Sheraton Hotel, Key Largo, Florida 24th October 1991
A long drive down the Overseas Highway to Key West – breakfast at Brian’s in Marathon – around 100 miles. The town at the end of the Keys was an extraordinary mix of charm and shoddiness, elegance and decay, liveliness and depression, quiet and rowdiness, of the precious and the meretricious, the ephemeral and the eternal.
Visited the Hemingway house as a sort of obligatory pilgrimage. The guide sported a neat Papa H beard, hairy chest and spoke with a clipped Hemingwayesque diction – he was English, from Berkshire with parents in Saxmundham. The drinking fountain for the polydactylcats was a urinal stolen from a local bar. The last penny that Hemingway claimed the pool cost him was preserved under plastic by the terrace.
In the centre the houses, from the grandest down, were fine with columns and porches, white paint and fretted wood, shutters and balconies. They were surrounded by a profusion of ferns, palms and exotic broad leaved trees that dropped scimitar-like bean pods onto the street Cool, shaded interiors away from the bright light of the street lay beyond half-open doors. Restoration was going on apace. It would have be easy to be seduced by the polished white perfection, the buzz of affluent visitors, the laid back atmosphere, but diving off Whitehead and Duval Streets onto Olivier and Petronia, or any of the smaller alleys, and the picture was different. The houses were poorer, weeds grew in the streets, lizards and geckos scuttled across peeling paint; and African Americans lounged in doorways or pushed ragged bundles around on bicycles.
A sign at the harbour promised ‘Free Crab Tomorrow’.