Professional Trouble Maker - Key West
Seems I was told in a dream a little while ago (it’s now pushing 4:30 p.m.) that some sort of prize awaited me for being especially ornery or rough or something like that. Today, I figured, not all the time. But then, maybe all the time.
Perhaps it had something to do with the three rabid Florida Gator supporters I’ve been adopted by at Jack Flats on Duval Street. Whenever I’m in there on Saturday afternoon during football season and I see them, I’m welcome to join them during whatever game the Gators are playing. Being a big Alabama fan and all, perhaps these southernmost Gators are practicing love thy enemy, turn the other cheek. Or perhaps they are just fattening me up for the slaughter, if the Crimson Tide and the Gators duke it out again in the SEC Championship game, recognized in real football circles as The National Championship Game.
Like most Alabama haters, these Gator yokels pull against the Tide every time they play, which is really dumb, in my opinion, because you’d think they’d want the big red elephant to have a perfect record when it goes against the big green gator, so like what happened last year, when Florida won the SEC Championship by beating Alabama, there is no doubt anywhere, except maybe in Texas or Oklahoma, which is the best college football team in the nation. As for me, I pull for any team that plays Florida, for the same reason these three Gator yokels pull for every team that plays Alabama: I don’t want the Tide to play the Gators in the SEC Championship, or ever. I want the Tide to play a team that is easy to beat, a team like, say, Vanderbilt.
As we sat there last night cutting up, a fellow from Knoxville sitting at the next table joined our conversation. Turned out this Tennessee Volunteer, when he was much younger, had gotten a wild hare and had come down to the Keys and gotten a job at Wide World Sportsman in Islamorada, before it got fancy and tried to become the southernmost Abercrombie & Pinch (your wallet). He loved it, he said, got to meet all the great old-time fishing guides and the two great amateur fishermen, Ted Williams and Billy Pate. But eventually he caved in to the need to heed his daddy’s advice to go to college and get a degree, or else he’d spend his days tying flies and knots and never amount to much, if anything.
Although I didn’t say it, deep down inside I wished hard that I could have summoned all of the old guides he had named and some he had not, with whom I had fished off and on for around forty years in another life in and around Islamorada, and had gotten to know, some better than others, and whose elite and esteemed company I often had wished really hard to join by becoming a guide myself, and let him tell them to their faces that they hadn’t amounted to much, if anything.
What I did get in, when the conversation across the two tables came around to whether or not I am retired? — “No,” I said. To what I do? – I said, “I’m a professional trouble maker” — loudly amen’d by the southernmost Gators, who had seen it proved up close and personal just three weeks before, when right in the middle of a tense moment in a Florida game, a well put together youngish very drunk damsel parked her well put together very drunk self right in front of me, she was standing and I was sitting, and I couldn’t see anything but her backside. So I reached out and lightly touched her on the back with a finger, and when she wobbled her head about around to see who had reached out and touched her, I smiled and asked if she would move over a bit so I could see the game.
It immediately became apparent on her countenance that she had never been asked to move over so someone could watch a football game, or watch anything but her. She rotated all the way around, if it had been Fantasy Fest and she was going the full Monty, she might have had a better chance, but she wasn’t in the full Monty stance and I wasn’t wobbled by her suggestive pouty shimmy, although I did think to myself that maybe she was sort of propositioning me, but I was a bit worried about missing the action in the Florida game I was hoping Florida would lose, and I was a bit more worried that maybe I’d catch something from her, like spiders and snakes, if I lured her back to my pad to play ride the dolphin and eat the banana and suck the conch, so I simply said again that I would like to watch the game please, which, of course, was impossible with her still giving me the pre-Fantasy Fest imitation full Monty about three feet from my face.
Not thinking she’d like it very much if I reached out and touched some of her equipment, or just yanked off the covers altogether to see if it was all really her or maybe had come from a Dupont factory somewhere, I said, “You aren’t nearly as cute as you think you are.” At which .44 magnum affront, insulated by perhaps a .20 blood count in her alcohol stream, she only developed what looked like a reaction that maybe a .22 caliber bullet would cause. I mean, she really did think she was really cute, and she really was really drunk, and maybe I really should have used something really bigger, like turning her over my knee and spanking the living daylights out of her, but that might have caused me to really want to do more than just spank and I really didn’t want to spend the night in the pokey and the next few months reading about myself in the local gazettes and hate blogs.
