Another story has me walking in, uninvited, wearing only a pair of Larry Bird-length gym shorts and carrying a pencil. That’s untrue as well. That happened in high school, not here.

The story most often told involves me magically appearing one day with a bunch of boxes. In this version, I just started working without ever having been hired. Again, not true. That was Fred.

On the occasion of Big River’s tenth anniversary, I have been asked to tell a story I have never told in over 900 blog posts. I’ve been saving it for this moment. Here is the story of how I became the third person at Big River.

In the beginning, there was Fred. Then he talked Jan into being Big River person number two. She and Fred sat down in the first Big River office just in time for two planes to hit the World Trade Center and another to hit the Pentagon. By the time he called me a few weeks later, there were two desks, a couple of chairs and a round, lazy Susan table that Fred’s wife was going to throw away.

While describing the vision he had for his new company, Fred started talking about tributaries and streams and I think he may have mentioned three men in a canoe. For the first twenty minutes of the conversation, I thought Big River was a fishing company. The early décor did little to dissuade that misconception. We had a lamp made from oars, pictures of bigmouth bass jumping in mountain lakes and maps of rivers from all over the country. I think I remember a reel and rod somewhere in a conference room. Our Christmas ornaments that first year were from a tackle box. No joke.

Margaret came next. Someone had to figure out what the hell was going on. She was about 16 years old at the time. Okay, maybe 19. I cannot remember exactly, but I have shirts older than she was back then. I’m wearing one as I type this.

Big River sort of started from there. In the wake of 9/11, we pitched some new business and got it. We pitched some more and got it. Ten years later, we have 27 people and clients all over the country. This story is pretty dull compared to the six-pack, strippers and boxes tale.

There is one small bit of truth to at least one of those stories up there. The boxes. I still have several of those boxes I brought in ten years ago. They’re sitting over in the corner of my office right now, pictures of beaches taped to the sides. I think about opening them now and then, just to see what is inside. Old books or maybe a coffee cup with the stains of 2001; could be anything in there. I don’t open them, though. The idea of a piece of the original Big River still perfectly intact and untouched like a time capsule from 2001 stops me. Then again, it could be the thought of old gym shorts and a six pack tucked in there.

Beaches do to me what chocolate does to some people. Months can pass before I need chocolate. I went a year once. I cannot, however, do without a beach for that long. The smell of coconut oil and spawning fish in the distance; the quick burn of sun on your skin; the taste of salt, the wedgie of sand lodged in the seat of your swimsuit; this is how humans were meant to live. Not in snow. Not on ice. Not in an urban rectangle, but right up there just to the right of that pier, feet snuggled in the sand, face on fire, waiting for absolutely nothing to happen. The beach is a temple to nothing important happening. And nothing happens all the time on the beach.

Some people sit under umbrellas and read. I tried that. Did not work. I have to be in the water, body-surfing the waves, slicing my feet on the shells, feeling the sting of jellyfish and the nibble of some other kind of fish I would rather not know about. That is the whole point. When there is this much water, you have to be in it.

When I go to the beach I cannot even remember what I do for a living. The advertising banner hanging off the tail of a plane is invisible to me. I do not care that “Hot Tuna has the best crab cakes on the beach.” I say the word “dude” even more often when I am around water.

Feeling tired, pissed, stressed, burned out, freaked out, anxious, worried, hurried, sober? Come on in, the water’s fine, dude. While it may rust your car, salt water heals all human wounds, both physical and mental. Maybe it is because there are no enemies in the water. Republicans become liberals. Liberals become conservatives. Almost everyone gets along when they are half naked and working on a good case of melanoma. It is even possible to get a good night’s sleep on the dunes, the sound of waves calling Mr. Sandman.

Okay, ahhh, I am trying to remember what I was going to type here. I think there was a point to this post. Hell, who cares, dude. There’s a killer wave over there and I still have a couple of layers of skin left.

Listen, dude, no matter where you are right now, no matter what you are doing, go find a big chunk of water, preferably a beach, turn off your phone and stop reading drivel like this.

Pic Above: Sunday, 7 AM, 57th Street, Virginia Beach. Your beach may vary.

