Voyager
Page 5
I could not believe that a woman like Christine could be attracted to a man like me. I was poor and by comparison uptight and boring. A very bad bet by anyone’s standards, I was a twenty-year-old divorced dropout and father of an abandoned child, a man who had made a mess of his and several other lives already. I had moved by then from Peterborough Street to a cheaper, smaller flat on Symphony Road, and to pay the $36 monthly rent washed dishes part-time at the Rathskeller in Harvard Square. I wrote terrible Whitmanesque poems and neo-Faulknerian stories and spent the rest of my waking hours reading all the books listed on the syllabi of a friendly Boston University English major.
Nonetheless, Christine was attracted to me. Obsessively so. Which astonished and pleased me. But that is another story, I said to Chase. I did acknowledge that my fourteen-year-long marriage to Christine and divorce were linked in important ways to the story of my prior marriage to Darlene and its brutal end, but they were complicated links, not simple cause and effect—even though my second marriage and divorce would never have happened if not for my first—and could not be quickly described. It was late at night at Scout’s on the island of Saba; it was time to pack our bags so we could depart early the next morning for St. Barthélemy. The present and future beckoned; the past could wait.
But it can’t wait for long. Whether teller or listener, to get a story straight—which is, after all, one of the things I’m trying to accomplish here—one has to go back to its beginnings. Last April, my Miami friend, the poet Tom Healy, and I were biking the Overseas Highway from Key Largo to Key West and return—two and a half days, about two hundred miles of pedaling—when the past, or a crucial part of the past, came unexpectedly back to me. It was a tough ride. The Seven Mile Bridge between Knight’s Key and Little Duck Key was the worst of it, our bikes squeezed on the right by a low guardrail, while eighteen inches off our left shoulders, semis and RVs and tourist-laden cars blew by. Fifty feet beneath the bridge, the ultramarine waters of Florida Bay merged with the turquoise-blue Gulf of Mexico. It was very humid, in the mid-eighties, with a fifteen-mile-an-hour headwind and only occasional cloud cover.
At least once a year, especially since moving to Miami four years ago, I’ve driven down the Overseas Highway by car to visit friends or participate in the annual Key West Literary Seminar. So I was surprised to find myself deeply and oddly stirred by traveling the same route on a bike, at ground level. Then I remembered. Fifty-three years ago, a wheezing, round-shouldered 1950s Greyhound bus from Miami dropped me off at a single-pump gas station in the fishing village of Islamorada. The bus lumbered back onto the Overseas Highway, old Route 1, and headed for Key West eighty miles beyond. I was lugging all my worldly possessions in an olive-green army-surplus duffel. I hefted the duffel to my shoulder and crossed the now empty road to a two-story, Bahamas-style rooming house with a wide porch that faced the highway.
I was certain of that much; those images were clear. But the rest of my memories of those early months in Islamorada and then later in Key West were vague and uncertain, even as to when I was there exactly, and for how long. I know that I was very young at the time, in my early twenties. I tried telling the story to Tom but couldn’t get it right. I must not have been paying attention back then. Or else paying attention to everything that wasn’t worth remembering now, more than a half century later.
I used to tell people that it happened in 1962 or ’63, when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. But a few years ago I gave a reading from a recently published novel at the Booksmith, a bookshop in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. It was one of the several stores and restaurants and contractors that had given me part-time employment in the early 1960s. It was a nostalgic event for me and a kind of triumphant homecoming, and I told the audience that many years ago I had quit my job at the bookstore and hitchhiked alone down to Miami and ridden a bus out to the Florida Keys, where I rented a tiny Airstream trailer in Islamorada, pumped gas part-time to pay the rent, and began to write my first short stories in the cool shadow of Ernest Hemingway, whom I associated with the Keys, although he had long since moved on to Cuba. It was a story I had told many times, whenever asked how I began my life as a writer. Although unsure of the exact date, I usually added that later that year Hemingway shot himself—as if to imply a slightly melodramatic connection between me, the apprentice writer, and Ernest Hemingway, the doomed master.
