The Songlines of Key West: Doing the Duval Crawl

01.07.09 | 10:28 AM ET

In the twilight of Key West, I can almost feel the weight of its outlandish island dreams settling around me here on Duval Street. 

Roots of sapodilla trees push up through cracks in the sidewalk, and fuschia petals of bougainvillea lay like confetti on the street. Overhead, frigate birds soar in and out of the scarlet clouds. 

Down here on the thin limestone crust of the island, the nightly pub bacchanal known as the “Duval Crawl” is underway. Neon bar signs glow, music thrums and mopeds buzz like giant salt marsh mosquitoes. It seems as if the ground itself is vibrating under me. Old bodegas and buildings where Cubans once rolled cigars by hand morph into souvenir shops, pubs and designer clothing stores, almost overnight.

I get the odd feeling that I’m atop a tiny raft bobbing unsteadily in the warm turquoise sea—a raft that at once holds a carnival, a maritime museum and a giant t-shirt shop.

Some of my favorite authors have walked these same streets during the last century, from novelists Ernest Hemingway and Thomas McGuane to poets James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop. The trick is to resist the hype that would have visitors seeing them all here at once.

MORE ON KEY WEST: Slideshow | Part two: The Other World | Part three: The Conch Republic, Unscripted.

Surely, this modern Key West is nothing if not richly tiered. Its decades of tinsel and tawdriness seem stacked, each upon the other, like an untidy layer cake. Once, novelist and poet Jim Harrison, who lived on the island, returned to Key West after being away for years. He roamed the streets with his friend McGuane, trying to figure out what old funk had been replaced by the new. “It was like a drunken ‘Songlines,’” Harrison said, referencing the Chatwin book.

Shorty’s, a downtown diner catering to locals—sometimes to the exclusion of tourists who were simply locked out—has now become a shop for tourist geegaws. The last time I checked, El Cacique, my favorite Cuban restaurant, had moved out to Sears Town because the rent was too high, taking its cafe con leche and generous plates of picadillo with it. 

I exited with my friend Michelle from a small plane on the tarmac of the tiny “International” airport just two days ago, walking under a large official sign welcoming us to the “Conch Republic.” During the next few days, I’ll be off on a Songline quest of my own, a Walkabout that allows me to burrow deep into the spirit of this mythic old island town. Despite the over-the-top marketing hype, there’s something very compelling that still draws me here and I want to identify it, once and for all.

The City of Key West, which sports a pink-lipped queen conch shell on its official seal, actually “seceded” from the Union back in the 1980s via an official City proclamation. After doing so, it declared “war” on the U.S., and then one full minute later, the mayor surrendered and requested foreign aid. This actually happened, even though the federal government chose to ignore it. 

Earlier today, Michelle and I were at a local party out near Garrison Bight and actually met the “Secretary-General” of the Conch Republic, one Sir Peter Anderson, a tall good-natured fellow who enjoys pontificating about the “state of mind” that Key West commands. Sir Peter has a real office with a real flag, issues passports and even implies a very real diplomatic immunity might be achieved, especially during certain moon phases. The motto is: “We seceded where others failed.” 

There’s a strong tendency to want to play along, especially since the Republic back on the mainland doesn’t seem to be having a whole lot of fun these days.

We are here in the hurricane season, which means that at any given time, a tropical storm can swell up and then Cuisinart its way over the top of this two-by-four-mile sea-level island with little effort. If this was anywhere else in Florida, TV weather people would be scaring the bejesus out of us with thunderstorm alerts. But the big news here is about the forthcoming Hemingway Look-Alike Contest—followed by ongoing reports about the status of the “gypsy chickens of Key West,” a heady issue that appears to have divided the town into pro and con poultry camps. (A chicken catcher was once hired to corral the fowl, but no one is sure what has become of him.) Meanwhile, at the Chicken Store on Duval, I can sign a petition to “hold dear the heart-stoppingly beautiful wild chickens of the City of Key West and ask they be preserved here forever.” 

