingway's house had survived the storm, except that the giant swimming pool was filled with brackish water and debris, along with a magnificent sea turtle that I immediately named Ernest. I imagined the big man as wide across his back and tanned as the dark turtle and just as unflappable as it did a slow breaststroke from end to end.
I untangled an aluminum lawn chair which had blown into a manchineel tree. I sat down with my writing journal and grinned like an idiot. Just describing that huge, brooding turtle lumbering from end to end was inspiring. I was so happy to be the first one on the scene and wrote down all my impressionsâjust as Hemingway did in Spain during their civil war, and Crane after the sinking of the
Commodore.
Suddenly I remembered that John Hersey lived in Key West. His on-the-scene reportage of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was incredible. These guys had gone into the heart of something raw and humanly transforming and had survived to write great books. They got their beginning as writers by going where the action wasâto warâand I could, too. With Vietnam on fire the army was taking everyone they could get, but there was no guarantee I could be a journalist like Hersey. Instead, I
could end up more like George Orwell and take a bullet through the neck. And there was something elseâas much as I despised the war, deep inside I felt I was a coward. Like Henry Fleming I figured when the bullets started chewing up the ground around me I'd duck and run. I depressed myself. The only thing I had to write about was a turtle in Hemingway's pool. Moments before it seemed so romantic. Now it seemed mundane.
In order to buck up I went searching for John Hersey's house. Maybe seeing where he lived would give me another boost of courage. I got in my car and drove to a market. There were guidebooks to Key West but none of them gave his address. He was mentioned after Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop, whose addresses were listed. I went to the Williams house. It looked fine except the little white gazebo he built for Jane Bowles had toppled over. I had read
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
The Glass Menagerie
and, like everyone, I thought Williams was a genius. I hadn't read Jane Bowles's work but knew her husband's book
The Delicate Prey
, which was just about my favorite collection of stories in the world. Paul Bowles had gone to Morocco to write about Moroccans. I was hoping that St. Croix might be interesting to write about. Maybe I could begin to write something important there.
I drove down to Elizabeth Bishop's small house. I hadn't read her poetry and wished I had. Someone once said that all
writers should read into their weaknesses. And I was weak in poetry. But nothing could blunt my happiness. Fate, it seemed, had brought me down to Key West. Fate brought the storm. And I felt fated to write. I still didn't have anything significant to write about so I just smoked another joint and recorded observations and reflectionsâjust like Sal Paradise.
And like Sal, I missed my Dean Moriarty. I wondered what had happened to Tim Scanlon, so I called his home in Plantation, Florida. His mom answered.
“Is Tim there?” I asked.
“You aren't Jack, are you?” she asked harshly.
I told her I was Dave, “his other friend.”
“Hey,” he said when he came to the phone, “what's goin' down?”
“What happened, man?” I asked. “I waited forever at the motel.”
There was silence. I thought I could hear his mother close a door. Finally he replied, “It was awesome. I had to sample the crop. It was like pure THC and sent me into a total genetic high. I couldn't tell where I was. Finally I walked around the campus in a trance until security picked me up and called my folks. They had to drive up and get me and now they're royally
pissed.”
“What happened to the weed?” I asked.
“Oh, well, the good news is the security people were potheads and they just kept the stash. But the bad news is we lost all your money.”
I took a deep breath. Money wasn't easy for me to come by.
“I'll pay you back when I get working,” he said. “Promise.”
I didn't listen to much after that, and when I got off the phone I didn't know what to think.
I retreated to Sloppy Joe's bar, where Hemingway drank and played cards with his mob of friends who would then go out in his yacht and try to spot and sink Nazi U-boats with hand grenades. I sat at the bar and read
A Moveable Feast
and cried with a kind of jealous disappointment because that beautiful time in history had passed me by and the contrast between the lush enchantment of Europe and my welfare-motel life was suddenly very sad indeed.
But I dried my eyes and after a few beers and a couple of joints around back I imagined the great books I might write. Of course, I didn't write a word. It was easier to smoke joints and have someone deliver drinks than it was for me to deliver sentences.
The next morning I woke up with blisters on my forearms and hands. I was a born-and-bred Catholic and thought immediately it was some sort of writing stigmata and that I should get to a church. But then I remembered the chair at Hemingway's
house had been lodged in a manchineel tree and must have been coated with a little bit of the tree's caustic sap. Ponce de León died from a manchineel-sap-coated arrow, and I figured I was a dead man, too. But after a few days of itching I figured it must have been the arrow that killed him, because I recovered just fine.
From the first week I landed in St. Croix I became part
of a drug culture. Drugs were available everywhere at all times. Especially reefer. You could smell it on every other breath of air. In bars, on street corners, in passing cars, on buses, at the beachâpeople grew it in their home gardens and smoked it like cigarettes. It was so much a part of everyday life even the local police didn't bother with it, which is why the island was also a depot for smugglers. The U.S. customs office was kept busy inspecting oil tankers from the Middle East which supplied crude oil to the refinery at Hess Oil. That left sailboats and speedboats from the British and French and Dutch and independent islands to slip into St. Croix at night and unload their cargoes of marijuana and pharmaceuticals from Europe and underground labs. Then U.S.-registered pleasure boats would haul the cargo up to Florida, where it was easy to unload into trucks at any backyard dock along the intercoastal waterway.
