You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Ernest Hemingway House.
If the man is a genius, if the man is a world renown icon, if the man is a literary gunslinger, then this is the house that Ernest built.
I am in Key West Florida. It is a stone’s throw to Cuba, a palm tree’s wave to insouciance.
It’s a million degrees outside. The humidity is so thick, my hair is sweating. My sunglasses are fogging sitting on the bridge of my nose.
I pull the wayfarers off my face, wiping them on my sweaty shirt. I use that moment to stare at the large compound on White Head Street in the heart of Key West. His house is large on a grand scale for Key West where real estate reportedly goes for $1000 a square foot.
The home is massive, ornate, with gold shutters. The villa is surrounded by palm trees and a brick wall.
We walk through the gate of the palatial estate and approach the ticket booth.
“That’ll be $26.00” the man says. He hands me two paper tickets that say Admit One. Each orange ticket looks like something you get at the state fair when you buy corn dogs.
We step up on the front porch. There is an old world charm, a sense of history about the building.
I see cats laying on pedestals all around the complex.
They yawn, and meow and have a relative air of superiority.
I remember somewhere that Hemingway loved cats and may have had one with 6 toes. I sneak a peek at the orange tabby grooming himself in the shade. “You have 6 toes little fella?” I whisper as we move forward.
“Meow Ass hole,” the little tabby says with all the concern of an alqada terror donkey.
A woman with wild hair and tattoos covering her shoulder stops us at the top step.
“Do you have tickets?” she asks.
I hold up my carnival tickets and she smiles. “You can wait for the next tour in 15 minutes or join the tour that is already in progress.
“We’ll join the tour,” I say. To wait outside another 15 minutes would be to risk evaporating into a viscous stew of sweat.
She directs us to the front room where we merge into the tour already in progress.
People of all shapes and sizes from all over the world are in the room.
Though we are inside, the heat is awful. I’m told there is air conditioning in the antiquated home, but it is working slowly like a TDOT hot patch crew.
So many people, so much body heat, so much florida humidity infiltrating into the building.
“Sorry about the heat,” the tour guide says.
Bob Smith is from Boston. He is a slight man with a thinning hair line.
He has a discernible accent, and a good tan. I see a bead of sweat poking through his rapidly depleted hair line.
Bob wears a nice watch and has a ring on his right hand.
Bob moves around the room. He has a dancer’s flair, even though he has a backside as flat as an ironing board.
Where you from, Bob asks.
“Nashville,” I say proudly.
Bob has memorized the location of each member of the tour.
“Stand here next to me,” he says pointing to a small spot of wall beside a desk.
“How you doing Kentucky,” he says to a couple from Lexington.
They smile and he acknowledges a couple from England.
He strikes up a conversation with them about the Royals.
They smile. Bob has them eating out of the palm of his hand.
I look around the room. It is a normal den and the number of people crammed inside of it creates a sense of claustrophobia, like being in a World War II U-boat.
The room is historical and reeks of literary importance.
Every wall has pictures of Ernest Hemingway from every time period of his life.
There are pictures of him on an ambulance. There are pictures with bill fish and smoking cigars and posing with many of his ex wives and mistresses.
It turns out Ernest Hemingway was a ladies man.
He had four wives that we know of and countless concubines that included ingred bergman and Cuban hotties, Bob will tell us.
Apparently Hemingway enjoyed fishing, F***ing and writing, and not necessarily in that order.
When did he like to write, I ask the historian.
He lived hard and wrote about that life, Bob Smith says. But he wrote religiously from 6:30 till 11:30.”
I feel a lump in my throat. that’s when I get my best writer energy too. I keep this to myself as I listen to Bob tell me about Hemingway’s 4 wives. He was happilty married for about 2 weeks, bob says as the group of Hemingway fans laughs.
I look around the room. Hemingway is in black and white pictures. He is shown with marlin and fishing boats and Cuban boat people.
It turns out that Hemingway had a home in Cuba around the time of the Bay of Pigs. When Castro took over, he took Hemingway’s home. Hemingway was crushed.
It’s about that time in 1961 that the literary savant, famous for “For whom the bell tolls” “The sun also rises” and “The Fisherman and the Sea,” put a shot gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
“There’s a gene in the family he couldn’t avoid,” Bob says. “His father, a doctor, killed himself. His grand daughter, Margot Hemingway, a famous, beautiful model, took a handful of pills and died at the age of 41. All of the hemingways had a history of depression.
I listen to Bob speak, but I’m interested in the man and his writing mechanism.
He loved life and he wrote about it, Bob says.
As the tour progresses through the house, I feel a kinship with this master of words.
Compared to this gargantuan of story telling excellence I’m a literary lump.
I have only read a handful of his books, but it’s hard not to be impressed by this American icon.
We walk up the stairs to his writing Den. The entrance is gated and I stop to gaze. It is inspiring. There is an old typewriter on a small desk. I see animal heads and a sail fish hanging on the wall.
What has brought us all here?
It’s different for everyone.
For me, it’s a chance to be inspired by iconic greatness.
I admittedly don’t know Hemingway by heart.
I go into the gift shop and I thumb through the first few pages of The Old Man And the Sea.
The story is a golden ray of literary sunshine. Literary experts say Hemingway’s genius is that he says so much in this story using breveloquence.
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.”
I close the book. It’s good, but it doesn’t resonate with me like it should.
I read the page twice in the book store.
I wonder if I am such a bad writer, that I don’t recognize brilliance.
I go to Sloppy Joes around the corner on Duval Street.
I man is on stage strumming a guitar, playing one Eric Church country song after another.
Sloppy Joes has a big head of Ernest Hemingway on the canopy, on the wall, on every t shirt they are selling in the gift shop.
It turns out that Hemingway had a close relationship with the owner. They were fishing friends and running buddies in this tropical locale.
I drink a corona light in the man’s honor.
Hemingway was brilliant I say aloud rationalizing my anxiety at being able to write but not being understood by the publishing community.
He was a troubled tortured soul. He wrote about life and sailed on the sea and married and divorced and lived a robust life.
He is a man of genius. As a writer, I am a stick of dynamite with a fuse yet to be lit.
I wonder what Hemingway would say to me if he was on this bar stool beside me. I stare at his big face and heavy white beard on the wall. I take a swallow of a lime flavored Mexican beer. What would he say to me, I ponder. I think he’d say “write what you know. Write what’s in your heart and soul. Write because writers write.”
Thanks Ernest Hemingway.
You are a God. Your house is a literary mecca for citizens from all over the globe.
Even your cats are revered by literary disciples who pay 13 dollars to take a tour in sweltering tropical heat.
What would he say? Keep writing, find your voice and find your way.
Life’s crazy™