A Scarlet Macaw torpedoed a calm Royal Palm, slashing open the peach underbelly of the virgin dawn, coming in fast, yawing hard, an expert move by an experienced flier, his red vanishing into the sunrise-tinted green as he pierced the spherical frond canopy at speed. The red dart was halted somewhere within the dome of arcing emerald and the grand bird did not exit the other side as its velocity indicated it would have had to have done. The cocky screech that followed made it clear the landing was a success, even easy.Scarlet Macaws, are a sign of luck, I told myself as I pushed down the dual compression release buttons on the opposing jugs of the Special Agent Zebra Express. A close double hiss spit sand against the snare drums as the release valves shoved shut, a serious sound swiftly followed by a rubbery double thump that slammed the humidity up against the walls of the garage at the Republic of Literature in the aquatic Miami morning. The 240-chopper bellowed to life, a fighting bull entering the ring, a prizefighter awakened suddenly, startled, wide-eyed, big, brash, swinging wildly.
For a moment I sat on the rumbling machine, allowing its rhythm to meld with my own, allowing myself to settle into the steel, rearrange my molecules so as to shift from man to machine, then partway back to man again.
The Royal Palm spit a bolt of red heat lightning into the atmosphere.
U.S. 1, or “Useless One”, as dubbed by natives of Miami, is the one road leading south toward Key West. It was open, broad backed, relatively free of Car People and cool. The lack of traffic caught my eye. The cool breezes caught my skin.
Mitch “Big Fish” Pheffer, a man credited with dragging some 74 men out of 80-foot seas and onto rescue tugs during the storming of a doomed and sinking oil barge in the disobedient Gulf of Mexico by the unkempt whore, Hurricane Roxanne, was waiting on me to the south at the gateway, the gateway to the Key islands that drip in drops off the rain-soaked tip of South Florida. We’d ride to Key West together for the Key West Poker Run.
“Zebra,” Big Fish said cheerfully, extending a hand as I rolled up. “Good to see you. Would you look at this weather? What a great day for a ride.” Big Fish was mounted similarly to myself, on a Thunder Mountain Custom Cycles (TMCC) 240 Blackhawk chopper. Fish ran the show for TMCC up in the north country, in Loveland, Colorado. He was the General Manager, or the General of the Infantry, some sort of officious title that meant he worked long and hard and got most of the blame and handed the credit for any victories to the owner.
It’s an unusual event, the Key West Poker Run. Not unlike the final Key island for which it’s named, the run is mildly disorganized, there’s no real schedule, riders leave whenever they feel like it, they arrive Friday or Saturday or maybe even Sunday. Some arrive early, on Thursday. Some stay in Key West and never return to the mainland, but instead fall in love with a sailor, or a pretty girl from South America, or, on Key West, both. Key West is that way. Clocks coast to stops.
Shoes wear out slower, from lack of use. Ambitious moss paints the west sides of houses and buildings a velveteen green. Palms gossip in encoded Morse code messages with one another with each sigh of the placid Atlantic that holds the island up. Hemingway’s ghost wanders through the minds of locals and tourists alike, pondering suicide, still trying to write that one true sentence. Nobody hurries…
We’d left early. Avoid the traffic. That was the game. Smell the sea salts on the morning air. And the natural sulfur. A lot of Americans have ridden motorcycles across the large landscapes of this country. But few, comparatively, have ever ridden across the Atlantic. When you ride to Key West, you spend a greater amount of time riding over water than you do riding over the islands.
How many Keys are there, I wonder, as myself and Big Fish do the gasoline waltz, twirling wheels, pirouetting bearings, pounding pistons.
The islands run southwest from the mainland, linked by a single, delicate strand of asphalt strung between pillars. It takes 110 miles of Overseas Highway to get down to the bottom, the end, the Southernmost Point of the U.S.A., the southwestern-most Key, Key West. The average speed is 40. The speed limit is 45. You can throw 6th gear away. Marathon Key is only halfway there.