Later, while I was signing copies of my book at a table, a man appeared in line—a bony guy in his late seventies, slouch cap, thick mustache, Irish face. He leaned in and whispered, “That ain’t how it happened, Russ. That bit about you and the Keys.” Anyone who called me Russ was someone from my distant past, from before I divorced Christine and became Russell. I recognized him at once, Joe Kerr, a.k.a. Joker, who back in the early 1960s rounded up young Boston artists and beatniks like me and my friends to work as carpenters and stagehands in amphetamine-fueled thirty-day bursts for the Opera Company of Boston. Joker was a likable guy who we all knew was a small-time, but well-connected, mobster. We were his non-union scabs. “I’ll be across the street at the Tam,” he said. “C’mon over when you’re done signing. I’ll tell you what really happened.”
Joker told me, over drinks at the Tam, that back then I was having a nervous breakdown, he called it, over a dame named Christine who’d left me for another guy. I couldn’t get out of bed and come in to work, he said, so the bookstore manager fired me. “You was crying like a fucking baby, man.” It was the winter of 1961, he said. “Same year Hemingway stuck his shotgun in his mouth. Not ’62 or ’63, like you said.” Joker had taken pity on me and sent me down to the Florida Keys to work with some associates of his who were helping train Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. He said he had helped get Rose La Rose, the famous stripper, out of Havana when Castro closed down the nightclubs in ’59, and he was still tight with the Miami mob. “You were a smart kid, Russ. You woulda made a pretty good gangster,” he said and laughed. “I made some calls and set you up at that rooming house in Islamorada where the Miami and CIA guys were staying. But I guess you got scared or something and moved the fuck out. They told me you disappeared. That’s probably when you started being a writer,” he said. “But it didn’t have nothing to do with Hemingway.”
There are three interwoven, underlying contexts to the story, the personal, the social, and the historical—as there are to all stories, true or not. The personal context, that weepy, disabling end of a love affair with a girl named Christine, was deeply embarrassing to me, somehow weirdly shameful, and I had forgotten it, so that later I could develop and elaborate the social context and make it into myth, the old story of a young artist’s solitary, dedicated apprenticeship in the shadow of a doomed living master. The historical context, Miami mobsters working with the CIA to arm and train Cuban exiles for the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion—looking back now, surely the most interesting part of the story—I left out altogether. It would have diminished the romantic, self-embellishing myth of how, in following Hemingway’s suicidal footsteps in the sands of the Florida Keys, I became a writer. Because I was mainly interested in shaping how I was perceived by others, by that audience in the Booksmith in Brookline, for instance, I literally forgot what really happened. Personalized myth displaced personalized historical reality. Until the night in the bookshop and at the Tam, when Joker made me want to get my story straight.
Were Joker’s Miami mob guys really rooming at the foursquare, wooden, two-story building with the long porch while they and a CIA cohort trained the Cuban exiles? Or was Joker, a storyteller himself, making it up? I have no memory of the men individually, but I do have a clear visual memory of the building and of some Americans living there, images recently freshened by my bike ride down the Keys with my pal Tom. The images, however, seem to have been drawn, not from lived experience, but from my memories of a movie or a play in which a group of people, mostly men, are trapped in a hotel bar by a hurricane.
At first I thought the images might have co
me from To Have and Have Not, with Bogart and Bacall, the film version of the 1937 Hemingway novel set in Havana and Key West. Then, as Tom and I rode our bikes past the old, remarkably unchanged rooming house in Islamorada, I realized that I was remembering images from a different movie, Key Largo. Did it really happen to me—the hurricane, being trapped in the hotel with a bunch of gangsters—or did I merely see it in the movie? Or did I imagine it? Or dream it? And if it did happen, why after a month or so did I leave the hotel and the gangsters and the CIA agents and rent a little trailer across the road?
Tom is gay and was convinced that Joker had been a gay gangster with a crush. No house, no wife, in Boston in the late fifties, early sixties, providing non-union workers for the Opera Company of Boston by hiring handsome young artists and writers to make sets and be stagehands. “It was an opera company,” Tom pointed out. “Not a waste disposal company. Give me a break, Russell.”
