In the Off-Season, It's Even More Laid Back

By Diane Roberts
Special to the Washington Post
Sunday, October 21, 2007

Katharine Hepburn lies supine across Clark Gable's long body. From the other side of the veranda, Yvonne De Carlo watches, narrowing her green eyes. Hepburn yawns, sticking out her pink tongue, stretching her paws over her head. De Carlo switches her tail. Gable keeps sleeping.

Key West is famous for its exotic creatures: skinks, conchs, feral chickens, feral poets, parrotheads, drag queens, pirates manqu¿ and, of course, Ernest Hemingway's polydactyl cats. There are four dozen of them, at least half descended from Snowball, a six-toed cat given to Hemingway by some ship's captain he met in a bar. Or so the story goes. The cats, named for movie stars, disport themselves throughout the big-windowed antebellum house Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, bought in 1930. I hang out with them every time I'm in Key West.

The house tour, led by a docent with a Papa-esque beard, tells how Hemingway's wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, replaced all the ceiling fans with fancy chandeliers. (There's still no air conditioning -- this is Old Florida.) Cats nap under the palm trees, cats lap at the water from a fountain Hemingway had built for them using a urinal from a local bar. According to the house guides, the uber-manly Hemingway occasionally used it for its original purpose.

Cats sit washing their paws next to the typewriter upon which the Master composed "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." In the Master's bedroom, Charlie Chaplin, a bolster-sized black and white pile of fluff, lounges on the candlewick bedspread, glaring at a couple of tourists who dare disturb his siesta.

The Hemingway cats embody the lazy hedonism of Key West, drinking, eating and sleeping when they feel like it. "This is a very nonjudgmental place," says Nancy Klingener, editor of Solares Hill, Key West's oldest newspaper. "We just reelected a strip-club owner as one of our city commissioners."

Hurricane season -- which officially ends Nov. 30 -- may seem a strange time to visit this comma of an island parked in a notoriously stormy stretch of water, but airfares and hotel rooms are cheap. Headwaiters who wouldn't give you the time of day in January and February are delighted to seat you at their best tables. True, there's a late-October bacchanal of rum-drinking, feather-wearing and body painting known as Fantasy Fest, and the Disney cruise ship still docks near Mallory Square, blasting the island with "When You Wish Upon a Star," making me wish I had a bazooka.

A small gaggle of solid citizens in the Margaritaville bar (shame on you, Jimmy Buffett) takes cellphone photos of one another drinking flamingo-colored potions, and a clutch of bottle-tanned bridesmaids lurches from dive to dive on Duval Street. But there's another Key West off the tourist trail.

"It's not about what happens on Duval Street," says Lorian Hemingway, granddaughter of Pauline and Ernest. "Key West has a magic that goes beyond anything. It's tied in to all that's taken place here. Look in the alleys, the corners, the little streets. Go when no one else is there."

And if a hurricane comes calling, do what the natives do: Buy a six-pack and sit tight. The chunk of coral that is Key West has been there for 10 million years.

Lost and Found

I'm somewhere on Olivia Street, trying to find the gate to the Key West Cemetery. I made it here from Caroline Street, where Robert Frost used to spend his winters in a cottage parked in back of a foam-green Conch mansion built in 1834, but I'm not quite sure how. The Old Town is theoretically laid out on a grid, but Key West geometry tends toward the surreal: Streets found on no map appear; other streets disappear into the sea.

Not that I mind being a little lost. Great swags of purple, peach and magenta bougainvillea hang on fences, and white houses with porches like fancy crocheting line the road. The poinciana trees are in hot-red bloom, and gem-colored lizards dart across the sidewalk.

Finally, I see the main gate at Margaret Street and Passover Lane and walk into a silent garden of stone crosses, obelisks, urns, lilies and lambs presiding over echoes of long lives, tragic accidents, dreadful diseases, crimes of passion, military adventures and eternal love. In 1846, a hurricane washed away the old graveyard, so the town worthies decided to do their burying inland, on the almost-imperceptible slope of Solares Hill, the island's highest point.

There are large plots ornately fenced or supervised by big-haired angels and aboveground tombs that look like miniature Gothic churches, Roman temples or art deco hotels. Conch aristocracy or cigar-making hidalgos share real estate with "General" Abe Sawyer, a famous midget; Austin and Tina Griffin, who died in a 1907 murder-suicide pact; and Willard Antonio Gomez, bootlegger and Hemingway amigo. Then there's local hypochondriac Pearl Roberts (no relation, thank you), whose 1979 marker reads: "I Told You I Was Sick."

The sea breeze has died down. The copper sailor statue at the U.S.S. Maine monument is so shiny it looks like he's sweating as he presides over the graves of Spanish-American War veterans. Not far away, the monument to Los Martires de Cuba, commemorating those who died in the 1868-1878 insurrection against Spain, shimmers in the heat.

Throughout its long history, Key West has looked south more often than north. In the 1880s, Jose Marti used to exhort Cuban exiles to rebellion at the San Carlos Institute on Duval Street. Some of his co-revolutionists -- such as Piedad de Ayala, granddaughter of the man who wrote the Cuban national anthem -- lie right here, 90 miles from home. When the wind is right, the island still smells faintly of cigars.

