Key Weird

I found this commentary on Slate Magazine by Florida correspondent Craig Pittman. Its at Slate On Florida and you can find plenty of Florida commentary there. I figured you might enjoy the Florida perspective so I offer the essay here bracketing my pictures of the Keys.

 

 

A few months ago I was in Key West and happened to overhear a conversation that could have occurred nowhere else. An art gallery owner was chatting with a writer about a mutual acquaintance. The gallery owner mentioned that this person claimed to have attended the very first of the island's annual bacchanals known as Fantasy Fest back in 1979.

“Now remind me,” drawled the writer. “Was he the nun with the enormous plastic phallus? Or was he one of the dueling Joan Crawfords?”

What is the weirdest place in America's weirdest state? There is a strong argument to be made for the town frequently referred to as “Key Weird.” This is, after all, the home of a guy who routinely bikes around town wearing nothing but a G-string and a homemade stovepipe hat. It's a place where the U.S. Department of Agriculture got into a legal snit with the operator of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum over permitting for the home's many six-toed cats. And it's the place where a legal dispute developed over a cache of valuable emeralds that one treasure hunter testified he found in the Gulf of Mexico by following a map he bought for $500 from a guy in a bar.

Key West tour guides love to tell the bizarre tale of Carl Tanzler, aka Karl Tanzler, aka “Count Carl von Cosel,” an X-ray technician who in 1930 fell in love with a tuberculosis patient named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos. When Elena died the following year, he paid for her burial in an immense mausoleum he’d built. Then in the dead of night he dug her up and brought the corpse back to his home. He kept her decaying remains there for nine years until her sister found out. Put on trial for grave-robbing, he was exonerated—because the statute of limitations had expired.

Still, I have friends in South Florida who contend that Miami is far stranger than anywhere else in the state. They cite the case of the guys who carried a shark, bleeding and gasping for breath, onto the city's Metromover in the middle of the night, then ended up leaving it, dead, in the middle of a street. (A photo from the train wound up on Dave Barry's blog.) Believers in Santeria often leave dead chickens and dead goats on the courthouse steps in an effort to sway trials. So many have piled up that there's a voodoo squad of janitors assigned to cleanup. And then there's the Causeway Cannibal, aka Miami's face-eating zombie, Rudy Eugene. You may recall Eugene stripped naked and chewed on a homeless man's face while high on ... bath salts? LSD? Angel dust? No, just plain old Mary Jane. The victim's life was saved by a police officer who shot Eugene dead but also accidentally wounded the victim.

Central Florida produces its own brand of landlocked weird. Right now, for instance, about half the Lakeland Police Department is facing suspension in a huge sex scandal that involves, among other things, an officer requesting to drink a woman's urine. And let's not forget all the weirdness that goes along with Disney, such as allegations that both Donald Duck and Tigger groped female visitors.

 

You could also argue that the Florida Panhandle produces more weird news on a regular basis than anywhere else. Look at the stories that wind up on Fark with a Florida tag. At least half of them come from the police blotter of the Northwest Florida Daily News in Fort Walton Beach. And it was the Panhandle community of Vernon that became known as “Nub City” for all the rampant insurance-related self-maimings.

That said, I have to tell you that I think Ground Zero for Florida Weird is Pasco County, a semirural area just north of Tampa.

 

The cops in Pasco County are constantly dealing with strange cases—Tasering a runaway kangaroo, for instance. In Pasco County a first date—with a man wearing a red mohawk and a spider tattoo—may result in a stolen car. A gang of teenagers planning a burglary may huddle together like a football team and pray, "Hey, God, get us through this. We know you don't like this, but get us through." It's not unusual to see headlines like this: “Fetish Model Indicted in Pasco Sex Party Slaying.”

Part of Pasco's weirdness originates from the fact that it's home to a lot of people you wouldn’t expect to find grouped together in one spot. In the 1970s it was a hotbed of Mafia activity, as documented in the book and movie Donnie Brasco. Now, instead of the Mob, it's got nudist resorts. By some accounts, Pasco is the Nudist Capital of America. The nudist resorts produce a steady stream of stories, such as when a nude woman went swimming with her nude family and was attacked by an alligator. She was saved by her husband kicking the gator in the head. (Did I mention he was nude?)

