Southernmost Wanted

I have seen the graffiti all over the Lower Keys and in Key West since about 2015. I made  a half hearted Internet search with no results (he has a private Instagram account for friends apparently) and resigned myself to never knowing who the author of these weird pointless letters might be. CYNE painted or printed with the additional slogan underneath: "southernmost wanted."

But it turns out these signs are bound to start disappearing. And most likely not coming back. Why?

Southernmost Wanted has a checkered and thus quite interesting  past, especially in light of the fact his crime in the Keys has been spraying uninspired graffiti and sticking small stickers on public spaces. In the past he was more inclined to violence it has been alleged. In the story below from the Fayetteville Observer one clause leaped out at me: "one of the odder homicides" in the community according to the author of this well written report. I reproduce an extract here. The link above has the entire story, well worth a read as it makes chilling reading.

Former Fort Bragg soldier Brandon Mims was found not guilty Tuesday morning of murdering Michael Ray Staggs in a parking lot outside a Chinese restaurant in Fayetteville two years ago.

According to Staggs’ family, the jurors thought it was likely that Mims killed Staggs, but that they lacked enough evidence to vote to convict him.

Prosecutors had circumstantial evidence that indicated Mims could have been the shooter, but no direct evidence - such as video recordings or positive identification from witnesses - that he was the person who fired a shotgun into Staggs’ car.

“I feel comfortable that with the evidence that we had before us and that was admissible that we put on the best case that we could put on,” lead prosecutor Nitza Rothstein said in an interview Tuesday afternoon.

Defense lawyer Dee W. Bray could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Mims could not be reached.

The case was one of the odder homicides in Fayetteville, seemingly random.

Michael Ray Staggs’ father, Mike Anthony Staggs, said it was a “stranger on stranger” killing, that his son did not know Mims and there was no known connection between them.

The younger Staggs was shot in the head Jan. 29, 2011, as he sat in his car in the parking lot of the Compare Foods shopping center on Bonanza Drive and Morganton Road.

Rothstein and co-counsel Scott Gainer were able to present these facts to the jury:

Mims had a burgundy Ford F-150 pickup. Witnesses observed a flash and loud bang from a burgundy Ford F-150 parked next to Staggs’ car, then saw the pickup drive away.

Mims was seen in the Chinese restaurant and shopping center parking lot shortly before the murder, and the restaurant had a debit card receipt of Mims’ roommate, who had given the card to Mims that evening to buy cigarettes.

Mims’ grandfather gave police Mims’ shotgun, which investigators say was of the type that fired the shotgun pellets that killed Staggs. There was gunshot residue in the window area of Mims’ truck.

“To me they proved the case,” Mike Staggs said.

But Rothstein and Gainer could not put Mims’ grandfather on the stand. He died last year. Had he lived, Mike Staggs said, Mims’ grandfather could have testified that, on the morning after the slaying, Mims brought him the shotgun and admitted that he shot Michael Ray Staggs.

Once again I find myself feeling relief that I live in a town where murders are so rare they don't get a rating. We get lots of calls in police dispatch from anxious relatives across the country who haven't heard from family members who come to key West on vacation or for business. Check the advertising and you might get the impression that if you come to Key West you should drink yourself insensible after you have met a whole bunch of boozy new wonderful friends.  Under the circumstances it might seem obvious that your friends and relatives are going to "forget to call." However that thoughtlessness strikes you, rest assured if they are engaging in drunken stupidity they may spend too much money and they may soil their reputations but this is not a town of violence. We don't have unusually interesting murders and I am very grateful for that. We do have a lot of drunken stupidity and helmet-less scooter riders with severe head injuries. And now the Sheriff has locked up an alleged killer. But he got locked up for graffiti, not murder which makes this arrest interesting to me. Are we witnessing the calming effect of the Keys? 

So why did I post a picture of a banal bottle of antiseptic soap, two dollars at CVS I discovered upon investigation. This story will I hope counterpoint the CYNE arrest with a description of the true crime scenario in Key West. I paused in my walk with Rusty to sit on a  brick wall and study the new business about to be built where Rum Barrel used to be, a bar opened by a pirate obsessed, media savvy doctor who wanted to sell food and drink for profit in Key West, and did very well parlaying his fame as a sports doctor to top flight sports figures I believe. The permit notice in the bar window says the city will be considering granting an easement to make legal what is apparently an illegal taking of city sidewalk. The brick ramp below has been incorporated into the architecture of the building apparently without a permit and now the usurpation of the public sidewalk is to be made properly legal. Bad enough you might think that a public sidewalk has been used illegally - there's a crime of key West proportions.

