Key West, it's Paradise!

It’s 10 AM in Queens, 1983, a late autumn day, crisp, dismal, wet and rainy— It’s a lousy day in fact, a good day to stay in bed. 

By 11 AM it's 38 degrees and the janitor of Henry’s apartment building hasn’t fired up the furnace because he has passed out in the basement. Henry and Lucia Varga, his Cuban wife of 5 months are in the bedroom drinking hot coffee and Kahlua,  she whines saying,  

darling, I’m cold, let’s go to Miami!

She is wearing a sweater over flannel pyjamas and is in bed under the covers, Henry has a sweatshirt and a pair of boxer shorts on, and he’s busy ringing up the apartment manager to find out why the furnace isn’t fired up.  

Lucia had lived in Cuba all her life until a few months ago. She had never experienced a New England winter and she was dreading the possibility, begging Henry to fly south so they could escape it.   

A few weeks ago they had gone to the Village to meet Henry’s editor Dave Spleen and his wife Goldy for drinks. Dave was a penny-pincher that spent his money on jewelry for Goldy while he hoodwinked the staff of HEADBANGER Magazine. Lucia didn’t like Dave and by the end of the evening she had heard enough bullshit, so she put him on the spot saying, 

you pay my husband nothing, you stiff the staff of your magazine, and that skank wife of yours is wearing more gold than a Puerto Rican pimp!

Henry still pens his weekly column for HEADBANGER Magazine, but he and Dave Spleen don’t talk much anymore. By noon he gets a call from the apartment manager who insists the furnace is burning, although it’s cold in the apartment. Lucia is still in bed and is begging him to get the tickets, and finally, he gives in and says, 

OK, anything for my baby, pack and we’ll catch a taxi to LaGuardia. 

The couple packs a single suitcase with light summer clothes. They ride the elevator to the lobby, walking outside to Flushing Avenue where they take a cab to the airport. Inside they go to a travel agent who books them a night at the famous Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach and business class tickets on a United Airlines flight to Miami International Airport.  

The United flight leaves on time, Henry and Lucia sit together in business class, when the jet is airborne they are busy drinking Courvoisier clean, drinking in business class is a game for the couple that's won if you're drunk when you land.   

In 3 hours they land at MIA, smashed on cognac, they make tracks to a waiting taxi. Inside the cab, Lucia notices the driver is Cuban and she tells him to drive to the Fontainebleau Hotel and asks, 

Que pasa Little Havana? And he answers, 

Si, señora, no es bueno, it's full of nouveau riche Cubanos that love money too much. 

The taxi stops on the large circular driveway at the entrance of Fontainebleau Hotel and they get out and walk to the front desk. Henry laughs as he eyeballs the larger than life lobby saying, 

ritzy, the joint looks like Scarface Tony Montana’s mansion, Greco Miami kitsch! 

The Fontainebleau Hotel was the place to be in the 60s, the guest list included mega-luminaries such as— JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, the Rat-Pack, Ava Gardener, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sam the cigar Giancana. Later, in the 80s, a scene from Scarface was filmed at the hotel pool.

Anyway, the couple gets comfortable in their room that has a view of the ocean and a terrace. After cleaning up Lucia puts on a light-blue evening dress with spaghetti straps, and Henry wears jeans and a white shirt. 

In front of the hotel, they catch a taxi and he tells the driver to travel windward on A1A to North Miami—the cab cruises past the rows of 3 story pastel-colored buildings that line the beach and at 82 Street Henry abruptly yells at the driver saying,

stop, stop, we’ll get out here.

He pulls Lucia towards a blushing tri-level art deco building where a flock of geriatrics are relaxing on the patio sipping protein shakes and eyeballing the action on the beach, asking one of the senior citizens,

excuse me, ma'am, wasn’t the chainsaw scene in the movie Scarface filmed here? The old gal looking angry says, 

young man, I’m going to call security!

As Henry and Lucia walk away from the nursing home he recounts the chainsaw saw scene, 

the sleazy narco-gangsters handcuff the poor bastard in the commode, slicing him up with a chainsaw, bits of body matter and blood gush everywhere... Lucia interrupting him says as she points,

over there darling, Little Havana restaurant, I’m so hungry! 

They walk a few meters and go into the Little Havana restaurant which is a Cubano deli of sorts, and sit down at the counter, ordering a pitcher of Bucanero beer with limes, 2 hefty plates of Ropa Vieja complete with fried plantains, barbecued pork, rice, and black beans. 

The food is scrumptious and they order one more pitcher of beer. Then, 2 drunk Cuban men walk into the restaurant and one of them approaches Lucia, looking at her and saying in Spanish,

mira agui! Castros puta, chica, chica, come on baby!

Lucia had been a working girl in Havana and she was Fidel’s favorite party girl until she flew the coop, absconding to America with Henry’s help.

As the waitress serves the pitcher of Bucanero beer Lucia lifts it off the counter and pours it on the foul-mouthed drunk, and he jerks his arm back to hit her, but before he can get the punch off the dishwasher runs out of the kitchen, coming up from behind the guy, applying a full nelson, then pushing the loud-mouth drunk out of the the deli.  

The smash-mouth encounter was over before it began and Henry says to Lucia,

you know him? And she says,

one of many in Havana who wanted me but couldn't have me.

They walk to the cash station to pay and get out, and the owner of Little Havana hands them a bottle of Hennessy cognac saying, 

the dinner's gratis amigos enjoy the cognac! 