The different cultures of Pasco County often don’t get along. In 1990, a coven of Wiccans got into a shootout with neighbors who contended they were Satanists conducting sacrifices. In 1993, the Ku Klux Klan joined the Adopt-A-Road litter patrol, kicking up a fuss among people who lived along the road they adopted—even though the Klan promised to wear safety vests, not white robes, while picking up trash on the roadside.

For my final piece of evidence that Pasco County is weirder than anywhere else in Florida, I refer you back to the case of Key West’s romantically obsessed grave robber, Carl Tanzler. After his trial, he moved to Pasco County and wrote his memoirs. He died there in 1952. Near his body, authorities found a life-sized effigy of his beloved Elena.

I admit the conclusion regarding Pasco County took me by surprise. I think a lot of Key West's weirdness these days is forced. Eccentricity feels more like a tourist attraction than an external expression of an internal need. It doesn't hurt to come to Key West, check it out and prove me wrong.

 

 

 

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A Living

This is the time of year when in defiance of the norms of Northern Hemisphere living, life calms down a bit in the Key West 911 center. Winter when the ranks of part time residents swells, along with the numbers of tourists, is when the place gets busier. The nice part about the job is that you never quite know what you are in for but whatever does happen we have a plan of some sort to deal with it and after all this time there really isn't anything much that freaks me out, which is as well as I am in charge of the room all night. The other nice part is that whatever the weather we are snug at the top of the police station. I really like my work place. I arrive just before six and the administrative staff have gone home, the officers are in briefing downstairs and upstairs the day shift dispatchers go home leaving us to turn down the lights and settle in for the night.

I am in one of those phases, long may it last where I am working with two people who suit my temperament and whom I can trust completely while we are at work. Nick and Shannon are both around 30 years of age and both have maturity beyond their years which makes it easy to share the room with them for twelve hours at a time. I trained them so they know how to take calls, how to share responsibilities and how to ask for help when they need it because you never know what odd thing a caller may need at three in the morning and I have been here longer than the other two dispatchers combined. I surprise myself sometimes by how much I know from years of being here.

One of the major character defects we tend to uncover in candidates for the job is the inability to sit still for twelve hours at a time. You had better know how to entertain yourself on summer nights when call volume drops off and you have only your own resources to keep you mentally engaged on those nights when the town is at peace relatively speaking. Shannon is a voracious reader while Nick is endlessly fascinated by car design and his new hobby of learning to fly. Me? I check out motorcycles and riding online. I call it a mini vacation spending a couple of minutes studying riders around the world doing something fun, in the minutes between the return to reality as one desperate call for help follows the next. I took the time to take a self portrait simpering horribly. The roof has been undergoing repairs but because we can never shut down the communications center the construction people had to rig a tarp to keep dispatchers and computers dry. Its a glamorous job but we soldier on no matter what.

Hurricane season is upon us and the thought that one may come our way is in the back of one's mind but of course all contingency plans are in place. We haven't had a hit in several years and I was surprised to find how few dispatchers have any experience with storms. The good part about working twelve hour shifts is that we get time off to compensate, two nights on and then two nights off. somehow I have learned to switch my sleeping patterns at will which makes life a lot easier. There again I have been working nights as long as I can remember, most of the 9 years I have worked in the 911 center. Its a paradox that I have found a job I enjoy, a job that I have held longer than any other in a town that celebrates not working. It's odd but I'm probably happier being here than there:

I just passed my ninth anniversary and when I think back to July 5th 2004 I really had no firm belief I could do the job let alone stick to it considering I had no experience whatsoever. Now I'm hoping I've got another 16 years in me doing this, what I hope will be my last job. In all my years of traveling and working here and there and failing to make a plan the last thing I would have expected was to find myself dealing with computers and telephones and radios and reassuring a lot of worried people from an office in a police station. I am rather looking forward to winter, when hurricane season is over and when the town is packed and we get the majority of the 180,000 calls we handle every year. Truly life is unpredictable, never quite so much as in a 911 center.

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Key West Traffic Light Hell

I have composed so many Letters to the Editor in my head I have no precise idea why I never got around to composing one on the subject of traffic lights, and then sending it. You get 350 words and they are pretty generous with their willingness to publish. The fact is perhaps there are several issues that are vexing me at the moment and traffic lights seems a bit too personal to make a scene over. Nevertheless when I saw this front page photo on the Key West Citizen I had one question for myself and that was not answered, or even posed in the short paragraph.

