Here's how the game Connections went this time:
I came across a nod to Key West, Florida, in an article I was reading, some offhand reference. So I went into the Apple bookstore and found a book called Mile Marker Zero, by William McKeen. It was a history, sort of, focused on the late sixties and early seventies, post-Pill, pre-AIDS, centered around the literary community there. Key West was one of Papa Hemingway's haunts before he moved to Cuba, and there were a plethora of other writers, who came there after they were famous or got so while they were living there.
Among the players are Hunter S. Thompson, Tom McGuane, Elizabeth Ashely, Margo Kidder, with passing references to Tennesee Williams and Truman Capote, and there is a lot of boozing, screwing, mate-swapping, and dope-smuggling going on, amongs the manly-men and womanly-women ...
You probably know that when Jimmy Buffett sings about Margaritaville, he's singing about Key West. Buffett, a so-so country singer, would up in Key West in the early seventies through the auspices of Jerry Jeff Walker. Went from sleeping on somebody's couch and getting shooed off doorstoops to fairly successful and rich. Once Buffett's music began focusing on the scene there, and he came up with a unique sound that spawned hit records and parrot-heads and franchise bars ...
There were a slew of other moves and shakers in the literary community down in the tropics and most of them seemed to party long and hard. Booze, sex, music, it was apparently quite the scene. Eventually, most of them moved away.
So whilst reading the McKeen book, which is a lot of fun, I came across the name Tom Corcoran who was one of the boys in the club. Corcoran eventually went on to become a writer, and did a series of mystery novels set in Key West, featuring a photographer named Rutledge. When he makes references to various folks, they ring true, because he was there.
In one of the books, there's a reference wherein his girlfriend grabs a baseball cap from Robicheaux's Dock and Bait Shop, in New Iberia, Louisiana. Dave Robicheaux is, of course, the protagonist in a bunch of novels by James Lee Burke ...
Thanks for the kind comments on my book. Tell all your friends! I'd like to tell the kids that we're going back to three meals a day.
ReplyDeleteThose Tom Corcoran novels are addictive, like heroin -- or at least Lay's potato chips.
Take care.
You're a writer, you already know that eating is overrated ...
ReplyDeleteGood work on the book, though.
I lived in Key West for a year and a half in my late-teens, early twenties.
ReplyDeleteI didn't drink and wasn't gay, so there wasn't much for me there except non-Midwest weather. I stayed about a block from Buffet's "secret" studio.
Would like to return there someday, but scared of how commercial/touristy it's become. It was already getting worse in the little time I lived there -- especially the giant cruise ships that would overtake the tiny 6-square-mile island.
My wife's grandparents lived there in the fifties and very early sixties, before the tourist boom, when the Navy was still there. Owned an ice cream shop. Never been myself and it doesn't sound like a place I would want to visit nowadays particularly.
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