Hemingway Adventure (1999) (25 page)

‘And
she
was fashion editor of
Voguel’
Gentle titter.

‘Maybe it was a different
Vogue.’
Bigger, if slightly uncertain, titter.

At the side of the house, next to the gift shop, is a murky green swimming pool. Our guide indicates a penny coin, sealed in the limestone paving beside it, and tells the story of how Pauline had the pool built in 1937 for the then substantial sum of $20,000. When Hemingway heard the price he was so disgusted he said something to the effect that as she had spent everything but his last penny, she might as well have that too, whereupon he’d flung down the coin we see today.

There is no mention of the fact that Hemingway had been away two-timing her with Martha Gellhorn in Madrid and that the pool had been paid for, like so many other extras in Key West, by generous Uncle Gus. But then, this is the Ernest Hemingway House, not the Pauline Hemingway house.

Hot, and a little bit bothered by all this, I cross the road to Ernest’s Cafe for a large ‘smoothie’, a big, refreshing pick-you-up of crushed fruit and ice. The bearded and bespectacled face of the great man growls down at me from T-shirts which the management is not allowed to sell owing to a copyright dispute with the house across the road.

From what I’ve read about Hemingway, he was very demanding of his friends, expecting loyalty and constant availability. His omnipresence in Key West makes him almost impossible to avoid and I feel myself suffering a severe attack of Hemingway-induced claustrophobia - as if I might find some manifestation of him in my bedroom cupboard or sitting next to me at dinner.

To clear my head I walk west down Whitehead Street, and find myself in a Hemingway-free zone of gracious, well-restored nineteenth-century timber and clapboard houses, many of which bear plaques indicating that they were built by wreckers and spongers. Ships regularly went aground on the coral reef and the opportunist seamen of Key West made a considerable living from salvaging the wrecks. That’s when they weren’t sponging, I mean, sponge-fishing.

Number 305 Whitehead is a pretty, balconied and balustraded building called ‘“Wrecker” Johnson’s House’, built entirely from the wood of submerged ships. Further down is the finest house on the street, the Geiger or Audubon house, saved from demolition in 1958 and now immaculately restored to its neoclassical glory with wide, shady balconies to catch the breeze, and inside a considerable number of bits and pieces, like a fine set of Chinese porcelain, that never made it past the reef.

Key West is that rare thing in the USA, a truly walkable city. The streets are mostly tree-lined and shady and in a short distance you can ring the changes from tourists and bars on Duval Street, to quiet backstreets with soothing names like Angela and Petronia. The trouble is that Key West is on the same latitude as Mecca and it can get very hot.

Which is why I end up talking to the local mayor, Wilhemina Harvey, at the end of the day, when the temperature is down to the low 90s and we can see the town from an air-conditioned car. Mayor Harvey has ruled Monroe County (which includes Key West and beyond) with charm, humour and, doubtless, a rod of iron, since 1980. She’s eighty-seven and not planning to retire. She’s a social liberal, very popular with the gay community, she tells me. As this comprises over a third of Key West’s 25,000 permanent residents, she should be there well into the next millennium.

We talk of all sorts of things, from the current sewage pipe leaks which have forced Key West’s beaches to close and for which she has applied for Federal Aid, to the separatist tendencies of this part of America. People born and bred in the Keys are called Conchs (pronounced ‘Conks’) after the sizeable local shellfish. There is a Conch Republic, with its headquarters in Key West and its own flag.

Mayor Harvey tells a good tale of meeting the Queen when she visited the Keys recently and presenting her with a conch shell which Her Majesty gratefully accepted. Only afterwards did the Mayor remember that she had not had time to warn her that conchs bring bad luck if taken indoors. She and her friends had a good laugh about this, until, a week or so later, Windsor Castle’s library burned down.

I feel obliged to mention Hemingway, thinking that she, like me, will be happy to avoid the subject for a while. Quite the opposite. She has fond memories of him coming in to her family drugstore.

‘He was a quiet, almost shy man till you got to know him.’

Try telling that to the Hemingway look-alikes.

