Magical Thinking (21 page)

I should have considered this before Dennis and I went to Key West, Florida, otherwise known as “Hemingway’s Hideaway” or “the tropical residence of America’s greatest writer.”

I had to admit, even though I never cared much about Hemingway, the name alone lends a certain appeal, as Thomasville
obviously knows through extensive consumer testing in shopping malls. “Hemingway” conjures images of thick-slat Venetian blinds, palm fronds, and quaint bungalows scattered on narrow, winding streets, paved with crushed white clamshells.

In no way did I expect a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum or an entire street devoted to extra-extra-large T-shirts embossed with slogans such as “I like my woman like I like my dog, on all fours” and “Yes boys, they’re real.”

“God, this is absolutely hideous. It’s worse than Fourteenth Street,” I said the instant we stepped foot on Duval Street.

Dennis is an optimist. “Hold on, hold on,” he said, dragging me by the arm. “We just got here five minutes ago. This is just a touristy part of town. Let’s give it a chance, okay?”

On the one hand, Dennis is the reasonable one in the relationship. On the other, he’ s just the slower one.

“Fine,” I said, turning away from the Hard Rock Café, “I’ll give it a chance.”

We crossed the street, and a man who weighed at least three hundred pounds turned to his larger wife and said, “I can’t believe there ain’t no fucking roller coaster in this town. Why the hell ain’t they got one?”

His wife’s hair had made unfortunate contact with a large amount of hydrogen peroxide, and the result was blinding in the noon sun.

Dennis gripped my arm tighter. “Okay, this place should be bombed,” he said.

We immediately went back to our hotel room.

As it turned out, our hotel room was actually a private bungalow, something out of an actual Hemingway novel. There were two pools on the grounds, with brick walkways and wildflowers blooming in places that seemed to hold only shadows. Manly, yet expressive, like Papa himself. The hotel had been a splurge, four
hundred dollars a night. We’d assumed that after spending nine or ten hours exploring Key West, it would be nice to come back to a luxurious room.

Now, we both checked to make sure the television worked.

“Look on the bright side,” Dennis said. “At least we can lie by the pool and get a tan.”

This was the bright side until later that afternoon when the rains came. We assumed this was a tropical shower sort of thing. But we began to worry by noon the following morning when the rains had only become harder and the streets began to flood.

“I sure am sorry about this weather, fellas,” the friendly gentleman behind the front desk told us. “I’m sorry for you, but boy do we need this rain. We’ve had a drought down here. Haven’t had a drop of rain for five months.”

“Why don’t we fly back to New York?” I suggested once we were back in our room under the covers.

“Because we’ve already paid for the room,” Dennis said. “And I’m sure the rain won’t last. Let’s just try to enjoy it. You’ve been saying you haven’t been able to read for ages. So read a novel.”

But I couldn’t read because I was so irritated. If I’d wanted to stay in bed and watch terrorist attacks and Amtrak train wrecks on CNN, we could have stayed home.

“Then let’s just go out for a walk, anyway,” Dennis said. “Who cares if we get wet, we’re on an island.”

So this is what we did. We decided that rain be damned, we’d explore the island, away from the tourist-infested streets. And to our delight, the rain had driven the fat Americans back to their motel rooms. And we were able to walk the streets in solitude.

And finally, finally, I was able to see what might have caused Hemingway to live here. The homes were quite charming, tucked away on narrow side streets and covered with flora. Grand porches, tall windows, wavy old glass. It was easy to imagine that several decades ago, this was a quaint island. Once, the wax museum was probably a corner hardware store. The Gap was
probably a drugstore, complete with a soda fountain where you could buy an egg cream for thirty cents. And the restaurant owned by non-lesbian Kelly McGillis was probably once a dive bar with swordfish pinned to the walls and fifty-cent tumblers of malted whiskey.

