Airstream trailer in Islamorada, pumped gas part-time to pay the rent, and began to write my first short stories in the cool shadow of Ernest Hemingway, whom I associated with the Keys, although he had long since moved on to Cuba. It was a story I had told many times, whenever asked how I began my life as a writer. Although unsure of the exact date, I usually added that later that year Hemingway shot himself—as if to imply a slightly melodramatic connection between me, the apprentice writer, and Ernest Hemingway, the doomed master.
Later, while I was signing copies of my book at a table, a man appeared in line—a bony guy in his late seventies, slouch cap, thick mustache, Irish face. He leaned in and whispered, “That ain’t how it happened, Russ. That bit about you and the Keys.” Anyone who called me Russ was someone from my distant past, from before I divorced Christine and became Russell. I recognized him at once, Joe Kerr, a.k.a. Joker, who back in the early 1960s rounded up young Boston artists and beatniks like me and my friends to work as carpenters and stagehands in amphetamine-fueled thirty-day bursts for the Opera Company of Boston. Joker was a likable guy who we all knew was a small-time, but well-connected, mobster. We were his non-union scabs. “I’ll be across the street at the Tam,” he said. “C’mon over when you’re done signing. I’ll tell you what really happened.”
Joker told me, over drinks at the Tam, that back then I was having a nervous breakdown, he called it, over a dame named Christine who’d left me for another guy. I couldn’t get out of bed and come in to work, he said, so the bookstore manager fired me. “You was crying like a fucking baby, man.” It was the winter of 1961, he said. “Same year Hemingway stuck his shotgun in his mouth. Not ’62 or ’63, like you said.” Joker had taken pity on me and sent me down to the Florida Keys to work with some associates of his who were helping train Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. He said he had helped get Rose La Rose, the famous stripper, out of Havana when Castro closed down the nightclubs in ’59, and he was still tight with the Miami mob. “You were a smart kid, Russ. You woulda made a pretty good gangster,” he said and laughed. “I made some calls and set you up at that rooming house in Islamorada where the Miami and CIA guys were staying. But I guess you got scared or something and moved the fuck out. They told me you disappeared. That’s probably when you started being a writer,” he said. “But it didn’t have nothing to do with Hemingway.”
There are three interwoven, underlying contexts to the story, the personal, the social, and the historical—as there are to all stories, true or not. The personal context, that weepy, disabling end of a love affair with a girl named Christine, was deeply embarrassing to me, somehow weirdly shameful, and I had forgotten it, so that later I could develop and elaborate the social context and make it into myth, the old story of a young artist’s solitary, dedicated apprenticeship in the shadow of a doomed living master. The historical context, Miami mobsters working with the CIA to arm and train Cuban exiles for the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion—looking backnow, surely the most interesting part of the story—I left out altogether. It would have diminished the romantic, self-embellishing myth of how, in following Hemingway’s suicidal footsteps in the sands of the Florida Keys, I became a writer. Because I was mainly interested in shaping how I was perceived by others, by that audience in the Booksmith in Brookline, for instance, I literally forgot what really happened. Personalized myth displaced personalized historical reality. Until the night in the bookshop and at the Tam, when Joker made me want to get my story straight.
Were Joker’s Miami mob guys really rooming at the foursquare, wooden, two-story building with the long porch while they and a CIA cohort trained the
Later, while I was signing copies of my book at a table, a man appeared in line—a bony guy in his late seventies, slouch cap, thick mustache, Irish face. He leaned in and whispered, “That ain’t how it happened, Russ. That bit about you and the Keys.” Anyone who called me Russ was someone from my distant past, from before I divorced Christine and became Russell. I recognized him at once, Joe Kerr, a.k.a. Joker, who back in the early 1960s rounded up young Boston artists and beatniks like me and my friends to work as carpenters and stagehands in amphetamine-fueled thirty-day bursts for the Opera Company of Boston. Joker was a likable guy who we all knew was a small-time, but well-connected, mobster. We were his non-union scabs. “I’ll be across the street at the Tam,” he said. “C’mon over when you’re done signing. I’ll tell you what really happened.”
Joker told me, over drinks at the Tam, that back then I was having a nervous breakdown, he called it, over a dame named Christine who’d left me for another guy. I couldn’t get out of bed and come in to work, he said, so the bookstore manager fired me. “You was crying like a fucking baby, man.” It was the winter of 1961, he said. “Same year Hemingway stuck his shotgun in his mouth. Not ’62 or ’63, like you said.” Joker had taken pity on me and sent me down to the Florida Keys to work with some associates of his who were helping train Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. He said he had helped get Rose La Rose, the famous stripper, out of Havana when Castro closed down the nightclubs in ’59, and he was still tight with the Miami mob. “You were a smart kid, Russ. You woulda made a pretty good gangster,” he said and laughed. “I made some calls and set you up at that rooming house in Islamorada where the Miami and CIA guys were staying. But I guess you got scared or something and moved the fuck out. They told me you disappeared. That’s probably when you started being a writer,” he said. “But it didn’t have nothing to do with Hemingway.”
There are three interwoven, underlying contexts to the story, the personal, the social, and the historical—as there are to all stories, true or not. The personal context, that weepy, disabling end of a love affair with a girl named Christine, was deeply embarrassing to me, somehow weirdly shameful, and I had forgotten it, so that later I could develop and elaborate the social context and make it into myth, the old story of a young artist’s solitary, dedicated apprenticeship in the shadow of a doomed living master. The historical context, Miami mobsters working with the CIA to arm and train Cuban exiles for the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion—looking backnow, surely the most interesting part of the story—I left out altogether. It would have diminished the romantic, self-embellishing myth of how, in following Hemingway’s suicidal footsteps in the sands of the Florida Keys, I became a writer. Because I was mainly interested in shaping how I was perceived by others, by that audience in the Booksmith in Brookline, for instance, I literally forgot what really happened. Personalized myth displaced personalized historical reality. Until the night in the bookshop and at the Tam, when Joker made me want to get my story straight.
Were Joker’s Miami mob guys really rooming at the foursquare, wooden, two-story building with the long porch while they and a CIA cohort trained the
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