So, the question of the soap...read on if you have the stomach. As we resumed our walk I noticed a certain odor hanging about my person so I scrupulously checked the soles of my shoes. It wasn't dog shit either it was pungent and human and wherever it was it wasn't on my shoes. I raised my camera to take a picture and the smell became intense. I looked at my hand and the tell tale brown smears were everywhere and unmistakable. I recoiled in horror and started frantically checking my short tails and shorts to see how far the plague had spread. Happily it was only on my one hand -only - and I staggered down Front Street like a leper holding out a diseased limb. I spotted a hose and managed to squeeze a few drops from the spout with my clean hand but that did nothing except increase my sense of panic. 

I am not germ-phobic, quite the opposite, but I do know that shit actually does carry disease and anyone who takes a  shit  on a brick wall is probably not the healthiest of specimens at the best of times so I was looking at my hand with half a mind to cut it off. The inspiration struck. I was staggering down the street pondering y options when I saw the pharmacy, one of half a dozen in Key West and for as often as I have been critical of all the chain pharmacies springing up all over town I approached the front doors with a  profound sense of gratitude. It took a while but I have become reconciled to the misfortune and now I think I can safely say my hand and I are friends again and I no longer look at the palm worrying that nasty brown smears will reappear and fill my face with that ever so nasty smell. Human not canine. I pick up after my dog so I know.

Murder? I felt like murdering whoever put me in that predicament but this is Key West and I contented myself with sending them a mental curse and clutching my bottle of hand sanitizer close to my chest for the next unfortunate encounter bound to happen in a town filled with residentially challenged visitors and several weeks of winter to wait out in the tropics.

Caroline Street

I really enjoy Caroline Street.

 Homelessness I don't enjoy  though I admire the resilience that finds a way around the armrests designed to prevent resting. Why can't we put such toughness to productive use?

 Harpoon Harry's:

 Until I passed the music store I'd never given much thought to the component parts of a piano:

 Off The Hook, worth a  visit.

 Rusty the rebel:

 A (car) parking garage...

 ...filled with bicycles.

 Keys Energy architecture. The public utility that works.

 The Dirty Pig is not a name that inspires me.  I still miss Finnegan's Wake.

The details of Caroline Street.

Elizabeth Street

These aren't typical commuter scenes of most cities which are forced to absorb streams of motor vehicles every work day. There are streams of cars entering Key West at the bottleneck known as the triangle, but  down here the traffic flow tends to be of a more genteel nature as the day begins. A pedestrian, a  bicycle or even a tricycle ambling through town.

Not many people get to make of their journey to work a walk through Old Town. My wife drives the Seven Mile Bridge daily and it's a struggle for her to remember some people drive slowly to savor the unique experience. That she might be late to school is of no concern when the oblivious driver is on vacation.

A Triumph with a wine bar on the back, below. Sometimes I miss my Bonneville then I watch traffic turning the wrong way on a  one way or passing on double yellow lines or braking for no obvious reason or slowing suddenly for an empty crosswalk or not knowing how to stop at a stop sign or failing to look both ways... you get the idea. I have a second chance at life.

This picture didn't work out the way I wanted but it evokes that early morning mood in me. The cat prowling and nearly obscured by the irritating handlebar, the homeless due (or tourist?) struggling with the suitcase. End of vacation or start of a new aimless day?  I put the picture in my diary to remember even though the picture is too busy and unfocused.

This rather obvious joke was Instagram worthy:

Johnson's Grocery store on Petronia and Emma in Bahama Village.  brilliant convenience store marketing involves selling beer and conch for locals and letting tourists in on the "secret." The cool part about the grocery is the connection it carries forth to the past and the community around it. I like to stop a moment and see what piece of history is being celebrated.

Without Rusty  none of it would be seen as he's always  ahead of me.

The Slow And The Dead

When I worked nights I frequently found myself on city streets at three in the morning unable to sleep on my nights off. Since moving to days walking Old Town at four in the morning doesn't happen very often. However with my wife out of town and Rusty always ready willing and able to walk there was no excuse not to go for  a stroll. I ended up wondering if I should have stayed home.

