Key Weird 06; Key Dali Read online

  “Not too, but the slip rental can be pretty dear.” I chance a peek and see he has tilted back his straw hat and is looking out over the water now. “Going to be even more expensive if the bank gets its way.”

  I have no idea what this means, but am glad he hasn’t asked me why I would want to know about houseboats. I venture another query to keep the discussion going, as it is well known that grunts also bite during good conversation.

  “What do you mean about the bank, Taco Bob?”

  He sighs big.

  “The marina has been having a tough time lately, and the Greater Keys National Bank, which most of us refer to as the Bank of Greed and Indifference, has its foreclosure lawyers circling like buzzards over the Tamiami Trail on a hot August afternoon. Word has it there’s a big foreign consortium wanting to build luxury condo towers on the property, but Big Jim and his family have been holding out, trying to keep the marina going. No one doubts what the bank will do if they get their hands on the marina.”

  “More condos?”

  “Yeah, and no more old houseboats, just yachts.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this, my friend. But you are doing okay otherwise?”

  “Actually, my only other problem is things are going almost too smooth for me these days. But I figure that’s a good problem to have.” I get a quick wink from an eye that has seen plenty of hard times as well.

  “Taco Bob, do you ever see the sisters who own the hotel?”

  The man rolls his eyes before answering.

  “Oh, I see them plenty, especially Consuelo. That girl has a powerful crush on me and can be persistent to the point of being a nuisance. I like her as a friend all right, but among other things she’s only half my age.”

  Taco Bob is looking straight ahead out over the water again and frowning. His friendship with Consuelo is obviously a problem, so I try to steer the conversation elsewhere.

  “Her mother? Wiola? Is she still in Key West?”

  Taco Bob reels in and checks his bait.

  “Sara, the oldest, is off to tracker school up north, and Wiola went back to California not long after you disappeared, as I remember. You were staying with her, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Wiola in California makes me sad, as she was the woman who first taught me that older women can be great lovers.

  We fisherman sit on the little pier, lost in our own thoughts for a while. As a favor to my fellow angler, I decide I will talk to Consuelo the next time I see her. Maybe if I tell her as a mutual friend how she is obviously causing poor Taco Bob a lot of anguish she will give the man a break. What harm could that do? She might even thank me.

  ∨ Key Dali ∧

  4

  Old Town

  After a leisurely lunch at Dog Park – also known as Bum Park – where Taco Bob and I employed a couple of handfuls of charcoal in one of the park’s grills to cook up some savory grunts, I feel ready to face the world and my legions of adoring fans. That is, if they still remember me.

  I am humming an ancient, sacred Tibetan tune I just made up while strolling along in one of the few cities in the US with abundant and often unusual daytime wildlife. As I turn onto Duval Street a brown chicken and four little chicks scurry across the road while an orange tabby cat watches their every move from behind the tires of a parked car. Nearby I hear dogs bark, seagulls screech, and roosters crow. Key West roosters crow all day and all night. I don’t presently see any big, scary iguanas, but I know they are in the palms and bushes, watching.

  The tourists are out on the streets in full force now, and the sidewalk cafés are doing a brisk business. I see a bald man wearing a biker’s leather hat sitting near the sidewalk looking over a menu and holding hands with another man at his table. They are sitting directly under a palm tree that is prime iguana habitat. I pause in my journey just long enough to warn them of the dangers of iguana poop and get only vacant stares back. The man with the biker’s hat hands me a dollar to buy my silence as though I were a common street crazy. He obviously doesn’t know that I am a gifted artist and iguana authority, but I pocket the dollar anyway and invite him to come to Mallory Square for sunset.

  Walking along Duval, I offer more iguana warnings to tourists in addition to delivering a couple of impromptu lectures as to why there aren’t any manatees on land (there actually are, that sing) and where to see flying snails (there aren’t, unless you count throwing them). I collect a few more dollars and a couple of angry phrases and hand gestures that I memorize, hoping to work them into conversation the next time I’m at the bank.