Alabama summer harvest: Covington County tomatoes, Chilton County peaches and plums.

The tomatoes were fire red. The plums were speckled purple. Peaches have their own color: peach. I know that because I saw it at Lowe’s in the paint department.

Brown paper sacks bulging with all three jostled in our backseat after a long and circuitous route through almost every state in the Deep South. The tomatoes came from the patch of a former Ag teacher at my high school in Andalusia. The peaches and plums had been waiting for us up the road in Chilton County, Alabama. If you think Georgia peaches are the best, you are mistaken. The land around Clanton, Alabama grows the best peaches I have ever eaten, and while you may claim otherwise, my own mouth is the only measurement of taste I can attest to.

South Alabama tomatoes can be eaten like apples if you don’t mind juice running down your chin, and I don’t. But by leaning way over, I avoided messing up my shirt. With the peaches and plums, Susan nor I were so lucky.

By the time we made McFarland Blvd. in Tuscaloosa, we had peach-colored stains on the fronts of our shirts. I had plum juice on mine as well, which is why I prefer to wear ugly, multicolored shirts – to hide the barbecue and other such droppings. Susan’s shirt, despite being peach in color already, showed peach stains anyway. This just proves several peach colors grow across the spectrum.

A decade separated us from our last visit to the gentrified shade of our alma mater, the University of Alabama. It was a hard contrast to the absolute destruction of the recent tornado that scraped half the town down to stumps and PVC pipes protruding up from concrete foundations. Bent metal, thrown bricks, pocked walls, twisted cars, ripped wood and broken glass had been bulldozed into pyramids in an effort to clean up the horror. It was a study in contradictions; total mayhem passing just a few hundred feet from untouched beauty. The randomness of the violence left us speechless and we drove street after street saying very little.

Alberta City, a small town where we used to go to an IHOP 34 years ago, was gone. No buildings, no trees, an elementary school wiped clean from the ground as if it had never there. To the left or right, fenced-n rubble for as far as you can see.

The university was almost untouched. After walking around the old campus, visiting familiar haunts and admiring dozens of new buildings, we went to the one of the best restaurants in our memory – only to find the Waysider closed for the day, but undamaged. Catch them in the morning and be prepared to wait for the best biscuits you will ever eat. Catch them at the wrong time and you end up at Waffle House down the road (which I refuse to complain about since I consider Waffle House to be as fine a dining establishment as there is in any town).

With good and bad memories of Tuscaloosa in our rearview mirror and an All American breakfast in our stomach (yes, we eat breakfast for dinner a lot), we drove toward Birmingham, past the Mercedes-Benz plant and Bessemer, looking at the Vulcan, the largest iron state in the world, perched on Red Mountain to our right. Night caught up with us near Trussville and we used our AAA card to whittle down a hotel room for the night. At the check in counter, the old woman looked at the stains on my shirt and said, “Looks like y’all must have come up through Chilton County.”

Barbecue is the most popular subject in Southern literature after drinking, Jesus and football. You cannot click on a Southern website, flip through a Southern magazine or unfold a Southern newspaper without a “Top 10” list of barbecue joints being hoisted on their own smoky petard with savory descriptions smoking under a beautiful photograph of a sandwich that would make an Auburn fan yell “Roll Tide!” at high noon out in front of Toomer’s Corner. Barbecue will get you trouble like that, worse than beer or bourbon, even. Cue has its on DNA changing gene, turning Christians into gluttons and gluttons into bypass patients.

Having worshiped at damned near every decent and some indecent barbecue establishments across the South for well over 48 years, I can say without reservation, this is a subject I know too well and my medical records prove it.

The sloppy picture you see up there is not the beautiful shot you will find in Garden and Gun or Southern Living or on the Food Network. Those are lovely side shots, prepped by a food stylist and turned just right to make you hornilicious. No, I took that picture up there with my phone in the middle of a “Cue Coma,” which can happen when you wander upon a sandwich so fine you use a fork out of respect. You can see the fork in the pic. Of course, that “Cue Coma” condition can change from place to place and time to time depending on your level of passion, hunger and luck. On a Saturday afternoon in Winter Park, Florida, I ran across all three at once – the barbecufecta, the father, son and holy smoke of flavor.

