Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  I think I know exactly why Gigi looks so untroubled, or wishes to appear that way. He’s trying to cover all the rottenness he feels inside, has always felt inside.

  When the police had picked him up fifty minutes earlier, when he had been sitting bewildered and seemingly drunk on a strip of median curb at 1121 Crandon Boulevard in Key Biscayne, right outside the entrance to Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, he’d had the hospital gown wrapped around his shoulders, but was otherwise naked. In one hand were a red jumper and black high heels. He looked like a man, although his toenails were painted, and he was wearing makeup and two rings.

  As Officer Nelia Real of the Key Biscayne Police Department drew up in her cruiser, Gigi was on the curb trying to put on a flowered thong. A few minutes before, a park ranger named Nelson Mompierre had noticed him stumbling along, north on the boulevard’s southbound lane. When the police officer got out of her car, Gigi was sitting down, as if pooped, or possibly trying to get his bearings. He was grinning.

  From Officer Real’s typed report: “Mr. Hemingway (defendant) had he/her genitals (Mr. Hemingway is a transsexual and had his male organs removed) exposed to the public. The defendant had a hospital gown wrapped around the shoulder area exposing the breasts. The defendant refused to be handcuffed and refused to enter the police unit. He was screaming and resisting our requests to leave.” Despite those last two sentences, the officer wasn’t really exercised about Gigi. Neither she nor her backup, Officer Ben Torres (she’d radioed for assistance, just in case), thought him dangerous in any real sense. He was just some confused old gay or bi or trans, possibly homeless. As Officer Real said later, “At times he was very coherent, but at other times he didn’t make any sense.” In the squad car, after he’d calmed down, Officer Real had a pleasant talk with Gigi. Once she’d discovered who he was, or who he was the son of, she told him that Ernest Hemingway was just about her favorite author. Her own people were from Cuba. At the Key Biscayne station house (before he was transported across Rickenbacker Causeway to Miami’s main detention center for women), Gigi offered to autograph the back of her arrest affidavit. She took him up on it. He was plying the old Gigi charms. He must have been hoping it would do him some good. He told her he was going to come back and take her out to lunch. The whole thing must have made some impression on her, for after his death, Officer Real told an Associated Press reporter: “I feel really bad that that happened. He was a very nice guy.” She repeated that sentiment throughout the week.

  No one has ever been able to explain with any certainty how and why Gigi came to be where he was, that day, September 26, 2001, with his clothes off, in the midday sun, immediately outside the entrance to a state recreation area at the southern tip of Key Biscayne, which itself is more or less at the southern watery end of greater Miami. I can’t explain it for certain, either, but I do have a deeply held theory about it.

  REENACTMENT

  Gregory Hemingway, September 26, 2001

  Because I could not stop for Death—

  He kindly stopped for me—

  —beginning of an untitled poem by Emily Dickinson

  No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

  THE BUILDING where Gigi died sits under a swirl of raised freeways on the edge of the Miami skyline. The Dolphin Expressway and 1-95 and 1-395 come together here. It’s a four-story, monolithic, concrete, beige box, with little slits for windows and some concertina wire wrapped around the perimeter. The people inside can’t see out the windows, though—they’re covered over. The jail is on the corner of Northwest Seventh Avenue and Northwest Fourteenth Street, which is also known as Tornado Way. The roar of cars and trucks overhead goes on day and night, although it’s doubtful the inmates think very much about freeway noise. They make their own noise. It comes from blaring TVs in the common spaces to clanging doors to yelling of all kinds.

  “A lot of the guards would still remember him,” said Janelle Hall, a public affairs officer from the corrections department, when I visited the jail. “Very interesting case. We had him in here several times. People liked him. Highly intelligent. He didn’t cause us trouble. He went by this other name—”

  “Gloria,” I said.

  “That’s right. Sometimes he’d be Greg, sometimes we’d have him as Gloria.”

  Cell 3C2 was a safety cell, she explained. It’s for inmates with psychiatric or other problems who need to be segregated from the general population.