I longed for the Key West that existed in my imagination. Where was the old man sitting on the steps of a diner named “Jack’s Place,” picking flecks of Lucky Strike tobacco off his lips? Where was the young French nanny who’d become a hooker and wore torn fishnet stockings and smelled like lye soap and lavender?

Instead, there was a sign that advertised glass-bottom boat rides. “Oh, fuck. We might as well,” Dennis said.

So we followed the street to the southern tip, and here we were surprised to see that the fat Americans had not been driven inside to their rooms; they had been driven into a line for the glass-bottom boat rides.

“Oh, there’s no way. I can’t stand in that line,” I said.

Dennis gave me the eye. “Like you have something better to do?”

I whispered, “But I don’t like these people.”

He said, “Well, you don’t have to marry any of them.”

Knowing I would never win, I sighed and jammed my hands into my pockets. It was going to be a long and painful vacation—also very wet and cold—but I’d suffered through worse. Like rehab when I was thirty. Twenty-eight days of hell. At least this would be a shorter period of time. So this is what I thought on my vacation:
I’m not in a rehab hospital. Yay!

“God damn it, Hank. Hold that umbrella over me. The rain keeps puttin’ out my cigarette.”

“So chew your damn cigarette gum,” the gigantic man—Hank, I assume—replied.

“I am chewing my cigarette gum, Einstein. And I got a patch on, too. But I’d like to enjoy my cigarette while we wait in line.”

I have always loved eavesdropping. But even more, I love knowing that somebody is eavesdropping on my own conversation. My former art director, Greer, and I had a lot of fun playing games with people. We’d be traveling on business, off to L.A. to shoot a commercial, and we’d be sitting near the gate waiting for our flight and chatting. Then we would become aware that somebody else was listening, so I would say, “Honey, tell me you arranged for your parents to stay with the baby.” And she would feign horror. “Oh my fucking God, I totally forgot. The baby is alone. Shit. Do you think she can last on her own for two days?” And I would reply, “Well, I guess. Babies are supposed to be pretty durable.”

As the couple bickered about her smoking, his umbrella, and the line for the boat, I could not stop myself from staring at them. The woman’s forehead was dented, as though she had bullet fragments in her skull that the surgeon had been unable to remove. She seemed like a woman who could become dangerous without warning, like one of the creatures I enjoyed watching on
Animal Planet
. Clearly, she already had enough nicotine in her system to kill a laboratory of rats.

“Why don’t we just go back to the room,” I whispered to Dennis.

He was enjoying this, my misery. “Oh come on . . . we’re almost there.” He winked. Dennis is the only person I have ever known who can wink and get away with it. When Dennis winks, the world is safe.

A child kicked me.

“What the fuck?” I said, looking down and seeing a young Chinese girl with a vinyl Hello Kitty knapsack.

She laughed, and then she kicked me again, harder.

I looked at her parents, but they both had dead, distant faces. The resigned expressions of older parents who had accidentally had a child, late in life. No doubt their little girl had kicked them both senseless, and now they were oblivious.

But I was not oblivious. And I was not amused.

“Stop that,” I said, leaning down and speaking into the top of her head. “Don’t kick.”

She kicked again.

The little fucker. I bent down. “Do you speak English?” I asked, sweetly. I smiled. “Do you speak English, you little cutie pie?”

She nodded, gave a little giggle, and then stepped on my toes, which were exposed through the straps of my sandals.

I immediately stopped smiling and narrowed my eyes. I whispered, “You kick me one more time you little cocksucker, and once we get on the boat, I’ll push your mother into the ocean, and she’ll die. And then I’ll hurt your daddy. And then I’ll be your new daddy, and I’ll take you home with me.”

She moved quickly to the other side of her parents, where she kept a wary, silent eye on me.

“Next time people ask if we’re ever going to have kids, I think I’ll tell them this little story,” Dennis said.

“What?” I said, indignant. “She’s a horrible, spoiled little bitch.”

“She’s just a little girl,” he said.

