Coffin Night

The real meaning of Coffin Night in Key West is a Conch mystery shrouded in darkness and illuminated only slightly by the knowledge that coffin night is a form of celebration of the start of Homecoming at Key West High. Coffin night is not a school activity and no adult would be caught dead supporting it. yet it is a preternaturally Key West tradition, as local as a Cuban mix sandwich or a civic leader riding a scooter around town. It is unhappily Coffin Night this week and the eggs are flying.

The senior class hides a small coffin they build for the occasion and the junior class has to run all over key West looking for it. Coffin Week involves a variety of other activities but the hunt for the coffin is the highlight. The problem is that egging is also a highlight of the hunt and young people all over Key West's New Town neighborhood can be spotted hauling quantities of eggs to throw at people and vehicles. It sounds funny but it can be overwhelming, I heard of one passerby copping more than 50 eggs in a pelting. Raw eggs do terrible things to car paint and a vehicle parked overnight without the owner spotting the offending yolk can lead to an expensive repair to restore the paint. People get annoyed by egg throwing.The background to this madness goes back to a football tradition. Apparently seniors celebrated their team's invincibility by making a coffin at the start of the season and represented that superiority by building a coffin in which to bury their opponents. Then the Juniors took it upon themselves to try to steal the coffin to annoy the seniors. In the struggle to secure the coffin eggs became the weapon of choice, and so the tradition grew and has become enshrined at Key West High School. Coffin Night is a Conch activity like no other, it is reserved to the New Town half of the island and thus is invisible to the great mass of drinkers on Duval in the hours of darkness.

And in case you were wondering this year a responsible adult found the coffin in the early hours of Tuesday morning, not soon enough to end the madness which got wild enough that the traditional homecoming bonfire has reportedly been cancelled. That would be the bonfire designed to ceremonially burn the symbolic coffin.

That should have stopped the egging but I guess the kids had stashed a large quantity of eggs and I further suppose they can't actually eat all their ammunition. And so it goes.

Behind Bars

Brady of the blog Behind Bars asked me to write an essay for his page about my upcoming trip to Iowa to retrieve a 33 year old Vespa. I was happy to oblige as Brady not only writes beautifully but also has an innate understanding of what my plan is all about. I was honored he asked me to write for his page. He has a penchant for Hondas, preferably of course old ones. I have a penchant for old Vespas, especially if not too old. Hit the link and see why.

Key West Art And History Museum

I finally got around to checking out the Art and History Museum on Clinton Square. It's been a while since I was last in the old US Customs house and as always it was a pleasure to spend an hour wandering the venerable halls of the elderly building.

Outside as always we find the over sized statues preferred by Seward Johnson who enjoys reproducing well known two dimensional paintings in three dimensions. He has had a display of nudes dancing which I featured previously on this page so tough luck, I did not photograph them again. Johnson, heir to the talcum powder fortune, amuses himself rendering two dimensional paintings into three dimensions and doing them over sized frequently as well. a while back there was a great exhibit of famous paintings cast as sculptures. I'm not an art critic and I don't know if it was High Art but it was fun.

The museum is ideally placed to attract curious cruise ship passengers as they make their way towards the bars and knick knack shops on nearby Duval Street. At the moment the moneyed interests in Key West's business community are pushing hard to study widening the ship channel to accommodate the new generation of super large cruise ships, something that gets not much support from the moneyed retiree classes. The argument is that cruise ship passengers don't buy much as they have it all on the ship while clogging city streets. I was quite surprised by the number of visitors, in the dozens, in the museum, wearing colored cruise ship tags. I am sort of opposed to more ships but on the other hand Key West lacks any kind of unified vision of its future so worrying about a few thousand more temporary visitors swarming off the docks from time to time seems a bit, I don't know, capricious?

They sell a few books and knick knacks in the museum shop as well which might be an argument in favor of multiplying the number of such visitors but I suspect it's t shirt shops, tour operators, bars (including the ones owned by the portly city commissioner) and souvenir floggers that expect to profit. As far as I'm concerned what's happening in Europe is probably going to migrate over here and the more key West can insulate itself from economic Armageddon the better.

Or perhaps bigger cruise ships mean the city is selling it's historic heritage for a mess of potage. Beats me.