Although Orlando is not exactly a hotbed of barbecue piety by any top 10 list – I passed a small building exhibiting all the signs of amazing smoked gold: a smell that attracts lawyers, rednecks, chefs, children, dogs and wayward housewives. The line was not just out the door; it was out in the street – the dangerous part on the other side of the yellow line where minivans roll with abandon toward Mickey’s headquarters down the road. When people are willing to stand in 4-lanes of tourist town traffic to lick their fingers after holding your meat, that’s the only advertising you need in barbecue circles.

Once John Rivers, formerly the president of a $1.4 billion pharmaceutical company, decided to ditch it all and start smoking meat, Orlando jumped up the Cue list a few notches in my book. 4Rivers Smokehouse is the result. I do not know what type of drugs he sold before in his pharma world, but I can say with greasy honesty and Plavix-gulping delight that his current prescriptions will cure what ails you.

Mr. River’s barbecue and sides are as good as I have ever tasted. That’s a hard-ass statement, I know. I mean every word. From the lines outside, I am not the only person chewing with that opinion. It is worth driving 11 hours down I-95 for is the smoked jalapenos stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon alone. I swear to God you’ll admit to crimes you did not commit just to eat another one of those poppers. In the pic up there, it’s the odd-looking thing in the white Styrofoam container at the bottom. The other three are in my stomach right now. One bite of anything in that pic and you’ll forgo the lines at Disney World to stand in John’s line off West Fairbanks Avenue in 98º humidity, rain or shine.

So far, and to the discredit of Southern culinary writers, I have not seen a national review of 4Rivers Smokehouse like the endless and deserved raves about Sonny Bryan’s and Sweatman’s that pour from traditional Southern publications. That will change. Guaranteed. John T. Edge, if you are reading this, set your GPS south and give this place its due.

http://www.4rsmokehouse.com

Over the next several posts, I will tell a few tales from a trip Susan and I recently took across Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee – most of the South as I know it. We also came within 20 miles of Kentucky and Mississippi on this 2,500 mile run to revisit our roots. We did not visit either of the Café Risque’s we saw on our journey, however. I only mention that because I know several people who have and who asked me about it several times during my trip. No nekked lunch for us.

Thirty-four years ago, my wife and I spent our honeymoon and every dime we had – all $400 of it – to go to a fairly new amusement park in Orlando, Florida called Disney World. That’s sort of how this recent trip began, as an ode to that part of our past. We went back to the Magic Kingdom and barely remembered any of it except Space Mountain – which I had to ride with the help of half a Vicodin due to my persistent back ailment. Getting old is a bitch.

The adventure grew to a drive down Highway 30A along the Florida Panhandle (a ride worth taking for anyone with a love of condos built just before the real estate meltdown). From there we took care of a little family business in Alabama and then on to a visit to our Crimson Tide Alma Mater in Tuscaloosa, walking one of the most beautiful campuses in the country and crying at the devastation of the most horrific tornado to ever hit Alabama. My words are too weak to tell what we saw in Alberta City.

Along the way, we roamed what was once called The Redneck Rivera in Panama City Beach, Florida, we dropped by boiled peanut shacks in Georgia and peach stands in Chilton County, Alabama. We ate barbecue every chance we got (as the first post following this one will attest). We saw fire and torrential rain, alligators, floods, cats, dogs, chickens, deer, armadillos and hundreds of what my father called “the National Bird of the South,” buzzards. From sugar-white sand to red clay to buggy swamps, wind-bent trailers and leaning loblollies, my Southern history passed before my aging eyes. Sometimes memory lane has a few potholes. But between spicy bites of Gulf shrimp in Destin to plums in Clanton and homegrown tomatoes in Andalusia, our stomachs relived a few memories as well. People down there eat better than people up here. Sorry. That is just the Southern Baptist truth.

By the way, if you have never stopped by South of the Border on the aforementioned side of the North Carolina/South Carolina state lines on I-95, you have missed one of the strangest things ever to sit beside an American interstate (unless you count that straddling-the-road McDonald’s in Oklahoma). The pic of it up there hardly does it justice. Yet people still get married there.

