Reinventing Mike Lake

by R. W. Jones

  Following breakfast, I went back upstairs for a few more hours to do some writing. I had intended to write for even longer, but being in Key West this long without seeing the sights was getting to me, and most likely hurting my writing if all I was thinking about was getting out of my room.

  After setting Bahama up in the room, knowing she does well alone for a few hours on her own, and of course closing the windows, I headed out. I would have normally taken Bahama on a walk like this, but because I wasn’t sure where I was going I thought it was best to leave her behind until I had a bit of an idea of my surroundings.

  It was a short walk from my room to the epicenter of Key West, Duval Street. It houses most of the restaurants and bars tourists like to frequent. During the short walk to Duval Street I thought about how my uncle had told me Hemingway had lived here and how he walked these same exact streets some 70 years earlier. From what I understood, from reading biographies and some internet research, he spent most of his time walking between his house which is now a museum and known as the Hemingway House, and the bar Sloppy Joe’s. Occasionally, legend states, he took his work to the bar and did it there. In my modern day thought it was hard for me not to imagine him lugging his laptop with him to the bar, which would have been quite the sight. However, he was bringing paper and pen, which makes for an even better sight. I couldn’t help but wonder if he ever spilled any of his drinks on his writings. I pictured his legendary temper getting the better of him, tossing the glass to the side while frantically running into the street, hoping the sun would dry his page before he lost a passage he may not be able to remember depending on how much he drank.

  I knew that many drinks are associated with Hemingway, mainly because he enjoyed many drinks. While in Cuba he preferred a mojito, but 90 miles away in Key West, he enjoyed a daiquiri or martini. He has also been associated with the on and off again legalized absinthe. It’s funny, Hemingway is arguably known more for his renowned drinking than his writing, so it’s no big surprise that a debate on exactly which drinks he drank and when he drank them is easy to come across, specifically online. I know drinking stories can be legendary, but I can’t imagine a more legendary drinker than Hemingway.

  Despite being around noon, I could see by my fellow passersby that this was plenty late to start drinking. I wasn’t, nor am I now, a big drinker, but being that I think Hemingway had a large part of me finding my way down here, I thought I’d have a “when in Key West” experience. Why not follow in the footsteps of the most popular resident ever? I wasn’t planning on discriminating on which Hemingway drinks I would ingest, thinking that the fairest way to get the most out of my experience. I mentally retraced my steps back to the house, because in a few hours I figured those steps would be hazy.

  A short walk up Duval I found Sloppy Joe’s, and I entered as the morning turned to afternoon. I’m guessing I wasn’t the first want-to-be writer attempting to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps the employees had ever seen come through their doors, but I was very excited to be in a place of history.

  After bellying up to the bar, I ordered a daiquiri, which prompted the young male bartender to ask, “Do you want a straight or a Hemingway daiquiri?”

  “Hemingway daiquiri? I didn’t know there was such a thing.” Thinking it was just a tourist-trap type drink, probably a few more dollars than a regular.

  The bartender sat a glass and towel down and assumed the position of someone who was about to give a lecture. “You see, Hemingway was a diabetic.”

  “He was? I had no idea.”

  “Yes,” he answered quickly, returning to his lecture. “He would sometimes order a regular daiquiri, but most of the time he replaced the sugar with grapefruit juice. He’d also add a hint of maraschino liquor – the actual liquor, not just the juice that comes with the cherries.

  “Oh, well thanks for educating me, I’ll take a Hemingway then,” I said.

  “Great,” he said, pleased that he got to educate a tourist today.

  As he walked away, a gentleman to my left with a deep tan, wearing a Panama Jack hat, buttoned-up flowery shirt, khakis, flip flops, and a beer in front of him – a local I presumed – began talking to me.

  “If he was really interested in educating you, he’d tell you that Hemingway never actually stepped foot in this bar.”

  “What?” I laughed uncomfortably, thinking this was a joke or a riddle of some kind going over my head.

