Shabby Chic

The past week of rain limited the number of riders in the Poker Run from Miami so we can thank the weather gods for the lighter attendance of barely muffled motorcycles. I ride a lot but I do like factory quiet motorcycles, and I also like getting a move on. Getting stuck behind a bunch of Harley Davidsons going nowhere slowly and making a lot of noise doing it is not my idea of motorcycling. So I rode my Vespa and zipped silently among them enough to emasculate as many of them as I could. 

Rain made Duval Street look more dismal than usual. I was in a grumpy mood as the city's  newly hired Special Magistrate recently ruled that the carbuncle at 616 Eaton Street complies with historic code designations despite its monstrous size and flying walkways and general inability to fit in with Old Town residential architecture. Why the magistrate thought the thing is okay beats me. First very public outing, first fail. And Donald Yates was the back-up magistrate when his predecessor was unable to preside so its not like he hasn't had any practice.

As reported by Konk Life, the weekly paper city commissioners took advantage of a faux pas by one of their number to replace the previous magistrate, Jeff Overby who was a "bit rough" with petitioners ( people with money):

Overby had been reappointed to his position by Key West City Commissioners on March 17. However, the commissioner voted two weeks later to rescind that reappointment and start the application process over after Commissioner Teri Johnston inadvertently violated the city’s “cone of silence” ordinance when she contacted Overby by telephone before his commission interview on March 17. Johnston had called Overby asking for information on how many of his rulings had been appealed during his tenure as the city’s first-ever code compliance hearing judge. Under the cone of silence ordinance, no direct communication can take place between commissioners and a job applicant or contractor if the commissioners are the deciding body on whether to hire that person or business.... 

... there were indications that some of the commissioners wanted a new special magistrate even when Overby was reappointed by a close 4-3 vote on March 17. At that time, Commissioners Billy Wardlow, Tony Yaniz and Clayton Lopez voted to give the job to local attorney David Van Loon, who also reapplied in the second round. Although complimenting the job Overby has done over the past almost 17 years, Yaniz said he had heard comments that Overby was “a little rough around the edges” during code compliance hearings.

Mind  you Duval Street has its own overdue clean up recommended by another study paid for by the city. Soap and water applied with a stiff brush might be a start but some of the street frontage looks adapted from the Addams Family mansion:

This old sign to the happily defunct bar is still around and every time I pass it I find religion and offer up a  prayer of thanks for its demise. There never was any easy way to dispatch officers over the radio to quell a  disturbance at "BIG UNS" which can only refer to one thing, no matter what medium you are speaking on, even a police radio.

There are corners of the tourist district that I find evocative and that do sometimes get a lick of paint, like this brick building that shall remain nameless lest it shame it's neighbors:

Telegraph Lane got a fresh coat of asphalt not long ago which might seem surprising considering how many streets downtown are rippled and pot holed and uneven. However when you remember it provides the back entrance access to a city commissioner's bar, all is explained. And it still gets filled with puddles when it rains. 

Nice green corrugated plastic cover the band stand at the Cuban place at Mallory Square just ninety miles from Havana, a city that we are told struggles to find the money to maintain its shabby stock of extra chic mansions and palaces in the embargoed city. I'd like to think that AstroTurf and corrugated plastic would not blight their town but I am probably dreaming. 

But Key West has chickens and they rule the roost in this town:

Best to enjoy the motorcycles and not look too closely at the peeling paint and dusty storefronts. From last year:

Reflections

Starting a  new week, because weeks start on Mondays perforce. and here we are again. I am a little shocked how fast the year is sliding by, and I read that Up North summer is slipping away. Around here time goes by because the calendar says so and in a week it will be October. Fantasy Fest starts to loom already with all the mixed feelings that bacchanalia engenders, and a title like "All Hallows Intergalactic Freak Show" is enough to make you tremble.

I got my first call of inquiry at work last week. I don't know what people are thinking but they frequently call the police when they have tourist questions. In my orderly world you call the Chamber of Commerce when you have questions relating to...commerce. But no, we field questions from people asking how hotels, where to park, alligators, how long it takes to drive from Miami, you name it. Last week in the middle of Poker Run with a million loud motorcycles infesting the city a man called and asked if it was safe to visit Key West for Fantasy Fest. That one stumped me. So I said it depends. And he waited for my pearls of wisdom. I suggested he might not like it if naked people in the street offended him, but that didn't put him off, on the contrary I think he was envisioning his type of people stripping off to be viewed.

