Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [63]
“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