The ride makes you healthy again. It rids you of wrong and “no” and maybes. Key West is real, tangible, quiet, something you can touch and absorb, lacking in hectic confusion, and at the same time dreamy, a good idea on oiled chrome balls, it creates the sense that it could slip away at any time and cause a great sense of loss. But then all good things are worrisome in the sense that they might one day become a good thing lost. It is independent, even from the islands above it, the youngest, or maybe oldest child of large family with a personal sense of style and wit that seems to defy obvious genetics. There is no north in Key West. There is only Key West, and “up there”. 2 miles by 4 miles. 27,000 residents. All tan. All with time to spare.
Succession from the Union occurred on 23 April, 1982, after the U.S. Border Patrol blockaded the Keys with a “border”. Mayor Dennis Wardlow, responded by leaving the Union, declared War, then immediately surrendered, demanding Foreign Aid; the Conch Republic. The coconuts are free.
Duval Street, it’s lined with hat stores, restaurants, bars, shops, some interesting, some crammed with plastic doodads not worthy of a fire, most converted from large, Victorian houses. Duval is the main street, the center of attention in a town that tries to avoid attention. There’s Sloppy Joe’s, a “famous” bar, big and empty in the belly, a hungry fat man, with music on one end of the open warehouse; reminds a man of Tipitina’s in New Orleans.
Ernest Hemingway– he was a writer– and a decent one at that, made Joe’s famous by using it as a place to take writing breaks. His house wasn’t far from there. A few blocks. Just enough to clear the head. He used to walk over and drink, have lunch, make notes. He wrote a nice book on fishing. That was after Paris. After the sun also rose. After the big war. After the 20’s roared.
The Iguana bar is a few steps south. I think it was south. A local’s place. Real nice. Not as crowded. At least during the poker run.
Captain Tony’s Saloon, oldest bar in Florida. Beer’s coldest there.If you go to the end of Duval, near the sprawling hotel where Big Fish bunked, and hang a left, there’s a cigar shop that has fine smokes. Prices are good.
What is the Key West Poker Run, I wondered, sitting, smoking a nice cigar while Big Fish sweat and hustled. He was trying to sell motorcycles to thickset men with moneyed bellies and deserving airs, men who all individually believed their financial might made them significant, crucial even, worthy of something, though they probably couldn’t tell you what. Dirk Peterson, who runs the show, told me the run was to raise money for a charity. All the money is given away. Which is nice, I thought to myself as I noted the raised diver’s helmet on Big Fish’s belt buckle. Big Fish was more relaxed in this environment, surrounded by the ocean he loved to sit under.
“There were times, when I was diving,” he later told me over a drink as the sun burned into the sea, “I’d just sit down there, in the darkness, the sound of my own breathing putting me in this weird sort of trance. You’re so removed from man down there. The big fish, they’d come up sometimes and lean against you, like you were their friend or something. It was so peaceful.”
The Key West Poker Run is a charity. But who puts in the money, I wondered. Supposedly you register before rolling down. Some actually do it. Most just ride down.
A subtle rain. I go walking while Big Fish and Doug put away the motorcycles for the evening. My residence for the long weekend is a bed-and-breakfast over near the big cemetery. In the night you notice that Key West isn’t as illuminated as the average city.
Dinner at a small place with massive ceiling fans that wave for attention in vain under an unusual amount of air conditioning. The close, warm air is a relief when I exit. Walking, smoking another cigar. There are no real events in the poker run, beyond the main event, relaxing on the island. Which may well be the best event I’ve ever encountered at a motorcycle rally.
In the street, near a man rolling tobacco leaves into cigars with juice-stained fingers, several women were topless and one was wearing nothing, but leather sandals, chatting with the local cops, who seemed unfazed by the bare women. Which is how it should be really.
