Latest News from the Large Animal Research Station

One Jasper of South Africa is currently under observation at LARS. Dark, slim and 33 Jasper says he is in the United States to find a wife. He says his understanding of a ‘relationship’ is that the woman takes care of the food, and the man builds a house. He described how he enlarged his mother’s kitchen, back home, with walls of bundled reeds. He chattered excitedly telling me how there’s a girl he likes, “I’m hunting for a wife, you know?” But he fell off his scooter right in front of her and now she no longer replies to his texts.

I, however, was fixated by his footwear, and I couldn’t help myself from asking him about the very strange looking shoes, like woven rubber baskets, “Are those made from truck tires?” Jasper nodded yes, they were.
“Did you make them yourself?” I was stunned

After recovering my breath, I said, “In this country, no one will be expecting you to build them a house of reeds, but the ladies do care about shoes. Go get yourself some sneakers ASAP!!”
“But these will last forever!” Jasper implored.

I used my minimal Swahili on him (because I don’t know any Zulu) and told him, “Mass Mali (sp?)” Which means, Take them away!!!

I’ll keep you posted on Jasper’s progress with the hunt.

You know you live in Key West when it’s 11am on a weekday and you’re invited boating. I scarcely ever step outdoors before twilight, when my eyes can better adjust. I replied to the Captain by text Yes!, and sped about gathering gear.

Off to one side like a slash of green from a paintbrush stroke was the landmass of Boca Chica, a mangrove tangled shore with pockets of beaches, peopled from inland.

So we stayed at sea, seemingly protected by space. All around was brightness with its play on the blue and green tiled sea, the pattern wittering in wavy baroque diamond shapes. I was hypnotized.

“Didja see that one?”
“I heard the splash!” This went on all afternoon. I missed every fish.

We jumped into the water, tumbling and rolling. To swim hard in one direction and then shoot down to the coral bumpy ocean floor, heaven. Sometimes, underwater I opened my eyes, always a little concerned I might see something I don’t want to, something with a fin.

Back on board we relaxed, drip-drying. Luxuriating.

Inexplicably, from the the landmass came a blast so enormous I was stunned. Booming intermittent surges of noise I felt in my limbs, through the reverberating deck of the sleek boat. Next came a smell of diesel. “Nothing ‘civilian’ sounds like that,” said the Captain, and he started up the boat, “which reminds me…”. As we puttered back to the marina he told a story of a tiny cloud he once saw just sitting on the water. “I had to check it out!” This left him blind for a week. If you read Carl Hiaasen, and I’ve read every word, he regularly warns of Florida’s contradictions.

Half way back and we had to wait on a convoy of tourists on jet-skis.
“Every boater’s bane!” Said the Captain, indicating the jet-skis. “Legend has it someone who lived on a sailboat took a shot at one of them, and killed him. The man became a local hero.”

The Captain returned me to my home, and feeling a little wobbly I took a shower which is when I discovered my skin crumbling off me like coconut flakes. Turns out I was microwaved crispy. I lay down in the cool a/c and passed the hell out. Solitaire in Paradise.

A week ago in Key West, on a blustery afternoon, the legendary David Wolkowsky and I were driving past Smathers Beach. Pointing at a writhing palm tree, he said, “The tree is dancing,” and then he added meditatively, “Feels like hurricane weather.”

But no matter as we were off to New York City for David’s party for his great friend author Phyllis Rose and her new book The Shelf, a charming and philosophical book about the myriad treats of reading. The party was slated for Tuesday, and unfortunately so was a rainstorm.

Unsurprisingly David’s domicile in Manhattan is glorious. An upper east side penthouse palace of glass and light and witty art, like a Degas with Cubans on horseback, and all surrounded by an extensive roof garden, like being in a summerhouse in the country, except atop a New York City building.

One hundred lucky guests filed in and milled around with notables including artist Susan Sugar and author Alison Lurie and crime writer Michael Misha and Barbar illustrator (and husband of Phyllis) Laurent de Brunhoff, and of course the eternally glamorous Jean Vanderbilt, the renowned movie critic David Denby (who recommended ‘Belle’- not quite a scoop since he already said so in the New Yorker), fabled feminist Molly Haskell and the amiable crew representing Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I forgot about the rain which seemed to have forgotten about us and never came to spoil what was easily the book party of all times. The party, which started at 6pm, was a sensation and at 10pm when I took my leave, a core throng of guests rocked on.

I took no photos as David’s nephew, the talented Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, was on hand. To see his wonderful shots please follow this link

David Wolkowsky knows how to throw a party. He also knows a thing or two about the weather, and while fortune winked his way for travel purposes, and more crucially, party purposes, the deluge let out its metaphoric belt and exploded all over the Eastern seaboard.

But I didn’t care as I still had a chapter or two left of Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf, which is as delightful an experience as a visit for tea with her charming self. I loved it, I highly recommend the read.

Last year at the annual songwriters festival I cruised through the bars but I only found country music bands, so I ran screaming.

This year my friend author Tom Corcoran is in town and I said I’d go anywhere, except for anyplace playing country music.

We met up at a restaurant called 2 Cents where it was just Tom & some friends and some chatting.

Then it was time to push off and so I glommed on.

Everything was going swimmingly when, a half a block along Duval, right around Margaritaville where a swelling of swollen Parrotheads always mills out front, here is where Tom turned and entered.

