Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  The tourists with their festive Japanese cameras all get to walk past Ernest Hemingway’s festive typewriter. It is to my knowledge the only typewriter in history to have sprouted a rude patch of literary pubic hair.

  Hemingway himself avoids the crowds. He never did like much fuss unless the fuss was somehow related to his patrician sized ego. I see him regularly, he comes over. We drink cheap warm island rum at my kitchen table (which sightly tilts so we keep porno magazines under the leg so the rum doesn’t spill) and we discuss (bitch about) the ins and outs of how much better the olden days were as opposed to the ins and outs of today.

  The olden days were better something considerable. In the olden days island time was dead and Hemingway lived here. Today, island time is like time anywhere. It has a post-modern tendency to breath down our necks, and Ernest Hemingway blew his bloody brains out in Idaho. Hemingway thinks the fishing here has gone to shit and then some. It simply ain’t what it used to be.

  Hemingway would kick the polyester-clad tourists out of his house if he could. But ghosts have an obligation to remain somewhat demure. Particularly the literary ghosts. Key West has more than its share of them. On the block where I live we have no less than seven (usually sober) Pulitzer prize winners. In time they will all turn into necro-literary ghosts as it is difficult to keep a good writer down. Or sober. Writers are stubborn and they refuse to die. Key West has more writers and more ghosts and more stubbornness than Ernest Hemingway had cats.

  Hemingway reads all of my manuscripts before I send them out. He is usually somewhat less than encouraging.

  “This manuscript sucks a big fat one,” is a par-for-the-course comment. “The manuscripts were better in the olden days.”

  “Do you always sit around other people’s kitchens, drinking other people’s liquor,” I asked him, “reading other people’s manuscripts? I thought that you were a novelist?”

  “I am a novelist,” he replied. “Sitting around other people’s kitchens, drinking other people’s liquor, reading other people’s manuscripts is what novelists do. And then we go fishing although the fishing has gone to shit if you ask me.”

  I didn’t want to move to Key West. I am not the literary type although I do enjoy fishing. And I had no fucking idea who the hell Ernest Hemingway was until I moved here. It wasn’t my idea to move to an island in the middle of nowhere. My lover, Lucas, made me do it. I am not really a fun-in-the-sun role model. I look silly poolside. I was forced into moving here. It’s easy to blame my lover for everything. Everything. It’s all his fault. My lover was one of those men looking for … something. I don’t know what Lucas was looking for. (It was not Ernest Hemingway.) My lover isn’t a man of many words. I’m the wordy one. Those were the olden days. And in the olden days my lover was looking for a refuge because everyone was looking for a refuge. Mostly from life. It’s what my generation became known for. It’s what we did. Some of us did it better than others; some of us are still doing it. In the South refuge is a concept related to home; a Southerner cannot be lost anywhere in the South because he is in the South. He is home.

  We were not lost. We simply weren’t where we wanted to be, not that we had any idea whatsofuckingever about where we wanted to be. We wanted to “experiment.” The word got thrown around a lot and got more positive press than it either warranted or deserved. People from the South do not experiment. There are no experiments worth any sort of significant change in the moral order of the Southern universe. At the time we went to places like Taos, Haight-Ashbury, Aspen, Woodstock, and the Boston Common. You had to be there. None of these places were in the South. We were all looking for some kind of refuge from reality, and if we couldn’t find one that suited us, we frequently built our own. From scratch, from the ground up.

  Lucas and I came to Key West a zillion years ago because at the time it was a refuge from things like an unpopular war you didn’t want to fight in but you fought in it anyway. Key West made some kind of sick Southern sense. Most of the people who lived there seemed to have served in Nam in one capacity or another. And it was okay to throw up your guts rotdrunk and Southern stupid on a hot night in the middle of Duval Street. No one minded.