  I ignore the t-shirt shops displaying all the latest in tasteless wit, but poke my head into every bar with live music for a second or two to see who’s playing. On a street corner I find a lovely young lady with a cart of shells with every conceivable name written on them you can possibly think of except, of course, mine. She winks and shows me a black ledger from inside her cart, so I invest one of my newly acquired dollars in a bolita ticket instead, then invite her as well to come to Mallory later.

  I pass a gay bar with signs boasting of live theater on stage, but it’s still early and the only action is an early shift of trannies out front on the street practicing provocative poses across the hood of an old Lincoln convertible with suicide doors.

  I am enjoying the familiar feel of Key West – like putting on a comfortable old shoe – when the mood is shattered by the sight of my arch nemesis. Across the street, a crowd is gathered around a small man wearing a beret and sketching wildly at an easel. I make my way quietly around to the back of the small crowd of people who obviously have no appreciation of true art, and am not surprised in the slightest to see the nearly completed crude sketch is once again of a woman with one large, oblong eye and triangular boobs. I look over the assembled throng and shake my head in pity, for these are the kind of people whose imaginations are totally captivated by things like mini-van air fresheners shaped like pine trees and James Patterson novels.

  I am about to put my nose in the air and attempt to strike from my mind this sad scene when I notice that closest to the so-called artist – who has had the unmitigated audacity to nickname himself Picasso – is a young woman whose eyes are filled with wonder and awe, and that the young woman is none other than the girl in the stripey socks.

  I am mightily flummoxed once again, and stagger away in shock and disbelief. I must seek something to erase the memory of the disturbing scene from my mind.

  Before long I find myself at the World’s Smallest Bar and order an appropriately small glass of tequila for its medicinal and mind-numbing properties. A drunken shrimper is piloting the only other stool at the bar. The tiny glass of liquor, combined with my stool-mates erratic and slurred tales of the sad state of the shrimping game and why everything is the fault of the government, helps to ease my mind of recent events.

  Fortified, and no more bewildered than usual, I step into a cigar shop the size of a closet and breathe in the wonderful aroma of premium cured tobacco, hand-rolled into some of the world’s best cigars. I inquire as to the pricing for a box of the best stogies. An old Cuban man with skin the color and texture of tobacco looks me over and frowns before pointing to the door and giving me free of charge yet another handy phrase, this one in Spanish, to use during my next visit to the bank.

  Back on the sidewalk with the overwhelming aroma of the cigar shop still wafting from my clothes and making my senses tingle, I’m at last beginning to fully feel the familiar charge Key West gives my artistic soul. I’m nearly ready to create except for one last thing – something that has inspired artists for centuries – and that thing will be up these stairs, if I’m lucky.

  On the rooftop clothing-optional bar I am just in time to catch a loud young woman with a body like a Venus and a mouth like a longshoreman telling a dirty joke while paying for her body painting session. She turns to leave and catches me staring at her chest, which is completely covered with swirls of color. There are even flowers with tiny fa
ces across her boobs. She raises her arms and slowly turns around, giving me the full view of a perfect body wearing only shorts and a thin layer of paint. I am spellbound.

  “Well, shit, what do you think, Dali?”

  I look at her face closely for the first time. I am horrified to recognize Consuelo, daughter of my former lover Wiola and dogged pursuer of my friend Taco Bob, whose judgment my lust-fogged mind immediately questions.

  “Uh, very nice, Consuelo.”

  She smiles the briefest of smiles and shrugs. “Yeah, I know.”

  Before I am able to even consider mentioning Taco Bob’s name or how Consuelo’s unwanted advances are causing the man considerable distress, the blonde angel is gone. Her boots clop loudly down the steps two at a time until she disappears into the crowds on the busy sidewalks of Old Town.

  ∨ Key Dali ∧

  5

  Mallory

  I have determined that my foray down Duval has not only stimulated my senses, but stirred my artist’s mind and shaken and awakened my body and soul as well to the point where I am now ready for my professional return to Mallory Square for the Sunset Celebration.

