It’s cold in metro Detroit, alternating between drizzle and snow flurries, and occasionally a low winter sun that’s right in your goddamn eyes no matter what time of day you’re driving. The sky is mostly the grim leaden blue-gray of a corpse pulled from a river.
It’s soul crushing, particularly after Christmas.
That’s why in this time of spiritual malaise my thoughts drift south. In fact, about 1,200 miles south to the city of Key West, Florida. My winter dreams are a sticky, humid reverie far from slush and road salt.
If you’ve known me for more than thirty seconds, then you know of my undying affection for Key West, that degenerate subtropical outpost that’s literally at the end of the highway. For a century, the four-square-mile island at the western tip of the Florida Keys has beckoned writers, artists, drifters, dreamers, oddballs, eccentrics, freaks, villains, cranks, the lost and the broken … but also an endless procession of sweaty dipshit tourists disgorged like porcine cattle from gargantuan environment-ruining cruise ships. And worse, there are now a lot of rich assholes that have sent real-estate prices soaring to Manhattan levels.
While Key West to the naked, untrained eye appears to be just a floating T-shirt shop and alcoholic playground not much different than the sunburned tourist traps along Florida’s Redneck Riviera, it boasts a literary pedigree that rivals Paris or New York — with a hearty dash of Michigan in the mix.
Most famously, former Northern Michigan summer resident Ernest Hemingway lived on the island in the 1930s, and many of his most famous works were written in Key West. Today, his former house on Whitehead Street is a museum that’s home to fifty-some adorable six-toed cats.
But Papa Hemingway isn’t the island’s only literary Michigan connection.
In the 1970s, a group of writers and artists congregated in Key West to fish, fight, fuck, fulminate, and get outrageously wasted on booze and drugs. Two of that clique’s central figures were Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane, Michiganders and MSU grads who crafted brilliant literature.
The rest of their tropical Algonquin Round Table included singer and writer Jimmy Buffett, novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, painter Russell Chatham, sportsman and filmmaker Guy de la Valdéne, and later the Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Last year, a documentary about their Key West exploits called All That Is Sacred debuted and is free now on YouTube. The fishing footage, taken from the ’70s film Tarpon that’s the root of the documentary, is stunning. McGuane and Harrison are its stars. It’s criminal that they’re not more widely read. Both have been Paris Review Art of Fiction interviewees.
Only McGuane, who turned 85 early this month, remains from that extraordinary group. Born in Wyandotte, he earned his MSU English degree in 1962, by which time he’d befriended Harrison. A friendship, built around adventure and literature, endured until Harrison died at age 78 in 2016.
McGuane’s early madcap novels The Sporting Club and The Bushwhacked Piano are set, at least in part, in Michigan. Perhaps his most famous work, which he also directed the 1975 movie adaptation of, was Ninety-two in the Shade. McGuane later moved to Montana to write about the vast and rich Big Sky country, leaving behind his swashbuckling island days that earned him the nickname “Captain Berserko.” A renowned cattle rancher and horseman, he still writes occasionally for The New Yorker.
It was the burly gourmand and outdoorsman Harrison, born in Grayling and blinded in one eye by a childhood playmate, that found more mainstream success with 1979 novella Legends of the Fall that was later adapted into a 1994 Brad Pitt-Anthony Hopkins film. The craggy Harrison looked like anything but a deeply intellectual poet and novelist that effortlessly and often quoted the likes of early 20th-century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and 13th-century Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Dōgen. His unique, gruff voice was impossible to forget and just as easily given to bawdy jokes. Jack Nicholson and Anthony Bourdain loved him.
Harrison’s works are sacred homages to life and nature, with many novels set in upper Michigan and written between drags on American Spirit cigarettes, glasses of Domaine Tempier Bandol red wine, and amid lavish feasts and barking dogs. His witty food writing is sumptuous. He died at his desk, pen trailing off mid-poem, in his Patagonia cabin — a genuine goddamned legend of all seasons.
Key West was also home, or favored getaway, to a who’s-who of American letters: Tennessee Williams, Shel Silverstein, John Hersey, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Wallace Stevens, Philip Caputo, and Detroit-born writer James Leo Herlihy. And today, the beloved Judy Blume still runs Books & Books at Eaton and Simonton streets.
Many of the writers, the Michigan writers in particular, stumbled along Duval Street, the spine and urethra of Key West that’s lined with the bars, shops, tattoo parlors, a Margaritaville, and art galleries (including that of nautical painter Robert Wyland, the Madison Heights-born artist best known here for the giant whale mural visible outside of Comerica Park). Ballcaps and T-shirts of Michigan sports teams are common sights on the island.
You can do most anything in Key West: Drink at a Denny’s with a full goddamn bar, smoke shitty legal weed, eat your weight in fresh seafood, swim and sail, fish, party all night with rowdy drag queens (it’s a famous LGBTQ safe haven), or even fly to Cuba for a daytrip.
If you want to experience a measure of Key West’s old days that attracted Harrison and McGuane and the other writers, you can find it preserved in the dingy little Chart Room Bar, the still-beating heart of a vanished era. It’s steps off Duval, but I’m not going to tell you the exact location because I don’t want this unspoiled slice of the past to become overrun with tourists.
If you have the right kind of eyes, you’ll find it.
Unlike Michigan, it’s never snowed in Key West. It’s often hot, but the gentle Gulf breezes swaying the palms offer an almost orgasmic relief for one’s damp skin and drowsy soul. The locals call it a sunny place for shady people. I call it my second home, my grubby paradise found. Come visit sometime (no direct flights from Detroit, unfortunately).
Bring a pen and paper if the spirit moves you — just don’t be an asshole.
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