  You had a real hard time shaking off having lost in Nam. You weren’t supposed to have lost. Certainly, Ernest Hemingway would not have lost. Hemingway had big balls. And big cats. He was a man in an age when men were men, and men did not lose. You wanted to forget. We were men who had learned that sometimes it’s enough to simply forget and … survive. To have come out of something that had been really crazy with your Southern humanity intact even if your Southern sanity wasn’t … intact. You were alive. Slightly gaga but alive. It was something. And this was a festive place, an island where it was okay to simply make it from one day to the next. Being alive and forgetting was enough. Key West for us at the time was a place removed from the realities of ex-wars, ex-wives, ex-lovers, ex-writers, Jesus, New York City parking tickets we had no intention of paying, and telephone answering machines. Hello, I’m not here right now. I’m out praying for Jesus …

  Key West was a place in the sun where we could forget about the oriental adolescents we had murdered. Key West was a place where we could wipe the stench of rotting meat smell, the odor of human ears strung in a fish-line necklace—erased—from our Southern consciousness. Key West was a place where we could wash our brains with soap and disinfect the image of our buddies putting grenades into fifteen-year-old Vietcong assholes— pull the pin. Clean up the mess.

  The Rock was a place we could embrace because when we moved here we were embraced, we were not merely accommodated. Key West was a place that had nurtured the likes of Ernest Hemingway. Maybe we could somehow become writers, not that we had any notion about what becoming a writer would mean. You learned how to kick newspaper vending machines in order to get your grubby hands on some coffee change. You ate something called food on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. On Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays you fasted. On Fridays you drank. Rum mainly. Key West was a place where we could gulp down neurological Ex-Lax. Everyone had his own internal versions of fantasy. Key West was a place where I could shit out the diarrhea of death from what was left of my constipated Southern soul.

  Lucas was a Yankee.

  This was the edge of sunset, the edge of the earth, and this was where we were either going to fall off the edge or totally disintegrate into starless indigo bits and pieces. To us at the time—eons ago—The Rock was more or less a psychological cave, an aberration, a malignant phenomenon where we could confront the fact that we were irrevocably where we were because we had chosen to live there. Key West was madness come home.

  My lover and I moved here, to this island place, in the middle of the hottest September in the history of mankind. And then some. It was hot something considerable. It was so hot the bottoms of my cheap tennis shoes dissolved when I walked on Key West blacktop. It was so hot all the Island mongrel dogs turned into melted porch pup. Mainly. It was so hot the dogs refused to fuck in the alleys thus cutting down on our diet of evening entertainment. We’d been living in the back of our pickup truck in a migrant campground on one of the less chic outer keys, a blue collar fishing stink of a place called Stock Island, where they really know h-o-w to drink. There are a lot of ex-Navy people on Stock Island.

  Lucas and I were trying to decide if we really wanted to live here. Or maybe we’d bit off more than we could Jesus chew. Again. This time. We spent nights drinking rum, stretched out in the back of the truck, reading the accumulated works of Ernest Hemingway. We smoked joints the size of Cucamonga, hallucinated on mescaline, and fished because food stamps were insulting. It was a time when we took most everything, particularly ourselves, much too seriously. And if we believed in anything, in the only constant reality that our small universe could grasp, we at least knew that the sun also rises. It did it pretty near every Jesus day.

  Somehow it all seemed appropriate. The tropical stars were awesome. “If we win here,” Hemin
gway once wrote, “we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” We knew in our emotional exhaustion who the bell tolled for, but we could not hear the bell. All we could hear was the crying sound of the vagabond sea.

  It was the hottest summer in the history of the universe. It was so hot we always seemed to soak our bed in some kind of a psychotic sweat. It was Saigon hot. If I woke up screaming from my meemee dreams, my lover was always there to hold me. To tell me that it was okay. You’re in Key West, now. And when he screamed at night in the Southern heat from his own version of the meemee dreamboogies, I’d be there to hold him. We were men, and somewhere along the line we had learned that simply because we were men it didn’t mean we would never need to be held.

  That was the summer we needed to be held. We wanted to be wanted. But our ex-wars, our ex-wives, and our ex-lovers didn’t want to want us. Much less hold us. Hello, we’re all not here right now. But if you need us, leave a message at the beep. Jesus loves you.

