Hemingway's Boat (72 page)

A bit ahead of the court date, on March 26, the police had been called at 3:30 in the afternoon to the wooden-gated house on Royal Palm Avenue. Ida—who had said to friends that she had allowed Gigi back in because he had nowhere else to go, and, anyway, they still loved each other—told the officers that Gigi had stolen her car, had returned, had thrown a glass of Coke at her head, had declared, “I'll see you dead.” What's astonishing in these incidents is how he kept managing not to serve real time.

That July, in Herb Caen's Monday gossip column, in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, there were the usual three dozen or so banalities for the morning transit riders, including this item: “The youngest son of one of the most macho American writers has just had the complete sex change operation and I guess that's showing Ol' Hairy Chest.”

Still, there were moments of the old calm and decency. On July 4, 1999, the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center opened in Piggott, Arkansas. Gregory and Ida Hemingway were the guests of honor; they'd gotten remarried, before a judge, two years earlier, in Washington
State. Gigi wore a suit and cut the ribbon at the ceremony. It was 102 in the shade. He went over to the parlor of his aged aunt Matilda, who was Pauline's sister-in-law, and sat holding her hand. And yet, three weeks later, in Oak Park, at a party marking the one hundredth birthday of his father, Gigi was a wreck. His two brothers had come for the celebration. “I can't go in there,” he said to an organizer, sitting on a step, crying. Inside, the crowd was singing, “Happy Birthday, Dear Ernest.”

Six months later, in January 2000, he and his wife showed up in Bimini for another Hemingway conference. He was fine, if distant, company. There were no crackpot ravings or schemes for winning a Nobel Prize in science. He went out fishing with several of the scholars. The sessions were held in the same little white clapboard Wesley Methodist chapel his father used to slip into, after a day on
Pilar
, to watch light shaft across the wooden pews. Mostly, Gigi sat by himself up front, in a white guayabera. He was very round now. He had a bad left hip and clogged arteries and high blood pressure. There was something waxy and not quite real about his features. But you could have studied him from behind and almost convinced yourself: it's
him
. The other him.

It's the last photograph, so far as I know, ever taken of Ernest Hemingway's youngest son while he was still alive: a police mug shot, recorded, along with a right thumbprint, at about 1:05 p.m. on Wednesday, September 26, 2001
,
Gigi's last day as a free man (well, he was free only for part of that morning, until his 12:15 p.m. arrest), five days before his heart went into cardiac arrest on a cement floor
.

If you knew nothing of his life, would you ever guess, from looking at this picture? I'm not talking about his surgical alterations but about his apparent devil-may-careness. Why does he appear so … untroubled? This can't be somebody living his life in deep shame. It's just some middle-aged, or maybe late-middle-aged, semi-androgynous guy with beach-boy hair and a toothy smile and what looks like a reddened nose and a gaze going straight at the lens. (That choker necklace was bought in a Key West trinket shop a few years earlier.)

That's a white hospital gown bunched around his shoulders
.

I think I know exactly why Gigi looks so untroubled, or wishes to appear that way. He's trying to cover all the rottenness he feels inside, has always felt inside
.

When the police had picked him up fifty minutes earlier, when he had been sitting bewildered and seemingly drunk on a strip of median curb at 1121 Crandon Boulevard in Key Biscayne, right outside the entrance to Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, he'd had the hospital gown wrapped around his shoulders, but was otherwise naked. In one hand were a red jumper and black high heels. He looked like a man, although his toenails were painted, and he was wearing makeup and two rings
.

As Officer Nelia Real of the Key Biscayne Police Department drew up in her cruiser, Gigi was on the curb trying to put on a flowered thong. A few minutes before, a park ranger named Nelson Mompierre had noticed him stumbling along, north on the boulevard's southbound lane. When the police officer got out of her car, Gigi was sitting down, as if pooped, or possibly trying to get his bearings. He was grinning
.

From Officer Real's typed report: “Mr. Hemingway (defendant) had he/her genitals (Mr. Hemingway is a transsexual and had his male organs removed) exposed to the public. The defendant had a hospital gown
wrapped around the shoulder area exposing the breasts. The defendant refused to be handcuffed and refused to enter the police unit. He was screaming and resisting our requests to leave.” Despite those last two sentences, the officer wasn't really exercised about Gigi. Neither she nor her backup, Officer Ben Torres (she'd radioed for assistance, just in case), thought him dangerous in any real sense. He was just some confused old gay or bi or trans, possibly homeless. As Officer Real said later, “At times he was very coherent, but at other times he didn't make any sense.” In the squad car, after he'd calmed down, Officer Real had a pleasant talk with Gigi. Once she'd discovered who he was, or who he was the son of, she told him that Ernest Hemingway was just about her favorite author. Her own people were from Cuba. At the Key Biscayne station house (before he was transported across Rickenbacker Causeway to Miami's main detention center for women), Gigi offered to autograph the back of her arrest affidavit. She took him up on it. He was plying the old Gigi charms. He must have been hoping it would do him some good. He told her he was going to come back and take her out to lunch. The whole thing must have made some impression on her, for after his death, Officer Real told an Associated Press reporter: “I feel really bad that that happened. He was a very nice guy.” She repeated that sentiment throughout the week
.

