Hemingway's Boat (73 page)

Through the years Thelma had listened to Gigi's crazy ideas about making some kind of scientific breakthrough on chelation therapy, which has to do with the removal of heavy metals from the body. He was going to apply chelation's methods to getting plaque out of the arteries and curing heart disease once and for all. He'd be world famous.

“If you come to Missoula, Greg, I won't be here,” Thelma said. She was going out to Hawaii with a friend for the University of Montana's opening game of the football season against the University of Hawaii. Gigi begged her not to go, but after she was in Honolulu, he had called to see if she had arrived okay and was having a good time. This was probably on September 7, 2001. Four days later, two taken-over airliners arrowed into the World Trade Center. Thelma and her girlfriend couldn't get off Maui. Gigi called again. “Please, I need you,” he'd said. She told him, “I'll be there soon.” He said, “If you aren't coming back now, I won't be coming to Missoula at all.”

By the third week of September, in Miami, he was raging. The newest breakthrough was to sink all his money into airline stocks—and then sit back and watch them rise in the aftershock of 9/11. He'd make a fortune
and leave the money to his kids. His wife was a money-grubbing alcoholic, he told some friends and at least one of his children. (In his manic state, he couldn't find phone numbers; pieces of paper spilled from his wallet at telephone stands outside gas stations.) He had come down to Florida from Montana with barely a change of clothes. Mostly, he was sleeping in those clothes at the house he and Ida owned in the Grove.

On Friday night, September 21, in drag, he tore through a local Borders bookstore. He was yelling and pulling down off the shelf his father's novels, scribbling his own name across the title page. Three days later, he dialed his third wife in Montana. He and Valerie hadn't spoken in a long while. When she didn't pick up, he left a lengthy message. He wished to thank her for the good years they'd had together, no matter all the bad, far more his fault than hers. “You did a wonderful job with our children,” he said. Valerie Hemingway writes about this call on the second-to-last page of her memoir. “I did something I never did before, I taped it,” she says. Did she somehow understand he was telling her good-bye? She doesn't say that, exactly.

That same evening, Dick Edmonston held his regular Monday-night open house at his home on Park Drive in the Grove. Gigi was a casual friend of the host's, and he tended to turn up at these standing parties when he was in town. Edmonston, a Miami playboy with a thing about cats, wandered around talking to his guests, who were smoking weed but not really snorting things. Gigi spent about two hours on a stool just outside the kitchen, stroking a cat in his lap and sipping from a glass of red wine. He was in a black cocktail shift and a brown wig. He held his unshaven legs crossed in a modest way. His wide feet were in a pair of spiky heels that looked at least a size too small. His friend Peter Myers, an Australian journalist, was at the party. He'd never seen Gigi as a woman. Myers thought to himself that Gigi was in better spirits than he'd seen him in a long time. He seemed damned healthy. Maybe he was like a lightbulb that incandesces the moment before it's going to go out. “Hello, Greg,” Myers said, trying to be casual. “No, it's Vanessa,” Gigi said evenly. “Oh, right, okay, Vanessa,” Myers said. The party broke up about midnight and Gigi drove off in a 1995 blue Ford.

The next afternoon, September 25, at 4:25 p.m., Vanessa or Gloria or Greg or Gigi or whoever he was at that moment was found by the police barging his way through a security gate at the entrance to a high-end high-rise apartment on Crandon Boulevard in Key Biscayne, quite close to Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park. There was said to be a woman in
this complex whom Gigi had dated from time to time. From the arrest complaint: “When the def. was confronted, he refused to cooperative [sic], refusing to give his name and D.O.B. and attempted to walk away several times from this officer.” They booked him on a double charge of resisting arrest without violence and failure to possess a valid Florida license. (He seems not to have had any license.) The bond for each charge was set at $500. He was kept in jail overnight, posted the $100—Ida, in Montana, terrified, and not wrongly, that he was going to blow all their money on crazed stock investments, had had their bank accounts frozen—got out by ten the next morning. Was it his last $100? I don't know.

The legal documents account for nothing between the time of his release on the morning of the twenty-sixth and his second arrest, two hours and fifteen minutes later, very close to the site of the previous arrest. Officer Real came along, with her flasher going, and there he was, the pathetic old guy with the streaked and almost whitish hair, clothes bunched in one hand, flowered thong in the other, and that white hospital gown covering his sun-burning shoulders.

Two days later, as mentioned, on Friday the twenty-eighth, his spouse learned where he was. Ida later claimed to friends and the press that she'd spent hours on the phone from Montana calling hospitals and jails, trying to find him. And once she did find him, why didn't she try to get him out? “He would've been on the street,” Ida said, a year later, to a reporter for
Rolling Stone
. “I wanted to get him into a hospital. I sent a psychiatrist to see him, but they wouldn't let him in.” Four days after he was dead, she told
The Miami Herald
, “He would not be dead if he had gotten the medical attention that he needed. I called constantly, constantly. I don't know if they ever gave him his high blood pressure medication.” And yet on the day after his death, on October 2, at 12:30 p.m., Gigi's wife would tell a medical examiner investigator on the phone from Montana: “He was not under any medication, but took Percocet until 4 months ago.”

