Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  Meara at the time was working in a loose partnership with a guy nicknamed El Primitivo, for his overhanging brow and enormous but sloping shoulders. The two of them were taking the alloy wheels off a new Porsche when El Primitivo said, “Yo, Teddy, you’re American, right?”

  “Yeah I’m American. What do I fucking look, Chinese?”

  “I mean, like, born here.”

  “Fuckin’ right,” Meara said proudly.

  “I know a guy,” El Primitivo said, “a powerful guy, his crew is mostly Cubans. He needs an American, a guy who was born here. Innerested?”

  So Meara had met with Benavides. The meeting took place at a delicatessen in North Beach and the young boss came straight to the point. “Teddy,” he said, “you want to stop dicking around with nickels and dimes and make some real money?”

  “Talk to me.”

  “How’s your patience?”

  “What?”

  “The arrangement I’m offering, it’s not a quick score. It’ll take a while. It’s a process. You’ll have to get a job.”

  “A job? A fucking job?”

  “In Key West. At the Coast Guard base. You’ll work on the dock.”

  “I hate this so far,” said Meara.

  “It’s easy work,” said Benavides. “A little cleaning up, a little moving ropes around. But mostly you just sit on your ass at the impound.”

  “The impound?”

  “Where they keep the boats that are seized by Customs. Except that never happens anymore.”

  “So why the fuck am I sitting there?”

  “Excellent question, Teddy. Good to see you’re paying close attention. You’re sitting there because one day they will seize a boat, and when that happens there’s a small and simple task I need you to do for me and for which I’ll pay you fifty thousand dollars.”

  The figure was considerably larger than any payday Meara had ever had. Contemplation of the number made the hair stand up on the back of his very pink neck but he tried to play it cool. “What’s the task?”

  “You don’t need to know for now. What you need to do for now is get the job and wait. Wear loose pants to work.”

  “Loose pants?”

  “Roomy. Wear them every day. I’ll advance you ten grand the day you start. We on?”

  That was back in August. Soon after, Meara had applied for an entry-level civilian job at CBP Key West, and, frighteningly, he’d been hired. At first he didn’t mind the job so much. There was little to do except look out at the green and twinkling water of the harbor, at the sailboats gliding lazily past and the para-sailors flying improbably by at the tops of their tethers. Double-dipping as he was with a government paycheck plus the advance from Benavides, he had enough folding cash to be able to drink to his heart’s content, and he soon found a waterside bar where he could do this. It was called the Brigantine and it attracted an odd mix of island types: grizzled men with cockatoos crapping down their shoulders, accountants who dressed up as pirates, assorted bullshitters who ran the gamut from mere braggarts to pathological liars. Meara fit right in.

  Still, after a couple months of Key West summer, the stultifying heat and daily afternoon downpours started getting on his nerves, as they got on everyone’s, and he began calling Benavides every few days to grouse.

  “Jefe,” he would always begin. This was just about the only word he knew in Spanish and he thought he was being awfully clever in saying it to Benavides. Benavides found this annoying in the extreme, but was content to let his despising of Meara gradually fester and build. “When are you sending me a fucking boat?”

  “I’m working on it, Teddy. I told you it would take a while.”

  “This is more than a while. This is a fucking eternity. It dumps rain on me every day. These loose pants you keep telling me to wear, they’re soaked with sweat and rain, they’re giving me a rash. They’re sticking to my balls.”

  “Try talcum powder,” the boss advised.

  “And these stiffs I work with, the hard-ons with the uniforms and name-plates, I can’t take these fuckers much longer. They never smile. They never tell a joke. They act like they’re trying to be movie cops or some shit.”

  “It shouldn’t be much longer, Teddy.”

  “Like how much longer?”

  “The last piece of the puzzle, I’m working on it now.”

  “How about you front me another ten grand, at least?”

  “Why? So you could skip out with twenty in your pocket? I don’t think so, Teddy. Just sit tight for now.”

  “Sit tight,” grumbled Meara. “Sitting with a rash is how I’m sitting.”