Before six in the morning in those hours of darkness when hangovers rule Key West I let Rusty run ahead off leash. In a world filled with busy bodies it gives him an opportunity to let off steam and it gives me an opportunity to make whatever pictures I want. That he sits on command and can observe traffic patterns without me fails to impress most modern fear filled Americans.But at this hour I can walk and think without submitting to the ignorance of the masses. And young Rusty can enjoy the fact he is no longer negotiating life and traffic on his own. The sexton's building at the cemetery main gate on Margaret Street:

Why I wondered was a traffic cone on a  grave? An annoying vexing question with a stupifyingly banal answer no doubt.

The cemetery offers much atmosphere even through the railings that surround it. I was standing on Passover Lane and all I could see was images. No ghosts were harmed in the making of these pictures. I believe so little in the supernatural that lost souls never make themselves known to me. 

 Flowers pinned to the fence attracted my attention:

Moving on I find myself compelled to photograph empty silent streets at this hour, by now approaching six o'clock, the witching hour when people come back to life and start driving and making noise. Looking up Windsor Lane toward Solares Hill in the distance:

Ambling toward Truman Avenue I passed a Sprinter camper van with a luggage rack on the back filled with coconuts. People sometimes wonder why we chose a Promaster van over a Mercedes and the answers are clear enough in our heads, not least saving $30,000 in the purchase price and avoiding the expense and complexity of maintaining a modern clean burning diesel engine. I grew up in an era when diesels were solid reliable machines of no great performance and nowadays gasoline engines are the simple dependable alternative to diesel exhaust fuel and catalytic converters that have to be replaced periodically and all that stuff needed to reduce air pollution. I enjoyed the coconuts and stopped pondering another imponderable. 

That was when the walk started to get weird. I was no longer alone when a voice called from the shadows to get my attention. No I said, I carry no money. Oddly enough in England I've heard street people take payments with credit cards nowadays when they are selling newspapers. Mind you the police in Britain now prosecute people for thought crimes so they live in a whole new world brave or fearsome as you may see it. Anyway back to the matter in hand. It sounds like the opening line to a joke: This guy walks up to me ans says...

"Can I use your phone?" So I ask what the problem is and he manages to explain he left his phone in a  Pink Cab - You know Carl? he asked as though I have intimate knowledge of the city cab drivers' lives, though maybe he asked because I knew the number to Five Sixes off the top of my head. I asked the dispatcher who did not sound like a bright spark if he could ask Carl to look in his cab for a phone abandoned by a  distracted fare who was now hopping up and down in front of me worried sick. He seemed a little confused and slow, possibly helped along by too much alcohol, a common condition around here.

I think I got the message through to the dispatcher and I was surprised it took so much explaining to get the cab company to comprehend the problem.  I get these calls all the time at work and I call the cab companies for lost items every work day.  Indeed I was feeling rather grumpy that I was now doing my dispatch work for free in the middle of the street with an impatient dog sitting there looking hard at me. If your phone is so important, and mine is to me, how the hell do you forget it so easily? The last I saw he was crossing the street to waylay a fresh young thing he spotted over my shoulder to ask her to follow up my incompetent call and make assurance doubly sure. I fled, happy to be ignored suddenly.

Not for long as a hooded figure shouted across Windsor Lane at me "Does your dog like cats?" Good Lord I thought to myself, two in one morning, really? At least she made no effort to extract money from me. She was freaking out that Rusty might invade the privacy of the cats she has been feeding for twenty years behind St Mary's. As obsessive and nuts as she was, she had a point. It was after six and clearly long past due time to put the cat eating hound from hell on his leash. As you can see this one bored into me with the piercing stare of a someone with only one thing on her mind: Her cats. I was reminded why I really like dispatching and not having to get any closer than the phone to the array of nutters who still hang on in Key West.

Rusty is scared of chickens and pretends to ignore cats who stare him down so her feline charges were quite safe but there are some people you just don't mess with and she was clearly one of them.  I engaged her in conversation for the hell of it, but it soon became clear we weren't going to figure out the meaning of life, and no it isn't cats. Call me nuts but I wish there were more like her in a town sliding into conformity and dopey adoration of mainstream reality. Key West could use a few more eccentrics. 