On the same day that Ida found out where Gigi was, an entry was made in a jail log about his general behavior. Later, after his death, in an all-capped synopsis titled “TERMINAL EVENT,” an official of the detention center would write: “On September 28, he appeared forgetful and confused at times. His vital signs were taken and were as follows; b/p 140/90, pulse 80 and he was also afebrile. He complained of pain and was given two Tylenol tablets. By September 29, 2001 [that was Saturday], he appeared to be calmer than initially. He remained in a calm state with appropriate behavior.” Ahead of this: “He was advised that his doctor had
called and ordered him to take lithium; however, he refused stating that he does not take lithium and had not taken lithium in 3 years.” (The doctor's name is Floyd Rosen. He's still a practicing psychiatrist in Miami. He declined to talk with me because, as he said in a phone message, he just couldn't violate the patient-doctor code of privacy, even if Gigi was long dead. “First, do no harm,” he said, “and even now talking about it could do harm to the family.” There was a pause. And then the disembodied voice said, even more quietly, “You see, this was a man who suffered very much, and he was a
 … doctor
.”)

The prisoner stayed calm through the weekend. On Monday morning he was awakened at 5:50 a.m. for his scheduled early court hearing. Fifty years before, another Monday, in Los Angeles, he'd had another hearing scheduled for another court. Now Gigi asked Corrections Officer Chandra Christin, who had just come on duty, if he could have some “slippons”—his toes were cold. Christin left to get the paper-like shoes. Within five minutes she was back at pod 377. She looked through the window and saw Gigi facedown on the floor, wedged against a leg of the bed. She yelled to a fellow guard, Rosa Echevarria. They unlocked the door. They called out his name. No response. They turned him over. In the words of the Investigation Report summary, they “found him without a pulse or palpitation. C.P.R. was administered until the arrival of paramedics. Paramedics arrived and pronounced him deceased.” One of the documents (“Natural Death Investigation Continuation/Supplementary”) gives the time of death as “Approx. 5:55 a.m.” Fifty years before, at nearly the same moment, if you factor in Pacific time, Doctor Henry Randall Thomas was pronouncing Pauline Hemingway dead.

On a form titled “Deceased's Valuables and Personal Property Record,” there was a space provided for a listing of clothing at the time of death. “None” was written across it. There was another space for a listing of “Valuables” at the time of death. Written across it: “None.”

Did he somehow know this was the end? For fifty years, every end of September and beginning of October, to lesser or greater extents, the old sorrows and shames and manias over his mother's death had been clicking in for Gigi—only this time something in the gears slid and shifted and took him all the way over. This is the way I understand his story. Unlike his own father, Gigi didn't take the “family exit,” to use John Hemingway's expression in
Tribe
. In that sense, Gigi was braver than his own father—he let
death find him. But to repeat what I said earlier: I consider them both far braver than we ever knew. Hemingway always had the gift and release of his words—until he didn't have them. Gigi, without such a gift or outlet, ended up sparing his own children the burden and guilt of a parental suicide. The spiral ended. Two generations down from Ed Hemingway in Oak Park, something hopeful, in spite of everything, had happened for future generations of Hemingways. God knows, though, how Gigi must have dreamed and longed for death for so much of his life. Dream? On the last page of
Papa
, Gigi has his father telling him, “Atoms can't dream, Gig. No use deluding yourself, old pal.”

So what would a person with no clothes on have been doing outside the entrance to Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park at 12:15 p.m. on the Wednesday before death came stopping? I prefer to believe this: Gigi was sitting on that median curb, trying to regain his breath and courage, to climb Cape Florida Lighthouse, which was about a mile away. It sits at the bottom of Bill Baggs, surrounded by sea grapes and palms and a wild stretch of beach. It's one of the most famous landmarks in all of South Florida. Gigi liked going there. As a med student, he had climbed it with friends. It is 109 hard-breathing iron steps to the top, or at least to the watch tower. Gigi used to sit with friends at the little café near the base of the lighthouse. He liked the Cuban food and one of the old waiters, who was from Havana. At least once, in drag, he got his heel caught in the wedge between the slats of the café's outdoor deck and took a humiliating header.

Up there, on a clear day, it's possible to see all of watery metropolitan Miami. You can face southwest and cup your eyes and look down the flat curving necklace of the Florida Keys as far as your vision will allow. If you were able somehow to look nearly 155 miles down the blue-green necklace, to its last bead, you'd see another lighthouse, the one that stands catty-corner across from Gigi's boyhood home, the one at 938 Whitehead, the one around whose grassy base he and his brother Pat used to sometimes play cowboys and Indians while their father, across the street, worked on
Green Hills of Africa
. When the mood was right, when the writing had gone good, their dad would knock off early and go find them and walk with them the eighty-eight circular steps to the top, sometimes carrying the younger one in his arms or on his back, telling them both on the way up rich stories about the old, lonely nineteenth-century keepers who used to spend the nights fueling their lanterns and positioning their big reflectors for lost ships trying to make home. Making home, such a complicated
notion. I want to believe that a lost son, who'd decided to shed all his clothes so that he could feel lustful and lawless in the salt air, was intending to climb the lighthouse at Key Biscayne that noonday so that he could see, at least pretend-see, the lighthouse of his Key West boyhood, so he could
see
, way off in the distance, his father, his mother, his two brothers, Saint Mary Star of the Sea (where he served early-morning Mass in the middle years of grammar school), the P&O Steamship dock, the dance floor at Sloppy Joe's, his father's workroom, all the cats, his old bedroom up on the second floor, his maroon Sears, Roebuck bike, and, not least, down at the navy yard, bobbing so loyally, gassed up and good to go, his papa's boat.

Perhaps I came too soon. I was a painter of your generation more than my own.… You are young, you have vitality, you can imbue your art with a force that only those with true feelings can manage. As for me, I'm old. I won't have time to express myself.

—C
ÉZANNE
, to a young artist in 1896,
ten years before his death

 … all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you.

—from
Death in the Afternoon

The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.

—from
The Old Man and the Sea

We looked and there it all was: our river and our city and the island of our city.

“We're too lucky,” she said.

…

Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, “I don't know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that's gone now. Memory is hunger.”

—from
A Moveable Feast