So I simply told her again that she wasn’t nearly as cute as the thought she was and I really did want to see the football game, and this time it seemed she actually got the message that I really didn’t think she was really as cute as she thought she was, even though, despite all prior cautions and concernes, I still sort of really would have liked to bonk her on her pretty head with my caveman club and drag her home to see just how cute she really was, if she didn’t puke on me first. I think maybe it was this display of true southern gentleman chivalry, which I had learned in drunken fraternity parties at Vanderbilt, that perhaps really topped the weight scales in my favor with the three Gator yokels, as I haven’t heard the end of it from them since, and I probably never will. The Rocky Top fellow in the next booth thought it was pretty funny, too.
Yesterday was a hell of a football Saturday. I watched Alabama screw up two first-half touchdowns on long passes to wide-open receivers, because the quarterback threw the ball clean out of the stadium, and I saw the refs not call three blatant LSU penalties, two of which muffed calls allowed LSU to score its first touchdown. The third muff was the ensuing tackle of an Alabama receiver before the ball sailed over his head, by the LSU defender right in front of two referees. If the Tide receiver had not been tackled, which is why he was, he might very well have caught that pass, as it seemed pretty well thrown and he was Alabama’s best receiver, and he is tall and can jump a mile high, and he might have scampered the Tide Elephant in for yet another touchdown that should have happened in the first half but didn’t, putting the game away and the Bengal Tigers back in their meow cage.
Thoroughly disgusted and just about convinced Alabama was being punished because I was way too desperate for them to win, as in, I was measuring the size of my weenie by the number of points they put on the score board and the number of points LSU didn’t put up, “weenie mania,” I think it may be called somewhere, I left Jack Flats and did some other things for a while. When I returned, it was the third quarter and Alabama was ahead by a little bit. Then they started having bad karma again, so I left again, now convinced I was the cause of it.
Outside Jack Flats, I checked my cell phone and saw I had missed a call. It was from a woman friend, not girlfriend, I can’t find a woman who can put up with me. She lives in a trailer on a piece of land I own up the Keys a little way, and is supposed to look after the place for me, since I let her live there for nothing because the angels told me to let her live there for nothing. Probably some karma thing for my being a male chauvinist pig in another life, maybe in a lot of other lives.
Anyway, I called her back and she quickly got upset over something I told her to tell someone else, who had gone to her to get her permission to do something on the property that she knew, but pretended she didn’t, that I already had told him several times never to go to her about but to come to me. So now it was her duty to tell him to get off my property and never come back, because this sort of end-run sneak had happened too many times before and it wasn’t going to happen again. She then went psychotic, blasting me, not letting me speak, so I hung up. I called back in a few minutes and she was somewhat more subdued; maybe she’d never had a man hang up on her before, and we got it straight between us — no, you dirty mind, we came to an understanding of the minds. It’s my property, I get to decide what happens there, as long as the angels go along with it.
Like I said, maybe she wasn’t accustomed to a man hanging up on her, like the drunk bimbo had not been accustomed to a man preferring to watch a football game to putting up with her enchanting charms. Also was some recent history with my woman friend, in which I’d drawn a serious line in the sand with her not all that terribly different from the serious line I drew in the sand with the fellow last night, which wasn’t something she apparently was used to having a man do with her either. When she tried to use as the excuse for her going psychotic on the phone, that she was a woman and did what girls do when they get upset, I asked, not particularly sweetly, “What makes women special, that they use that as an excuse for going psychotic, but men can’t?” I remembered, but didn’t say it, telling another women friend recently that some years ago I had realized that for every male chauvinist pig there is a female chauvinist pig. You learn a lot of things in life, say, by being married seven times, that you don’t learn in college. A lot of things.
Following that peachy love and light phone conversation, I pedaled my bicycle out to Higgs Beach, where I saw three KWPD cruisers with officers attached hanging out around Casa Marina, which was having some sort of shindig. I wondered what had caused the city to furnish inside security for Casa Marina‘s party, when we have people being mugged and stabbed and stuck up at knifepoint on our city streets. I mean, shouldn’t Casa Marina furnish its own inside security for its parties? Shouldn’t our officers be out patrolling out public streets?
