My excellent friend David Wolkowsky, the King of Key West, invited me for Easter Sunday lunch on Ballast Key, his private island five miles south and in the direction of Cuba.

David Wolkowsky, The King of Key West & Ballast Key

The plan was to meet at the Garrison Bight marina at 11am. Due to my neurotic ways I was the first to arrive. I strolled the length of the dock, past tethered boats, until I saw David’s boat. You can tell which is David’s boat by the lavender cashmere sweaters strewn across the helm.

Amongst the guests was one James Auchincloss ebullient in safari clothes and slung with a camera and a white headband which I have artfully concealed with a photoshopped Fez.

Jackie O’s half brother Jamie Auchincloss, Ballast Key Easter 2014

The entire ride to the island, interrupted by the sight of mating turtles, James never broke stride as he unspooled reams of tantalizingly gossipy morsels, all of which he declared ‘Off the record’.

At the island we walked the slim planks of the jetty, high above silver fishes and a baby bull shark lazing beneath in the shadows. Three little tractors awaited us in which to cross the island to the house by way of sandy paths decorated with thoughtfully placed statues and nurtured palm trees and bougainvillea. David’s house is three levels of glass and white wood and painted ceilings and wide open windows. To sit in the second story living room and breathe in the ocean air is tranquility itself.

A tranquility fluffed by James and his ready smile and his intriguing monologues. James has been everywhere, done everything and he has met everyone, and conveniently he has a crystalline memory. Luckily for James I’m a vault of secrecy but with the right amount of sodium pentathol heaven knows what I’d reveal, I now know EVERYTHING.

Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy’s father, Jack Bouvier, married a Janet Auchincloss. Janet was James’s mother, thus James is the half-brother of Jackie O.

Lunch was served in the marble ground floor dining room, with walls of glass pushed open so that one is surrounded by pink sand planted with sun baking conch shells and the turquoise sea.

James told one story he swore was already well documented (Vanity Fair 2013 ~ with slight variations), and therefore repeatable. Allegedly, one sunny morning in 1962 at the White House President John F. Kennedy’s ultra secret private telephone line rang, and because Jackie was in the room she answered the phone. It was Marilyn. Allegedly, super cool Jackie told the startled starlet, “You can have Jack if you want him so much. But think about it. You’d have to give up your life as a movie star. Give up all that glamor. Do you know how boring life is as a First Lady? You have to sit through endless State dinners. If you want him, you can have him. But think about it.”

Ballast Key, the picture perfect private island of David Wolkowsky

I leave the Rock so infrequently my world has shrunk to this final bead of coral, the end of the archipelago and sunk in the shallows of the Straits, near the edge of the Gulf Stream and surrounded by predators like sharks, crocodiles, tourists and Bubbas. Key West is a fractal of the world at large, and I love it, but to leave is daunting.

Usually I depart from the Key West International Airport, minutes from my home, reached by a route that parades along the coast with palm trees to one side and the other a scape of wide open dazzling glittering ocean its horizon split with bands of blues.

I almost never drive. Partly because it’s effing loooooooooooooong. Occasionally, for one reason or another, I do motor to Miami or the even chillier north of the Palm Beaches, west or otherwise. To cross the divide and merge with the highway northbound and roll into the mess of rushing automobiles is to enter an alien world, also known as the Real World, and mixed in there is a whiff of something horrifying.

Recently I made one such trip and on the way, forgoing the phone, I plucked music discs at random from the center console of my car. Full blast and blaring like a pimped-mobile I relished one great track after another. This was a year’s worth of discs I have happily and sweatily purchased at the end of nights of hypnotic dancing at my favorite bar in the world The Green Parrot which I love because of the reliably sensational bands they book. Groups of searing talent like only the backwaters can produce. I’m there so often I worry they might hit me up for rent money. The drive north and back I zoned out to this music and it helped insulate me from the fray of big city vibes and hectic anguish inducing traffic. The tunes were original and nothing you would find on the radio, especially since radio stations scarecely waver from predictable Billy Joel. Nothing against old BJ you understand, but there’s so much more out there to explore.