  “Talcum powder, Teddy. Okay, gotta go. Soon, Teddy. You just be ready for that boat.”

  6.

  Ozzie Kimmel was straddling his bicycle at the corner of U.S. 1 and Florida Street, just across from Bayview Park. He waited at the traffic light as the half-dozen clients who were paying to follow him on his Original One and Only Key West Bike Tour bunched up behind him. When everyone had stopped, he gestured grandly up the highway, which just a few blocks north had squeezed down to a clogged and crawling two-lane street.

  “Folks,” he said, “you see this road? The famous Highway 1. Starts in Fort Kent, Maine and runs for 2376 miles to Key West. Locally known as Roosevelt Boulevard then Truman Avenue then Whitehead Street, where it ends at the famous Mile Zero. Great thing about my tour: everything is famous. Pay attention, you’ll hear that word a lot. This famous highway runs through Boston, Baltimore, Washington DC, carries millions of cars, trucks, RVs, Harley-Davidsons…but I can stop it with a finger. I can back it up to Fort Kent, Maine. I can back it up to Canada, where I believe it continues, but who cares? Now watch closely and prepare to be amazed. Be amazed and enjoy the power, ‘cause it’s the last time you’ll feel the least little bit of control as a pedestrian or bicyclist in this town. Now, watch!”

  He cocked his wrist, stuck out his pinky, reached toward the post that held the traffic light and pushed a button. The light instantly switched to yellow then quickly to red. Brakes squealed and springs squeaked as the endless queue of cars ground to a stop. The Walk signal came on, and a little boy, maybe twelve years old, with freckles on his nose and a helmet that was two sizes too big for him, stood up on his pedals. Ozzie held him back with his forearm.

  “Not yet, Junior. This is where it gets good.”

  He waited for the light to change then immediately pushed the button again. Exactly two cars made it through. The first one that didn’t had Jersey plates. A guy rolled down the passenger window and yelled, “You fuckin’ douchebag.”

  Hiding the gesture with his body, Ozzie flipped him the bird. “Have a nice day, sir. Enjoy Key West.”

  On the other side of Highway 1, leading his little flock past tennis courts and a ballfield, he continued his patter. “The famous Bayview Park. Anybody see a bay from here? Me neither. A healthy reminder not to believe everything you hear. Anybody need a pit stop? There are ancient, historic restrooms by the baseball diamond, well-ventilated and hygienic. But don’t take my word for it. Ask those six homeless guys passed out against the wall. No one? Okay, then we’ll continue on to a very famous neighborhood where the very famous playwright and barfly Tennessee Williams used to live.”

  Ozzie pedaled on, narrating more or less nonstop. He’d been doing the bike tour for half a dozen years now, ever since he lost his job as a driver on the Bone Key Tour Train after flunking what he thought of as a ridiculous and unfair drug test. He’d smoked a little weed on his day off. Okay, a lot of weed. But it was his day off. This was a reason to fire a guy? A guy whose job it was to drive a stupid fake train that never went more than ten miles an hour anyway?

  Totally unfair, though in the long run the firing turned out to be a good thing, as Ozzie just wasn’t meant to work for anybody else. He should have figured that out long before. In fact he had figured it out long before, after being fired by a couple of taxi companies, a grocery store, two bars, and a pizzeria; but it wa
sn’t until the demerits had stacked up and he’d become all but unemployable in town that he finally mustered the initiative to go off on his own.

  And even then he probably would not have come up with the bike tour idea without a lucky break, the sort of unsought and too often unseized moment of good fortune that some people get in life and some people don’t, and that can subtly but fundamentally shift the whole arc of a destiny. The break had come in the form of a random conversation with an old man.

  His name was Bert and he’d been a regular at the Eclipse Saloon for as long as anybody could remember. Not much of a drinker but loved to talk to people. Seemed to be retired, though it was hard to say from what. Dressed like someone who’d just stepped out of a Technicolor movie from the late 1950s; favored silk and linen shirts in vibrant, popsicle hues like raspberry or tangerine. On this particular evening when Ozzie had just been fired, he and Bert happened to be sitting a couple stools apart. Bert could not help observing that Ozzie was drinking much more heavily than usual.