Moved by the Spirits

Key West isn't America. It is sui generis, the Conch Republic (as the big sign at the airport says), suspended half in the occidental rump of the Atlantic and half in the eastern end of the Gulf of Mexico. The peculiarity of the island is always butting up against the American rage to regularize.

Aided by a mimosa as cold as Christmas in Nunavit, I'm sitting in Sarabeth's, an Old Town restaurant in a converted synagogue, contemplating the local cult of eccentricity. "It's as if Key West exerts its weirdness on everybody who arrives here," says Klingener, whose work as a journalist brings her up close and personal with it. "Or maybe," she says, "they're just waiting to have their inner weirdness revealed."

Take the chickens: Gallus gallus, Key West wild poultry, scions of the specially bred fighting cocks. Over the past few years, residents have been at war over them, with some arguing for radical chicken population reduction, and others insisting that the birds are an integral part of the local funk. Bumper stickers ask "What's the Clucking Problem?"

Nuisance fowl (Key West roosters notoriously cannot tell time and crow all night) occasionally disappear from the streets, possibly to reappear as chicken salad. The city hired a chicken catcher, although he has now been let go and spends his time trapping nuisance iguanas. However, private sector chicken champion Katha Sheehan, founder of Rooster Rescue, is still arguing that the birds belong on the island.

By the time I finish my Key lime pie, it's 4 p.m. and I decide to go walking in the Old Town. It has rained. At this time of year, storms rush in from the sea, soaking the island, then skedaddle back out again, leaving the pavement steaming. The resulting flora are monumental. It's as if you find yourself on a planet where ordinary houseplants -- your ficus and your philodendron, your fern and your hibiscus -- have ingested some fierce horticultural steroids making them grow as tall as telephone poles. The banyan tree up the road at the old lighthouse could have its own Zip code.

I wander around Bahama Village, marveling at the political posters up on everybody's fences: Key West is voting for city commissioners, utilities board members, school board members and, of course, King of Fantasy Fest. Somebody named "J-Ho" is campaigning hard. Klingener says he's not even the most interesting candidate on the island: "There's a guy running for mayor who only does what angels tell him to do. He says the angels want him to turn Key West into a pirate theme park."

Bahama Village, around the back of the lighthouse, was once the center of the cigar industry. Now its narrow little streets are lined with shotgun houses, some all tarted up, many not. Guys haul their sofas and their TVs out in the front yard to watch sports in the open air. Huge calla lilies bloom in dirt yards, and in the window of one place there's an image of the Virgin Mary holding a quilted and curlicued heart -- the emblem of the voodoo spirit Erzulie Freda.

About now I'm regretting having quit the air conditioning. It's not just hot, it's thick: air like wet velvet. To be in Key West in hurricane season is to become one with your sweat. I pass some shambolic houses where children throw a GI Joe around in the sand. Santiago's Bodega appears just at the right moment. They don't take reservations, so in season there's often a line out the door, practically down to the U.S. naval base. But in the fall you can show up and sit on the porch, strung with Christmas lights, or get cool inside. Santiago's offers tapas of chilled asparagus with lemon tarragon sauce, yellowfin seviche, pinchos morunos (pork and fruit skewers) and salmon carpaccio.

Perched at a table in the cool, cinnamon-colored dining room, I wonder what the conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon would make of Key West today. He sailed past in 1513 and called the Keys Los Martires, because, he said, "they looked like men suffering." Pity he didn't have some of the white sangria I'm drinking.

Historically Abnormal

Gentrification threatens Key West's wondrous strangeness. Even as Florida's economy chokes, house prices here are crazy-high. Condos and resorts are taking over the old, odd areas. Residents have to get several jobs just to get by.

Yet late at night at the Green Parrot, an island bar where people have been known to play pool naked, where right now Abdul Mateen, backed by the Key West Reggae Ambassadors, is singing Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up," it's hard to believe that Key West will ever become "normal." Surely the ghosts of the place wouldn't allow it. The dominant industry in 1822, when the Americans took over, was wrecking -- waiting for ships to run aground on the reef that runs from Biscayne Bay to the Dry Tortugas, then "appropriating" the cargo for resale. Piracy and smuggling were common.

Respectability never gained much of a foothold here, which could explain Key West's attraction for writers. It isn't just Williams, Frost and Hemingway: The place is still stiff with them. Judy Blume, Alison Lurie, Annie Dillard, Robert Stone and a slew of other shiny literati have found in Key West at least a part-time home. According to part-time resident Cynthia Crossen, "Key West is the anti-Hamptons."

Or maybe it's just the elemental power of two seas, the turquoise and malachite waters, the living reef just offshore. Lorian Hemingway says artists love Key West because the "sea is the source of creativity, the source of our birth." A distinguished fiction writer, she is working on a new book about Key West, "the biography of a place," called "The Pirate Heart." For the part-Native-American Hemingway, the pull of the island isn't because of her Nobel-winning grandfather; it's a much older, stronger "compass pointing here to the place of my ancestors."

Late, late in the night, after waiting out another sudden rain in the Green Parrot, I come across a six-toed cat and a cold-eyed rooster on Margaret Street, staring each other down. I try to shoo them off in opposite directions, but they ignore me. I give up and walk on. They may be standing there still.

Diane Roberts last wrote for travel about Barnard Castle, England.