S
omewhat reluctantly plugging myself back into the world of Key West’s best-loved son, I search out the Hemingway suite at La Concha Hotel, which, at six storeys high with a tower on top, looks big and bulky amongst the neat, low-rise streets around it. It was opened in 1926 in anticipation of a tourist boom. Instead the Depression came along, Key West stayed poor and La Concha was spared a rival.

It hasn’t changed much and probably should, certainly in the elevator department. A one-legged man with a hod of bricks could have got up to the sixth floor faster than the lift I’m in. Nor is there anything very special about the Hemingway Suite, except for its current occupant.

Kevin is a New York policeman who makes my obsession with Hemingway look like mild interest. He runs with the bulls at Pamplona, has taken the Hemingway Suite at the Sun Valley Lodge and says he once broke down in tears after clearing four feet of snow off Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum cemetery.

Though Kevin has a spiky red beard and looks more like my auntie than Ernest Hemingway, it doesn’t surprise me that he has entered the look-alike competition, nor that he is through to the finals. Spiritually, Kevin is clearly a contender, and if this were a be-alike competition he’d win horns down.

He’s a little uncomfortable about the Suite. A guest recently checked out complaining of hearing someone else in the room and waking up to feel an invisible pressure on the end of the bed. Another guest cut short a booking giving no reason at all. I should imagine that any manifestation of Ernest would be just what Kevin wanted, but for a New York cop he sounds remarkably squeamish about the other side and suggests we continue the conversation in somewhere resolutely corporeal, like Sloppy Joe’s. Sloppy’s is basically a watering hole. A great crowd of people, including one man wearing a Viking helmet, are clustered round every available inch of bar and table, shouting against the thudding rock music, dealing with beers or simply chewing away on some of the house specialities - ‘The Bun Also Rises’, ‘For Whom the Grill Tolls’ or a simple Ernie Burger, ‘a giant half-pound burger from the cattle ranches of Key West’.

Ceiling fans stir the fetid air, giving a gentle flutter to the dusty flags that hang down over the bar. A painted marlin arches across one wall, and Hemingway’s great rock of a head stares back at me from the black back-cloth behind the band.

Kevin talks fast, his clipped New York delivery jarring amongst the southern drawls of Florida. He brushes aside any questions of what books of Hemingway’s he may have read. His is not a literary thing, it’s a mind thing.

‘I’m a man of action. A romantic activist. I’m a chaser of bulls and a dodger of boredom. Boredom’, he says, fixing me with a manic stare, ‘is a very, very scary thing.’

From what I’ve seen, Kevin’s fellow contestants look an amiable bunch. Does he detect a generosity of spirit amongst the look-alikes?

‘No, they hate me. They can’t stand me.’ He smiles cheerfully at this and his eyes go slightly misty.

‘I’ve been taking abuse down here for ten years … and now I’m like a local. Ask anybody, I’m a local legend down here now.’

He has a plan for tomorrow’s final. For his presentation he’s going to team up with an even more venerable local legend, an 83-year-old by the name of ‘Shine’ Forbes, who boxed Hemingway back in the thirties. I should come along. This could be Kevin’s year.

I accept his invitation to be a sort of unofficial second, but I’d like to meet Mr Forbes for myself.

A
local cartoonist called David Laughlin offers to introduce me to Shine. Laughlin is slim and softly spoken, with long hair and a golden beard. He was raised on an Amish farm in Ohio, thinks laid-back Key West is becoming too rich too fast and is contemplating a move to New Zealand. He has a healthily sceptical view of the local life-style and particularly the Hemingway worship. In one of his cartoons a bull sits pounding away at a typewriter beneath a head of Hemingway sticking out of the wall.

Shine Forbes’s house on Fort Street feels more Caribbean island than American mainland. This is the cheaper end of town and has a quite different and much more seductive atmosphere than the manicured main drags round Duval Street. It’s known as Bahama Village.

Shine sits out in a small patch of yard, drinking a Bud from the neck in the shade of a tree. Chickens scratch and strut in the dust. I’ve noticed chickens all over Key West, occasionally causing cars and bikes to skid to a halt as they potter across quite busy roads. ‘Why do the chickens cross the roads?’ I ask Shine. He tells me that many of them are descended from the roosters who were bred for cock-fighting, which, until two years ago, was a common occurrence in Key West, and one of the reasons Hemingway liked the place.