Suddenly Tom was explaining to me how his songwriting partner John Frinzi was playing at Margaritaville, and Tom had promised to drop in.

Mollified, I trotted behind, espying the assess of the masses in their denim and the restaurant’s servers squeezing through with UFO-sized trays held high in the air on their fingertips, bulging with heaped plates of fried things, and of course, cheeseburgers.

The only empty table was at the center of the room, right in front of the stage. Tom knew everyone, moreover they knew him and many paid homage. Turns out Tom writes country music songs! As this momentous reality was sinking in John Frinzi began his set, humorously bandying from song to song, many of them co-written with Tom. I was shocked, they were lovely!

Some songs were written by Tom and Jimmy Buffett. Including a song called Fins, about sharks in bars and everyone in the room knew not only every word but also some hand gesture, a sort of shark fin salute to the middle of the forehead. John Frinzi has a gorgeous voice and turns words into glass blown sounds.

When Tom joined John on stage for the last verse of Fins, after much urging from the room, he was a hit.

John Frinzi & Tom Corcoran

Tom asked me, “Is this hell for you?”
“I liked!” I said, but I had to confess I couldn’t accept a song about a cheeseburger.

To which Tom helpfully explained the origin of the ghastly lyric. He said they were sailing with a man who brought with him a silly childhood saying about how fabulous it would be to be a hamburger, and years later when sailing with Tom and Jimmy Buffett and joshing about being a hamburger, Buffett upped the ante, which is perhaps the secret ingredient to his superhuman success, and he said, “If you’re a hamburger then I’m a cheeseburger! A cheeseburger in paradise!”

To which I would say, not every funny thing you say should go on a bun, or in a song. Otherwise, country rock on lads!

It was summertime and I was 18 and just moved to NYC. With nepotism on my side I wrangled a job and a studio apartment. My privileged childhood did not prepare me for these strictures and nightly I drank microwaved ice cream and wondered what the hell had happened to my life.

Midwinter I was invited to Palm Beach for a weekend and I gratefully accepted. Someone knew someone with a private plane and space was found for me. Late on a Friday evening we flew out of Teterboro Airport on a small but very deluxe plane with burled cherry walls and wide white leather seats.

The plane owner, one polo playing tycoon, switched on a movie called Dog Day Afternoon. Before the movie was finished Mr Tycoon and his passengers began mimicking Pacino’s lines and making bang bang sounds, and soon Mr Tycoon picked up a gold receiver and commanded the pilot change course.

Just like that I was hijacked and diverted to the Bahamas for one night at Mr Tycoon’s bit white oceanside domain. My only request was that I be allowed to use a telephone when we landed to alert those expecting me in Florida.

At the Tycoon’s marble palace I was assigned a room with massive windows and stunning views, and I exhaled as if I were home. “This is more like it!” I thought, soothed.

I changed into my swimsuit and made my way across rubbery lawn and down a path edged with orchids to a half moon shoreline. I sunk my toes into the sand and absorbed the pristine view and the dwindling shafts of daylight fusing with dusk.

Meditatively I made my way into the gentle water, disturbing tiny shells over my ankles. I was wondering how deep the cove might be when I thought I saw something, something dark. I stopped and focused.

In the pale water, a mere few feet from my own toes, three large black triangles circled.

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!

I stayed only one night at the brothel in Bangkok.

For a white girl traveling alone the safest place is a brothel. Sure it’s full of ‘Business’ men with paunches and sunburned noses, and desires. But they were hunting for the exotica and thus I remained invisible. This is all a long time ago when I was still searching for the meaning of Life.

It was late when I stopped in at what looked like a hotel. The front room was a restaurant. The concierge lady behind the bar tried to encourage me to scat, but I was having none of it, “Your cheapest room, please!” I stood my ground and she caved.

Things took their time making sense to me. I ‘checked in’ which was, in reality, me forcing myself upon the management. The bemused concierge escorted me to my ‘room’.  The route passed through the restaurant and out the back where it was smelly and wet with a noisy steaming half outdoor kitchen, and then a wall of doors, the first of which was mine. My flip-flops stuck to the foul floor with every step. Here she left me, after pointing out my bathroom, a few more doors along. Inside my ‘room’ the walls did not reach the ceiling so bugs and smells swarmed to be evenly distributed by the rickety overhead fan. The bed was a metal frame single bed with a thin mattress with no sheets, no pillow, no nothing. Just a dingy towel laid just so at the center. There was a wooden chair. I sat on the chair and it wobbled and I tried to consider my options. Except I was tired.

Equally, I was hungry. I retraced the sticky steps to the restaurant where I took a table. I had not noticed anyone at all on the way in, but now as I waited on the waiter I took stock of the other tables in the nightclub-dark room. The tables all looked alike with one sweating pink Caucasian male flanked by a flutter of bedazzled Oriental dolls.

By the time the waiter arrived with my plate of rice and fish it occurred to me I was possibly in a bordello and this ‘restaurant’ thing was just a front. No one else was eating. Only drinking, and playacting flirtatious joy. I munched the rice and fish and peeked about with every mouthful as I ingested the inevitable truth. Somewhat stunned, but sated, I went to my ‘room’ and I lay myself on that frightful bed and passed out, with one eye open.

Very early the next morning I was up and out and never to return. And so began my travels in Siam.