For many years, an outline of my posterior adorned the upstairs bar top at Bagatelle, the lower Duval Street restaurant that was a high-rollers’ hangout in the early 1980s.
Mercifully, the sketch wasn’t visible. Instead, it had been traced on the temporary plywood bar top the first night the upstairs bar opened, shortly before the plywood was permanently covered with rare Australian beefwood.
Details of that raucous opening-night party remain hazy, but it definitely involved free-flowing alcohol and other substances.
I was perched on the bar when a friend decided to memorialize my denim-clad behind. Who was I to argue?
After all, Bagatelle was something special. Located in a gorgeous two-story wood-frame “Conch house” with a broad porch and balcony, it had a casual elegance that appealed to our offbeat crowd.
Under lazily rotating ceiling fans on the first-floor porch, bartenders like Phil Clark made cocktails and told tall tales with effortless fluency.
But the bartenders weren’t the only storytellers at Bagatelle. The regulars who wandered in during the afternoon lull, when the breeze dropped and the heat was practically a living thing, included some of the generation’s leading outlaw writers.
Thomas Sanchez, who later depicted Key West in his end-of-the-road masterpiece “Mile Zero,” frequented the place with his beautiful blonde companion, Diane Rippe. Phil Caputo, author of the definitive Vietnam memoir “A Rumor of War,” and a notable marlin angler, usually turned up at some point.
Even Jim Harrison, lauded for the three-novella volume “Legends of the Fall,” was a regular whenever he could escape his real-world home to indulge his passion for Keys tarpon fishing.
Watching those three and their cohorts at the bar, as they drank steadily and wrangled over topics that ranged from philosophy to fishing, I wasn’t bothered by the brutal late-afternoon heat. Despite being young and inexperienced, I sensed what a rare privilege it was to sit quietly and listen, soaking it all in.
However, Bagatelle wasn’t just a semi-highbrow haven for rebel writers. It was also home to a herd of mythical goats.
I might have played a tiny role in spawning the myth, but most of the credit goes to a nameless bartender and a curly-haired adventurer named Mikey Dare.
Mikey was renowned for his tales of jaunts around the Caribbean and exploits in places like Cozumel and Guatemala. Built like a longshoreman, he had a grin that combined innocence and pure wickedness.
Caputo called him one of the world’s great oral storytellers, yet his colorful yarns revealed little about his personal background. But in early 1980s Key West, that didn’t matter.
Mikey’s tough exterior hid a curious gentleness, and he treated me like a little sister. He was also a world-class cook — a talent probably developed working on the freighters and fishing boats that peppered his stories — and held occasional kitchen jobs at Key West restaurants, including Bagatelle.
During his time in the Caribbean and Central America, Mikey had learned several recipes for roast goat and regularly threatened to prepare them. Finally one summer day at Bagatelle, he served a goat dish as the lunch special.
The bar crowd, possibly over-served despite the early hour, ordered it enthusiastically. Shortly after that, a ferocious clattering and banging noise began overhead, emanating from the upstairs bar.
Startled, I spilled my drink and yelped, “What the hell is going on up there?”
The bartender shot back, “It’s the goats, of course. That’s where Mikey keeps the goats.”
The regulars erupted in laughter, and the imaginary goats loomed large in Key West conversations for months afterward.
Eventually most people forgot about them — but not me. Even these days, whenever I stroll past Bagatelle, I can almost hear the clatter of mythical hooves.