A gay Irish mobster? Well, yes, it was possible. And if so, I was too oblivious to have guessed it. But why else would Joker want to help a brokenhearted kid having a nervous breakdown over a busted romance by sending him off to train Cuban exiles in the Keys with his mobster friends so the kid could maybe become a mobster himself? Joker’s little mobster.
And could it really have been that early, the winter of 1961, in time for the Bay of Pigs, an event that at the time seemed to have escaped my notice? Or had no memory of, anyhow. As Tom and I pedaled on, I did the numbers. I needed to establish when, exactly, this happened. I’d fallen in love with Christine when she was a student at Emerson College and I was living on Symphony Road in Boston, working part-time at the bookstore and the Rathskeller restaurant and in binges at the Opera Company of Boston. She left me for another boy, ran off with him to finish college in Richmond, Virginia. I remembered pumping gas at the filling station in Islamorada next to my Airstream on old Route 1. Then at some point I left Islamorada and rented a room by the week at a whorehouse in Key West that took me two weeks or more to figure out actually was a whorehouse. Key West was a navy town then, and I was very naive and, as I said, oblivious. I was writing my neo-Hemingway short stories and paying more attention to my sentences than to my surroundings.
I remembered that a few months later I delivered a drive-away Opel picked up in Miami to its owner in San Diego by way of northern Mexico, with an extended stopover in New Orleans, accompanied by two guys who ran a card game at the Key West whorehouse, Frank, a strip show barker recently released from jail in New Jersey, and an AWOL sailor from Oklahoma whose name I can’t remember. I stayed for a few weeks in San Diego, where my mother had recently moved, then hitched back east to New Hampshire. Temporarily reconciled with my father, I moved in with him and his new wife where he was living in his parents’ home in Barnstead and began working alongside him as a union plumber, the Banks family trade for three generations. Returning to Boston the following summer, I renewed my relationship with Christine. And on October 29, 1962, married her. The marriage did not last as long as we hoped, of course—they never do; that is, mine never do—but the date is indelible, part of the record.
So the numbers confirmed it: yes, I was in Islamorada in April 1961, which is when the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred, and I must have been frightened by whatever was happening before my eyes, which I could not have understood, so I fled the rooming house and the men living there, abandoning the life of a gangster for the life of a writer in an Airstream trailer just across the road. And the rest became my more sharply remembered life: Key West, New Orleans, Mexico, San Diego, New Hampshire, a second early marriage, college in North Carolina, Jamaica, and on.
Still chasing down the imagery, at home in Miami a few nights after my bike ride with Tom, I rented and watched the movie Key Largo. The film is adapted from the play by Maxwell Anderson. Richard Brooks and John Huston wrote the screenplay, Huston directed. Released in 1948, it starred Bogart, Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, and Claire Trevor. I’d forgotten the weirdly racist Seminole Indian aspect—it opens with a local sheriff looking for “two young bucks” who’d busted out of jail. Me and Morelli on the lam in a ’53 Olds? The real action begins when Major McLeod (Bogart) arrives by bus at the Hotel Largo, a Bahamas-style wood-frame rooming house and bar with a long porch facing the road. He’s come to keep a vow made to a guy in his outfit who was killed in Italy in the war. He’s promised to visit the guy’s wheelchair-bound dad (Barrymore) and gorgeous sister (Bacall) and report that their beloved son and brother died heroically in battle.
Bogart finds the hotel taken over by a posse of American gangsters up from Cuba led by Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a short, round, cigar-chomping Capone type, there to meet some Miami mobsters and exchange a suitcase of phony money printed in Cuba for a bag of real cash—when the hurricane hits. The wind rises to a roar. And then comes a strangely ominous scene in the hotel bar where Robinson leans in to Bacall and whispers something in her ear that the audience can’t hear, something that frightens and repels her. She recoils, and he does it again. This time she spits at him and claws his face with her nails. Bleeding, he backs off. Throughout the scene Bogart stands and watches from the bar, but does nothing.
The scene is ugly and realistic in a way that the rest of the movie is not; the rest is operatic and stagy. But for me that exchange between Robinson and Bacall carries the emotional and moral meaning of the film. Everything seems to hinge on whispered words that we never hear. We’re invited to imagine the filthiest, most degrading words possible. It was shocking and frightening and deeply felt by me in a way that nothing else in the film was.