So I said, as to safety it depends. If you live in a small town in a quiet part of your state then Key West might seem, possibly, a tad intimidating. But if you live in New York City Key West has no crime at all, aside from drunkenness and the occasional fight. Oh yes, he replied enthusiastically, I do live in New York. I'm booking my tickets! And on such slender evidence we can expect to see one more New New Yorker gawping in the last week of October. The Chamber owes me one.

The no crime statement is a slight exaggeration most of the time. Key West has crime, it has to with 23,000 residents and millions of visitors, but most crime is not planned and spontaneous crime tends to be stupid, and violence is usually limited to people who know each other, be it ever so briefly. And yet, last week a woman got killed on South Roosevelt Boulevard. I was not working at the time and I make it a point not read reports about stuff that I have no work related reason to read so all I know comes from the paper which says the driver, who appeared to target the pedestrian, is being charged with vehicular manslaughter.

The worst part of small town living is the intertwined connections that you end up making with people who, in a more expansive community would remain total strangers, so the fact that I had a passing acquaintance with the victim is not really too surprising.  My connection was remote but she worked in the dentist's office where I am a patient, where the employees never leave, where every visit to have a tooth job is weirdly enough more of a party than an event to be feared. So to think this woman was run down by some crackpot in a car is just one more sign to me that life is random, the universe is meaningless and we are lucky for the time we get so lets make the most of it.

Decrepitude is the status quo of my generation.  I wrote a while back of a friend from my distant youth who has a brain tumor and today is back under the knife hoping for a little more time, hoping not to wake up a vegetable, always a possibility when lasers sear your brain cells. That she is 71 years of age is scant consolation as I face the start of my 58th year. Once upon a time 70, the Biblical span of a human life, seemed impossibly old. Now it seems so close that I expect to be seventy before I realize it. 

My 911buddy app is creeping along, still being built piece by small piece by engineers in Los Angeles, and the fact that it is taking VezTek this long makes me believe that building a national 911 application is indeed far harder than I ever thought. I was figuring implementation would be almost as easy as dreaming up the idea. Roll on Thanksgiving when the thing is supposed to be done.

See? Here I am wishing for time to fly by. What a jerk! 

The Proper Way to Spend A Sunday

Posted with Blogsy

At Work In A Time Of Stress

The BOLO (Be On The Lookout) said the suspect was a white male last seen wearing khaki shorts, blue shirt and  had dark curly hair. Not me I yelped at Kristi (my alibi) as she took my picture. 

 Makes you wonder what mischief she was getting up to over my shoulder.

JW has been using his initiative to help officers collar  the bad guys, and he's only been working with us for about a year, and half of that was training. Didn't stop him showing up in the newspaper...

 Yup, he's real and he loves the work. JW grew up in Key West and is a fund of stories about his hometown when he isn't getting commendations. Three generations live in his home and he wouldn't have it any other way, grandparents, wife and child all under one roof. It would drive me mad, all the family cacophony but he trives on it and comes to work energized.

Sometimes we run low on dispatchers, like when Nick, rather unreasonably left JW and I in the lurch and took a  driving vacation in California.  So on a night when we had no help and we both needed to go to the loo we had to beg an officer, previously trained in dispatch to sit in for us for a short while. That's the dispatch life, unable to get up from the desk unless your radio is covered by someone else in the room. 

And yet, as hard as it is sometimes to listen to endless streams of human misery we find time to talk, exchange ideas (JW is working hard to convince me ghosts really exist) we order in food sometimes and the outside world never sees us or thinks about us.

They notice us all right when we aren't doing our jobs fast enough. Officer Rodriguez got a bit blatant when he thought I should have got his paperwork to him faster...he picked up a newspaper and started reading it- and I am pretty sure it was right side up. So I took his picture, handed him his  paperwork and got a sly grin back. We try to remind ourselves we are just humans dealing with inhuman situations form time to time. 

It's been a strange eleven years and I never thought I would have found myself taking 911 calls before I came here. But right now I can't imagine a job I'd rather do. Where else can a  civilian hold up a police officer and make him laugh at the same time? Its a tough time to be a cop but the ones I work with are half my age and nothing like what some will tell you cops outside the Conch Republic are said to be. This stuff is too bizarre for me to understand, and its happening all over the place:

From Huffington Post:

Arby's apologized Thursday after a Florida employee refused to serve a police officer -- though the employee is keeping his job.

