Miami Surgery

Sitting on a motel bed with 40 television channels at my beck and call I find myself amazed, like a Martian first encountering life on earth as filtered through the lense of the T.V. Worse than a Martian I feel like a peasant, a quasi-local, trying to understand my fellow humans. I don't understand why anyone would want this intrusion in their homes; worse yet why did I ever have it in mine? Why did I wonder if I would miss it? Then I gawp at frenzied advertising and fail to imagine how it can even be so effective. It looks crazy to me, smiling people sucking down drugs (legal ones) and driving cars that are clearly powered beyond their abilities, and acting crazy cheerful in ways that in real life would frighten shoppers away. Buy buy buy.Then the delightful "news" programs which were like advertising only worse. Most "news" is thinly disguised advertising and the highbrow stories come and go rapidly and without explanation or rational discussion. Historical perspective? What's that? Why does one even need that? Middle East leaders, looking ponderous and serious were filmed walking seven times around a rock, an effort to bring Peace, they say. Which behavior must explain why Peace is so unattainable. Perhaps if leaders talked to each other instead of engaging in empty gestures, something might change. Case in point: Paris. We were treated to the US Secretary of State kissing the leader of half of Palestine, Abu Mazen, on not one but both cheeks. Wow! So European! Talking? No, kissing! I think its past time we killed our televisions and instead the people in charge want us to spend even more money buying new improved high definition televisions. And people will, amazingly enough people will line up to buy HD TV.I went to buy a couple of bagels for lunch after the post-op doctor's visit and the clerk (team member? associate?) in Einstein's sighed when I couldn't figure out how I wanted the turkey and cheese bagel. There are hundreds of possible variants it seems. I knew I wanted the whatever flavored bagel toasted but that never happened. And the other barrista got flustered when it turns out my Visa card (I was out of cash what can I say?) doesn't have a chip and still needs to be swiped. I personally can't wait for the day I have a chip under my skin and we can dispense with all this plastic nonsense. Don't laugh its coming. Out on the streets of Miami people reflect their leaders and are crazy. Drivers push and shove even in places where shoving accomplishes nothing. On stretches of open road they slow down. Changing lanes is a life altering, or ending experience. One black man with gold teeth got out at a traffic light and threatened me for changing lanes. He got back in when I smiled and licked my lips at him. Never take on a loony who actually appears to enjoy physical violence. Had he called my bluff I might be the second member of my family with a broken wrist. My aching wife got vaguely annoyed at my confrontational behavior but those drugs are keeping her quite comatose, luckily for me.

The longer I live in the Keys the less capable I am of functioning in mainstream America. I dislike not making eye contact, I dislike walking among people who are hunched and afraid ( with reason as my little confrontation proves), I dislike the thoughtless nastiness of modern urban life. Its a pretty short sliver of land I live on, the rest of the continent (with all its marvelous medical facilities!) weighs heavily on my island and on my mind.

Normal cheerful programming will be resumed when I get over all this ridiculous surgery stress. She seems less stressed than I am. I need my Bonneville.

Construction Zone South

When people talk about "South Beach" in South Florida they usually mean a glamorous Art Deco neighborhood in Miami, but at the end of the road, south beach is the bottom end of Duval Street, more or less. Perhaps its the top end of Duval, because in upside-down-land, Upper Duval is the part of Duval furthest from the action. Lower Duval is where the action is, where the cruise ship passengers land, where people get drunk and look at naked women in city Commissioner Rossi's Red Garter strip club. At the Atlantic end of Duval then, lies south beach. The Duval Beach Club and the Southernmost Everything crowd the ends of Duval and Simonton Streets. Nowadays there are lots of holes. And the construction is promising a better future, bigger hotels, nicer facilities means more expensive and so it goes. But the old Key West, not the ancient run down Key West, the middling Old Key West, the one that came as part of the first wave of gay oriented re-development, is getting knocked down. At the southern end of the city that piece of history is long gone. Atlantic Shores was a place that offered rooms in motel-like rows heavily vegetated and really quite pretty. There was a diner for post-orgy breakfasts and Thursdays was al fresco movie nights where we took over the parking lot and lounged with free popcorn and cans of Heineken and my Labrador snored in my lap while I sank into the magic of the silver screen under the silver star-studded night sky. All gone. Even the pool where clothes were optional and men and women sun bathed, if they so chose. I doubt the new Southernmost extension will offer any of that. And who will miss Atlantic Shores?