  Gigi’s pod in 3C2 was and is about a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room. They let me look through the window. The room had a steel bunk, a metal sink, a hopper, a ledge for toiletries. Gigi’s and the four or five other pods of the cell were arranged in a semicircle, fronting a common area. There were two TVs going, and the sound was being piped into the pods. There was also a telephone in the common space, and it was on a rolling pedestal. It looked like a payphone outside a 7-Eleven. Attached to the pedestal was a length of cable tethered to the phone’s receiver. The way it worked, I was told, is that when an inmate wished to make a call—and, really, there were few restrictions on calls, as long as the party on the other end was accepting charges—the inmate signaled the guard, and the guard rolled over the phone and fed in the receiver via an opening in the locked door.

  I can’t report how many phone calls Ernest Hemingway’s son made—or whether he made any at all—in the five days he lived in 377 of 3C2 of the Miami-Dade County Women’s Detention Center in the last week of September 2001. The jail doesn’t have those records. The only person in his immediate or even extended family who apparently knew where he was that week was his wife, Ida, who was at their home back in Montana. Once she found out (on the second full day he was there), she declined to get him out. His bail was $1,000, which means $100 would have sprung him, because all you need is a tenth. John Hemingway feels huge regret about this. He writes of it in Tribe. “Christ, even I would have had a hundred bucks,” he said to me once. “If one of us kids had known, maybe we could have gotten him out of there and into some serious medical care in a hospital.” As to why he thinks his father didn’t tell any of his children where he was, ask them for help, John said, “I don’t know. Maybe there was no place for us in what he had to go through. This was a reenactment. He was reenacting it all over again, and there wasn’t room for anybody else.”

  • • •

  Gigi had had a rough summer. He’d gotten his hip replaced at Miami Heart Institute. In both Florida and Montana, he’d been getting around with a walker. He was taking too much Percocet, mixing it with too much alcohol, talking morosely about the fact that he was closing in on seventy. He was fighting more than ever with his wife.

  In early September he called his old friend Thelma Baker in Missoula. He was three hours away, in Bozeman. He was going to leave Ida, this time for good, but he was scared about it, too, because he didn’t know if he’d be able to take care of himself. He didn’t know what Ida’s reaction would be. She was physically stronger than he was. “Let me come over to my old room at the motel, so you can take care of me,” he said. Through the years Thelma had held money for him, barked at him, done laundry for him, mothered him, big-sistered him. Gigi had gotten to be friends with her three grown sons, who helped their mom with the motel. They’d played tennis together, and hunted and fished, although one of Thelma’s sons couldn’t abide his sex change. (Thelma herself had tried hard to talk him out of going through with it.) Gigi and Thelma were almost the same age. Once they’d gone out on a sort of date, but their relationship had never really been romantic, despite that he’d once proposed. He’d spent all day worrying about where to go for dinner, arranging for flowers, getting his car washed, his clothes cleaned. The evening turned out to be a big success. He was a nervous gentleman.

  Through the years Thelma had listened to Gigi’s crazy ideas about making some kind of scientific breakthrough on chelation therapy, which has to do with the removal
of heavy metals from the body. He was going to apply chelation’s methods to getting plaque out of the arteries and curing heart disease once and for all. He’d be world famous.

  “If you come to Missoula, Greg, I won’t be here,” Thelma said. She was going out to Hawaii with a friend for the University of Montana’s opening game of the football season against the University of Hawaii. Gigi begged her not to go, but after she was in Honolulu, he had called to see if she had arrived okay and was having a good time. This was probably on September 7, 2001. Four days later, two taken-over airliners arrowed into the World Trade Center. Thelma and her girlfriend couldn’t get off Maui. Gigi called again. “Please, I need you,” he’d said. She told him, “I’ll be there soon.” He said, “If you aren’t coming back now, I won’t be coming to Missoula at all.”

  By the third week of September, in Miami, he was raging. The newest breakthrough was to sink all his money into airline stocks—and then sit back and watch them rise in the aftershock of 9/11. He’d make a fortune and leave the money to his kids. His wife was a money-grubbing alcoholic, he told some friends and at least one of his children. (In his manic state, he couldn’t find phone numbers; pieces of paper spilled from his wallet at telephone stands outside gas stations.) He had come down to Florida from Montana with barely a change of clothes. Mostly, he was sleeping in those clothes at the house he and Ida owned in the Grove.