  “Lost my fucking job,” Ozzie grumpily explained. “Drinking up my final paycheck.”

  Bert had also noticed that Ozzie was cadging more drinks than he’d been buying. “Drinking up some other guys’ paychecks, too.”

  “Always happy to help.”

  “So why’d’ya get fired?”

  “Drug test.”

  Bert nodded without judgment. “First time?”

  “First time what? First time drug test or first time fired?”

  “Either,” said Bert. He was widowed and mostly alone and was just happy to be chatting.

  “First time drug test? Yeah. First time fired?” Ozzie laughed in a way that moistened his lips so he had to dab them on a napkin. “Shit no, I get fired all the time.”

  “Like for what?”

  “Lemme think. Last time I kept showing up late.”

  “Time before?”

  “Insubordination,” said Ozzie, managing the long word with some difficulty. “That’s what they called it. I called it my boss was a fuckin’ asshole.”

  Bert considered this and began stroking himself between the legs. Or so it seemed until you noticed that he had a tiny fat chihuahua in his lap. Dogs were not allowed in the Eclipse but Bert always brought his anyway. His dog at the time was named Don Giovanni, like the opera. The dog fit under the upholstered lip of the bar and never made a sound and no one seemed to mind. After a moment of stroking the old man said, “Interesting.”

  “What’s interesting?” Ozzie said as if he himself didn’t find it too damn interesting at all.

  “That every time you get fired, it’s a different reason every time. If it was the same thing every time, like say drugs, or punctuation—“

  “I think you mean punctuality.”

  “Right. Whatever. If it was the same thing every time, I’d figure, okay, the guy has a problem with this or that. But given that it’s a different reason every time, I think it’s only logical and therefore makes sense to conclude that the problem is you just can’t hold a job.”

  “Jobs suck.”

  “Now that depends who you ask. Some people really like their jobs.”

  “No one I know.”

  “Baseball players,” Bert said. “Opera singers. People who do what they like. Whadda you like to do?”

  “Nothing anybody tells me to.”

  Bert signaled to the bartender to send yet another free drink Ozzie’s way. “I’d say that much is obvious and also very clear. But you didn’t answer the question, by which I mean what I actually asked. What is it that you like to do?”

  “Nothing anyone would pay me for.”

  Bert then turned his eyes away from Ozzie and addressed the dog. “Giovanni, you notice anything difficult and maybe even just slightly obnoxious about this guy? I keep trying to approach his current situation, one might even say dilemma, with what I like to think of as a positive attitude, constructive like, and he constantly, like every time, comes back with something very negative and full of a stinking rotten attitude. I ask him what he wants to do, he tells me what he doesn’t want to do. I ask him what he likes, he tells me what he doesn’t like.” Turning his attention back to Ozzie, he went on. “No offense, but your stinking rotten attitude can only lead to frustration and unhappiness and to remaining very, very poor. Is that what you want? No? Then tell me something, anything, that you like to do.”

  Like anyone being badgered to provide an answer he didn’t have, to a question he didn’t want to think about, Ozzie was getting to feel cornered and extremely testy. Finally he blurted out, “Okay, okay. You know what I fucking like to do? I like to sleep late, wake up without a fucking alarm, pull on old shorts and a t-shirt, and ride my bicycle around in circles. That’s what I like to do.”

  Bert at that pivotal moment six years ago had lifted up his drink and tipped the rim toward Ozzie. “That’s better. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s a start. Salud.”

  7.

  The houseboat that Ozzie and Nicky had shared for nearly a year now was berthed at Garrison Bight Marina, a shallow basin right in the middle of town. Getting to open water from the Bight was a big chore and a waste of time, but that didn’t much matter because, for as often as the houseboat ever moved, it might as well have been berthed in the middle of a Costco parking lot. In fact, it was anybody’s guess whether the houseboat even could move anymore. It had been years since its old diesel had cranked over; its bottom was bejeweled with barnacles, its propeller and drive-shaft furred over with long tresses of algae and slime. Salt-encrusted dock lines secured the houseboat to its pilings, but the ropes seemed somehow redundant, like tying up an animal that had grown too meek to leave its master’s side.