I ran into an old amigo on Higgs who asked me for a referral to a local lawyer to sue his ex-girlfriend on a promissory note she had reneged. I had told him before he gave her the money several years ago that I had been told in a dream that she was trying to fuck him and not to give her any money, but he had given it to her anyway and now here he was asking me to send him to a lawyer to sue her for what he had done to his own self. I said it was enough to make me want to go over to yon nearby palm tree and beat my head against the trunk. When another fellow showed up and started bitching about everything he thought was wrong with the world, about which he could do absolutely nothing but bitch about it, I said I had to go.
I wended my way back to Jack Flats, to learn from the southernmost Gators, now gathered at the river for the Florida-Vandy game, about all of which I tattle-tailed some earlier, that this current cardiac-kids Alabama team had once again snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat, which convinced me for dead sure that, yep, I had been jinxing them by playing the weenie mania game through them, instead of going out and playing some shaman football of my own, to help them beat those terrible Bengal Tigers I root hard for whenever they play anybody but Alabama. About the only time I can bring myself to root for Florida is when they play somebody like Oklahoma, Texas, Notre Dame or Southern Cal. No way would I ever root against a Southeastern Conference team against on of those foreigners. For sure, I’d die and burn in hell forever, if I ever did that. For sure.
Oh, I finished Tom McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade after I left the southernmost Gators at Jack Flats last night, watching Florida beat my alma mater, which was still putting put a good fight. I told the Gators last night that the reason I went to Alabama Law School was because I was tired of watching a football team have a perfect record, 0-10. Also in play, my daddy was close buddies with Bear Bryant, I had a pass to practices not even the press could get into, and I saw some darn good football when I was studying to be a lawyer, including an 8-1-1 Alabama team passing a 10-0 Nebraska blind in the Orange Bowl for a piece of the National Championship during my freshman year in law school.
The next year, an 10-0 Alabama team, let by Kenny “The Snake” Stabler, passed the Cornhuskers blind again, in the Sugar Bowl. That maybe best of all Alabama teams came in third in the “national championship poll,” behind Notre Dame and Michigan State, which had played to a tie when one of the two titans decided to go for a tie by kicking a field goal, instead of going for a win. “Like kissing your sister,” Bear Bryant had gruffed. Alabama would have beaten the tar out of either of the “co-national champions.” As for my own gridiron aspirations, maybe if I stay away from Alabama televised games and play shaman football, maybe the Elephant will get its revenge on the Gators this year.
As for Ninety-Two in the Shade, I think maybe McGuane, assuming he’s still alive, needs to ask himself if he wants to be a writer, or if he just wants to think he’s cute? The way this novel ends, one even has to wonder about McGuane’s future on this planet. The way the yahoo from Montana cranked up the flats boat and ran it on a plane through tricky waters he didn’t know shit from shinola about all the way back into Key West, left me, at least, wondering if McGuane had used a real fishing guide to ghostwrite the fishing parts of the story, which otherwise seemed authentic enough. But no fucking way does a yokel from Montana, or Alabama, or even Gainsville, safely race a flats boat back into Key West from the fishing grounds. No fucking way. Meaning, maybe that was McGuane’s cute way of telling people, who really did know something about flats fishing, how the tale really ended.
McGuane has, or maybe had, a hell of a command of the English language, a way of painting pictures with words to describe something that nobody else would ever describe it in that way. He also has, or maybe had, a command of many different disciplines. Yet, I couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t hopped up on something, LSD came to mind, when he wrote Ninety-Two in the Shade. But for the Hemingwayesque fatalist hero and his not at all fatalist girlfriend, Miranda, and some of the other really weird characters in the tale, whom I’d probably like to meet, if such people actually exist, I couldn’t recommend Ninety-Two in the Shade to anyone. The local public library has a copy, assuming I turn the copy I have back in. Maybe I’ll just mail it to a born-again Christian lawyer I used to know somewhat in Montana.
Sloan