Voyager: Travel Writings (7 page)

Were Joker’s Miami mob guys really rooming at the foursquare, wooden, two-story building with the long porch while they and a CIA cohort trained the Cuban exiles? Or was Joker, a storyteller himself, making it up? I have no memory of the men individually, but I do have a clear visual memory of the building and of some Americans living there, images recently freshened by my bike ride down the Keys with my pal Tom. The images, however, seem to have been drawn, not from lived experience, but from my memories of a movie or a play in which a group of people, mostly men, are trapped in a hotel bar by a hurricane.

At first I thought the images might have come from
To Have and Have Not,
with Bogart and Bacall, the film version of the 1937 Hemingway novel set in Havana and Key West. Then, as Tom and I rode our bikes past the old, remarkably unchanged rooming house in Islamorada, I realized that I was remembering images from a different movie,
Key Largo
. Did it really happen to me—the hurricane, being trapped in the hotel with a bunch of gangsters—or did I merely see it in the movie? Or did I imagine it? Or dream it? And if it did happen, why after a month or so did I leave the hotel and the gangsters and the CIA agents and rent a little trailer across the road?

Tom is gay and was convinced that Joker had been a gay gangster with a crush. No house, no wife, in Boston in the late fifties, early sixties, providing non-union workers for the Opera Company of Boston by hiring handsome young artists and writers to make
sets and be stagehands. “It was an
opera
company,” Tom pointed out. “Not a waste disposal company. Give me a break, Russell.”

A gay Irish mobster? Well, yes, it was possible. And if so, I was too oblivious to have guessed it. But why else would Joker want to help a brokenhearted kid having a nervous breakdown over a busted romance by sending him off to train Cuban exiles in the Keys with his mobster friends so the kid could maybe become a mobster himself? Joker’s little mobster.

And could it really have been that early, the winter of 1961, in time for the Bay of Pigs, an event that at the time seemed to have escaped my notice? Or had no memory of, anyhow. As Tom and I pedaled on, I did the numbers. I needed to establish when, exactly, this happened. I’d fallen in love with Christine when she was a student at Emerson College and I was living on Symphony Road in Boston, working part-time at the bookstore and the Rathskeller restaurant and in binges at the Opera Company of Boston. She left me for another boy, ran off with him to finish college in Richmond, Virginia. I remembered pumping gas at the filling station in Islamorada next to my Airstream on old Route 1. Then at some point I left Islamorada and rented a room by the week at a whorehouse in Key West that took me two weeks or more to figure out actually was a whorehouse. Key West was a navy town then, and I was very naive and, as I said, oblivious. I was writing my neo-Hemingway short stories and paying more attention to my sentences than to my surroundings.

I remembered that a few months later I delivered a drive-away Opel picked up in Miami to its owner in San Diego by way of northern Mexico, with an extended stopover in New Orleans, accompanied by two guys who ran a card game at the Key West whorehouse, Frank, a strip show barker recently released from jail in New Jersey, and an AWOL sailor from Oklahoma whose name I can’t remember. I stayed for a few weeks in San Diego, where my mother had recently moved, then hitched back east to New Hampshire. Temporarily reconciled with my father, I moved in with him
and his new wife where he was living in his parents’ home in Barnstead and began working alongside him as a union plumber, the Banks family trade for three generations. Returning to Boston the following summer, I renewed my relationship with Christine. And on October 29, 1962, married her. The marriage did not last as long as we hoped, of course—they never do; that is, mine never do—but the date is indelible, part of the record.

So the numbers confirmed it: yes, I was in Islamorada in April 1961, which is when the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred, and I must have been frightened by whatever was happening before my eyes, which I could not have understood, so I fled the rooming house and the men living there, abandoning the life of a gangster for the life of a writer in an Airstream trailer just across the road. And the rest became my more sharply remembered life: Key West, New Orleans, Mexico, San Diego, New Hampshire, a second early marriage, college in North Carolina, Jamaica, and on.