But all I did was smoke it. I never thought dope would
lead to trouble, and I certainly had no idea it would land my ass in jail.
Â
While I was in Key West smoking dope and wondering when I would find my writer's voice, everything in St. Croix had changed. Racial tension in St. Croix had always run high. There were a lot of white haves and a lot more black have-nots. The tension mounted when a radical black party, based on the Black Panthers, formed and publicly called for white extermination. The racial divide widened, and the anger boiled. Homes were broken into. People were murdered. Stores were looted. Hotels hired extra security to patrol the grounds and beaches. Tourism dropped.
The news media picked up the story and before long the wealthy white people who were living in the States and building retirement homes in St. Croix decided to cancel their house jobs. It was that sudden. Now, nobody was working, black or white.
The story must have been reported in the Florida papers, but in Key West I was “too busy” to read one and didn't hear about the situation until after I arrived. By then, it was too late to turn around. All my father's building jobs had been canceled. I was trapped. Instead of finding ourselves building new homes or hotels, my father and I worked at building large wooden packing containers to fill the need of the hundreds of
people who were scrambling to empty their homes and ship their belongings off island. The white exodus was on.
All day I built crates. Because money was tight I didn't draw a paycheck and instead reluctantly agreed with Dad to be paid in room and board. With the little money I brought from the States I just managed to keep gas in my car. And there was no way I was going to save money for college. After my year of racial harmony at the King's Court I found the turmoil in St. Croix very disturbing. I understood the black point of view, but there was no way I could get them to see my sympathies. I was just another white target on legs. The level of anger was beyond reason. Black activists were preaching white extermination and the place was getting ready to explode. It wasn't long before I wondered if I could build a crate and ship myself off the island.
One morning after I had just smoked a joint rolled from old roaches a man came in with hand-drawn plans for a crate which included a false bottom about four inches deep. I remember him in detail. His name was Rik. He was in his late twenties, blond, shag haircut, green eyes, and a silver-dollarsized circular burn scar on his forehead. When I asked about the scar he said it came from being shot with a flare gun.
“What was that like?” I asked.
“Blinding,” he said dryly.
I didn't ask more, but he said he was shipping art and archaeological
artifacts that needed extra protection. Fine, I thought, let him ship the crown jewels. It was none of my business.
After work I went down to the dockside bar where all the whites tanked up on duty-free Heineken.
I took a seat at the bar, next to my dad. As I looked across the room I spotted the guy with the scar sitting by himself. “What do you think of that guy?” I asked.
My dad took one look at him and had him pegged.
“He's a dope smuggler,” he replied.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Just do,” he said. “It's a gift I have.”
I told him the guy had ordered a crate with a false bottom.
“He probably wants to smuggle cash or dope or gold into the States.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he has Indian artifacts or pottery or stuff he doesn't want shippers to find.”
“Don't be naïve,” he said. “I've got his number. Dope is his game. But I don't give a damn where his money comes from as long as it helps get us off this rock.”
I felt the same way. I wanted off.
Â
Since I didn't have much money it didn't matter how lousy the bookstores were, and the library was little help. It was so hot
and humid inside I had to scrape the mold off the spines of the books in order to read the titles. Nine out of ten books I looked up were missing. The librarians just shrugged when I mentioned the apparent theft problem. And if I complained too much they turned up their desk radios and played at being busy.
Because I couldn't find the books I wanted, I read what was available. The biographies were closest to the ocean and were especially moldy and not as desirable for the thieves. I read a few books about revolutionaries: Che Guevara, Emma Goldman, an odd book titled
Mutual Aid
by Peter Kropotkin, who was an anarchist, and a book by Alexander Berkman titled
ABC of Anarchism
. All this political.reading made me think the island was ripe for an all-out race riot and political revolution just like the Haiti Graham Greene had written about in
The Comedians.
Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn't want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, “good book,” as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.
I was still trying to find something significant to write about and so, like all those political writers, I realized the only thing for me to do would be to jump right into the middle of
the racial tension and use my wits. I remembered reading a quote from a newspaper journalist that stuck with me: “Where there is blood, there is ink.”
I thought I'd put that quote to work. I got my notebook and a pen and ventured down to the Black Revolutionary Party headquarters to see if I could interview any of the leaders. There were about twenty black guys sitting under fluorescent lights in an old warehouse. They were playing cards and drinking rum. The walls were covered with Black Power posters, pictures of Malcolm X, and green, red, and black maps of Africa. When I walked in, all heads turned toward me. It wasn't quite like stepping into a military ambush, or being on the front lines in Spain, or witnessing the aftermath of an atomic bomb, but the atmosphere around me was definitely hostile.