The article was pointing out that the city has a new style of traffic light to install, one that is made of a kind of plastic that is lighter and cheaper than the metal ones used previously. That's all well and good and laudable but my problem is something else.

Here's the thing: why do we spend so much time sitting at red lights while the cross street is empty? It's a simple question and as much as I hate to quote how "they" do it "Up North" let me say I have seen the future and it is lovely. Every time I visit Santa Cruz California I am astounded by the speed with which traffic lights change. The amount of time spend idling, and thus polluting the air with fumes and noise, is reduced to almost nothing. Traffic flows smoothly and cars don't race to catch a light nor is there any reason to run a red light. It's amazingly effective. And get this: they have motorcycle sensitive loops in the road and bicycle sensitive loops in the bike lane next to the sidewalks. It is amazing and if I miss anything about life in Santa Cruz it's the swift changing traffic lights.

In Key West traffic lights are hell. I don't want to go into too much detail but there are certain lights around town whose timers I have studied and I can, with 90% accuracy, beat the red light by taking a one block detour to pass the light by. It amazes me how few motorists bother on their repeated drives to notice how much time they waste sitting at a red light with zero cross traffic. I meanwhile am making three extra turns and am long gone by the time they look up from their texts. Its not a matter of speeding or driving fast, its simply a matter of ambling past a traffic light that seems stuck on the red for no visible reason and there are lots of them that can be bypassed. Check out this truck on Eaton at Duval.

Waiting, waiting, waiting for no reason. No crossing traffic. He waits so long he starts anticipatingbthechange and edges forward. Is this a good use of time, or fuel? Does this help safe driving? Why make him impatient when all we need is a traffic computer to monitor the weight of vehicles in each direction? I don't know why but he pushed out into the cross street anyway:

Blame him if you like but he has my sympathy.

In the end what I'm trying to point out here is that it isn't a matter of my finding a way around some of these incredibly delayed lights, rather I would like for people not to feel like a red light merits being run, because if the light changes rapidly and sensibly the red will be of no consequence. Besides that the less time cars spend idling the less noise and fumes they emit. But I see no sign that any of these insanely lengthy lights that create traffic jams are going to be modernized. And I further understand that eventually when the Boulevard is finally repaved there will be more lights than there were before. Oh joy!

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Tropical Storm Dorian Takes Aim

Well bugger. The National Hurricane Center has called it again. Earlier they predicted what we see today, a weakening of the low over the Bahamas which has brought the storm's track further to the south. Now the prediction puts the storm north of the big islands of the Caribbean, the so called Greater Antilles, whose mountains tend to break storms apart. Yet the current track is not curving far north which means Key West looks like a possible target. The good news is track prediction this far out is not completely accurate, but strength prediction is reasonably accurate so we can hope this thing won't strengthen into a full blown hurricane, and the National Hurricane Center is holding that out as a possibility at this stage. Wind and rain and not too much of either, please!

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As of Saturday morning the National Hurricane Center in Miami is downgrading TS Dorian and is predicting it will fizzle out into an inchoate rainy mess over Puerto Rico. So much the better.

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Cheyenne On Petronia

There are days I envy my dog. On this occasion she was hot and thirsty so nothing came more naturally to her than to sit down and drink her bathwater.

Had she been moved to take a dump I would have been there, the perfect valet, ready to leap into action with a plastic bag and take care of all her needs, as well as the needs of the next pedestrian to walk that way.

Cheyenne is actually quite well trained in that regard as she prefers to wander off into the bushes rather than to just let loose anywhere but the guiding principle here is that I have to keep my legs crossed till I find a loo, while for my Labrador the world's her loo, her bathwater, her refreshment.

 Of course not everyone views her as benignly as I do when we go for a walk in town.

 Had the Jewish breakfast joint been open I'd have no doubt found my way to sharing...

 ...a  taste of an onion omelette in a soft fragrant pita with diced cucumber and hummus on the side.

There are those pesky pink Crocs again doing daily duty as actual usable footwear. These wheels  fascinate me ever since I discovered a set can cost more than my Bonneville. That's the wheels without the tank attached to them.

Ooh! Look!  Another Labrador!