Sometimes my tourist disguise is a little too effective. On Saturday a smelly man came up to me with an ingratiating air and grabbed my hand -ugh!- and started talking rapidly and following me. So finally I turned and said I work for the police department.  That was all it took and he melted away. I didn't have time to get to the bit where I point out I'm a civilian phone answerer.  I need to get more mean my colleagues tell me when they laugh at my street encounters.  I don't think we need more meanness in the US just at the moment.

I get the feeling that living on the streets of Key West must be incredibly boring, no matter what anyone tells me. We are told most homeless have mental issues but they can't get help so there they go aimless drifting day and night after day and night. So if feeding cats give you purpose then I guess more power to you and in the matter of dealing with people versus animals I'm on the cat lady's side. They fed Rusty when he was on the streets but with the ultimate goal of getting him into a home which he seems to enjoy and that must be why I prefer dogs to feral cats. Perhaps one day I shall fade away into the dog feeding equivalent of a cat lady. Meeting these people on the streets is making me maudlin which  probably means I'm going to attract another call at work from the mad electron woman who thinks her ex is sending her messages through her TV streaming service by subverting her internet account. Or the other one who thinks her neighbor is preventing her from sleeping by sending musical vibes through the wall separating their apartments by wires inserted into her pillow. Lucky for both of them they have enough money to keep them off the streets, for now. I prefer the endless parking violation calls between feuding neighbors. At least parking problems I can understand. And don't forget the reason why I like the cemetery is that dead people have no problems that prompt them to call 911.

Rusty Four Years On

Four years ago today I drove up to the Homestead Petco around ten o'clock on what was  a Friday morning. This Is The Dog had put Rusty up for adoption twice before to no takers. My wife had heard from a  friend about this unwanted dog and as Cheyenne had laid down and died of her own volition just a week before  I surprised myself by being ready to adopt at once.  Not having to decide to give Cheyenne the needle made it infinitely easier to accept her death as it was on her own terms and at the time and place of her choosing. My last picture of her as she prepared to leave me:

Old age is merciless but she was generous to me to the last.

My plan was to get an unwanted older Labrador, the sort of dog that's hard to place as they are viewed with unwarranted suspicion by people who want "puppies." Cheyenne was once an expensive pedigree puppy dumped when her shitty family decided she was too old. But lucky for Rusty I wasn't looking for an expensive fashionable trophy dog. Lucky for me too as it turned out. As you can see when I first spotted the little runt I wasn't really focused on the people who saved him from the streets:

He was dumped in the Redlands of Homestead  where he led a pack of dogs that were killed off by angry farmers using shotguns and poison. When he was the last dog left he surrendered to the good people of This Is The Dog who had been following his progress for months, To this day he cannot stand fireworks or gunshots though he has learned not to run at the mere sight of a big dog and he pretty soon learned to sleep soundly with both eyes closed. This was a picture they posted of him on Facebook when he was a stray:

He whimpered a bit as I drove him away from the only people who had ever shown him any kindness but we stopped along the way and he sniffed the sidewalks and stretched his legs as he got used to riding in a  car. He wasn't overly impressed by this guy's overtures in Marathon:

I always get confused as to why people abandon their dogs. From early days Rusty did his best to please me and apart from a  couple of times when I lost my confidence and yelled at him we have had pretty smooth sailing most of the time.The times we didn't were down to me not having faith in myself which my friend Webb says I need to get over. Rusty agrees and by now we are like old friends and he understands me faster than I understand myself.

I have lived with some really excellent dogs who have put up with my eccentricities over the years but Rusty has attained a new level of understanding. Right from the start we bonded and when I was in the hospital in 2018 I worried he would forget me.

He never did of course and my wife told me he started whining when she turned onto the street leading to the hospital when she brought him to visit me. But right from the start he kept close like he knew this was it for him.. We tried to fence him in to keep him safely off the street but he put paid to that plan easily. In the end I figured he probably could handle our genteel Cudjoe neighborhood after dodging the angry farmers of the Redlands and surviving.

The start of a beautiful friendship.

We did negotiate the bumps, for instance we learned he much prefers curling up in a tight bed that supports him on all four sides. He reserves the couch and our bed for those rare occasions when he wants to stretch out and the open plan dog bed just wasn't for him. But we have had lots of time to learn the little Prince's quirks and to adapt to them.

Long may he last for we have much traveling to do.