I laughed. “Little girl, my ass. She’s a little Chinese dragon.”

Dennis rolled his eyes, and we finally boarded the glass-bottom boat.

“Pepsi!” shouted a kid sitting near us. The kid pointed to the glass below us and sure enough, a Pepsi can.

“Maybe we’ll see a body! What would you think of that?” the kid’s dad said. “Maybe a swimmer who was attacked by a shark!”

“Doug, stop,” the mother said, slapping her husband’s meaty shoulder.

Dennis and I looked at each other. The true curiosities were not outside the glass bottom of the boat; they were sitting in the chairs next to us.

A guide’s voice crackled through the speakers, explaining the
various fish that swam past us. But by far, there were more license plates, plastic six-pack holders, and soda cans than fish.

“Maybe we won’t have seafood tonight,” Dennis said.

I watched as a mutton snapper glided over an old hubcap. “Yeah, burgers sound good.”

I stood up to stretch my back and saw the little monster child glaring at me from the safety of the other side of the boat. I winked at her, and she turned away.

And then in a moment of sanity, I realized I probably really had terrified that little girl. And I’d certainly ruined Key West for her. In fact, I was fairly certain that she would never return to Florida at all.

So clearly, Hemingway would have been proud of me.

For Christmas that year, my brother was astounded that I did not know how to use the slide rule he had given me. “What the fuck?” he said in his deep monotone voice. “You must have read about how these things work.”

I glanced up over the liner notes of my new Marlo Thomas
Free to Be You and Me
album and told him that of course I didn’t know how it worked; I didn’t read the encyclopedia like he did.

His mouth opened in disgust. He simply could not comprehend this. “You didn’t read
any
of them?”

I told him I looked at some of the pictures. “Those transparent pages with naked people and their insides, that was neat,” I said.

“Well, that’s just unacceptable. I mean, you’re reading at a third-grade level. Don’t you find that alarming?” Considering I was in the third grade, no, I didn’t.

And from this moment on my brother treated me as not just his younger brother, but his “borderline retarded” younger brother. In fact, this is exactly how he introduced me to his friends: “This is my younger brother. You can just ignore him; he’s basically retarded. Our mother smoked while she was pregnant with him, and I guess there was brain damage.”

But to me, it was my brother who seemed retarded. Either that or a genius, I couldn’t decide. All I knew for sure was that he was a peculiar creature. While he could not fathom a younger brother who did not share his fascination with quantum mechanics, I likewise could not comprehend that my brother didn’t own a single pair of platform shoes. As far as I was concerned, he was in training to become a creepy gas station attendant, while I was going to be a star.

So what, exactly, was he?

On the one hand, my brother knew how to create something called a circuit board, which, when attached with wires to a series of strobe lights and placed next to our sleeping mother, provided a shocking amount of fun. He could create an entire automobile engine Frankensteined together from parts he found at the dump. The floor of my brother’s room was littered with transistors, tiny batteries, wires, bits of lead from his soldering iron, red-and-black rubber-capped clamps. Instead of a baseball glove, my brother had an oscilloscope on his dresser. And if you asked him, “Are platinum records really made of platinum?” you would
get a thirty-minute discourse on the periodic table, including the half-life of each element.

But on the other hand my brother seemed like somebody best confined to a basement. Not only was he gruff and abrupt, but he spoke in a deadly monotone at all times. He never made eye contact. And he took no pride in his appearance, seeing nothing wrong with wearing pants that had been too short for years. When my parents had guests, my brother often asked shockingly rude questions: “Didn’t you have an abortion last year?” he asked my mother’s friend Nancy. When my mother shrieked, “John, that is absolutely none of your business. How dare you ask such a question,” my brother simply grunted and then snorted, “Well, I thought you said she had an abortion. One of your friends did. I thought it was this ‘Nancy’ character.” Nancy herself simply sat in mute horror on the sofa, her hands protectively folded across her chest.