And in the fullness of time Cheyenne stumped around Bahama Village far enough to come up behind the new courthouse which is now free of construction. The building on the right is the Freeman Courthouse which was designed and built at vast expense with no functioning lobby so jurors had to stand around in the fresh air waiting for the metal detector to approve their presence. Supposedly that small oversight has been repaired at a cost of $600,000. I should be an architect because that short coming became apparent to me the minute I was lined up across the parking lot waiting to get into the jury pool, and I have no experience designing buildings. 

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Lobster Mini Season

It started yesterday and ends tonight and not a minute too soon.

I have been feeling under the weather for a couple of days and spent most of Tuesday sleeping and chewing ibuprofen while feeling sorry for myself. I worshipped briefly at the porcelain altar and called out from work. It was in all respects a day best forgotten.

By the time I resurrected myself Wednesday, the bed a nightmare nest of twisted sheets after a restless period of unconsciousness, Cheyenne was trembling in anticipation of her walk. Such was my state of mind I had completely forgotten about lobster mini season and only remembered as I approached Big Pine and saw the highway lined with cars and the water filled with boats.

I have a plan to one day ride to Maine and eat a lobster roll which consists I am told of cold lobster and mayonnaise wrapped in a hot dog bun. People say it is delicious but I have to wonder. Lobster is a delicacy so I o end up eating it from time to time though I cannot imagine spending a perfectly good morning chasing lobsters underwater.

Mini season is a two day grace period for amateurs to go out and blunder aroud and see if the can catch legal sized lobsters in their natural habitat. Next month commercial lobster season begins and we will hear endless stories of too much rain, too much wind, etc etc explaining a poor harvest ad igh prices. Fishing is like fading I that cndrions are never quite right.

So these two July days see thousands of amateurs with only the vaguest knowledge of local waters and a tenuous grasp on the rules invade the Keys and get first dibs on the much sought after Florida lobster. Which some people say is much inferior to the North Atlantic version but on that I have no opinion.

Like any self respecting sport lobstering requires manly equipment, big trucks, big boas and lost of paraphernalia. So when I see these cast trucks towing huge trailers I wonder what chance do the little ouster have? Quite a lot it turns out as every year one or two less than capable divers end up dead.

Not everyone has the wherewithal to bring a boat but nothing daunted they set up camp by the side of the road and jump in anyhow and scrape around looking for te tell tale anenna of lobster lurking under rocks. There are limits on where exactly you can hunt including staying offshore a certain distance and not hunting in canals but enforcement is a huge task.

I tried to induce Cheyenne to take a country walk away frm the water but she was having none of it. My perverse dog wanted to walk by the water, perhaps for the breeze, perhaps for the bait that fishermen drop as they angle. It was a good plan, she hunted back and forth amusing herself while I stood on the slope and watched the busy boats come and go. Honestly I wasn't in the mood for a sturdy walk myself.

It was a beautiful day to be out on te water and I regret tha 2013 may be another year when we keep futzing around on land so much we don't get the skiff in the water ourselves.

Lobster mini season s one of those times in the Keys when you have to assume everyone is a little less focused than usual and one must drive accordingly.

I tried sitting in my folding chair with a book -Aurelio Zen by Michael Dibdin is my summer read this year- but Cheyenne with her usual precise sense of timing decided she wasn't going to amuse herself or leave me alone so reluctantly I landed us in the midst of the fray.

It's an odd business really, you can't spear them you can only tickle the to persuade them to come out of their lairs. You can't use compressed air, you must rely on what you carry in your lungs. You can only take lobster with tails of a certain length.

Imagine. A lobster will live 120 years if you leave it alone.

Locals maneuver their way between the busy keen amateurs. Some sit on the rocks, above, and watch, while others, below, go about their business as usual.

It was, in any event, a lovely day to be in the Keys.

I spoke with a Monroe county detective who was working with a Fish and Wildlife Officer trying to keep lobster hunters in line. "Thirty years I've been waiting for them to ban mini season, " he said with a sigh. I was anticipating the usual chaotic night in Key West with sun baked dehydrated hunter gatherers recounting their exploits over several too many drinks...FWC the yellow tag says. They were everywhere.

Last weekend it was Hemingway Days and now it's lobsters and next week it will be something else. It used to be that summer was quiet time but not anymore. A few people still refer to "season" meaning winter but It hardly seems to apply anymore. Lobster hunting is one more way to spread the money around so it will never be closed down. From the Citizen:

It' will be over soon and quiet times will return, and as they go maybe they will take the rowdy kids screeching about lobster in the rental home across the canal. That would be nice.

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