Still chasing down the imagery, at home in Miami a few nights after my bike ride with Tom, I rented and watched the movie
Key Largo
. The film is adapted from the play by Maxwell Anderson. Richard Brooks and John Huston wrote the screenplay, Huston directed. Released in 1948, it starred Bogart, Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, and Claire Trevor. I’d forgotten the weirdly racist Seminole Indian aspect—it opens with a local sheriff looking for “two young bucks” who’d busted out of jail. Me and Morelli on the lam in a ’53 Olds? The real action begins when Major McLeod (Bogart) arrives by bus at the Hotel Largo, a Bahamas-style wood-frame rooming house and bar with a long porch facing the road. He’s come to keep a vow made to a guy in his outfit who was killed in Italy in the war. He’s promised to visit the guy’s wheelchair-bound dad (Barrymore) and gorgeous sister (Bacall) and report that their beloved son and brother died heroically in battle.

Bogart finds the hotel taken over by a posse of American gangsters up from Cuba led by Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a short, round,
cigar-chomping Capone type, there to meet some Miami mobsters and exchange a suitcase of phony money printed in Cuba for a bag of real cash—when the hurricane hits. The wind rises to a roar. And then comes a strangely ominous scene in the hotel bar where Robinson leans in to Bacall and whispers something in her ear that the audience can’t hear, something that frightens and repels her. She recoils, and he does it again. This time she spits at him and claws his face with her nails. Bleeding, he backs off. Throughout the scene Bogart stands and watches from the bar, but does nothing.

The scene is ugly and realistic in a way that the rest of the movie is not; the rest is operatic and stagy. But for me that exchange between Robinson and Bacall carries the emotional and moral meaning of the film. Everything seems to hinge on whispered words that we never hear. We’re invited to imagine the filthiest, most degrading words possible. It was shocking and frightening and deeply felt by me in a way that nothing else in the film was.

When did I first see
Key Largo
? Not when it was released in 1948—I was only eight years old. It is possible, of course, that I saw it a year later at the Star Theater in Concord, New Hampshire; I went to the movies at least once a week starting when I was nine, regardless of what was showing. But at that age what, if anything, would I have made of Edward G. Robinson’s whispering into Lauren Bacall’s lovely ear? The scene might have frightened me, but only a little. Bacall’s response would have frightened me more—a beautiful young woman reacts violently to an ugly man’s unheard words by spitting at him and scratching his face with her nails. The sexual element would not have occurred to me. Not consciously.

It’s more likely that I watched the film for the first time many years later, after I had actually lived in the Keys, in the 1980s, late at night on the Turner Classic Movies channel. And just recently, prompted by my bike ride down the Keys with my friend Tom, when I watched it again, this time via Netflix, and it became clear that the scene with Robinson and Bacall was the emotional and
moral center, not just of the movie, but of my all-but-forgotten, long-ago months in Key Largo.

But I couldn’t be sure of the differences between what I remembered experiencing in 1961 and what I saw decades later in the movie. They flowed together like Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico under the Seven Mile Bridge and elaborated and extended each other. This time the movie stirred up a wave of impacted and disturbing and mysteriously mingled memories, all brought on by Joker’s revelations at the Tam and the bike trip with Tom years later: lived experience first, then a long half century of forgetting, then a willed return to the location and to the film—followed, as I write, by these overflowing memories, making it possible for my early lived experience to be relived now, in my mid-seventies.

Almost
relived. For at the very center there floats a small, opaque gray circle, an absence, behind which something shameful lies hidden. It’s what no one hears Robinson whisper in Bacall’s perfect ear. It’s what I imagine he said to her. Something I myself must have said to a beautiful young woman. To Christine, driving her into the arms of another, a man standing at the bar, watching, like Bogart. She evidently forgave me, or she would not have married me. But I cannot remember what I said to her and can neither imagine nor acknowledge it, and thus cannot be truly forgiven. All I can call up today is the emotional residue: which is shame. Guilt dissipates over time; shame, like a man’s character, stays.