There was a man in the back sitting at a desk. I assumed he was the leader. He had an Afro-pick stuck in his ball of black hair and he was talking loudly to someone on the telephone. When he saw me he abruptly hung up and gave me a long, studied look.
“What you want, white boy?”
That question sure cut to the chase and everyone watched to see how I'd take it.
There was no going back. “I'm looking to interview someone
about the race relations,” I replied. “They seem pretty bad to me, and I want to know more.”
“What's there more to know than what you can see with your own eyes?” the man shot back. “The white people own the island and the black people work it like wage slaves.”
That brought loud agreements from the other men, but they seemed to laugh and enjoy the situation more than be angry. For the moment, the oddness of my showing up was funnier than it was confrontational. That was a relief, but I wasn't sure how far I could keep going.
“I guess I want to know what you are going to do about it. I mean, how are you going to go about getting your share?”
“See,” the man said, pointing at me, and looking to the other men in the room as if he were a preacher, “see, this question goes directly to the heart of the matter. Because we don't want a share of what we own, we want
all
of what we own. And that is the issue that cannot be solved with the white man unless we come to blows.”
I stood still, and felt instantly trapped inside a stage play of rehearsed hostility. I looked from side to side as much as I dared. The anger was so sudden I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone for fear they might make something personal of it. And I couldn't tell if my courage had evaporated or if it
was common sense that told me to get out of there, so I just asked, “Well, do you have a book I can read, or some material that will explain what your goals are? And then I can understand it all a bit more, and we can talk about it later?”
“What's to understand?” a man sitting to one side asked. “He already told you: the island belongs to the black man, so the black man is going to take what is his and be done with it. We don't need to make it more clear than that.”
“Thank you,” I said, and like some cub reporter I began to scribble a few words down on a small pad of paper. My hand was shaking badly.
“Besides,” the first cut in, “how can we trust you?”
I didn't answer.
But another man did. “Give him a gun,” he suggested. “Give him a gun and let him go out there and shoot a white man dead. Then we'll trust him.”
I started to back away.
“Yeah. Give him a gun. If he's on our side, let him show it.”
“I can't do that,” I said.
“Then here's some advice,” the same man continued, pointing a finger as black as the barrel of a gun at me. “Don't be coming in here as if you can play with the big boys. Revolution is serious business. You just turn your white ass around and go back to the white bar you come from and drink a cold
white man's beer while you can because as the song say, âWhen the revolution comes, Hertz is not going to put
you
in the driver's seat.'”
I knew it, too. “Okay,” I said, turned around and fixed my eyes on the door, and as I walked toward it, I hoped I would make it. And when I did make it, I walked quickly to my car and took off with both hands on the wheel to keep them steady. I drove directly to the all-white bar and ordered a drink. I didn't know what to do next so I went out back and smoked a joint, then returned and ordered another drink. And another. I should have taken out my journal and written about what had happened. But I was so afraid of the incident I ran from it rather than write it down. Somehow, I didn't trust myself. I didn't trust that my own words would make a difference to anyone, black or whiteâeven if the ink was blood red.
Â
A few nights later Rik stopped by the warehouse. My dad was gone and I guess that was the moment he knew he could talk to me about his big plans. He wanted to pack the crate and have me screw it together, as he didn't have a screw gun. Before we got busy he pulled out a hash pipe and a piece of hash the size of a candy bar.
“You mind?” he asked.
“Fire it up,” I said.
He cut off a gram and lit the pipe. He took a big hit and
passed it to me. We went on like this, loudly inhaling and exhaling, until the pipe was finished.
He went to his car and returned with a stack of square plastic containers about the size of cigar boxes. The edges were sealed with silver duct tape. We both knew they were filled with hash. What else could it be? But I didn't say anything. He slipped them into the false bottom, wedged them tightly together with wadded-up newspaper, then I screwed down the next layer of plywood. That was it. He didn't have anything else to send in the rest of the three-foot-square crate.
“Seems odd to ship an empty box,” I ventured, before screwing down the top.
“Yeah,” he said.
I looked around the warehouse for some heavy items. We threw in a bag of concrete, some broken pieces of cast-iron garden statuary, and a twenty-pound ingot of hard tar, then carried it to his trunk. It wouldn't fit all the way in.
I went to get some twine to tie the trunk lid down, and when I returned he said, “I'm a little low on bread, but I could pay you in hash if that would work for you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That'll work for me.” Since I wasn't paid anything from my dad, getting paid in hash was a good deal. Besides getting off the island, it was the only other thing I wanted.
He snapped the bar of hash in half and gave me some. It must have been about two ounces.
Just before he pulled away he said, “By the way, if you see a sailboat with red sails pull into the harbor, give me a call.” He told me the name of his hotel.
“Sure,” I replied. “I'll keep my eyes open.”
As soon as he left I made a pipe out of some plumbing fittings and aluminum flashing. I got so high I passed out in the warehouse and slept on a sheet of packing foam.