Shine, whose real name is Kermit Forbes, is amused but not greatly impressed by the celebrity that being Hemingway’s sparring partner has brought him. He lives modestly in a rented single-storey clapboard house which was once a dairy. Now it’s home to Shine’s rich collection of memorabilia. There’s a pair of boxing gloves with the stuffing spilling out, masks from the Halloween procession, beads, necklaces, a Conch Republic flag, a young child’s woollen dress, soft toys, bar mirrors, two teddy bears in a net, a cactus growing from inside a bright yellow kettle. And that’s just outside.

Indoors there’s barely room for the two of us amongst more mouldering toys, baseball hats, birdcages and photographs of Shine with various friends, which hang from the ceiling as densely packed as leaves in a tropical forest. On one wall is a picture of young Shine, fists raised in fighter’s pose. Next to it is Hemingway, his great barrel chest bared, a cloak around his shoulders, beaming broadly as he leans on the ropes of a boxing ring.

One day, some time in the 1930s, Shine was acting as a second to a young boxer who was taking quite a pasting. Shine threw in the towel. The referee refused to accept it. He did it again and once more the referee kicked it away. Furious at his refusal to stop the fight, Shine climbed into the ring and swung a punch at the referee. Only after the fight was Shine told that the referee he had assaulted was the famous writer Ernest Hemingway. He was made to go round to the house and apologise straightaway.

Shine knocked on the door of the grand house at 907 Whitehead with deep misgivings, but Hemingway, far from being angry, asked him and his friends in for some sparring practice and told them to come round any time.

And they did. One Christmas, Shine recalls, they were walking up Whitehead, short of cash, when they saw a light in the Hemingways’ house and knocked on the door. Hemingway was holding a party and the boys earned $200 sparring by the pool as an entertainment for his guests.

Shine finishes his Budweiser and sends the bottle skimming across the yard. One of those sparring friends, who went by the name of ‘Iron Baby’ Roberts, is being buried this morning but Shine doesn’t think he’ll go along. He doesn’t like funerals. And he looks like the sort of man who doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do.

He stares for a while across to the chain-link fence on the other side of the street, which surrounds a now abandoned military base. He flicks a fly away. I ask him if he ever hurt Hemingway. He rubs the flat of his hand across his bad eye and chuckles.

‘I could never get near him. He was a big man.’ He mimes Hemingway’s long arms. ‘I had to look up to see him.’

I ask him if Key West has changed a lot since the days when he helped milk a cow in the house he now lives in.

He looks around, never hurrying to answer. ‘Sure.’ His eyes come back to mine. ‘No one’s hungry any more.’

As we’re leaving, Basil notices a cockerel lying in a corner of the yard. It’s been very still for an awfully long time. He brings it to Shine’s attention. Apart from confirming that this is an ex-rooster, he doesn’t seem much interested.

‘What do you do?’ Basil enquires solicitously. ‘Bury him?’

‘We’ll bury him.’ Shine yawns expansively. ‘Or throw him over the fence. He’ll go over the fence one day.’

As will we all.

S
even o’clock in the evening outside Sloppy Joe’s and Kevin the cop is not a happy man. His chance to win the Hemingway Look-Alike competition at the eleventh attempt is only an hour away and Shine Forbes has not shown up.

‘Goddamit, where the hell is he?’ mutters Kevin, puffing nervously on his cigar, his eyes flicking over the growing crowd.

Kevin is not the only one of the twenty-four finalists to be displaying uncharacteristic jumpiness (though Hemingway himself once said that the only two things that really frightened him were snakes and public speaking). Most pace quietly up and down, like little boys before a school play. ‘Just talk loud and slow,’ one contender is counselled. Another sits quietly with his wife and daughter, dressed, like Kevin, in the all-white strip and red neckerchief of a Pamplona bull-runner, every now and then running his tongue over dry lips.

Meanwhile the judges, who are all previous winners, are behaving with the assurance and swagger of those who know they have the destinies of others in their hands. Wearing medal ribbons round their necks, they’re photographed and eyed-up and accorded all the guarded respect of school prefects.