  But first I have a call coming in, which I decide to listen in on while walking towards Mallory. Sometimes after enough raps to the side of my head the ringing stops for a few hours and the calls just go to mailbox. Fortunately, the mailbox in the phone in my head stopped working long ago, but people still leave messages from time to time.

  I listen to an incoming message that is a long tearful apology from a woman to what appears to be either her lover or cat, I’m not sure which. I check a few trashcans along the way and soon arrive at the old shipping docks, which these days are a spacious plaza and the most popular place in the country to watch the sun slowly fall into the ocean.

  It seems I’m early at the check-in kiosk for vendors and performers, so I sit on a bench in the sunny plaza and watch a gigantic cruise ship pulling slowly away from the dock. The passengers along the upper decks are as tiny as ants. Some of the ant people are waving, so I wave back. I think to flash the Vulcan hand signal in case there are any Trekkies or space aliens aboard, but the ants have all gone down inside the giant mound of ship, probably to check their cabins for towel animals.

  Only a few straggler tourists wander the plaza at this hour, and a couple of early vendors are coming in from the streets pushing or pulling loaded carts. The sea breeze is cool, but the sun is warm. I take some deep breaths of the fresh, tropical air, and stretch mightily – all gangly arms and elbows at weird angles.

  I sit contentedly for a while, glad to be back in Key West. But before long I start feeling exposed, sitting alone on the bench, so I scrunch up and wrap myself completely with my cape so as not to attract attention. Now I am nearly invisible, thanks to my florescent orange plastic poncho, and not subject to the probing and judgmental stares of strangers. Closing my eyes seems to help even more, but I peek through a tiny pinhole in my cape when I hear an angry female voice coming across the plaza.

  “You’re bothering the wrong person, Copper!”

  Shee-it. It’s Consuelo, still wearing just body paint and shorts, coming this way, with boots clicking loudly on the brick pavers of the plaza. And there’s the young cop I saw out here last night, walking right behind her.

  “Hold on, Miss, I need to talk to you.” He looks pissed and has one hand on his baton as he’s trying to keep up. From what I’ve heard about Consuelo, showing her that baton would be a very bad idea, especially if she’s been drinking. Sure enough, I see in one hand the sturdy young woman is carrying a bottle wrapped in a paper bag.

  Normally I am a strong believer in not interfering with the natural order of life’s ebb and flow, but I feel something coming over me. Just as the angry pair are almost upon me, I explode from my hiding place and, holding my fedora above my head with one hand and pointing like Moses at the Red Sea with the other, I stand directly in front of Consuelo and loudly proclaim, “I MUST PAINT THIS WOMAN!” This stops everyone in their tracks, and thoroughly startles the shit out of not only Consuelo, the cop, and a nearby tourist couple, but myself as well.

  Before the shock can wear off I quickly overturn a nearby trash can and fall to my knees and frantically begin to tear tiny bits of paper and trash and assemble them into a scrap-art painting of a beautiful woman with short white-blonde hair with another painting on her naked chest. I jump to my feet only long enough to turn Consuelo’s head slightly and raise her chin a fraction of an inch. She holds the pose as I go to my knees again and close one eye while holding up a thumb for perspective before again frantically ripping and tearing and placing bits of trash as well as some of the sand from the plastic bags in my pockets. Soon the two dimensional form of a painted woman begins to magically appear on the bricks of Mallory Square. People gather around and, as usual, all eyes are on the artwork as my two hands fly as though with a mind of their own. The only sounds are of awe and astonishment as pictures are snapped and the crowd grows. The cop, who has been transfixed along with everyone else, takes a few steps back when he gets a call on his radio. Consuelo is proving to be a perfect model and holds absolutely still except when she frowns briefly at a chubby guy in a red tropical shirt rudely pushing through the crowd to take extreme close-ups of her chest. The young cop turns away briefly and my model uses the bottle in her hand to give the camera guy a quick warning pop to the forehead.