The building was abandoned in the sixties and was well on the way to falling apart, like most of downtown Key West. Gay visitors, attracted by the enormous Navy base saw the guest house potential and bought out the Conchs who built modern homes in New Town and left the ramshackle old town huts to the crazy outsiders. The smart ones held on, built and made fortunes, and some small portion of those fortunes spilled over into public works.

The restoration has been well done and the building is lovely, with or without the art.

I like wandering the corridors between exhibits as much as the rooms filled with the attractions.

My plan is to illustrate several of the exhibits on show over the next few days in separate essays now I've introduced the brick building that houses them.

Next door to the Westin Hotel near the waterfront you will find this big red brick building with the pointy roof, designed to slough off the snows of winter on the Canadian border (no, really!) built to one government design for Customs Houses. Inside you will find Key West laid bare. Not to visit would be a crime. Almost as bad as being undecided about what to do with the ship channel.


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Trouble Is My Middle Name

So on the weekend the electrical system took a dump on the Bonneville, a fault whose full import has yet to be understood. Nothing too serious no doubt but enough to stall my commute. I was pretty sanguine about the problem as I got a ride and arrived at work on time, barely and Jiri will sort out if it is the new battery or or the old charging system. No problem, still I like to ride rather than drive and my 27 mile commute is my pleasure as well as my burden. My wife knew what was coming when I sidled up and asked if I could borrow her Vespa. "Sure" she said which was easy for her because her classroom this year is new digs and she hasn't figured out where on the campus might be a safe place to leave the ET4. Usually she commutes with gym gear and files and papers littering her car (my Asperger's causes me to shudder each time I ride in her car) and then she rides around town as needed on her 150cc scooter.

I like riding the Vespa and I sneak a trip on it as often as I can but I don't like to impose on my wife. However there are days when the prospect of being shoe horned into a car just burns me up. I get bored in my zombie box, just like the other dawdling commuters trapped in their cages. Better to ride the pretty little 2004 cream colored scooter, which does 65mph and shocks the hell out of complacent dawdling motorists when they see me zipping past them and treading on their SUV penises as I go. Ha!

Meep! Meep! I was having the usual ball perplexing an early bird tourist leaving Key West before dawn in a convertible showing off the Keys to his hot date and wondering why the moped was passing him like he wasn't there. Further along a car pulled out of a side road and paused in the travel lane while the driver gathered his/her bearings instead of adjusting to the road in the on ramp that was thoughtfully provided for the purpose. The devil was in me and I slowed barely perceptibly, took the speed up ramp and passed the dazed driver adjusting her/his crotch in the travel lane. That was decidedly a trampled penis because my temerity was rewarded with high beams aimed at my mirrors as I floated off toward the horizon. Better the high beams than the car windshield fluid aimed my way by zombies annoyed that they can't shake off the moped. I follow the two second rule religiously so fluid arcing over the car doesn't usually get me.

It ended badly. The engine ran perfectly but suddenly we lost way and I knew instantly the drive belt had split. I coasted onto the ample shoulder, parked the Vespa and in the beam of my flashlight saw wisps of yellow insulating like material poking out of the transmission. It happens that modern scooters break their belts usually without warning and when they do they disintegrate into their component woolly parts. I set off in the muggy airless morning to walk the four miles home. 23 out of 27 miles wasn't bad and the belt broke in a safe spot. All was well. I ended up catching the Lower Keys shuttle for the last two miles of the journey home. I arrived barely half an hour later than usual around 7:15 am. My wife slept through the whole drama and only awoke when I returned from walking Cheyenne and picking up the Vespa with the trailer.

Sooo, my Fusion needed new tires and had a failing battery, fixed by Sears Automotive, my Bonneville needs diagnosis and the Vespa needs a new belt and rollers. My wife says this is the series of three issues and my forthcoming ride home from Iowa on the new-to-me 1979 P200E Vespa will be flawless. Perhaps she's right. The old Vespa needs no battery and uses no belt and is said to have tires with lots of tread. I hope my streak of bad luck is over now. Please. But I do have to launch the boat for the first time since the little outboard was serviced this summer...When we used it last summer it wasn't working well and now I hope my new mechanic did actually find the problem as he promised he did. Just now though my luck with engines is terrible. If I didn't have bad luck I'd have no luck at all as the saying goes...