In a doorway of a local shop was Mercy, looking bored, watching the bikes with a half-hearted longing. Ethiopian, copper colored, lean, with the handsome look Ethiopian women all bear. She’d never ridden a motorcycle in her twenty-some years, she admitted, watching the long chops as they rolled motionlessly past on rolling black rings that were all but obscured by the darkness.
Tomorrow night. At midnight. That was the plan. I’d take Mercy on her first ride.
Morning. Breakfast. We only enjoyed the sunshine for a brief period. Big Fish was there to sell motorcycles. Doug, one of his men, had brought down a long trailer of motorcycles. Keep ‘em polished, answer the questions, throw a tent up when it rains. And it always rains. Afternoon, when it gets hot and the day gets sluggish, confused, baffled by its own heat, then it comes, dark off the Atlantic, smooth, rain that falls with practiced regularity. Nobody pays attention to the rain in the Keys. Only the tourists try to avoid falling water.
The hotels in Key West down near Duval work well. They’re clean. Most have expensive views of the ocean. But I think a man should stay in the small bed-and-breakfast spots instead. Old homes converted to stay-awhiles provide a quiet spot to toss your gear bag and catch the Key West bug. It’s a bug you want. Gets into your veins and the fabric of your skin, under the paint of your motorcycle, a bug that slows you down, relaxes the stiff skeleton, discharges the spinal chord.
“There’s a pirates’ museum,” Big Fish told me as I strolled up. I’d bought a new linen shirt at a local store and was enjoying how lightly it sat on my shoulders. “We have to go see it.”
“Wouldn’t it have been great to be alive then,” Big Fish asked, admiring Blackbeard’s pistols. “Can you imagine?”
Midnight, Mercy was ready to ride in typical Key West attire, shorts and sandals.
“Don’t touch the pipes,” I warned her casually. “I’ll only say it once, so as not to reduce the significance of the warning. Otherwise, you burn yourself. Where would you like to go, on your first ride?”
Mercy pointed over my left and right shoulders as we rolled along. Occasionally I would hear her saying from behind, in her light, girlish voice, “This is so beautiful. No wonder everybody likes these things.”
We rode the big road, on the east side of the island. It arcs around the island, rides right up against the sea. 100 miles out, a young hurricane named Katrina glowed and popped with power, long tendrils of electric might and color fingering gigantic black thunderheads that silhouetted starkly against the flawless full moon. There are never hurricanes on the moon.
Standing by the roadside, we chatted as infinite waves gently slapped the concrete a few feet below us, trying to get us to watch them.
“Have you ever seen lightening like that?” I asked.
“No. In Ethiopia we never have this kind of storm. We don’t have hurricanes. They’re so beautiful.” A mountain range of clouds thousands of feet high glowed internally in response, then went black again. “Your motorcycle is incredible. I love riding it.”
“Why the name Mercy?”
“My father was a spy. He was set for execution the day I was born. Then, with no explanation, they released him.”
“Why Key West?”
A large stingray soared four feet out of the water and slotted silently back into the silvery mass without so much as a ripple in the gleaming distance.
“It’s so warm,” Mercy said. In the full moonlight she looked like dusted mercury. “And the storms just always seem to go around you when you’re in Key West.”
Far, far in the distance, I could see what looked like a small rowboat coming in from the storm, with a single old man at the helm.
–Special Agent Zebra
Key West
September, 2005
“There were times, when I was diving,” he later told me over a drink as the sun burned into the sea, “I’d just sit down there, in the darkness, the sound of my own breathing putting me in this weird sort of trance. You’re so removed from man down there. The big fish, they’d come up sometimes and lean against you, like you were their friend or something. It was so peaceful.”
The Key West Poker Run is a charity. But who puts in the money, I wondered. Supposedly you register before rolling down. Some actually do it. Most just ride down.
A subtle rain. I go walking while Big Fish and Doug put away the motorcycles for the evening. My residence for the long weekend is a bed-and-breakfast over near the big cemetery. In the night you notice that Key West isn’t as illuminated as the average city.