No one has ever been able to explain with any certainty how and why Gigi came to be where he was, that day, September 26, 2001
,
with his clothes off, in the midday sun, immediately outside the entrance to a state recreation area at the southern tip of Key Biscayne, which itself is more or less at the southern watery end of greater Miami. I can't explain it for certain, either, but I do have a deeply held theory about it
.

Gregory Hemingway, September 26, 2001

THE BUILDING
where Gigi died sits under a swirl of raised freeways on the edge of the Miami skyline. The Dolphin Expressway and 1-95 and 1-395 come together here. It's a four-story, monolithic, concrete, beige box, with little slits for windows and some concertina wire wrapped around the perimeter. The people inside can't see out the windows, though—they're covered over. The jail is on the corner of Northwest Seventh Avenue and Northwest Fourteenth Street, which is also known as Tornado Way. The roar of cars and trucks overhead goes on day and night, although it's doubtful the inmates think very much about freeway noise. They make their own noise. It comes from blaring TVs in the common spaces to clanging doors to yelling of all kinds.

“A lot of the guards would still remember him,” said Janelle Hall, a public affairs officer from the corrections department, when I visited the
jail. “Very interesting case. We had him in here several times. People liked him. Highly intelligent. He didn't cause us trouble. He went by this other name—”

“Gloria,” I said.

“That's right. Sometimes he'd be Greg, sometimes we'd have him as Gloria.”

Cell 3C2 was a safety cell, she explained. It's for inmates with psychiatric or other problems who need to be segregated from the general population.

Gigi's pod in 3C2 was and is about a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room. They let me look through the window. The room had a steel bunk, a metal sink, a hopper, a ledge for toiletries. Gigi's and the four or five other pods of the cell were arranged in a semicircle, fronting a common area. There were two TVs going, and the sound was being piped into the pods. There was also a telephone in the common space, and it was on a rolling pedestal. It looked like a payphone outside a 7-Eleven. Attached to the pedestal was a length of cable tethered to the phone's receiver. The way it worked, I was told, is that when an inmate wished to make a call—and, really, there were few restrictions on calls, as long as the party on the other end was accepting charges—the inmate signaled the guard, and the guard rolled over the phone and fed in the receiver via an opening in the locked door.

I can't report how many phone calls Ernest Hemingway's son made—or whether he made any at all—in the five days he lived in 377 of 3C2 of the Miami-Dade County Women's Detention Center in the last week of September 2001. The jail doesn't have those records. The only person in his immediate or even extended family who apparently knew where he was that week was his wife, Ida, who was at their home back in Montana. Once she found out (on the second full day he was there), she declined to get him out. His bail was $1,000, which means $100 would have sprung him, because all you need is a tenth. John Hemingway feels huge regret about this. He writes of it in
Tribe
. “Christ, even I would have had a hundred bucks,” he said to me once. “If one of us kids had known, maybe we could have gotten him out of there and into some serious medical care in a hospital.” As to why he thinks his father didn't tell any of his children where he was, ask them for help, John said, “I don't know. Maybe there was no place for us in what he had to go through. This was a reenactment. He was reenacting it all over again, and there wasn't room for anybody else.”

•   •   •

Gigi had had a rough summer. He'd gotten his hip replaced at Miami Heart Institute. In both Florida and Montana, he'd been getting around with a walker. He was taking too much Percocet, mixing it with too much alcohol, talking morosely about the fact that he was closing in on seventy. He was fighting more than ever with his wife.

In early September he called his old friend Thelma Baker in Missoula. He was three hours away, in Bozeman. He was going to leave Ida, this time for good, but he was scared about it, too, because he didn't know if he'd be able to take care of himself. He didn't know what Ida's reaction would be. She was physically stronger than he was. “Let me come over to my old room at the motel, so you can take care of me,” he said. Through the years Thelma had held money for him, barked at him, done laundry for him, mothered him, big-sistered him. Gigi had gotten to be friends with her three grown sons, who helped their mom with the motel. They'd played tennis together, and hunted and fished, although one of Thelma's sons couldn't abide his sex change. (Thelma herself had tried hard to talk him out of going through with it.) Gigi and Thelma were almost the same age. Once they'd gone out on a sort of date, but their relationship had never really been romantic, despite that he'd once proposed. He'd spent all day worrying about where to go for dinner, arranging for flowers, getting his car washed, his clothes cleaned. The evening turned out to be a big success. He was a nervous gentleman.