In small town living you've got two choices. The first is to sit on a corner and wait. The second is to get on your Bonneville and ride. Either way, sooner or later, everyone you know and a few neighbors you don't, will pass through your field of vision. It may take some time and the story about kissing a few toads may come to mind, but New York City this ain't. There are no strangers alone by themselves in Key West, not if they wait and bear themselves in patience. So it was that I recently crossed paths with Curt. He is the quintessential liveaboard who has rowed out to his boat for years just like this:
I was riding out of downtown after a pleasant afternoon at the Tropic Cinema watching Patricia Clarkson and Chris Cooper pretending to be in love, and the afternoon was still pleasant, sunny and breezy and unnaturally dry and cool for the middle of May. God was in his Heaven and all was well with the world so I detoured on my way to the Police Station and took Greene Street to Elizabeth and there at the Monument at Lazy way Lane I flashed past Curt riding his bicycle one handed, hauling bits for his boat in the other hand. We each spotted the other and we circled like prey and predator in the street before coming to rest at the side of the road. We had not seen each other for a while and we had lots to talk about.
"I can't believe it's you Curt!" I said "I was just in St Petersburg, at the Vinoy, and the anchor outs are back!" I said. Curt had been anchored in the Vinoy basin when I had first arrived in Tampa Bay in 1989 and we had become friends after we survived a brutal thunderstorm one summer evening. Our boats had pitched and yawed wildly in the sudden onslaught of wind, and the lightning and frightened the knickers off us both, cracking like sulphur whips into the waters around us. A neighbor had a hole blown in the hull of his unsinkable trimaran. Later they decided to ban people at anchor to make way for the new luxury resort that was planned for the refurbished Vinoy Hotel overlooking the basin. Curt sailed for Key West, I "upgraded" to a regular slip in the St Pete marina.
Curt left St Petersburg well ahead of me and sailed a tough trip south to Key West, losing his way in that era pre-GPS, nearly running aground off cape Romano's sand banks and drifting alone across the Gulf Of Mexico. I stayed in St Pete, and left the marina eventually sailing for a winter in the Bahamas with an unhappy woman in tow.
We met again after I got back, and I settled into a life afloat borrowing one of Curt's many homemade moorings off the north shore of Garrison Bight. Curt was and always will be an inveterate cheapskate and he showed me the life on the margins of Key West, where to sneak drinking water, how to dump trash without anyone noticing because in those days trash disposal was horribly expensive in Key West and dumpsters were locked tight. We tied our dinghies to sea walls surreptitiously to avoid dollar-a-day dock fees. We met after work at Winn Dixie and filled up with food from their incredibly cheap self serve all-you-can-stuff deli. Weekends Curt taught me where to find free food at happy hour and our nighttime entertainment was lounging in the cockpit drinking gruesomely cheap wine and staring at the stars. It was perfect, so perfect it was a life that perhaps made me immune to the blandishments of Jimmy Buffet. Now I think of it I was living on three-four time. "For real" as my young colleagues say. I didn't need a pied piper to feed the dream, I had it in the palm of my hand for most of a year. Frankly I couldn't stand it. For me a dollar a day was a bargain not to have to worry about where to get water or dump trash and come ashore in the dinghy like a civilized liveaboard rather than skinning my knees on cement seawalls. I was an unpiratelike wimp:
Curt stayed in Key West and twenty years later is living on the money he has squirreled away from many menial jobs. He's fixing up his Westsail 32, still living at anchor far out west of Christmas Tree Island. Curt has given up the wine on doctor's orders and looks better than ever. He works less now, only when he feels like it and needs to spend it on something useful. Years ago he framed pictures now he works in a store downtown and helps tie up the cruise ships as a lucrative sideline. He was tying up the ship I cruised the Western Caribbean on last year, when we arrived in Key West before dawn:
He's as cheap as ever and enjoys thoroughly his ability not to spend money. He disagrees vehemently with people who say you can't make a living in Key west; he's done it for years making less than $10 an hour. It just takes finesse. No one owns Curt, Curt owns Key West and has for decades, living on the margins, sticking to his plan and not letting the naysayers tell him its not worth it or Key West is changing to much to be able to scavenge a living on the edge. Curt embraces the changes and makes them work for him. He is the romantic survivor all the wanna be Key Westers aspire to become. "Key West accepts you or it doesn't, " he says, shrugging his shoulders. I'm glad it accepted me in all my middle classness. Being seen in public chatting to Curt reasserts my own credibility as former wharf rat, a belonger even if I have now sold out and joined the ranks of middle class mediocrity. Everyone wants a romantic Key West story attached to their lives; Curt is the witness to my waterborne past. 
He's as cheap as ever and enjoys thoroughly his ability not to spend money. He disagrees vehemently with people who say you can't make a living in Key west; he's done it for years making less than $10 an hour. It just takes finesse. No one owns Curt, Curt owns Key West and has for decades, living on the margins, sticking to his plan and not letting the naysayers tell him its not worth it or Key West is changing to much to be able to scavenge a living on the edge. Curt embraces the changes and makes them work for him. He is the romantic survivor all the wanna be Key Westers aspire to become. "Key West accepts you or it doesn't, " he says, shrugging his shoulders. I'm glad it accepted me in all my middle classness. Being seen in public chatting to Curt reasserts my own credibility as former wharf rat, a belonger even if I have now sold out and joined the ranks of middle class mediocrity. Everyone wants a romantic Key West story attached to their lives; Curt is the witness to my waterborne past. Curt and I stood in the sun, me astride my $8,000 Bonneville, Curt on his $50 Conch cruiser bicycle, me the city plutocrat with a house and a wife. Curt footloose, fancy free and still a raggedy ass harbor rat after all these years. It was great talking to him about all the history, the details of the past since last we met, the mutual friends, the hopes for the future. We parted on a vague promise that I would drop by sometime soon.
Meeting Curt wasn't a cause for envy nor regret. What is a lifestyle for him was a phase for me. He was my Siddhartha, my Tim Leary, my anchor-out guru. But for me it was an interlude, and seeing Curt so happy and unchanged as ever made me realise how lucky I am to have slipped out of the mainstream and later slipped back back in so effortlessly. I remember very clearly sitting in my cabin pondering whether to stay on the boat and continue to live marginally around Key West or to get on my motorcycle (Yamaha Maxim 650) and ride West, back to California to have another go at life lived the mainstream way. I made the right choice because I like my life as much as he loves his.