Pembroke Pines Police Sgt. Jennifer Martin wrote in an incident report that she went to Arby's on Tuesday night and ordered at the drive-thru. Clerk Kenneth Davenport, 19, took her credit card, but it was restaurant manager Angel Mirabal who returned, saying, "[Davenport] doesn't want to serve you because you are a police officer," Local 10 reports.

Martin said she was uncomfortable, but went inside to get a refund and asked for the employees' contact information. Mirabal, 22, reportedly laughed, and said Davenport was allowed to refuse her service. He gave her back her money and his contact info, but Davenport refused to give his name.

Arby's CEO Paul Brown apologized in a statement penned to area police departments, saying that any officer in the Miami area can get a free combo meal on Friday:

Please accept our sincerest apology for the recent incident that occurred at our Arby’s® restaurant in Pembroke Pines, FL. This isolated incident does not represent Arby’s Restaurant Group (ARG) views and Arby’s values. We appreciate all that you do, as well as the hard work and sacrifices of your fellow law enforcement officials in communities across America.

In a statement to The Huffington Post, an Arby's spokesman said the manager, Mirabal, was fired. Davenport was put on temporary paid leave.

"This was a complex and difficult decision, but as a company that highly values trust and fairness, we ultimately found that the crew member was not involved other than to attempt to remedy the situation," the statement said.

Davenport's grandfather told Local 10 that the whole thing was a joke and that the teen's words were "taken out of context and blown into something much bigger than what it should be."

The Arby's spokesman said that Pembroke police consider the case closed and that Brown will travel to the area today to visit restaurants and hand out free meals to officers.

Color-Free Key West

They say Key West is "colorful" a euphemism for weird. I can fix that.

Have a pleasant weekend, filled with color and light and check out our podcast at Travel and Safety this week talking about starting a career in photography and what to check out in South Africa with Travis Levius of Mr Levius. 

Morita's Cuban Cafe

The Conch tradition of Cuban coffee shops is alive and well in Key West and I like them very much. You'd think this town would be saturated but they keep popping up. Some people I know swear by this or that place, not always the places tourists know of, Five Brothers and Sandy's being leading contenders. "Did you try the coffee at the gas station?" they say, "It's the best..." Really? But Cuban Coffee is what the Lower Keys operate on, and I dare say all the Styrofoam cups in North America end up down here where recycling is a vague concept not fully embraced.

  

So perhaps I should have been surprised when my wife noticed a new/old sandwich shop appear on the frontage facing Highway One on Cudjoe Key, a block from her gym. However Cudjoe, an under served island had no Cuban Coffee available so the former sandwich shop at this location could be expected to end up offering Cuban food... Five Brothers Two on Ramrod Key is fully five miles north of here...

Morita's is classic Cuban, a family run, hole in the wall business aimed at the take out market. Perhaps its a matter of economics or simply tradition but Cuban coffee shops don't offer traditional sit down amenities that modern North American coffee houses have embraced. Cubans a re strictly carry out. You may find a seat or a bench or a stool at a counter but these are not places to linger.

The bread is Cuban and looks like what passes for French bread in North America (true Frenchmen would blanch) but the soft spongy baguette shaped loaf is made with lard they say and it has its own imperceptible flavor. Wrapped and ready to go for working stiffs on the go:

We shared an egg breakfast sandwich and a couple of coffees, strong enough, sweet enough but not bitter. The sandwich had a salsa, pico de gallo, I've not been offered before on a Cuban sandwich. It made the thing unusual and good and distinctive. Clearly one cannot pile on these kinds of sandwiches daily but I hope we can get a (Styrofoam) container of lunch ion the Cuban style before too long, and see how that goes. Cuban food has come to Mile Marker 23, lots of parking and an easy pause on the road to Key West.

Key West's  Cuban culture is really home grown, and even though Cuban is usually equated with Miami by the outside world, Key West's Cuban culture is homegrown, indigenous and only partly integrated. We live in a  period of increased homogenization thanks to intense electronic "connection" so I particularly appreciate that fact that this is not a chain. 

Sometimes you want to sit and nurse a coffee in air conditioning, but sometimes you need to sip on the wild side and take your Styrofoam and hit the road, a rebel without a cause, Cuban style.