Dinner at a small place with massive ceiling fans that wave for attention in vain under an unusual amount of air conditioning. The close, warm air is a relief when I exit. Walking, smoking another cigar. There are no real events in the poker run, beyond the main event, relaxing on the island. Which may well be the best event I’ve ever encountered at a motorcycle rally.
In the street, near a man rolling tobacco leaves into cigars with juice-stained fingers, several women were topless and one was wearing nothing, but leather sandals, chatting with the local cops, who seemed unfazed by the bare women. Which is how it should be really.
In a doorway of a local shop was Mercy, looking bored, watching the bikes with a half-hearted longing. Ethiopian, copper colored, lean, with the handsome look Ethiopian women all bear. She’d never ridden a motorcycle in her twenty-some years, she admitted, watching the long chops as they rolled motionlessly past on rolling black rings that were all but obscured by the darkness.
Tomorrow night. At midnight. That was the plan. I’d take Mercy on her first ride.
Morning. Breakfast. We only enjoyed the sunshine for a brief period. Big Fish was there to sell motorcycles. Doug, one of his men, had brought down a long trailer of motorcycles. Keep ‘em polished, answer the questions, throw a tent up when it rains. And it always rains. Afternoon, when it gets hot and the day gets sluggish, confused, baffled by its own heat, then it comes, dark off the Atlantic, smooth, rain that falls with practiced regularity. Nobody pays attention to the rain in the Keys. Only the tourists try to avoid falling water.
The hotels in Key West down near Duval work well. They’re clean. Most have expensive views of the ocean. But I think a man should stay in the small bed-and-breakfast spots instead. Old homes converted to stay-awhiles provide a quiet spot to toss your gear bag and catch the Key West bug. It’s a bug you want. Gets into your veins and the fabric of your skin, under the paint of your motorcycle, a bug that slows you down, relaxes the stiff skeleton, discharges the spinal chord.
“There’s a pirates’ museum,” Big Fish told me as I strolled up. I’d bought a new linen shirt at a local store and was enjoying how lightly it sat on my shoulders. “We have to go see it.”
“Wouldn’t it have been great to be alive then,” Big Fish asked, admiring Blackbeard’s pistols. “Can you imagine?”
Midnight, Mercy was ready to ride in typical Key West attire, shorts and sandals.
“Don’t touch the pipes,” I warned her casually. “I’ll only say it once, so as not to reduce the significance of the warning. Otherwise, you burn yourself. Where would you like to go, on your first ride?”
Mercy pointed over my left and right shoulders as we rolled along. Occasionally I would hear her saying from behind, in her light, girlish voice, “This is so beautiful. No wonder everybody likes these things.”
We rode the big road, on the east side of the island. It arcs around the island, rides right up against the sea. 100 miles out, a young hurricane named Katrina glowed and popped with power, long tendrils of electric might and color fingering gigantic black thunderheads that silhouetted starkly against the flawless full moon. There are never hurricanes on the moon.
Standing by the roadside, we chatted as infinite waves gently slapped the concrete a few feet below us, trying to get us to watch them.
“Have you ever seen lightening like that?” I asked.
“No. In Ethiopia we never have this kind of storm. We don’t have hurricanes. They’re so beautiful.” A mountain range of clouds thousands of feet high glowed internally in response, then went black again. “Your motorcycle is incredible. I love riding it.”
“Why the name Mercy?”
“My father was a spy. He was set for execution the day I was born. Then, with no explanation, they released him.”
“Why Key West?”
A large stingray soared four feet out of the water and slotted silently back into the silvery mass without so much as a ripple in the gleaming distance.
“It’s so warm,” Mercy said. In the full moonlight she looked like dusted mercury. “And the storms just always seem to go around you when you’re in Key West.”
Far, far in the distance, I could see what looked like a small rowboat coming in from the storm, with a single old man at the helm.
–Special Agent Zebra
Key West
September, 2005