  I finish with a flurry, using tiny bits of orange peel for the sunrays, and stand to a smattering of applause, which rapidly spreads and grows through the crowd as I bow deeply. With as much humility as I can muster, I drop my fedora to the ground to receive the generous donations from the crowd as they continue to take pictures. I allow myself a small smile, acknowledging that I do, indeed, still have it. Consuelo is among those bending down to more closely examine my work.

  “That’s pretty good, all right.” She looks again and the frown is back. “But my boobs aren’t that big.”

  I take advantage of the opportunity to freely stare and compare, and come up with a crooked smile. “Artistic license?”

  Soon I can see some bits of green sticking out of my hat, so I produce a small house-painter’s brush and quickly sweep the artwork onto a piece of cardboard and dump it back into the same trash can from which it came. As usual, there are gasps of disbelief as the crowd slowly breaks up, one still rubbing his forehead. I see the cop now walking quickly across the plaza towards a rental scooter in a NO SCOOTER zone while talking into his cop radio.

  I retrieve my hat and place it on my head without removing the offerings. A quarter falls to the ground and Consuelo deftly scoops it up and hands it over. She flashes me a quick, hard look.

  “I could have handled that cop.”

  I just smile slightly, as I strongly suspect that anything I say will be wrong. She takes a long pull on the bottle in the paper bag while giving me a parting, squinty-eyed glare. Thankfully, she saunters away in the opposite direction as the cop and does not look back.

  ∨ Key Dali ∧

  6

  Stoney

  The vendors and performers are showing up now, hanging around the kiosk and waiting for the drawing that will determine which spots we each will have for the evening. I go back to the bench to wait and pull knees to chest and once again use my cape to wrap myself like an orange bat. In a few minutes I begin to relax. Then as I often do, I think of ideas for making huge sums of money. In my fertile mind I’m working out the minor design details for a home phone that looks like a stone crab when I smell something. It’s a bad smell, like burning plastic. I take a peek and see Weird Nancy holding a lighter to my cape. I jump to my feet.

  “ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS?!”

  I yank off my cape and stomp on the smoldering plastic. Weird Nancy is laughing her crazy old lady head off, but I am thoroughly un-amused. Somehow I have come through the traumatic ordeal unscathed, though my cape has sustained serious personal injury. There is now a hole the size of a pump
kin on one side. The sight of my wounded cape brings brief thoughts of counterattack, but Nancy is already pushing her cart filled with overly colorful paintings across the plaza while making a shrieking, laughing sound. Why can’t she just scream in my face about where did I go and why didn’t I at least leave a note like any normal crazy-person would?

  I again consider giving chase, but notice a pair of stripey socks coming around the corner, headed in my direction. I fold my damaged garment into a caplet and drape it across my shoulders as the pair of socks filled perfectly with girl draw near. I am about to doff my hat and bow politely to the captivating glass-walker, when out of nowhere, the so-called artist who goes by the name Picasso materializes and intercepts her, not ten feet from where I stand. I can hear his every word.

  “Good afternoon, my dear. I didn’t get a chance to formally introduce myself earlier. I am Picasso, painter of beautiful women.” At this, the worm sweeps the beret from his head and bows deeply. Socks has stopped dead in her tracks and is smiling and blushing. I am nauseated by the display and look away before I am sick in public. As the vermin leads the lady away I hear him droning on about her alluring eyes and perfect chin, and asking if she has been painted recently. I am seething as I again take a seat on the bench.

  “Dali! Mi amigo!” It’s Stoney. The bushy little man affectionately slaps me on the shoulder as he plops down beside me. “When did you get back?”

  The little worm is now holding my precious Socks by the hands as he talks. I drag my dagger eyes away from the appalling show and focus instead on Stoney.

  “About this time yesterday. Twenty-three hours from Jax on the Hound, man.”

  Stoney nods his head sagely. “Yeah, with all the stops they make, Greyhound is only a little faster than walking. You been in Jacksonville all this time?”