With a cold drink between us, let the trip begin.

Humidity chokes me as if a hot towel is wrapped around my head. It is too hot to write. Once the temperature pops 100º, my keyboard begins to reject my fingers, or perhaps it is the other way around. Above me, suspended in the cerulean sky, the sun slaps the back of my neck, a neck that has had a lot of practice being red.

People move in slow motion up the sidewalk, the look of lost vacations creasing their faces, their shoulders slumped, their eyes squinting the brightness into slits just small enough to let in bits of visual information that allow them to coherently put one leg in front of the other. It is a tough job on a day like this.

Am I in Richmond? I look at the scorching skyline to be sure. Yes. My mind, however, wanders back to Key West where sentences ramble and pour between sips of frozen drinks and not a damned thing to do. No matter what they tell you about Hemmingway’s truncated writing style – pounded out in an upstairs room on an old manual typewriter next to fifty six-toed cats and bottle of rum – few people talk like Mr. Hemingway in Key West anymore. There are no periods in their sentences, just commas leading to another noun somewhere down there next to a margarita. I can imagine Cormac McCarthy describing Key West in a four-page-long sentence.

Duval Street’s music echoes in my head. Thoughts of chickens crossing Thomas Street headed for Blue Heaven make me want scrambled eggs and rubbery conch fritters. Instead I lean against the wall of the Edgeworth Building on Richmond’s Tobacco Row, remembering happy drunks in the cool darkness of Sloppy Joe’s and the laughing of aimless tourists roaming toward The Schooner Wharf Bar for their daily 7 A.M. happy hour. Even the iguana that crapped in my morning coffee from the limbs of a Royal Ponciana tree seems welcome right about now.

Have to stop this. Got to go to work. Duties, deadlines, obligations. My head is filled with ideas about assignments I have not even gotten yet. But those ideas are being assaulted and beaten unconscious by sunburned ghosts wearing cargo shorts and funky shirts while humming Jimmy Buffet music. I wince and wipe my face as if I can dislodge the wonderful and dangerous thoughts from my head. I cannot.

Another ten feet closer to the door of our office, yet far enough away to still turn around and go back home, grab my wife and pack a bag and buy a couple of tickets to the last island in the U.S. before Cuba and lose my corporate memory somewhere next to the bobbing boats waiting for a guy like me to do something stupid, like forgetting how to dial a cell phone or perhaps dropping his cell phone into the reflection of South Florida sky sloshing beside a fiberglass hull stenciled with a name like “Adios Responsibility.”

I fight the urge to run as I walk into the cool lobby of our office building and push the elevator button. I should take the stairs. I do not. In ten minutes I am in a meeting and Key West is far away. Soon it will just be photographs on my cell phone, the same phone I considered dropping into the Gulf of Mexico a few paragraphs ago. Leaving the meeting I walk into the restroom, go into the stall and dangle my phone over the ceramic bowl of water and wonder.

A 10-hour technology conference ends and Geoff and I take to the streets of New York City ready to stretch our legs. We walk for miles. It’s been a while for me since I roamed NYC and even longer for Geoff. I spent years in New York. In many ways, I know the town better than I know Richmond.

We walk down 42^nd towards Times Square after leaving Grand Central and bouncing around Friday evening’s crush of commuters. We turn left at the New York Public Library for Geoff to shoot the famous lions. Click. Next. Curling around behind the library, we come upon one of the most beautiful places in New York outside of Central Park. Lush green ivy covers the glass walls of the restaurant looking out across Bryant Park. As beautiful as it may be, it is not the best part. Being beautiful is the job of the pork chops inside.

The Bryant Park Grill is probably not at the top of some people’s menu of New York City restaurants. It should be.

“We have a special,” said the friendliest waitress I’ve seen in NYC in many meals. Crispy soft shell crabs.” She cocks her head to one side and grins. “By the way, that shirt makes your eyes look beautiful.”