A Dance To The Music Of Time

I heard James May say it for the first time and he got it right. "Batteries are crap." James May is the nerdy presenter on the BBC's "Top Gear" program, an English motoring show that skewers everyone and everything in a way US television would never tolerate for fear of causing -gasp!- offence. In this instance May was testing a couple of electric cars and the crap he was talking about referred to rechargeable batteries. He's right batteries are crap. My Bonneville stuck by the side of the road is proof of that unarguable fact. Batteries lose their charge, their chemical composition changes and charges inside them mysteriously vanish when you most need them. Batteries are the most unreliable links in the chain of our tenuous civilization and when anything fails the best thing to do is blame the battery, if there is one. There is a battery in my Bonneville and I am squinting at it very old fashioned at the moment.

Or maybe not. Maybe five year old alternators become crap after 68,000 hard fought miles and stop charging the potentially crap batteries. Either way the lack of a spark brought forward progress to a halt Saturday afternoon as much of South Florida was pouring into Key West for a night of riotous drinking and subsequent public intoxication, fighting and general bad manners. I was riding the Bonneville in the general direction my desk at the top of the police station girding my loins to take a few dozen calls from the mentally impaired and verbally incoherent good time charlies on Duval Street as the holiday weekend progressed. I anticipated a lot of calls, a lot of headaches and a lot of activity requiring my close attention. Dealing with another dead battery in my life was not on the list of weekend activities.

It happened that black clouds closed in over Highway One near Mile Marker 13, between Baby's Coffee and Big Coppitt Key. I could see the rain spattering the highway up ahead so I pulled out of the long line of cars rolling toward Key West and stopped on the shoulder. I turned the engine off as one does, a small inconsequential decision that altered the course of my afternoon and impaired the start of my rather stressful work night because once the engine stopped, and I had pulled my waterproof Frogg Toggs out of the saddlebag, the engine remained mute even when I pressed the starter button and expected the 900 cubic centimeter powerhouse to burst back into life. All I got was a whirring noise from under the seat. Most unsatisfactory.

I think it was last Thursday, I have worked a lot of overtime lately and the days are merging into a long blur, when I stopped for gas at the Key Haven Shell and I put my credit card into the pump and the pump failed to respond. I stood there like an idiot waiting for the usual prompts and commands, zip code and so forth, and when none were forthcoming I had no idea what to do. I could have moved immediately to one of the several other pumps not in use, but I tried again, and again and used another card and nothing happened. I was stumped by the failure of technology.

It was the same problem I had with the starter failing to start. I pressed the button and got nothing more than a whirr from the machinery that has never previously given me a moment's trouble. I did the only thing I could do and called for help.

Chuck arrived minutes after the downpour reached my stretch of the highway but he raced to my workplace in most un-Chuck-like haste and I arrived with 50 seconds to spare. Chuck is one of those drivers who thinks speed is the devil's work but for me he sinned, grievously, and he got me where I needed to be. Praise Chuck! Meanwhile the problem of the recalcitrant Bonneville remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a riddle, as the Man said about the Soviet Union's leadership, many decades ago. I returned to my abandoned Bonneville after work with a battery pack, fired the dead engine up and followed my wife home, she in the car. Ironically the Fusion with its own three year old battery did the same jiggery pokery to us just last week when we were the Ramrod Pool swimming. We faced the prospect of a three mile walk home in our salty wet skivvies until a kind youth connected his functioning car battery to my jumper cables and set our Fusion alight once again. I hate batteries!

The quick solution is to replace the motorbike's battery but my question is why did my month old battery take a dump? Is it defective? Or is the system charging it on the blink? I told Jiri to put a new battery in the Bonneville not because the old one was broken but because I wanted to preempt any problems! Irony where is thy sting? It seems to me the most likely solution is that the alternator has grown weary but to try to check this theory I have put the battery on a trickle charge in the hope it fails to take that charge. That would lay the blame fairly on the battery - cheap quick solution... BUT if the battery does take the charge I will have to take the bike to Mechanic Jiri and ask him to paw my love with a multimeter and check the charging system. If that is the problem then I can finally admit my Bonneville has at last left me stranded by the side of the road with a mechanical problem.