When Tom and I biked our way back from Key West to where we had left the car in Key Largo, we pulled off at the old place in Islamorada. Freshly painted, it looked the same outside as it did fifty-four years earlier, except for a resort-wear boutique and a real estate office on the first floor and what appeared to be a rack of studio apartments upstairs. I stepped into the real estate office and spoke to the Realtor, a pretty, very pregnant, young Hispanic woman with frizzy dark hair seated in front of an electric fan. I asked her if the building used to be a bar and rooming house. She said that
was before her time. But yes, she’d heard it was once a roadhouse. Where a lot of bad things happened, she added, smiling. Except for her office and the boutique next door, it was condos now. There’s one available, she told me. An end unit. Just came on the market. A view of the Gulf on one side and Florida Bay on the other. Would I be interested in seeing it?

I hesitated a few seconds, then said no, and Tom and I mounted our bikes and rode on.

Meanwhile, in harmonious, if asymmetrical, late 1980s counterpoint, my courtship tour of the Caribbean continued. Chase and I returned to Sint Maarten from our sojourn in Saba and immediately departed for St. Bart’s. Though not as terrifying as its counterpart on Saba, the single scariest thing about St. Bart’s was the approach to the landing strip. The rickety old STOL passed through a cut in the steep hills west of the town of Gustavia, a defile, actually, not much wider than the wingtips. When the pilot suddenly cut the engine, the plane literally dropped toward a runway that ended precisely at the edge of Baie de St. Jean, where several half-submerged planes that had missed the stop lay moldering below. After that, touring the tiny eight-square-mile island was mainly a matter of restaurant-hopping. St. Bart’s may have the most restaurants per capita of any place in the world—at last count when we were there in 1988, sixty restaurants for thirty-five hundred residents. And I’m talking French restaurants, from the elegant high-end hilltop Les Castelets to Chez Joe’s on a Gustavia backstreet.

After visiting the American and British Virgins, Sint Maarten and St. Martin and Anguilla and Saba, it was a visual surprise to arrive at St. Bart’s and realize that almost everyone was white—the tourists, of course, and the large number of island entrepreneurs, but also the natives, who were mostly descendants of the original Norman and Breton settlers and had traditionally been small farm
ers instead of plantation owners. Plantation culture and its painful residue were as foreign to St. Bart’s as to St. Moritz, and the place felt a little like St. Moritz, though more laid-back, if that’s possible, and more expensive. In a sense, the entire island was a huge, chic French gated resort. There were many private villas in the hills, luxury hotels and bungalows along the coves and beaches of the north coast, and a picture-perfect yacht basin in the one town, Gustavia, a regular stop for the Lesser Antilles sailing crowd.

Popular with entertainers hiding from their fans, models working on their tans, and a large number of balding businessmen in their sixties and seventies strolling the beaches alongside very attractive, much younger women in string bikinis, St. Bart’s provided little of interest for travelers like me and Chase, voyagers interested in the five-hundred-year clash-and-blend of diverse cultures, races, and classes that makes the Caribbean so exciting and so threatening. St. Bart’s was lotusland. But even the most intrepid of travelers can use a break now and then, so we settled into a cabana at Baie de St. Jean for a few days and tried not to be too distracted by the perfect beaches, the cuisine, the designer boutiques, and the discos. And—no surprise—we slumbered our days and nights away as if on holiday in St. Moritz, thousands of miles from the Caribbean, and I spoke almost not at all about my marriages and divorces. And it was painful to leave.

Our itinerary and booked flights, however, obliged us to head next for Antigua. After reading native daughter Jamaica Kincaid’s book
A Small Place,
one might think, as one approached Antigua for the first time, that one was entering the third circle of hell. And, indeed, there was much about the island to offend the sensitive visitor and perhaps even more to offend a native Antiguan like Kincaid, who left her idyllic island home and returned twenty years later to find a country on the make and the local politicians on the take. Antigua is the largest of the Leewards, 108 square miles, seventy-six thousand people. It is also the most entangled in the history of British imperial ambitions. The economics and culture of sugar and
slavery shaped its destiny to a degree matched only in Barbados and Jamaica. As a general rule, these are the islands most tragically caught in the subtly interwoven conflicts between hatred and slavish adoration of the mother country, between third-world nationalism and hopeless dependence on foreign loans, between profound affection for their island’s natural resources and relentless determination to develop, at all costs, the tourist industry. Antigua was an island at war with itself, and it showed.