  “Sure, he drank quite a bit of the drink you just ordered, but he did it around the corner there on Greene.”

  Over the course of my first daiquiri, and second, the man wearing the khaki shorts who never revealed his name, not that I would have remembered anyway, gave me a history lesson about two popular bars in Key West.

  For a large portion of the 1930’s, the bar known as Sloppy Joe’s was in an establishment around the corner, the actual drinking hole of Hemingway. In 1938, the owner of Sloppy Joe’s saw the rent of the building that housed his bar raise considerably. As the tale goes, the landlord seemed to think that because the bar was so popular the owners would have no problems paying the increased rent. The landlord was correct in just half that statement – it was no problem – for the whole bar to shut down and move around the corner onto Duval Street where they received lower rent, and continued as if nothing happened. Thing is, Hemingway was already out of town by the time Sloppy Joe’s took up its new residence, having left town just a couple of years prior.

  “In other words, if you want to really drink where Hemingway drank you’ll have to move your solo party around the corner to Captain Tony’s,” said my own personal professor.

  While the daiquiris were good, and my bar stool had seemed to rise by three feet, I bid the man adieu and headed around the corner.

  Being that Key West is known for Duval Street, and not Greene Street, this road, and this establishment, were far less crowded than the one I had just come from. Now, this is how I pictured Hemingway’s Key West. In a place like the current Sloppy Joe’s, especially if it were modern day, Hemingway would have been pestered by autograph and picture seekers between every drink of his daiquiri. It’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have said, “The hell with this,” and moved his drinking to his own sizable house – or at a place like Captain Tony’s.

  Despite seeming like less of a tourist trap than Joe’s, Tony’s still had a reminder here and there that Hemingway once walked those floors. The biggest reminder of that was a bar stool – THE barstool – that Hemingway sat on when he drank here. In addition to a bar stool with his name on it, there were ones with the names of Truman Capote, Shel Silverstein, John F. Kennedy, and Jimmy Buffett, among others. I chose the Walter Cronkite stool, as the Hemingway stool was taken just before I could scoop it up.

  Here I ordered another daiquiri or three, and walked around. Despite losing the name “Sloppy Joe’s” and most of Hemingway’s tourist traffic to the establishment on Duval Street, this place holds tons more charm. I’ll go out on a limb, perhaps the limb of the tree that sits right in the middle of Captain Tony’s, that if Hemingway came back today and had to choose between the two bars he’d most likely be sitting right next to me on his stool.

  I learned from the bartender here, an older man named Hess, that the barstool with Buffett’s name on it is usually warm, because whenever he is in Key West – his permanent residence – he does most of his drinking at Tony’s. In fact, legend has it, he even wrote a song about this bar and its longtime owner, the captain himself, Tony Tarracino. Buffet will always be grateful to Tarracino because Buffet got his start there. The rumor is Tarracino usually paid him in tequila instead of cash. If you’ve heard just a few Buffet songs you get the impression that this arrangement was just fine with him.

  Hess told me that Tarracino sold the bar in 1989, but still showed up once a week until his death in 2008 just to greet new customers and shoot the breeze with the long-standing ones. The new owner, of course, didn’t mind Tarracino’s presence because it brou
ght in quite a revenue stream.

  In addition to having a tree centered right in the middle of the bar, there are also thousands of business cards lining the walls, some of them 30 and 40 years old. It was almost enough for me to wish I had a business card of my own to post on the wall just to join the others.

  Instead I figured I’d have to just sit down and drink with the others. After another, I began thinking of other Hemingway staples I could try. The Hemingway daiquiris were getting a little too sweet, and I was ready to try something else while I still could. Plus, I was getting the feeling that this wasn’t a daiquiri type of place, unless you were ordering one for your female companion, one of which I didn’t have by my side.

  I automatically went to the most extreme thing I could think of. I wasn’t even sure if what I wanted to order was legal, but because most of my inhibitions were out the door and somewhere on Greene Street, I placed my order.