This girl is good. I believe her, even though I know deep down that my shirts are hardly the highlight of anyone’s day, including mine. But it works. She can sell me anything right now. Then we asked about the pork chops. It is a seminal moment. Her face changes into a reflection of pure pleasure as she searches for words.

“Oh, my. The pork chops,” she pauses, thinking. “Oh…” She closes her eyes and smiles up at the ceiling. Her mouth is moving but only moaning sounds come out. Her semi-words trail off to a place where Geoff and I know for damned sure we have to get the pork chops.

When the charred chops come, two of them leaning on each other for support next to golden fingerling potatoes tucked beside sautéed, garlic spinach  surrounding chunks of apple wood smoked bacon and the whole thing doused lightly with a rhubarb compote, I know from the smell we are both in trouble and in paradise at the same time, which is a beautiful place to be, trouble in paradise.

“I hope you love them,” she says. We do. And do. And do. We love them more than the barbecue we ate at Virgil’s the night before. For me to love something more than barbecue is a rare moment in my culinary history. The Bryant Grill pork chops are just as the waitress moaned.

“If I were on death row right now, this would be the last meal I’d order,” says Geoff, chewing the apple wood bacon and staring into his plate as if it is Scarlett Johansson’s face. “This is the best meal I have ever eaten.”

“I might volunteer for death row if they served food like this,” I mumble, mouth filled with tender pork and savory spinach.

“Damn,” I say.

“Damned right,” says Geoff.

Fast forward. It is now two days later. As I am writing this, I think about death row and garlic spinach and apple wood bacon and pork chops from the great beyond, and I pause to flip the TV channel over there because I am tired of hearing the drone of teenage drama on MTV and there is Tom Hanks holding the massive hand of John Coffey (Michael Clark Duncan) on “The Green Mile,” lights exploding behind Hank’s head as Coffey imparts his special knowledge of the universe in a moment of extreme clarity. As I watch the transference of knowledge, I realize, a pork chop kind of did the same thing to me.

Photo From http://www.carolynbates.com

The porch straining across the front of the old house on Elizabeth Street in Key West was painted Haint Blue. My aunt’s house had a large porch with a ceiling painted Haint Blue as well. My grandfather talked about haints (ghosts and evil spirits) regularly. This nebulous shade of blue, according to people across the South, keeps such hauntings away. As a result of superstitions and cultural traditions, Haint Blue is popular from South Carolina to Louisiana.

“Haint Blue is sold specifically by Benjamin Moore,” said the old woman standing under the shade of a color in which the reflection turned her white dress a light turquoise hue.

“There are a lot of light blue porch ceilings around here,” I said. “Must be a lot of ghosts.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Key West is one of the top three or four haunted places in America.” She stood up straight like a teacher, which she may have been for years, ready to deliver her lecture.

“When slaves were brought to America,” she said, “they brought the idea of Haint Blue with them from the Caribbean. They often created it from indigo mixed with limes. There seems to be several shades of Haint Blue, but it seems that any variation works. Some people who paint their houses this color have no idea why. They just like the color.”

“My aunt’s house was ghost-free, as far as I could tell,” I said “Perhaps that’s because of the paint. Could have been that there were no spirits hanging out there to begin with, Haint Blue or not.”

“I’m sure it helped,” she nodded.

“How exactly does Haint Blue keep away evil spirits?” I asked.

“Ghosts can’t cross water,” she smiled, waving at the color above her. “When someone dies on this island, if they turn into a ghost, their spirit stays on this island.”

“Like what happens in Vegas…” I began before she interrupted me.

“Yes. Stays in Vegas.” She paused. “I went there once. But I didn’t stay, obviously.”

“If a ghost can go through a wall and haunt a place forever, how does water stop it?” I asked.

“The way I heard it is this: Water gives off some kind of energy that frightens ghosts,” she said. “Its like a voodoo or Santeria thing.”

The idea of a scared ghost seemed a bit odd to me but I went with it.  “And ghosts think that Haint Blue paint is water?”

“I guess ghosts are easier to fool than most people think,” she said.

I thought she might laugh, but she said it with a straight face.

Staring at the soothing aqua color, something began to bother me. “So what if the ghost is in the house and you paint it in there with the Haint Blue?” I asked.