  On Friday night, September 21, in drag, he tore through a local Borders bookstore. He was yelling and pulling down off the shelf his father’s novels, scribbling his own name across the title page. Three days later, he dialed his third wife in Montana. He and Valerie hadn’t spoken in a long while. When she didn’t pick up, he left a lengthy message. He wished to thank her for the good years they’d had together, no matter all the bad, far more his fault than hers. “You did a wonderful job with our children,” he said. Valerie Hemingway writes about this call on the second-to-last page of her memoir. “I did something I never did before, I taped it,” she says. Did she somehow understand he was telling her good-bye? She doesn’t say that, exactly.

  That same evening, Dick Edmonston held his regular Monday-night open house at his home on Park Drive in the Grove. Gigi was a casual friend of the host’s, and he tended to turn up at these standing parties when he was in town. Edmonston, a Miami playboy with a thing about cats, wandered around talking to his guests, who were smoking weed but not really snorting things. Gigi spent about two hours on a stool just outside the kitchen, stroking a cat in his lap and sipping from a glass of red wine. He was in a black cocktail shift and a brown wig. He held his unshaven legs crossed in a modest way. His wide feet were in a pair of spiky heels that looked at least a size too small. His friend Peter Myers, an Australian journalist, was at the party. He’d never seen Gigi as a woman. Myers thought to himself that Gigi was in better spirits than he’d seen him in a long time. He seemed damned healthy. Maybe he was like a lightbulb that incandesces the moment before it’s going to go out. “Hello, Greg,” Myers said, trying to be casual. “No, it’s Vanessa,” Gigi said evenly. “Oh, right, okay, Vanessa,” Myers said. The party broke up about midnight and Gigi drove off in a 1995 blue Ford.

  The next afternoon, September 25, at 4:25 p.m., Vanessa or Gloria or Greg or Gigi or whoever he was at that moment was found by the police barging his way through a security gate at the entrance to a high-end high-rise apartment on Crandon Boulevard in Key Biscayne, quite close to Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park. There was said to be a woman in this complex whom Gigi had dated from time to time. From the arrest complaint: “When the def. was confronted, he refused to cooperative [sic], refusing to give his name and D.O.B. and attempted to walk away several times from this officer.” They booked him on a double charge of resisting arrest without violence and failure to possess a valid Florida license. (He seems not to have had any license.) The bond for each charge was set at $500. He was kept in jail overnight, posted the $100—Ida, in Montana, terrified, and not wrongly, that he was going to blow all their money on crazed stock investments, had had their bank accounts frozen—got out by ten the next morning. Was it his last $100? I don’t know.

  The legal documents account for nothing between the time of his release on the morning of the twenty-sixth and his second arrest, two hours and fifteen minutes later, very close to the site of the previous arrest. Officer Real came along, with her flasher going, and there he was, the pathetic old guy with the streaked and almost whitish hair, clothes bunched in one hand, flowered thong in the other, and that white hospital gown covering his sun-burning shoulders.

  Two days later, as mentioned, on Friday the twenty-eighth, his spouse learned where he was. Ida later claimed to friends and the press that she’d spent hours on the phone from Montana calling hospitals and jails, trying to find him. And once she did find him, why didn’t she try to get him out? “He would’ve been on the street,” Ida said, a year later, to a reporter for Rolling Stone. “I wanted to get him into a hospital. I sent a psychiatrist to see him, but they wouldn’t let him in.” Four days after he was dead, she told The Miami Herald, “He would not be dead if he had gotten the medical attention that he needed. I called constantly, constantly. I don’t know if they ever gave him his high blood pressure medication.” And yet on the day after his death, on October 2, at 12:30 p.m., Gigi’s wife would tell a medical examiner investigator on the phone from Montana: “He was not under any medication, but took Percocet until 4 months ago.”