  “Hey Hess, are you able to make me an abs-absith…ummm absinthe.”

  Hess laughed “You’re walking home, right”?

  “Ahh, yeah just right around the corner,” while awkwardly pointing in a direction that was most likely nowhere near Frank and Jean’s place.

  “Okay good enough. Well the absinthe we give you here isn’t quite the same as what Hemingway drank. We have a watered-down version, if you will, but in your state I’m not sure it’s going to make that much of a difference. And with nothing to compare it to, you won’t know the difference anyway” he said with a straight face.

  Based on the little I knew about the history of the drink, I was hoping for him to lay out an arrangement of silver spoons, or at the very least a cool-looking, hour-glass-shaped glass. Unfortunately, all Hess had for me was a basic high ball glass. First he filled it with a green color liquid that came out of a liquor bottle like any other. Once that was in the glass he took out a champagne bottle adding just a splash before sliding it over to me.

  “A Hemingway absinthe, sir.”

  I thought about arguing about my lack of silver spoons, sugar cubes, and interesting looking glass, but thankfully I had enough of myself left to refrain. If this is what Hemingway drank, it was good enough for me.

  It was the strongest taste I had ever experienced. I imagined I looked like I had just taken a bite out of a lemon, only a thousand times worse. Hess laughed at me, adding, “I wish I had a camera! You better drink all of that before the ghost of Hemingway comes after you.”

  There it was. The hook, line, and sinker for a drunk guy: a ghost story.

  He judged my expression of confusion, saying “What? You didn’t think Hemingway would grace that other establishment, did you?”

  I had seen the Elvira Tombstone in the other room with the pool table, but took it as a joke. That, Hess told me is not a joke, and with the unique history of the old yellow building I was doing my drinking in, it would be more of a surprise if there weren’t any ghosts. Turns out Hemingway’s ghost is just one ghost that people have said they saw or heard while working or drinking here late at night.

  Hess explained to me that the very building we were in was built in 1850, making it one of the oldest buildings in the city. The first business this building held was enough to make almost anyone believe in ghost stories – a morgue. In addition to being a morgue it was also the city’s main supply of ice. I inquired to Hess about how many ice and morgue combinations still operate in the country. Hess, who laughed, chalked my question up to being drunk.

  In the 1890’s they shipped out the bodies and ice, and replaced it with some newfangled technology called a wireless telegraph station. The station became not only an important part of the history of Key West, but also the history of America. When the battleship Maine was sunk in April 1898, provoking the Spanish-American War, it was through this building that the rest of America heard the news. The sinking of Maine has been determined to be an accident when guns on board detonated, and not an actual act of war.

  A decade later, the building became a cigar factory, housing thousands of Cuban cigars – back then they were easy to get; now, not so much. After a short stint as a cigar factory, it became a very popular place for the young men in the Navy who were traveling around the world – a bar that moonlighted as a bordello.

  During prohibition, the building hardly missed a step, becoming the most popular speak-easy in the area. Hess said it hardly ever met any legal issues from local law enforcement – because, he added with an easy chuckle, “they were some of the biggest customers.”

  “That brings us to just about Hemingway’s day. He lived in Key West on and off for about a decade, but around the time he left for the last time the owners took advantage of a cheaper rent around the corner, and moved there. This place went through a few names as a bar and finally was sold to Tony, and here we are.”

  Being as drunk as I was, it took a few trips to the bar before I finally got down the whole history. For my first visit, and a few after that, I couldn’t get past the ghost stories. Luckily Hess was a patient man.

  Hess told me that this was a popular place on the Key West ghost tour, and that of all the other places on the tour, this was the one that held the most allure because more people believe they felt the presence of another being here more than anywhere else.