The back end of the old Atlantic Shores was a place my wife and I still talk about. City Commissioner Rossi owned The Sands beach club, a place that offered decent food and outdoor casual seating on an actual sand beach. It really was a cool spot, and we enjoyed it. Our peripatetic yellow Lab Emma used to be able to sit alongside us in the sand and that was a bonus. The Sands is gone and a white construction fence is there instead. Across the street the old Reach Resort has been rebuilt and looks just as massive and solid as it did before Wilma trashed it in October 2005. The Santa Maria resort, a cute 1950's art deco motel has been transformed into minuscule condos selling for over a million bucks for each 400 square feet. I don't suppose the new occupants of the rabbit hutches will miss the ability to fling off their clothes around a public pool. They get tiny balconies to watch traffic whizzing by on South Street though.

I can't really say what I think about all this. Lots of people spend a great deal of time bitching about change and threaten to leave the Keys for a better, more expansive life Up North. What they don't investigate is that Up North is convulsing with change also, and for the price of a small residential condo in a converted Key West Victorian they can buy a tract house, twice as large with garage and a clean, bum-less street outside. But what makes the keys worth living in and struggling in isn't on offer in suburbia, at any price. Change is inevitable and it isn't usually a real improvement, but at least in Key West it is still a subject of debate and we all try to hang on and remember what's gone on ahead.

The 1990's was a decade of great wealth everywhere, in the Conch Republic as much as Up North and development was set in motion, but there was lots of good stuff that cheered people up in that decade. Much of it is gone or going as money dries up and people spend less. PT's a second rate restaurant where people liked to hang out is an actual parking lot. Dennis Pharmacy a cheesy but cheerful diner whose success was predicated on nostalgia is now a bland bank and so forth.

I wonder if one day we will wax nostalgic about the good old Santa Maria. Personally I never stayed at the old one and I sure as hell won't at the new one. As for my role in the poolside shenanigans at the Atlantic Shores? Why on earth would I miss them...?

Vignettes IV

The Bat Tower.

There is more to the Keys than many might surmise from a quick run down the island chain. I've covered many miles it turns out, to find them. It happened that the wife and I were out at a benefit event on Sugarloaf Key and after we had paid our benefits and eaten our (hot) dogs we wondered if it was time to end the happy afternoon. But no! I was among those present and with my inexhaustible desire for adventure and obscure knowledge I stunned Scott by the simple expedient of asking him if he had ever seen the Bat Tower.
"Why no!" he replied, agog.
The bat tower was built nearly a century ago by a land developer who hoped to make a fortune turning the wilds of Sugarloaf Key into tract homes. The Mosquito Control Board hadn't yet been invented so he turned to Nature to give him a hand. however the bats, famously voracious mosquito snackers, did not much fancy the home he built for them, from plans sent from Up North. The bats left, the humans never came. This is their monument. (Hint: Near the Sugarload Airstrip). I promised Scott and Heather a return trip some day, to see the Giant Sugarloaf Mansion (Not near the Airstrip).


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Volunteer Life Savers.


It remains true that most homes in the Keys are protected from fire by volunteers, a fact that does not appear to surprise anyone who owns a home down the Keys. The City of Key West has a paid fire department and has had for decades, which is not surprising as the city is packed with tightly packed wooden homes that burn like packed wooden torches.
People whose homes catch fire on say, Big Pine Key, need to hope their firefighters are close to their phones and are not far from the fire station while their homes burn. It seems terribly old fashioned to me, but I'm probably the only home owner within hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles who wouldn't be too offended to pay a tax to hire full time firefighters. An ounce of prevention...

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High Speed Weed Whacker.