Five years and 68,000 miles with not a single issue is a fine track record, but I cannot help but remember that my new/old Vespa doesn't need a battery to run, starts with a kick start and in the event it needed a bump start it only weighs 230 pounds. The bulk of my 500 pound Bonneville on the deadly flat bicycle path defeated my every effort to bump start it.

One way and another it's just one small headache taking up tons of time in a world filled with far more serious issues. Yet it is a reminder of the infamous conclusion James May came to when he tested the electric cars on Top Gear: batteries are crap. Even when they aren't.

Dahlonega, Georgia

I was looking forward to seeing Rider's Hill the Moto Guzzi and Aprilia dealership said to be the largest of it's kind in the US, a country not noted for it's appreciation of Moto Guzzis.

Coming from South Florida where motorcycles are toys, overpowered racers for juvenile delinquents or chubby old cruisers for chubby old cruisers it was slightly startling to see a shop like this, a massive investment in a way of life on the fringes of everyone else's hobby.

Of course there was a price to pay for all the fun of riding The Dragon all day and swooping up and down and over Highway 129...I arrived after closing time! They aren't Triumph dealers so I wasn't there for help or anything. Just curiosity.

Six pm had come and gone but there was still activity in this enthusiast's oasis. A man I later discovered is called Steve armed with the reputation of being one of the top Moto Guzzi mechanics in the country was taking a customers ride for a...ride.

The customer was buried in a book outside the mechanic's shop. We talked but we never shared our names. He lives in Knoxsville Tennessee, three and a half (lovely!) hours away and he owns the black Griso in question and also a LeMans, oh lucky man. He made an appointment for a tune up, left home with a room reserved in then local Motel 8 and was waiting for his bike to be finished.

"You live in Key West?" it was too hard to explain where Ramrod Key is. "I've never met anyone who actually lived there. I know lots of people who vacation there." He looked at me as though a traveling zoo had dropped a truly weird specimen on his doorstep. "What do you do?" Mostly spend a lot of time riding the freeway back and forth seeking interesting roads, I wanted to say as the 20 hour ride home was at the forefront of my mind at that moment.

Steve came back and I stepped away, as I heard him ask the owner "...does it always do that?" I love Moto Guzzis but they aren't rock solid reliable like my indefatigable Triumph. I saddled up and rode away in an effort to keep my dream intact of one day owning a V-twin Italian Stallion.

Dahlonega was unknown to me until I was told they had this huge Moto Guzzi and Aprilia dealership. I found out they rent bikes and the cost of the daily or weekly rental can be deducted from the price of a purchase...the customer above spent the day riding an automatic Aprilia Mana 850 while he waited for his service to be completed. What an interesting place. I shall return.

But not for the little college town, pronounced: Dal-ON-egg-ah which has a pretty downtown square devoted to the genteel pursuit of middle class pleasure, within the bounds of polite society.

Luckily I needed no Himalayan Salt Crystals because the shop like most everything else on the square was closed. But there again I have no clue what they might be for if anything.

The sun was setting on a deserted ville so I clumped around sweaty and disheveled in my heavy motorcycle boots and snapped a few pictures.

They found gold in these here hills in 1828 and built the square and courthouse for Lumpkin County in 1836. Civilization had arrived in the wilderness north of Atlanta. Nowadays this little town is voted a great place to retire. Ho hum.

Students attend North Georgia College and State University and apparently old folks like it here because the living is cheap, Atlanta's an hour away and lots of senior-like activities are catered to here.

There are times and places when the chaos and lack of vision in Key West come as a relief. I got that feeling in Appalachicola and here too. These small towns lack the drawing power of Key West and as much as the empty bottles, vomit and running street fights on a Saturday night irritate me the sight of a moribund town can be a healthy reminder that you need some kind of a schtick to have prospects for your economy.

I have no doubt when school opens the town will ring to the happy sounds of well behaved students and their wealthy parents. If you suddenly feel the urge to buy a sexually explicit t-shirt or women's underwear with instructions printed on them this is not going to be the shopping district that will meet your needs.

On the other hand Key West does not boast any coffee shop anywhere with a classic Lambretta parked in the window.

Nice town. Time to go home and trip over a few drag queens and legless tourists, in Key West to drink themselves insensible to get away from the boredom back home. And to buy one of those t-shirts that read "I'm not a gynecologist but I can take a look." On the whole it's always good to be home.


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