  On the same day that Ida found out where Gigi was, an entry was made in a jail log about his general behavior. Later, after his death, in an all-capped synopsis titled “TERMINAL EVENT,” an official of the detention center would write: “On September 28, he appeared forgetful and confused at times. His vital signs were taken and were as follows; b/p 140/90, pulse 80 and he was also afebrile. He complained of pain and was given two Tylenol tablets. By September 29, 2001 [that was Saturday], he appeared to be calmer than initially. He remained in a calm state with appropriate behavior.” Ahead of this: “He was advised that his doctor had called and ordered him to take lithium; however, he refused stating that he does not take lithium and had not taken lithium in 3 years.” (The doctor’s name is Floyd Rosen. He’s still a practicing psychiatrist in Miami. He declined to talk with me because, as he said in a phone message, he just couldn’t violate the patient-doctor code of privacy, even if Gigi was long dead. “First, do no harm,” he said, “and even now talking about it could do harm to the family.” There was a pause. And then the disembodied voice said, even more quietly, “You see, this was a man who suffered very much, and he was a … doctor.”)

  The prisoner stayed calm through the weekend. On Monday morning he was awakened at 5:50 a.m. for his scheduled early court hearing. Fifty years before, another Monday, in Los Angeles, he’d had another hearing scheduled for another court. Now Gigi asked Corrections Officer Chandra Christin, who had just come on duty, if he could have some “slippons”—his toes were cold. Christin left to get the paper-like shoes. Within five minutes she was back at pod 377. She looked through the window and saw Gigi facedown on the floor, wedged against a leg of the bed. She yelled to a fellow guard, Rosa Echevarria. They unlocked the door. They called out his name. No response. They turned him over. In the words of the Investigation Report summary, they “found him without a pulse or palpitation. C.P.R. was administered until the arrival of paramedics. Paramedics arrived and pronounced him deceased.” One of the documents (“Natural Death Investigation Continuation/Supplementary”) gives the time of death as “Approx. 5:55 a.m.” Fifty years before, at nearly the same moment, if you factor in Pacific time, Doctor Henry Randall Thomas was pronouncing Pauline Hemingway dead.

  On a form titled “Deceased’s Valuables and Personal Property Record,” there was a space provided for a listing of clothing at the time of death. “None” was written across it. There was another space for a listing of “Valuables” at the time of death. Written across it: “None.”

  D
id he somehow know this was the end? For fifty years, every end of September and beginning of October, to lesser or greater extents, the old sorrows and shames and manias over his mother’s death had been clicking in for Gigi—only this time something in the gears slid and shifted and took him all the way over. This is the way I understand his story. Unlike his own father, Gigi didn’t take the “family exit,” to use John Hemingway’s expression in Tribe. In that sense, Gigi was braver than his own father—he let death find him. But to repeat what I said earlier: I consider them both far braver than we ever knew. Hemingway always had the gift and release of his words—until he didn’t have them. Gigi, without such a gift or outlet, ended up sparing his own children the burden and guilt of a parental suicide. The spiral ended. Two generations down from Ed Hemingway in Oak Park, something hopeful, in spite of everything, had happened for future generations of Hemingways. God knows, though, how Gigi must have dreamed and longed for death for so much of his life. Dream? On the last page of Papa, Gigi has his father telling him, “Atoms can’t dream, Gig. No use deluding yourself, old pal.”

  So what would a person with no clothes on have been doing outside the entrance to Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park at 12:15 p.m. on the Wednesday before death came stopping? I prefer to believe this: Gigi was sitting on that median curb, trying to regain his breath and courage, to climb Cape Florida Lighthouse, which was about a mile away. It sits at the bottom of Bill Baggs, surrounded by sea grapes and palms and a wild stretch of beach. It’s one of the most famous landmarks in all of South Florida. Gigi liked going there. As a med student, he had climbed it with friends. It is 109 hard-breathing iron steps to the top, or at least to the watch tower. Gigi used to sit with friends at the little café near the base of the lighthouse. He liked the Cuban food and one of the old waiters, who was from Havana. At least once, in drag, he got his heel caught in the wedge between the slats of the café’s outdoor deck and took a humiliating header.