  Because of mixing drinking with ghost stories, I found myself thinking about my wife more than I had since I started the trip. I instantly hit a point of sorrow so strong that I was aware of Hess still talking, but she was all I could think of. While sitting on the Cronkite stool, I remembered when she died I would find myself pleading almost every night that she would give me a sign that everything would be okay, perhaps even in the form of a ghost. I just wanted to see any sign at all that what had happened made sense in any way at all.

  Hess obviously didn’t mean to offend me. In fact, at this point in our relationship he had no idea that I had ever been married, let alone a widower. Hess continued to try to make some more light talk that day, but after a while I told Hess I had to leave. He had no reason to ask me if something was wrong having just met me, but he did anyway. Later I would be thankful he cared about a stranger’s sudden change of attitude, but that day I just said I had to go get my dog.

  With a day that had started so excitingly, I was surprised even in my drunken state how quickly it had turned. Luckily, by the time I got back to Frank and Jean’s house, the alcohol had made me very sleepy so I got some relief from myself when I passed out almost as soon as I walked back in the room. Jean must have taken Bahama out because she didn’t act like she had to go when I got back to the room, but she always seemed to know when I was thinking about my wife and usually gave me distance. I fell asleep thinking about my wife and my dreams were filled with nightmares of her in her wedding dress walking around Captain Tony’s, always just out of my reach.

  13

  I remember my first love. Puppy love. Teenage love. It was my freshman year of high school, and I was so enamored with the idea that a girl could like me. Because it was the first time a girl had admittedly liked me, it came along with a large amount of jealousy I still am not proud about to this day. A perfect mix of that jealousy, hormones, and typical teenage angst was a perfect cocktail for a lot of regrettable thoughts and actions.

  Abby and I had been friends since elementary school, then things got awkward with us in middle school, as boy-girl relationships often do. In high school it seemed all the cool kids were dating, so Abby and I resorted back to our old elementary school days, only we were older and kissing each other more. I remember the emotions I had hijacked nearly every other thought I had. Concentrating on sports was out of the question most of the time because I was in my own world thinking about Abby and the thought of losing her to another guy almost constantly. Despite having a girlfriend, my self-esteem was weak.

  Our boyfriend-girlfriend relationship lasted from the first week of junior year in high school until just before the end of the school year. In that time I think we broke up with ea
ch other at least a dozen times, mostly for just a day at a time. The drama consumed so much of me that it was routine for a basketball being passed to hit me square in the face or a baseball to land just a few feet away from me in the outfield, landing me seat on the bench next to a very angry coach.

  Eventually, and rightfully so, my dear Abby tired of my jealous ways. I can remember being so ridiculous that I would ask to use the bathroom in class so I could walk by her class just to see if I could see her chatting with another guy. Plus, considering she was a cheerleader, and our cheerleading team was co-ed, I had to watch from the court – or more often the bench – as another guy perched her high up into the air, hand on her ass. In my mind, I always saw the guy go from staring at her ass and then at me with a smirk on his face.

  After a while, being accused of doing things she wasn’t doing eventually wore her out. I remember her breaking up with me. While I was upset, I figured she would call in a day or two, and we’d be “Mike and Abby” again. School ended. She went on vacation in Minnesota to see her family; she never called. When she got back a few weeks later she dropped off some of the things I had given her for her birthday and holidays – a mix CD, photos, my basketball jersey – and then I knew it was over. What was torture is that she lived right on the main road – the main road that was impossible to bypass if you wanted to go anywhere, meaning I passed her house almost every day. I still have vivid memories of me staring out the window at her house as we drove by in the family car. It’s usually raining during these remembrances.

  When school started back up I was shocked and hurt by how, in Abby’s eyes, it looked like I never existed in her world, that’s if she even looked me in the eyes. Walking by each other in halls, she ignored me completely. It was a small school, so this happened often. I wrote letters, professing my love for her, telling her I miss our friendship, and how sorry I was for being so jealous. All of them went unreturned, and I’m guessing unopened. Even her friends, who used to be my friends, gave me glares. Much of senior year was a miserable blur.