On Bush, Hemingway and Key West

Papa with Castro

It was only when I put the phone down that I remembered my father is Indian, which believe it or not is something I forget once in a while, and Indian dads don't go bowling.

Mike then had a brainwave. 'Let's go to my mom's place in South Carolina.' We all knew instinctively it was either that or Prozac! His mother lives in a beach house down there, and we had all been there before, but that was years and years ago, and though we kept making plans to go over there again, something or the other kept coming up and we hadn't been there in ages. But now seemed to be the primo time to go. 'We won't even look down at the red states below us in the plane' Mei said, meaning all those states in the great 'heartland' which had voted for Bush. 'We'll pretend the United States is just one big doughnut.'

'But South Carolina went for Bush. It's in the South, remember?' Mike said. We all sighed. Unless we wanted to go up the East Coast, to the north-east, or stay at home, there was really no escaping the right-wingers. The only other option was Canada.

'Maybe' Tom said, to divert us from our sorrows, 'the in-flight movie is going to be great and we won't have to think about it.'

The movie turned out to be Bull Durham. And even though I am not a sports fan, and can't get teary-eyed about baseball like Nancy, who has beautiful gray eyes, grew up in New York and is a Yankees fan as all get-out, Bull Durham I have to admit has its moments. Like when Tim Robbins pitches in black garters. I always have to wonder how everybody else kept a straight face in the movie.

But then we found out that we were restless in South Carolina, too. The beach house was great and the breakfasts Mike's mom fed us were delicious (maple syrup from a friend's place up in Vermont that was the last thing in pure scrumptiousness) but the Atlantic was really too cold to frolic in and that week a raw, blustery, killjoy wind sprang up from nowhere ('the White House' said Mike's mom darkly), so we were stuck indoors watching the boob tube, and that kicked in the old blues again. Plus my dad kept calling up, with conservative talking heads shouting in glee on the TV in the background: 'This is terrible, Salma. Now they are going to level Falluja.'

'Dad, get a dog.'

Something had to give! We hadn't come all the way from 'Frisco to vege in sweats indoors. Again it was Mike: 'We can either go up to Kill Devil Hills where the Wright Brothers flew their planes, or we go down to Key West, Florida.' Kill Devil Hills is in the Outer Banks, up in North Carolina.

And even though we knew that it was probably kitschy as hell and full of gift shops in makeshift garages, we all went thumbs-up for Key West, simply because it was the longer drive. We piled into Mike's mom's Honda Civic and hopped onto I-95 south. It got warmer, more 'country,' more pickups, and when we stopped in Savannah, Georgia for lunch the friendly waitress began every sentence with 'Ya'all…' We kept telling Mike now that he was in S.C., his 'down home' accent was coming back, and how he kept saying 'yeeeup' instead of 'yes.' Somewhere before Miami Nancy mentioned that 'Papa' Hemingway had lived in Key West and that we could go see his house, which was a big tourist attraction. Ernest Hemingway, writer, journalist, big game hunter, sports fisherman and bullfighter extraordinaire, a genuine celeb in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He moved there, we learnt later, around 1928, then lived there continuously from 1931 to 1940.

I didn't know much about him. In my sophomore year I had read A Farewell to Arms and A Moveable Feast. Though I remembered one line from A Farewell to Arms, it was more the latter book that had stayed with me, sketches of famous America expatriate writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s.

'Do you remember his portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas?' Mei asked us, searching in her bag for Kleenex.

'Yeah, I do,' I said.

'Don't you think that was a subtle hatchet job? They came out like such creepy women. I always thought that the big he-man felt threatened by a brilliant lesbian intellectual like Stein.'

'Right,' said Nancy. 'He couldn't shoot her or mount her on the wall.'

'Hey, Nance, "mount" is not exactly the word I'd use here,' Mei said theatrically. She, like Nancy is older than me, used to be a lawyer, but has ditched it all for black lipstick and acting lessons. 'Of course,' she said after we were done with our cackling, 'the best thing that happened to him was Martha Gellhorn, but he couldn't hold on to her.'

'Martha who?'

'Gellhorn. His third wife. They had a hot thing going when he was still married to Pauline, but she was too independent for him. She married him, but divorced him later. I imagine she couldn't take it any more, sucking up to the great man.'

'Martha Gellhorn! Wasn't she a journalist too?' This was Tom.

'Yes. She wrote some great articles on Cuba. You guys should read them.'

'I have. It's coming back to me now.'

'So how come you know so much about him?' Mike asked Mei.

'My dad loved him. We had all his books in the house when I was growing up.'

'The son of a Chinese immigrant who loved Hemingway?'

'Yeeeup.'

From Florida City we scooted over to Highway 1, which went all the way to Key West, the last island in the string of islands at the tip of Florida called The Keys. We kept a loud count of the mile markers that began with Key Largo, the first island on the string. Straightaway we could see that it was getting touristy, with 'shacks' pitching discounted 'longnecks' (which is Americanese for beer in a bottle) and hotdogs. Bridges linked the islands, and the best one was the seven-mile bridge between Boot Key and Big Pine Key, which we hit with perfect timing in the evening to drool over a fabulously technicolor sunset. Key West was alive and hopping when we got there at night, a cacophony of lights and loud voices. We checked into a motel and did laps in the swimming pool with other tourists, mostly British. It was peak season, the pool bartender told us, and we had been lucky to get rooms without reservations. We chomped down our burgers and called it an early night. Morning confirmed what we had only suspected at night: that Key West was very touristy indeedy. After breakfast, we walked around what the residents of Key West call the Conch Republic. It was more like Tacky Town, Plastic Pomp, all done in garish Florida pastel colors. A warm wind sushed through the palm trees. On and around the pier were the usual fake 'town characters' and 'street artists': men on stilts, mimes, clowns, sleight-of-handers, chess matches, trombone players, Jimmy Buffet posters and T-shirts. Down side streets were shops crammed with gimmicky stuff, bars and saloons, and paintings done by artists sitting beside their works laid out on the pavements. I and Nancy bought a painting each. Mine was of shrimp boats at rest in a wharf, and her's of sunset at the pier, which sounds terribly clichéd, but the artist was a silent, dour-faced young girl who we concluded was obviously a talented runaway from home and both of us wanted to offer her our support.