  So somehow Lucas and I ended up in Key West with our accumulated junk, our falling apart Jesus shit pickup, Ernest Hemingway, and each other, because we wanted us. We were all we had. Was this a refuge or was this a refuge? This was a refuge. No one we met here owned a telephone answering machine. My lover found an apartment we could (barely) afford. We moved in.

  The rain reminded us of Vietnam. It still does.

  Our place came with Hemingway’s cats. The cats are still here. They think they own the place. I also think they own the place. We gave them cute names because we were broke and tired and filled with a numbed despair that eluded us. We could not fathom it, and we needed to give the cats cute names. Angel Bananas is my favorite. He’s sort of small for a tom. Although Angel Bananas is totally fearless. A lot more fearless than I am or ever will be. He’s a tiger. At night he climbs on our bed and eats the lizards he brings to us. Angel Bananas is Jesus arrogant. We push him off the bed and yell but yelling at Angel Bananas does no damn good. He eats most of the lizards but he always leaves the heads. Lizard heads do not appeal to him.

  He’s Southern.

  Angel Bananas basically comes and goes as he pleases. I ought to have him fixed. Every time a publisher sends me a check for a piece I’ve totally forgotten about having written— surprise—I swear to Angel Bananas that this time he’s going to the vet’s to be fixed. And then I find myself in one of those cutie-pie cha-cha designer grocery stores we have on the island, now, buying a bottle of very nice delicious French wine. Because I deserve it and the check was an unexpected treat and nice wine is no damn good for me (mainly) and Angel Bananas still has his tiger gonads.

  For the life of me I cannot pinpoint the exact date that all the telephone answering machines first started coming into town. There is now an army of them. I have my suspicions as to WHO the little busybody WAS who snuck the first telephone answering machine into Key West. There ought to be a law. I blame my ex-wife. It’s convenient. I blame her for everything. Everything. It’s all her fault. It was right about the time that she arrived for a little visit that people started buying telephone answering machines. Hello, I’m not here right now. I’m visiting my ex-husband in Key West. My ex-husband is a fag. If you can believe it. Edward Albee was right; some things are, indeed, too much. Just ask Jesus.

  She wanted to know if I was really gay as opposed to only partially perhaps just maybe a little bit temporarily Southern gay, and why had I moved here, and why didn’t I have a telephone answering machine, and did I want the kids for the summer? My ex-wife is an inveterate liar—it is a skill that comes naturally. She was born corrupt. I love her. I try not to. I try NOT to love that woman that beautiful bitch with tits the size of Texas. She drives me to madness but there it is. I hate her. Yes, I wanted the kids for the summer. But when I got them she did not want me to have them although she wanted me to have them. At least for the summer.

  Or something.

  My ex-wife’s desire to be as independent as possible, a woman of the world, conflicted with her desire to be a mother. The battle still rages. Ernest Hemingway says things used to be less complicated. The world used to be a somewhat slow and simple place. Men were men and women (even women with Texas tits, and Hemingway says all the women had Texas tits in the old days) knew their place in the social scheme of things.

  Angel Bananas ate a dead lizard (he left the head) on my ex-wife’s bed which was really the living room couch. My ex-wife was less than amused. In the olden days Key West used to be this island place where no one (no one I knew) had a telephone much less a telephone answering machine. And everyone let their kids run loose. If you wanted to talk to someone you went over to their house. And you talked. Maybe you had a margarita sitting in the swing on the front porch. Margaritas for Jesus. And then you talked some more. Maybe you had ten margaritas for Jesus. Maybe you passed out on their floor. No one cared. No one gave a damn Jesus shit. Now on the streets of Key West I invariably meet the people I left New York to avoid. Most of them are Yankee writers with ex-wives and word processors. Most of this scum owes the City of New York a ton of money in unpaid parking tickets. Neither the writers nor their ex-wives nor their word processors nor their parking tickets have any business whatsoever running around the South loose. All of these things, these people, are in dire need of close supervision.