I realized I forgot about the cleansing soothing invigorating benefits of the road trip. The stops at cafes for strong rhythmically delicious Cuban coffees that one inhales as much as sips. US1 connects the islands by bonefish-slim spans high above the open water. Healing happens on the bridges.

Happy Easter!

I was always obsessed with adventure. Which is exactly how I would eventually find my way to glorious Key West. But I wouldn’t figure that out for many years.

When I was 19 years old and filled with desire to unearth the meaning of life, I traveled around the world for six months by myself. While this sounds brave I never intended to travel alone. It would not have occurred to me to travel through foreign lands all by my lonesome.

When I flew out from NYC with my friend Gina and a couple of backpacks from the Salvation Army and a switchblade knife, we thought it would all be great fun and the goodbye party we threw for ourselves was riotous. When the backpacks rattled out on the luggage conveyor belt at Orly Airport their little metal legs were bent and all the straps were ripped off so that we could no longer wear them, but rather we had to drag them bumpily behind us like reluctant puppies. We should have heeded the omen.

Instead, over the next couple of weeks we alit here and there through Europe and all the way to some Greek island (not the one we bought a ferry ticket for so we were tossed off the boat at the first port of call) we left a steaming hideous trail of squabbles. We fought about absolutely everything. Every day was a tangle of disagreements and sometimes my switchblade knife looked like a tempting solution.

Thankfully Gina had a moped accident on this Greek island (I swear I did not push her). I stuffed her and her bloody knees into the surf to clean her gravel filled wounds, got her a bottle of wine to shut her the hell up, and made arrangements to ship her home.

We had been poised to head east, to the start of the truly mysterious destinations, like Sri Lanka, a country I had never even heard of but I was ecstatic to see Gina go.

Gina being gone was such a relief that loneliness never affected me. Rather, at times when I felt ‘alone’ for example locked into the youth hostel in Colombo during a spate of Martial Law, I suspected that for the first time in my life I was experiencing ‘freedom’, and I liked it.

It’s a fat lie, but my brother will tell you I murdered his cat. 

I love cats and mercifully Key West is overrun with feral inedible chickens (protected by law from manhandling and frying pans) and cats. However, ever since a few of my own kitties met with murky ends, I refuse to own. I cannot take the heartache.

Yesterday a friend, my most psychic friend, asked to stash her feline, short term. I leapt at the chance. I was so excited I rushed around readying my home to make it cat friendly when I was suddenly struck with a hideous memory and I froze, and cast back to a time, long ago and somewhere up in the mountains, when I babysat an old, inexplicably nasty, lady cat with lovely long white fur. Fur one could not touch without the sting of the claw whipping out to remove tiny slices of skin. Most cats are divine manifestations and then there are a few losers.

My brother’s cat was one such loser, so I didn’t’ move the thing in with me. Instead I visited the ferocious fur-ball and did the food and water thing once daily, in her own domicile. For the short time I was in her presence she hissed dramatically at me and scattered out of the way as if I was coming at her with a flaming torch and a skewer. 

One day, apparently, I did not fully secure the front door. I surmised this because when I returned she was nowhere to be found. I did the searching high and low thing, until I felt the first twinge of doubt. There was something about the silence, and suddenly I knew things were going to end badly.

I walked into the garden of fields of wild flowers rolling down to a fast moving rocky stream. The summertime winds had ravaged leaves and twigs and strewn them everywhere, messy confetti. Methodically I walked around the large house, a gnawing worry worming its way through me, until I detected a splattering of white bits pasted on a short slope.

I tried to hope against hope but the bits were the cat reduced to nothing more than tufts embedded in the tall grass.

This morning my psychic friend called to say, “I woke up in the middle of the night, I had a premonition. I’m going to find someone else to care for my cat.”

Phew!