I've seen this combination around town for several years, which means business, in a notoriously fickle corporate environment, must be good for this high speed entrepreneur in Key West. It's hard, impossible really, to find reliable tradesmen in the Keys so if your gardener shows up driving a Formula One you don't dare raise an eyebrow. Just be happy he's there. Unhappily he only has room for one helper in his Corvette, but they must spend very little time traveling between jobs.

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$3:60/Gallon.

I am grateful that more people don't use Shell gasoline cards and thus leave the pumps free for me to take my gas and my discount. I enjoy getting the Shell 5% rebate at the pumps and now that premium has hit all time highs, five percent is starting to equal real money, even riding a 43mpg Bonneville. People bitch at the cost of gas but apparently prices have yet to get high enough to force changes in the way we do things, not least grab a small discount where available. The cost of gas in the Keys is high by Florida standards, $3:40 for regular, and today I filled my tank with 3 1/2 US gallons of premium for $12. It wasn't so long ago that $8 would have been an ample sufficency. I don't ride to increase my mileage(I'd still be using the 70mpg Vespa 250), but I'm glad I take my traveling pleasure on a motorbike, and don't require a 15mpg SUV to make me whole. Even among these restricted highways and the few byways I have run up 3600miles since the Bonneville came home with me in mid October. Thats a few gallons under the bridge.

Wrist Surgery

Monday is the day my wife gets her wrist cut open at Miami Baptist, and as this is a mirror image of surgery she had on the right wrist last year we know exactly what is in store, and it ain't pretty, not even when she is pumped full of brain-dulling drugs. She'll murder me when she sees this post-op picture taken last year. I crushed my thumb years ago and learned to my cost that doctors have a really hard time numbing extremities, and even though my wife, like many women, is tough when it comes to pain management this coming week will be brutal. We've done the pre-op, we've met the surgeon, we've got the paperwork under control, and we're braced for our share of the cost, not covered by insurance, which last year amounted to something over $6,000. Gotta love free medical enterprise, pity we couldn't have surgeons bidding for the job, but there it is. The week upcoming doesn't look great for me either but I'm just the care giver so I will fade into the background, dispatch style, while all her friends gather round and cluck with her over her misfortune. Its a great thing to be a woman sometimes.

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On a better note there was some sad news for Santa Claus this week. He was scheduled to land by seaplane at some gathering of young people in the Upper Keys and the float plane crash landed and sank just off the beach. A rather soggy Santa waded ashore to do the job and the pilot rather ruefully told the Citizen reporter he doubted he'd been good enough lately to merit a new plane. Apparently the kids thought differently- they figured he'd rescued Santa from a watery fate. No word on the fate of the reindeer.

Last week there was a picture of a hard working Santa at Bayview Park, the portly retired KWPD Sgt Bittinger, heavily disguised. So heavily disguised in fact he was in danger of passing out in the eighty-one degree heat. The picture showed Santa panting in the blast of a small portable fan.

Let no one says life's just a beach at 24 degrees north.

Paving Paradise

Key West continues, inexorably to change. The changes aren't sudden and God knows they are planned far enough in advance, but the paving of paradise continues apace, like it or not. Its Old Town that takes the brunt of the cement attacks, focused on two stretches of waterfront. The old Atlantic Shores resort at the southern tip of Simonton Street is a large hole in the ground at the moment. It used to be a pretty cool place, straight friendly, dog friendly offering open air movies every Thursday night with free popcorn. Next door the old Sands beach resort is also gone, paving the way for some new monstrosity. That's the bad news on South Beach, and more on that later.

The focus of controversy I rode by earlier this week is around Waterfront Market an overpriced food store offering key West's widest selection of organics (Publix is in close second place). The owner of the Waterfront wants to quit but locals want the institution to remain so there is a move afoot to sell shares and keep the place going as a coop. Buco Pantelis was notorious for low low wages and its hard to imagine a coop will be able to pay the sort of money that will keep experienced staff.

Just next door to the Waterfront Market is an older Key West institution that may also survive as a public entity. Historic Tours of America abruptly fired the crew and put the schooner Western Union up for sale last summer. With hurricane season over (notwithstanding Caribbean islands getting a drenching from Hurricane Olga this week), some civic minded citizens popped up and decided to try to sell shares for the Western Onion and raise 1.5 million to keep it on the Key West waterfront. So far so good. But I did think it odd when organisers showed Deep Water as a fundraiser to save the boat. The film is about the suicidal Donald Crowhurst and his doomed attempt to sail around the world in the 1968 Golden Globe race. But I went to the Tropic Cinema anyway and yielded my $25 to watch one boat flounder to save the other.