Around 11 o'clock we went to see Hemingway's house. There was a long line ahead of us, lots of German tourists, lumpen ladies in khaki shorts. The Hemingway house, made from native rock mined from the surrounding land in 1851, is a two-storeyed Spanish Colonial, a style that favored arches in wraparound verandahs, wooden shutters, high ceilings, plenty of light and a Mexican adobe feel to it. It was swampy hot inside, and our guide, an overweight, short man who kept mopping his forehead with a large bandanna told us that one reason was that Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, who was the one he lived with here, removed the ceiling fans so that she could hang her imported chandeliers. Cats are everywhere, the descendents of cats Hemingway had, some of whom were six-toed, and there were a lot of their great-great-grandkids around. As were trophy animal heads on walls. The tour is quite good, with every detail faithfully pointed out to visitors: Pauline's Spanish tiles, the style similarity between the Deacon's bench downstairs and the bed in the master bedroom upstairs, the boys' room where Hemingway's sons Patrick and Gregory lived, the replicas of the original Miro painting and Picasso sculpture from his Paris years. In fact, it was John Dos Passos who in Paris told Hemingway about Key West, and it was here in a little studio at the back that Hemingway worked on Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and many of his short stories. We climbed up the stairs to the studio where they still had the portable Remington. Back in the old days there was a plank Hemingway would walk to get to it. One slip, and it was a twenty-foot drop to the paved patio below! In the boys' room there was a very old photo of Hemingway in his WWI Red Cross Uniform. He was wounded in Italy and fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. It was this experience he used for A Farewell to Arms. I didn't like the Attenborough movie, though, with Sandra Bullock as a fatuous Nurse Catherine, looking as if she was waiting for her nails to dry.

But later, at Sloppy Joe's, we women agreed that Papa's house and his legend left us cold. Sloppy Joe's is the bar where Hemingway drank and roistered with his 'manly' buddies. Nearly every bar in Key West boasted of having had Hemingway, but Sloppy Joe's was the 'authentic' place. It was crammed to the rafters with tourists, half of them wearing 'Papa Lives On' T-shirts. We ordered 'Papa dobles' his favourite drink. A mix of Island Rum, grapefruit juice, Grenadine, splash of Sweet & Sour, club soda and fresh-squeezed lime. All the waitresses and waiters looked like seasonal help, Europeans too, with tanned, fit bodies, people out of a Calvin Klein ad.

'It turned me off, those animal heads mounted on the wall of his house,' Nancy scoffed, looking at the 119-pound sailfish caught by Hemingway that still hung on one wall. 'Big game hunting! More like white man goes slaughtering in Africa. Bet you Papa was just another imperialist at heart.'

'You can't judge him according to later standards,' said Tom.

'And that super-macho stuff about walking the plank every morning! Who was he kidding?'

'Hairy-chested fiction, too,' said Mei. 'Me and the world going at it mano a mano. I don't think his writing has worn well.'

'Oh come on,' Tom said, 'he won the Nobel prize, didn't he?'

'Nobel prize, shobel prize. Bunch of Swedish men.'

'Well, your dad liked him.'

'So? My dad was in the Second World War. He probably had fantasies about meeting up with a cute white nurse.'

'So you think all that meant something?' I asked.

'Male insecurity?' Mei said. 'All that chest thumping makes you think there was something deep in the closet.'

'Easy, guys,' said Mike, looking at the big bartender. 'You don't want to say it too loud in this place.'

We ordered a second round of drinks. Cuba Libres this time.

'Do you think he would have voted for Bush?' Nancy asked, checking the menu. 'What's conch fritters?'

'I don't know, he certainly looked the type. Beard, beer gut, a good ole boy.'

'No way,' I said. '"Every thinking man is an atheist" is the line I remember from A Farewell to Arms. That's not a Bush guy. You gotta give him that.'

'He loved guns, hunting. The gun lobby voted for Mr. Texas National Guard.'

'But Hemingway loved cats, too. The Bushes are dog people.' This from Mike.

'Besides, A Farewell to Arms is anti-war,' I said, 'which sure wouldn't provide Dick Cheney's meal ticket.'

'Yeah, he wasn't what you'd call a big Christian,' Mei said slowly, lost in thought. 'Hemingway's thing was the world's a cruel, screwed-up place, religion was a bad deal, and you had to make do as best as you could by not talking too much.'

'Something to be said for that,' Tom jumped in quickly, now that things were going Papa's way. 'Besides, didn't he live in Castro's Cuba?'

'Yeeeup. Old Ernest did live in Castro's Cuba and by all accounts the Fidelistas were fond of him. They have statues of him over there. Nope, I can't see him going for Bush...'

It was a thought that made our day, Papa's one saving grace, that after one look at Bush he would probably have boarded the nearest fishing boat and paddled like blazes for Cuba.

Salma Ridhak works for an alternative newspaper in the Bay area.