Chris Robinson is a born storyteller, and his colorful life in Key West has given him plenty of fodder for tales — including some so wild that they sound like fiction, but are actually documented fact.
Now a Lower Keys fishing guide with roguishly twinkling eyes and long white hair, Robinson doesn’t need to make things up.
In late August, his tales were on full display during a panel discussion that was part of the Just a Few Friends celebration of Jimmy Buffett’s music and legacy. The panel was presented by Scott Atwell, author of “Buffett Backstories,” to launch the new edition of his book.
Audience members listened, spellbound, as Robinson described sharing adventures with Buffett and “gonzo journalist” Hunter Thompson — and tending bar for some 20 years at Key West’s landmark Chart Room and Louie’s Backyard.
He arrived in Key West in 1972, when he was 24 years old, and found himself in a renegade seaport town. City issues were decided at the Chart Room, pot smugglers were admired as romantic outlaws, and local treasure hunters drank rum with Pulitzer Prize winners escaping from “real world” constraints.
Before long, Robinson was the guy pouring their rum.
“I got a job at the Chart Room Bar, and Key West was run out of the Chart Room in those days,” said Robinson, whose regular customers included the local sheriff, state’s attorney, mayor and fire chief. “I was in the heart of everything.”
Friendships were formed with novelist and poet Jim Harrison, “Ninety-two in the Shade” author Tom McGuane and struggling singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffett, who later memorialized the Key West lifestyle in song and earned enduring fame.
“He was not a star then — he was just like you and me,” Robinson explained during the Buffett panel. “He used to sit with his little guitar and amp and play in the Chart Room.”
Even as a young man, Robinson had an easygoing attitude and lively enjoyment of the absurd — valuable personality traits for both a bartender and a flats fishing guide. During his early Key West years, they also served him well in an offbeat venture begun with buddy Tommy Hicks.
“We opened the world-famous All-Breeds Hot Dog Pound on Greene Street,” said Robinson with a grin. “Our motto was We Relish Your Buns.”
The business didn’t last long, but old-time Key Westers still remember the “pound’s” juicy hot dogs nestled in soft Cuban rolls.
Robinson and Buffett became fast friends when Buffett moved into the apartment above Robinson’s in an old house on the Atlantic Ocean, next to the bar and restaurant named Louie’s Backyard.
“As he got more popular, people would be knocking on the door with a six-pack of beer in their hands wanting to play music with him,” said Robinson. “Most of the time they hit my door because it was on the front.”
When Buffett departed, he loaned his apartment to writer Hunter Thompson, widely credited with establishing the gonzo journalism movement.
“Hunter was … he was bizarre,” said Robinson in a world-class understatement.
His tales of the writer include a midnight boating mishap when Thompson inexplicably fell out of his craft while trying to dock it, leaving it circling on its own.
“The boat is running loose in Murray Marine,” Robinson recalled. “It hits another one, jumps the fuel dock, comes back around after Hunter. And he said ‘Chris, the Boston was trying to get me. It circled around and it was coming to get me again.’”
By 1986, Robinson was tending bar at Louie’s Afterdeck, an open-air cocktail deck on the edge of the Atlantic, whose clientele combined local fishermen, upscale tourists and visiting celebrities. It was a position he would hold for 18 years.
Yet while he enjoyed the Keys’ partying pursuits, Robinson also was drawn to life on the water. An angler since his childhood, he bought a boat shortly after arriving in Key West and learned flats fishing tips from McGuane.
Eventually he got his captain’s license and began guiding. For years, he chartered part-time while working at Louie’s.
In 2004, he retired from Louie’s Backyard and started chartering full-time on his 18-foot Action Craft, fishing the flats for tarpon, bonefish, permit, barracuda and the occasional shark.
His current life is more peaceful than it was in his bartending days, but Robinson can still be persuaded to spin a yarn or two about long-ago exploits with friends. Based on the enthusiastic response to those yarns during the Buffett panel, his storytelling talents will be in demand for a very long time.