These public minded attempts at preservation are bookended by two major housing developments that bode little good for the mostly city owned waterfront. To the north is the old Steam Plant, the electrical generating station that spewed its effluent into the harbor at the "toxic triangle" off Trumbo Road. That thing sat unused for decades, a brooding castle of Transylvanian proportions, that has now been reborn as 3 million dollar exclusive apartments (one left!) with a dozen affordable units built in its shadow (none left!).

Once Ed Swift, owner of Historic Tours of America, is done with the Steam Plant we will shortly thereafter witness the birth of another set of condos popping up on top of the old Jabors RV park which sat across the street from the Waterfront Market. This development is being created by another development company that is convinced this is the best way to make Key West a hot tourist destination. Despite the glut of condos in south Florida these ultra expensive units, also on offer at around $3 million, are selling briskly. Everyone wants a slice of "Old Key West" even if they kill it in the process of buying it. The Watermark took a lot of effort to permit as the developers wanted to violate just about every zoning regulation but steady citizen opposition got it within city zoning requirements and now construction has begun.
Watermark, a name discredited by the zoning fiasco is known as Harbor Condominiums in its latest incarnation, and will soon tower over the little bar that likes to call itself "the last little piece of old Key West," Schooner Wharf Bar. Bar aficionados are sounding the death knell of the funky, musically off beat and always loud joint, even though current plans call for the Schooner Wharf to be treated as a charming attraction, for the multi gazillionaires who plan to live next door. I doubt that will last. All new residents bitch when they start to reside here, about the funky charm that attracted them here in the first place.

And this has been going on for decades in the Keys. Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum, and we just can't find any decent local leaders to elect who will change our headlong course into middle class mediocrity.

Flying Dreidels

I was rushing up the stairwell at work, the ends of my motorcycle jacket flying, my hands encumbered variously by my man purse and my lunch box. I was minutes away from being late for work, the first time in a couple of years and blam! Who should I bump into on the stairs but the Great Gawd Almighty City Manager himself. He's smiling cheerfully and its 4 minutes to six in the am. I am not smiling, I'm gasping, and with a brief "goo..mo..ning" I'm gone down the corridor motorcycle boots thumping on the carpet as I skid into the doorway of the 9-1-1 call center. What the bloody hell is he doing in the police station at this hour of the a.m.?

"I'm never usually this late," I wanted to shout over my shoulder, "but I was nearly knocked off my motorcycle by a flying dreidel!" As if he would have believed me. An excuse worthy of Reginald Iolanthe Perrin indeed. The manager was cruising down to the briefing room to meet the troops, who were no doubt equally enthusiastic as I was to meet him for the first time.

The morning had started off well enough, with a brisk alarm ring at four minutes past four, followed by an instant leap out of bed and into my t shirt and shorts cycling gear. A pair of crocs on my feet and the bicycle is downstairs illuminated by the harsh glare of the outside lights. I am properly awake.

The ride was excellent, a half hour whizzing through the mangroves, past the dormant Cuban Deli, under the harsh orange glare of the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority pumping station's street lights, and so back home in a tingling lather. I am an unfit suburban rider far from the world of spandex, tour de France and racing ten speeds. I pedal sedately upright on my three speed automatic. Very refreshing.

My commute started less well after I pointed the Bonneville south on Highway One. Four smooth gear shifts and we were purring along at 60mph on an empty highway (speed limit: 45mph). Up over the 40ft Nile Channel Bridge things got sticky, stuck behind a 50mph truck with a Proud to be American sticker (I'd like one that reads Cheerfully American, or Grateful to be American on my Triumph) and a large flag decal on the tailgate.