When did I first see Key Largo? Not when it was released in 1948—I was only eight years old. It is possible, of course, that I saw it a year later at the Star Theater in Concord, New Hampshire; I went to the movies at least once a week starting when I was nine, regardless of what was showing. But at that age what, if anything, would I have made of Edward G. Robinson’s whispering into Lauren Bacall’s lovely ear? The scene might have frightened me, but only a little. Bacall’s response would have frightened me more—a beautiful young woman reacts violently to an ugly man’s unheard words by spitting at him and scratching his face with her nails. The sexual element would not have occurred to me. Not consciously.
It’s more likely that I watched the film for the first time many years later, after I had actually lived in the Keys, in the 1980s, late at night on the Turner Classic Movies channel. And just recently, prompted by my bike ride down the Keys with my friend Tom, when I watched it again, this time via Netflix, and it became clear that the scene with Robinson and Bacall was the emotional and moral center, not just of the movie, but of my all-but-forgotten, long-ago months in Key Largo.
But I couldn’t be sure of the differences between what I remembered experiencing in 1961 and what I saw decades later in the movie. They flowed together like Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico under the Seven Mile Bridge and elaborated and extended each other. This time the movie stirred up a wave of impacted and disturbing and mysteriously mingled memories, all brought on by Joker’s revelations at the Tam and the bike trip with Tom years later: lived experience first, then a long half century of forgetting, then a willed return to the location and to the film—followed, as I write, by these overflowing memories, making it possible for my early lived experience to be relived now, in my mid-seventies.
Almost relived. For at the very center there floats a small, opaque gray circle, an absence, behind which something shameful lies hidden. It’s what no one hears Robinson whisper in Bacall’s perfect ear. It’s what I imagine he said to her. Something I myself must have said to a beautiful young woman. To Christine, driving her into the arms of another, a man standing at the bar, watching, like Bogart. She evidently forgave me, or she would not have married me. But I cannot remember what I said to her and can neither imagine nor acknowledge it, and thus cannot be truly forgiven. All I can call up today is the emotional residue: which is shame. Guilt dissipates over time; shame, lik
e a man’s character, stays.
When Tom and I biked our way back from Key West to where we had left the car in Key Largo, we pulled off at the old place in Islamorada. Freshly painted, it looked the same outside as it did fifty-four years earlier, except for a resort-wear boutique and a real estate office on the first floor and what appeared to be a rack of studio apartments upstairs. I stepped into the real estate office and spoke to the Realtor, a pretty, very pregnant, young Hispanic woman with frizzy dark hair seated in front of an electric fan. I asked her if the building used to be a bar and rooming house. She said that was before her time. But yes, she’d heard it was once a roadhouse. Where a lot of bad things happened, she added, smiling. Except for her office and the boutique next door, it was condos now. There’s one available, she told me. An end unit. Just came on the market. A view of the Gulf on one side and Florida Bay on the other. Would I be interested in seeing it?
I hesitated a few seconds, then said no, and Tom and I mounted our bikes and rode on.
Meanwhile, in harmonious, if asymmetrical, late 1980s counterpoint, my courtship tour of the Caribbean continued. Chase and I returned to Sint Maarten from our sojourn in Saba and immediately departed for St. Bart’s. Though not as terrifying as its counterpart on Saba, the single scariest thing about St. Bart’s was the approach to the landing strip. The rickety old STOL passed through a cut in the steep hills west of the town of Gustavia, a defile, actually, not much wider than the wingtips. When the pilot suddenly cut the engine, the plane literally dropped toward a runway that ended precisely at the edge of Baie de St. Jean, where several half-submerged planes that had missed the stop lay moldering below. After that, touring the tiny eight-square-mile island was mainly a matter of restaurant-hopping. St. Bart’s may have the most restaurants per capita of any place in the world—at last count when we were there in 1988, sixty restaurants for thirty-five hundred residents. And I’m talking French restaurants, from the elegant high-end hilltop Les Castelets to Chez Joe’s on a Gustavia backstreet.