Back when I was a 20-something hippie enchanted with my Key West home, my friends and I had a lot of time on our hands.
Around 1980, life was relatively simple on the island — a place we all regarded as outside the real world, and therefore not subject to the real world’s rules.
We worked just enough to pay the rent, buy a few necessities and pay our bar tabs (that is, if our bartender buddies wouldn’t give us credit or accept payment in lobster or other trade goods). No one tried to keep up with the Joneses — and besides, until the fabulous Fast Buck Freddie’s store opened, there was practically nowhere to buy high-end clothing or household items anyway.
We didn’t have much money, but we never felt poor. We rode beat-up bikes for transportation, swam in the Atlantic Ocean off the old Sands Beach Club, and hitched rides on friends’ boats to catch fish for dinner. Without cell phones or cable TV to distract us, we read books, relaxed and spent hours wrangling lazily over obscure topics.
I had another pastime. Because of my passion for Key West, I wanted to know as much about the place as possible. So I pedaled my bike around the narrow tree-shaded Old Town streets, learning their names and soaking up the atmosphere. I studied island history and famous residents and spent hours poring over old books in the beautifully shabby library.
Eventually, being cursed with a peculiar sense of humor, I developed a satirical narrative that blended street names, heritage and personalities into a mishmash that would make a historian cringe.
The narrative began, I decided, with railroad magnate Henry Flagler Avenue, who built the Florida Keys Over-Sea Railroad. He was the father of President Harry Truman Avenue — not to be confused with President Theodore Roosevelt Boulevard, President Dwight Eisenhower Drive or President John F. Kennedy Drive (who stopped by for the Cuban Missile Crisis).
In my absurdist chronicle, President Truman Avenue’s daughter Margaret married into the Launderette family, becoming the eccentric Margaret Truman Launderette.
history, the real one is pictured here, circa 1965. MONROE COUNTY PROPERTY APPRAISER//Florida Keys History Center
The Street family, I figured, was among Key West’s early settlers — raising daughters that included Caroline Street, Emma Street, Catherine Street and Julia Street. (Della Street, famed in books and films as attorney Perry Mason’s assistant, was probably a black-sheep cousin.)
At some point, I shared the quirky chronology with friends over cocktails at the Full Moon Saloon. Either because they were polite or dazed by the Moon’s startlingly strong drinks, they seemed fascinated.
Of course that motivated me to continue, turning my attention to Key West’s history as a literary haven. In my skewed satire, it dated back to legendary writer Ernest Hemingway House — whose ancestors included the famous ornithologist and artist who visited the island in the 1830s: John James Audubon House.
In fact, I imagined Audubon House’s obsession with painting birds might have inspired Hemingway House’s messy tale, “The Old Man and the Seagull.”
Later, after becoming a part-time secretary for Key West’s resident troubadour Jimmy Buffett, I wove him into the narrative.
By that time, the offbeat parody had gone completely off the rails and I never mentioned it to Jimmy. That was probably wise, as it portrayed him pining for a sultry woman named Margarita and chronicling his love in the career-making song “Wasting Away in Margarita’s Villa.”
As my life evolved, however, I abandoned the satirical narrative and forgot all about it — until it turned up recently in an old folder.
Reading it recalled those early sun-drenched days, when our lives were simple and Key West was a drowsy end-of-the-road paradise … and for a moment, smiling at the memories, I could almost picture President Harry Truman Avenue strolling around Old Town.