We purr through Summerland Key under the streetlights (45mph zone continues) at a respectable if timid 55 and in the glow of the street lights I can just make out the time: 5:25am. I'm on target if not ahead of myself. It's on Cudjoe Key that things become unglued. Were I not wearing heavy gloves (its 74 degrees) and a full face helmet (its 74 degrees I say) I'd rub my eyes in disbelief for the Proud American in the full size pick up in front of me has slowed to 38mph (45 zone continues) and peering round him I see a car with a stalk on the roof and a red light on top of that. Absurd, I think to myself, that can't be right.

Can it? Anything's possible in the Keys. But why so slow? Argh!

Sure enough, we take the wide sweeping corner at Square Grouper and there in front of the car I see two more cars also equipped with red light poles on the roof and a slow work truck towing what appears to be an elaborate outhouse. By now I can barely bring myself to wonder what the hell is going on so slow is the parade. Further up ahead I can see more illuminated masts riding on cars and an RV and some sort of machine between them with what appears to be a billboard on the roof.

Then the penny drops -it's Christmas! This must be some peculiar traveling circus of strange religiosity coming to Key West to offer season's greetings to the southernmost hedonists. I've never found eternal salvation to mix very well with 20th century advertising razzmatazz.

And to make things worse, they are driving slowly and by the light of the lamp over the Sheriff's substation I see its gone 5:30am. Time's a-wasting as the red lights wobble on the carefully proceeding cars.

Finally we crawl past the traffic light at Sugarloaf School and just as I am about to open it up (45mph zone continues) and zip past the Proudly American truck and the illuminated mobile roof ornaments a car crests the bridge ahead and I have to wait. Then, past the bridge, Mile Marker 20 opens up a long sweeping stretch of roadway with a gentle curve to the right, it takes a flick of the wrist I'm hitting 75 (45mph zone continues) putting me past the truck, the three cars and the rolling outhouse. Up ahead the billboard is illuminated and visible beyond the other three cars with lighted poles on their roofs.

The outhouse was weird. It had writing celebrating Hanukkah on it and the walls were painted like faux New England brick work. This is a Jewish caravan? Curiouser and curiouser muttered the motorcyclist into his helmet. Especially as New England brickwork, I'm pretty sure never was seen in pre-Christian Palestine. But what's a little historical inaccuracy between believers?

The cars up ahead met their fate when finally we were all free of the 45 mph constraints and entered the highway beyond Sugarloaf Lodge. Here the limit rises to 55mph and I jerked the Bonneville out and beyond the illuminated poles tucking in behind the billboard to avoid oncoming cars.

It was a dreidel, illuminated from within and twirling gently from one side to the other in the slipstream of the car beneath. It looked delicate like rice paper and fragile enough to flip backwards, cutting its bonds to the automobile and toppling onto the Bonneville behind. I throttled back.

After a decade of pootling through the Saddlebunch Keys we finally trooped through Big Coppitt where a few startled dog walkers paused to check out the mobile-museum-cum-illuminated-RV trailed by a flying dreidel and a motorcycle outrider. I was aware the time was 5:45am and I was at Mile Marker 10 with eight long miles to go and a current speed set at a divinely inspired 37mph. Soon though we crossed the bridge to Rockland Key (Mile Marker 9) and the Highway turns gloriously to four lanes (55mph zone) and a straight shot to Key West and the police station.

The final insult as we dropped off the causeway onto the four lane was when the dreidel meister and his cohorts, instead of slipping politely into the right lane took up station in the overtaking lane. Argh!

I like to think the Jewish God is a forgiving sort (my wife assures me He is) because I was ripping His devoted followers all sorts of unmentionable orifices as I dropped two gears and gunned the Bonneville to an embarrassingly high speed in order to pull past before they spread like locusts across all available lanes at a stately 37 mph. I'm pretty sure my rapid fire swearing combined with the slipstream of my angry passing wobbled that dreidel worse than it had wobbled all the way from wherever it originally came.

And that is how I nearly mowed down the City Manager on my to work. Not quite late, but entirely out of breath cursing a group of sweet defenseless Hanukkah lovers out to spread the light of good cheer across the land.

I am a brute and I am sorry. I could have just left the house five minutes earlier and avoided putting my immortal soul and the spirit of the season at risk. I am humbled.