The sovereignty of the Conch Republic, ruled by Sir Peter and inhabited by anyone with a sense for the idiosyncratic, implies immunity to just about all higher forces—from tropical storms to rigid normalcy. At Greene Street, Michelle and I dodge the Conch Train tour, a cartoonish mini-locomotive trailing along open cars full of brightly dressed tourists like a mechanized conga line. I notice some of the passengers are actually taking photos and home video of us. It occurs to me that an “attraction” in this old island town is just about anything that fits inside a viewfinder. 

On Greene Street, we duck under a sign with a giant grouper into Capt. Tony’s Saloon, where a couple of decades ago, I remember spending a leisurely summer afternoon chatting with the good captain himself. 

A conch slinging feud erupted a few years ago when the new owners of Tony’s were sued by the new owners of Sloppy Joe’s, just a few lurches away on Duval. The current Sloppy’s trucks big on promoting itself as “Hemingway’s Favorite Bar,” although the original pub was actually in the building where Tony’s sits today. 

Little signs are now posted in both bars that clarify when and where Hemingway actually drank. 

Built in an old morgue, Tony’s still has that fecund and decadent feel that once marked all of this old town of pirates and wreckers, spongers and shrimpers. And Tony’s was the place where Papa met his third wife Martha Gellhorn in 1934. If you squint into the dark cavern of the bar, past the trunk of a banyan tree growing through the ceiling, beyond the bras and thousand shards of notes and money hanging from the walls, you can still imagine Papa, sunburnt from fishing on the Gulf Stream, with the brainy and striking Gellhorn, hunkered down on the wooden bar stools. 

Back out on the street, we stop in Sloppy Joe’s where a clutch of white-haired cruise ship passengers is huddled around a table under a stuffed billfish and a large photo of Papa. On stage, some tattooed slackers are banging out a rock cover song that is so discordant I can’t even identify it. I notice the air conditioning is blasting away, even with the doors swung wide open. Ceiling fans spin, but only as an accessory. For now, one can purchase an $8 “Papa-Rita” and more than 300 pieces of merchandise with the bar’s logo in the adjacent retail store, including golf balls. 

The band mercifully breaks, and I look up on the stage and see Michelle in her mini-dress, shooting photos of the crowd, which is looking at her shooting photos. Behind me, a “Sloppy’s Bar Cam” captures her on a nearby screen, just in case you missed it the first time. Umberto Eco was right about thrice-removed reality seeming more real to Americans than reality itself. 

Out we go into the balmy tropical evening, heading for the Schooner Wharf bar, which edges up to the waters of the Key West Bight, the historic harbor of the island. Not so long ago, working shrimp trawlers berthed here, so thick you could walk the entire harbor from one deck to another, ducking below the nets and outriggers. Faced with a gentrifying harbor with costly docking fees, the raw, picturesque boats and their raw, picturesque crews moved north to Stock Island. Today, the Bight is full of expensive yachts and sightseeing charters. 

The poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived on nearby White Street in the 1930s, once wrote “The Bight,” a poem that was elegant and precise. Some of her images still remain today:

Black and white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts

And:

At low tide like this how sheer the water is
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare. 

But other images have not fared as well:

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers

Except for one room with a pool table, there are no walls at the Schooner Wharf, just a bunch of frond covered huts. The Bight, where tarpon still come and roll under the soaring man-of-war birds, is just a few feet away. There is a large dog sitting at the bar, drinking a beverage from a cup held up to him by a pretty woman. Nearby, a lean, dangerously tanned guy in tight shorts and a plaid fanny pack is gyrating to the music on the gravel and dirt floor, alone. His eyes seem to be focused on some point that is far, far away.

MORE ON KEY WEST: Slideshow | Part two: The Other World | Part three: The Conch Republic, Unscripted.

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