  If the houseboat was somewhat peculiar as boats go, it was also rather eccentric as a house. A previous owner had grandly named it the Sea Queen, but it would have taken a loving eye to see anything regal in it. Its gangway and deck were covered in Astroturf that had developed bald patches here and there. The cabin was built of plywood slabs that had been rather casually bracketed together; the panels were painted pink with purple accents. None of the walls were plumb and the entire structure leaned like a tree that had grown up in a prevailing wind. The inside was cozy, not to say cramped, with lots of mismatched and brightly colored cushions tossed around among the few pieces of scavenged furniture. The living space was nominally two-story but the upper level, where Nicky slept, could only be reached by ladder and wasn’t quite high enough to stand up in.

  The place didn’t offer a lot of privacy, so when Ozzie was out leading tours Nicky tried to make the best use of the time alone. That was when he practiced. With no one listening he could try new chords that stretched and tested the fingers he’d mangled during his brief, failed, unhappy tenure as a low-level wannabe tough guy. Sometimes he tried out new songs but the simple truth is that he tended to prefer the old songs and his audience did as well. So he mainly worked at refining those, getting them just right. Optimism did not come easily to Nicky—given his experience there was no reason why it would—but he was not without his secret hopes and not without ambition; if an opening ever came up at one of the better venues, Sloppy’s or Hog’s Breath or even Margaritaville, he wanted to be ready. So he practiced.

  But on this particular morning his discipline was wearing very thin, and after an unfocused quarter hour of strumming he realized why. He was thinking about Phoebe, the rather scrawny, magenta-haired, quietly ferocious woman he’d first met at the bar a couple of weeks ago.

  This was before she’d bought the Sno-Cone truck; before she’d realized or accepted that it was all on her to make things work. She’d come in looking for a job—bartender, waitress, anything. It was late afternoon, the dead time before happy hour, and Nicky was puttering around onstage, getting ready for the evening. Phoebe had gotten an application from the manager and sat down at a little table to fill it out. Nicky caught her eye and smiled at her. She didn’t really smile back. She didn’t not smi
le, exactly. Her expression was somewhere between a smile and not a smile, but at the same time there was nothing vague or wishy-washy about it. It was a very specific look; it just wasn’t a smile or not a smile. It wasn’t unfriendly. It wasn’t inviting. It was wary but also candid, something sort of take-it-or-leave-it about it but without being nasty or aggressive. Nicky couldn’t quite pin it down and so it stayed with him.

  Phoebe finished the application and then the manager came over, sat down across from her, and looked at it. They talked briefly but Nicky couldn’t hear what they were saying. After a minute or two the manager gave his head an apologetic little shake. The skinny young woman looked briefly at the floor and got up to leave.

  Before he really thought about it, Nicky had stepped down from the stage and was walking toward her. He caught up just as she was getting to the door. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “It didn’t,” she said, in that flat and neutral voice that was the equivalent of an expression that was neither a smile nor not a smile.

  “Too bad,” he said, then added hopefully, “Maybe when season starts.”

  “No. Not then either.”

  “You never know.”

  “I know. He told me.”

  “Lots of turnover down here.”

  “Look, he’ll never hire me. He told me that. Says he can’t.” She paused then something came into her voice that sounded like sarcasm, but sarcasm aimed at no one but herself. “I have a record.”

  “Ah,” said Nicky. The news didn’t really surprise him. This was Key West, after all, an outlaw town, a refuge, a last chance sort of place. Plus she had tattoos all up and down her arms and her hair was a color that did not occur in nature. There was only thing about her simple statement that surprised him. “And you put it on the application?”

  “It asked.” Again, that fierce neutrality.

  Nicky nodded. “Background checks,” he said. “All these places say they do ‘em, but if they need help they sometimes conveniently forget to run ‘em. Most people wouldn’t come right out and admit they had a record.”