On A1A they catch a taxi and Henry tells the driver to travel starboard to the Fontainebleau Hotel. In the back of the cab, they sit close to one another, opening both windows to let the sea air in which they inhale as they sip cognac, passing the bottle back and forth, and offering the driver some. Then Henry says, 

how bout we take a slow boat to Key West tomorrow and spend a few nights? I want to write a story on Hemingway. 

In their suite they lay in bed drinking cognac neat, watching the Hollywood film, The Old Man and the Sea based on the mini-novel by Earnest Hemingway— Santiago, a poor, ageing Cuban fisherman rows his small wooden skiff far out into the Gulf Stream hoping to break 84 days of bad luck, eventually hooking a giant marlin with his feeble fishing-line, fighting the big fish for 5 days, harpooning it, and strapping it to the side of his boat. As Santiago rows home bone-tired, he chews over the hefty price the fish will bring him and how many people it will feed. Then, as he’s rowing to his village sharks savage and eat the marlin off his boat— the beasts indifferent to his valiant attempt to save the great fish as he bashes them with his harpoon. 

As the film ends Lucia is crying as she says, 

the old man, Santiago, only loses if he tells himself he lost, Henry then says, 

you're a wise soul babe.

Up at 8 AM they have coffee, check out of the Fontainebleau Hotel, and take a taxi to the Miami Beach Marina where they board the Key West Ferry, a high-speed-turbo catamaran that can make it to Key West in 3 hours. 

Once safely aboard the couple makes a b-line to the bar, where they order drinks and sit at a table. There is a basketball game on TV, the Heat playing the Bulls. A young couple who have been standing at the bar drinking walk over to Henry and Lucia’s table and a  midwestern kid asks, 

could we join you? 

Henry nods yes, they sit down and the young man says, 

I’m George and this is Martha, we’re newlyweds from Dayton, Ohio!  Henry goes on to say, 

I’m Henry, this is Lucia, we're from Queens by way of Cuba,  opening a pack of cards he says,

George my man, whataya say we order a bar tray full of shots and play some Shit Head? Oh, Bartender, would you mind turning the TV down? We can't hear ourselves talk!

Shit Head is a drinking game— the deck is dealt to the players, each player throws a card down, and the high card wins. The first player to lose their cards has too down a shot.

So, Lucia deals the deck, after 5 minutes Martha loses her cards and does a shot and after an hour everyone is getting loaded. Suddenly, the high-speed-turbo catamaran hits a stretch of rough sea and what the whiskey set in motion, the stormy sea finishes off— Martha throws up in a trash can, and Henry makes it to the head, vomiting alone, lucky to save face. 

The 2 couples spend the last hour of the woebegone cruise holding-on-tight to deck chairs, having earned their sea-legs in spades. The high-speed-turbo catamaran docks at Sunset Harbor in Key West and the passengers are falling all over each other to get off. Henry and Lucia are happy to be ashore as well, and they walk to Sloppy Joe’s bar which is a hop-skip and a jump away from Sunset Harbor. 

After a few drinks and a couple of Philly Steak Sandwiches, they leave Sloppy Joe’s as the sun sets, walking the quaint streets of the Key West looking for a hotel— finding a motel. 

The Blue Marlin Motel hasn't changed since the 50s, the exterior is on the cusp of art deco, and the interior is straight forward and simply designed, not unlike Ernest Hemingway’s writing. 

Lucia feels shaky from the high-speed-turbo catamaran trip from Miami so she goes to bed. Henry works on a story about Hemingway, typing it out on his portable typewriter.    

Ernest Hemingway was relaxing in a Key West bar in 1928 with his wife Pauline Pfeiffer, waiting for a Ford V8 Roadster to be delivered. The car took 3 weeks to be delivered, so, the Ford Motor Company put Hemingway and his wife up in an apartment. The couple soon discovered that life in isolated Key West was like living in a foreign country, even though it was in America. Ernest loved it and wrote,

It's the best place I've ever been anytime, anywhere, flowers, tamarind trees, guava trees, coconut palms...Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.

Many believe if you want to know what made Hemingway tick, look at his fiction. 

Hemingway blazed onto the international literary scene like a supernova when The Sun Also Rises was published in 1931. His thread-bare, too the point, journalistic writing style was a radical decampment from high-brow British literary style— flowery adjectives piled on top one another, superfluous use of abstract nouns and complicated syntax, which only steadfast readers read.

Hemingway at times would talk about something he called The Iceberg Theory, that makes perfect sense to writers— the theory maintains that the tip of the iceberg is the 10% of the story which is told through prose, and the underwater part of the iceberg, the other 90%, is unwritten and inherently known by both the author and the reader. 

Simply put — don’t lowball your readers' intelligence.

By the summer of 1959 Hemingway was suffering from a liver condition, depression and exhaustion. He and his last wife, Mary Hemingway left Cuba to escape Castro’s socialist revolution, moving to what was supposed to be their dream house in the wilds of Ketchum, Idaho. 

After going through a series of shock treatments at the behest of Mary, they travel back to their house in Ketchum. The following morning he wakes up, goes to the basement, loads a double-barrelled Ross shotgun with shells, puts the butt of the gun on the floor and the barrels in his mouth and squeezes the trigger. 

The why of Ernest Hemingway's suicide is easy— Writers' block hand nothing to do with it, he had a plethoric list of medical problems as long as a Physicians Desk Manual, and he was clinically depressed with no clear way out.   

After a restful nights sleep, Henry and Lucia go outside to the pool, sitting in lounge chairs drinking coffee, and Lucia says,

I love Key West, it’s paradise, it’s like Cuba without Fidel, I feel beautiful and free here! Let’s stay forever! And Henry replies, 

You caught the Hemingway mojo babe!