She pursed her lips and squinted her left eye, turning around and glancing at her Haint Blue porch ceiling. “That would be a big problem, I reckon.”

It took less than fifteen minutes to realize I had found a place that fit a part of me that I have kept prisoner under the guise of corporate bullshit for 30 years. I was still in the cab when it hit me. I see why Harry “Give ‘Em Hell” Truman loved to come here. Key West is so far from DC – or his native Missouri – as to seem foreign. I know. I’ve lived in both. People in Key West have their own opinions about life, love, law and liquor. Independence flourishes. Eccentricity rules. Best to bring you’re a-game in that department.

Conch’s – what Key Westerners choose to be called – don’t care what you think about them or politics, religion, work ethic, prejudice or government. Just to prove it, Key West has left the United States officially several times (I lose track), forming the Conch Republic and still flying the blue Conch flag every chance they get from New Town to Old Town. According to the pilot, the sign on the airport building: “Welcome To The Conch Republic” is longer than the runway. The motto “One Human Family” is displayed at businesses and homes across the 4×2 mile stretch of very flat and independent land. People are happy, behaved and respect each other, even when they do not get along. It is another world down at the southernmost tip of the U.S. So leave yours behind when you come here; changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes and all that.

Leathery fishermen work docks; leathery tourists roam hundreds of bars; leathery Conch is served in balls of spicy cornbread. Dogs are everywhere. Some are dressed like pirates. Chickens dip and peck across streets and under tables. It seldom rains in Key West. The sky is so blue and the trees so red that people run into each other looking up at both. Of course, looking down you will likely see a plastic cup of rum or beer or “greenish booze from the blender.” Music pours from almost every open door on Duval, cool air rushing the sidewalk, luring sweating people inside. Word is there are well over 300 bars in 8 square miles. Most are packed. Some are disguised as restaurants. When the cruise ships dock, the crowd swells, the patrons get older and hundreds of Hawaiian shirts snug the bars.

The smell of salt breeze, fish, coconut, alcohol and cigars waft down Duval Street, a place much like Mardi Gras without the police. I saw two cops in 6 days while walking at least 10 miles a day. Then again, I was not in the thick of it at 3 A.M. I heard more laughter than a lifetime of jokes and more lies than a lifetime of politics. Except the lies are told knowingly as humorous stories meant to entertain.

“Life is just too damned hard and too damned short to spend it listening to lies told by assholes who think we believe them to begin with,” said a man who tossed his former job, life and wife and runs a fishing charter boat catering to “short-termers.” That’s what he calls people like me who only come down for a few days. “We understand our lies here. They are told with flair and honesty. Honest lying. That’s storytelling.”

“The tales are tall under the palms,” said a woman driving a tour bus passing us near the first headquarters of Pan Am. “If you want a beer, there’s Kelly’s in the old Pan Am house.”

No shortage of beer in Key West. They sell it in four-foot wide alleys “just big enough to wedge two drunks into,” according to the guy sipping a cool one in front of the “smallest bar in the world.” Open containers are no problemo on Duval. The Anheuser-Busch distributor must be a happy guy.

Over by the Hog’s Breath Saloon sign a man laughed with passersby. Friendly and wanting nothing from anyone, I think his name was Bart or Ben. Could have been Louie or Frank or Gerald. Hell, it doesn’t matter. No one has a name down here.

“You will be lied to at least 30 times a day at work, I bet,” he said. “That’s not the bad part. The bad part is, they don’t even know how to lie in a good way. They are pathetic liars. They’re just deceit wrapped in fake concern. There are two kinds of liars. Only one of them you want to hang out with. The rest of them can go to hell. And will.”

“I’m in advertising,” I said, smiling.

He nodded, holding up one hand like an evangelist on TV. “Preaching to the choir, brother.” He walked over and rubbed his dog’s head and turned to me and squinted. “I hope your lies are the good kind. Not bullshitting some poor bastard about what happens in a meeting. You getting me here?”

“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I said. “If you’re going to lie, make it a good story about something that…” He cut me off.

