Captain Tony's

I was in Key West not long ago, and I began drinking at the Green Parrot. It's a blues bar and the jukebox is full of blues songs, and I'm not really a blues fan - some of it's alright, but it gets old pretty fast. Anyway, I'm in there alone and I'm drinking Heinekens as fast as I can because I don't know anyone and I figure if I drink fast enough someone will get interesting or I will get interesting, and my mind will wander away from the blues - I was feeling a little depressed at the time, but more than that I was feeling edgy - don't ask, I made a mistake. So I'm gunning these beers back to get my mind off everything and it's starting to work and I order another and the waitress finally says, "Hey, where you putting these?" "I'm dumping them out in the toilet," I say. She gives me a hard look. "Carry on..."

A while later I'm at the Half-Shell on the wharf. I'm feasting on conch soup and oysters, sitting amidst license plates. The walls there are full of license plates, i.e. specialty tags, with clever witticisms and innuendos on them. This to me is if not the height, at least a tall mogul of dumb-shit American diversionary indulgence. I scanned the plates for the best/worst one. I decided I would never wanna be a passenger in a car with Ohio plates that said "HOP IN." But it was right over my head. It was just plumb
wrong.

Here's a poem I got out of that night. I ended up at Captain Tony's Saloon - the original Sloppy Joe's, where Hemingway used to mill about. I ended up drinking rum with Robert Frost's great-nephew (he's a kayak-outfitter in Key Largo, soft-spoken, funny, egoless, one of the better ones - never even bothered reading his uncle's stuff - says it just doesn't interest him - me neither - Frost can pound sand for all I care - I can't think of anyone who I don't like better than him), and his jail-bound buddy who wound up balls-naked in the Garden of Eden later that night and got thrown out by the scowling tarbender for continually forgetting to put the complimentary washrag under his ass when he sat on his bar stool - it was more than a little disturbing - he was the only nude in the (clothing optional) bar, too drunk to remember the washrag.


(+) 428 Greene Street ~ see: Underground Voices Poetry