  Most of the porch swings here have rusted. Key West has joined the rest of civilization. Today you need a machine that can call someone else’s machine and leave a message. Jesus loves everyone. Today, even in a place as removed as Key West, you need kids who are capable of understanding the social complexities of something as emotionally knotted as the AIDS crisis. If your adolescent doesn’t understand AIDS, we will all end up with uninformed teenagers hot between their sweaty little fuck-me legs who will almost certainly confront having the disease itself. I make my teenage son carry around rubbers. I demand this from him. There is no room for compromise. I roll with the punches. Occasionally the punches roll with me. And occasionally I roll a joint to roll with the punches when the punches knock the wind out of me. When my son goes out at night I sound like an old nagging maid. Be back by midnight. Do you have your rubbers?

  You never know when it might rain.

  Angel Bananas thinks Key West has become too much like the rest of the universe. Angel Bananas likes for me to read to him at night. It soothes his weary spirit. I’d read to my kids at night but my kids complain that they are too big for it. My daughter now wears eye shadow and people who wear eye shadow are not people who have bedtime stories read to them. So I read to my cat. He’s partial to Samuel Clemens. My cat cannot stand Earnest Hemingway.

  The last few words of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn go like this: . .so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Angel Bananas objects to civilization and ex-wives on mere principle.

  My ex-wife does not understand AIDS, Mark Twain, cats, daughters who wear eye shadow, or teenage sons with their pockets full of rubbers. After my kids visit me she makes them wash their hands. With soap. My ex-wife likes the new about-to-be-very-pink Holiday Inn which is, of course, rising like a glorious phoenix from the ashes of what was once Key West downtown decay. Angel Bananas has nothing against Holiday Inns although too much of the color pink in any one place gives him severe migraines. Angel Bananas even stayed in a Holiday Inn once in Boston where he was smuggled under wraps into the room. Angel Bananas didn’t think too much of Boston. There were very few lizards to eat there.

  My ex-wife is waiting for them to finish the pink Holiday Inn so she can stay there when she visits me because pink Holiday Inns do now allow cats who enjoy eating lizards on the beds. They are
unwelcome. Pink Holiday Inns do not have AIDS because pink Holiday Inns use Lysol. Or something. What was once some kind of unexplainable enigmatic island refuge from the realities of wars and pinkness and goodness and Holiday Inns and rules and Lysol is now a place that virtually seethes with ex-wives, ex-lovers, pinkness, and parking tickets. Southern writers and semi-Southern writers, here, are now a dime a dozen, and we now have more Holiday Inns and fruit-flavored prophylactics than you can shake a leg at.

  In the Key West I once knew time was timeless. The pinkness was rationed. There were no telephone answering machines and Jesus was reserved strictly for Sunday morning excess. This was a place full of men who in many ways were warriors, the kind of men who cannot deny this part of who they are. When I think of Lucas I think of a warrior, only Lucas is a warrior who now works quietly with wood. Lucas makes things because making things, wood things in his workroom, defines the new Lucas, the gentle Lucas. I blame him for everything but mostly I blame him for letting Key West slip through our fingers.

  My kids came to visit me in the summer, here, and they turned deeply Caribbean brown. They came from San Francisco, life with their urban mother fast, furious, frenetic, and they slowed. They gave up their nervousness, trading it in for sunsets. Time stopped and came to life. Evenings were ice cream at strange laid-back places with strange Cuban names like La Bodega and sunset was whenever sunset was. This summer I am informed by my children that sunset is … set. It has an exact time established by someone with a Jesus clicker. Sunset takes place precisely at somethingorother. There is a schedule and schedules must be followed. I no longer go to sunset. Let’s face it. Sunset here is now something of a middle class zoo complete with Coney Island plastic cups for the tourist-liquor. In the olden days Ernest Hemingway and I preferred our sunset refreshment straight from the bottle. Key West will never be the same.