“Look, sorry to cut you off, but Hemingway lived up on that hill over there.” He pointed up Whitehead Street to what was likely a one-foot-above-sea-level rise in the landscape, not exactly a hill to most people, but easily a hill here in Key West.

“I was there earlier today,” I said. “Lots of cats. Some six-toed. The guide said a few things I know to be suspect.”

“So?” he said sharply. “Did you go there for the guide or for Hemingway?”

“We both know the answer to that question,” I said.

“Hemingway knew how to tell a good lie, didn’t he? Wrote them in an attic behind his house. A Farewell to Arms, Death In the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls – all his best lies were written down right up there. Tennessee Williams wrote the first draft of A Street Car Named Desire over at the La Concha Hotel. There are a lot more too. I’m just too drunk to remember them all.”

He seemed more sober than most people I know.

“I wouldn’t call what Hemingway wrote lies, necessarily,” I said. “I’d call them great stories.”

“But were they true?” he said, pausing for effect. I grinned. “Same thing!” He burped silently, his eyes remembering lunch. Obviously a red onion was involved.

“Hemingway didn’t lie about what some shit at work. He told lies about fishermen and wars and struggles with being human,” he said. “Great stories, his lies.”

I turned to leave, but he caught me. He was not finished.

“Jimmy Buffet records his lies in a concrete building near the harbor,” he continued. “Michael McCloud sings his over at the Schooner Wharf Bar. Some famous country stars steal songs from Michael, you know. Sometimes we inspire other people to lie. You get YouTube?”

“Some of Mr. Buffet’s and Mr. McCloud’s lies sound pretty true to me,” I said.

A group of loud people came by. One woman was loudly telling her friends about an adventure she most likely had not been on. She waved her arms in circles for effect. Everyone listened drunkenly.

“Proof right there,” he said tilting his head towards them. “I’m telling you, this is an island of damned good liars. And a few Nashville Pirates.”

VIDEO CREDIT: YouTube, Michael McCloud singing Tourist Town Bar at the Schooner Wharf Bar, Key West. As he has done for over 20 years.

Scribbled on an AirTran barf bag are these words: “Below me, the Atlantic meats the Gulf of Mexico, blending in shades of Galaxie 500 peacock blue, luminescent aqua and deep cobalt surrounding the last island in the Florida Keys. Scabs of other islands sprinkle to the left, northeast to the horizon. White froth follows boats in gently curling arcs between splotches of uninhabited tropical scrub that likely holds the bones of pirates and bootleggers and lost drug dealers. White houses hide under the pedals of thousands of flaming red Poinciana trees, hugging palms, shading people drinking frozen margaritas. It is hard to tell the haint-painted front porches of the hundreds of Conch houses apart. From row 11 of this plane, everything seems to be green, white or red down there. The entire island is shaped like Michael McCloud’s crooked smile.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtiZpbRGHZg

Bits and pieces of paper fill my Moleskin notebook. On each one is scrawled slanting and abbreviated words that connect to memories I plan to share one day, somehow. The barf bag is a bit longer, however, bending and folding at the torn edges.

More scribbles: “A long bridge stretching U.S. 1 from Fort Kent, Maine dead ends 90 miles from Fidel Castro’s backyard next to the “first and last bar on U.S. 1” – The Green Parrot Bar, known for Jazz on Sundays. Music on the rest of the bougainvillaea-laced island, once known as Bone Island, sounds more like something in Jimmy Buffett’s head. To some younger people Jimmy Buffett is just a character on South Park. A joke. But down here, he’s the Parrot Headed Patron Saint of sunburned middle-aged white guys wearing Hawaiian shirts and wishing pretty girls still looked at them like it was 1975. I guess there are worse things to be. That said, I like Jimmy Buffett. But then again, I kind of fit that demographic up there.

Over the next few posts, I will tell stories of what I saw, heard and felt in Key West. It is sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes inspiring, at least to me it was. So stay tuned if you have a few minutes to waste on tropical verbiage. Or book your own cheap flight and drop into a world where things are not like they are where you live, unless of course, you live in Key West where it is always 5 o’clock.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPCjC543llU