David Wolkowsky at the Tennessee Williams exhibit, Key West, Florida January 2014

In ’48 or ’49 Tennessee Williams visited Key West, Florida, where he found a fishing village with a Navy Yard full of beautiful young things. There were many reasons to stay. Despite the homophobia of the day and the random beatings it was worth it to him to tolerate these slights to his humanity.

He wrote well here. He wasn’t wanted but he was undeterred. And the rewards were heaping, from the ocean swims, the routine of writing in the morning, painting in the afternoon and throwing around the fairy dust with the sailors in the bars all night.

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“You work out your demons your own way,” is what he did not reply to her most recent text, from out the blue, this after, long ago, she assured him if he needed anything she was there for him. He had suspected this was hogwash. She was doing this for herself somehow. To expiate some guilt from some other time perhaps another lifetime. Whatever, who cares. She’s trying to use him to rid herself of her demons. He is acutely aware of this and he wonders if she is oblivious. Operating on automatic. So he rejects her offers of comfort.

One reason he knew this was hogwash was after one of the two times when he had leaned on her and asked for help she became annoyed with him, and tough. Exactly contrary to what she had promised him. For example, the night he broke a shoe almost exactly outside her home. And sure it was the middle of the night, but she’s a night owl and she’s his friend right? He knocked at her door and asked for a spare shoe or a ride home. Her response was anger. How dare he and his presumptions just drop on in whenever he felt.

She did not offer to get him home, she did not care he would have to walk two miles barefoot seeing as he’d also lost his wallet and his phone. She stamped and remained indignant at this intrusion, his audacity. She did not behave like the friend who’d offered, more than once, ‘I’m always here for you.’

Twice he sought her assistance and each time the same response. Malicious indifference. Now he could never trust her again and he let go.

Eventually she texted, ‘Hope ur well.’
‘Do you need something?’ he replied.
‘Thinking of u,’ she wrote. 
He’d wasted Xanax on her? He berated himself. He’d been so wrong, he was fumbling while he texted, ‘I was thinking you should lose my number.’

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For medical purposes I again closed my favorite bar the one and only Green Parrot at around 4 this Sunday morning.

Here’s the thing, my doctor tells me dancing is the cure for all that ails me.

News got out that something special had come to town, so Friday at 10 p.m I felt obligated to saunter on over and judge for myself. I was already doing a jig as I made my way to the bartender to get a bottle of water and then I slid in with the crowd that was moving fast to some mind blowing beats.

Trae Pierce & the T-Stone Band is the brainchild of 4 time Grammy winner Trae Pierce. He is one rocking delight, he plays the bass he plays electric guitar and he sings with a rich entrancing voice and he also does something called talk box which makes you feel you’ve entered an alternate universe. It feeds your soul.

The band is all men with powerful talent and wide range. And these guys put on one hell of a show sometimes being ferried aloft, still playing, still singing, while on the back of a roadie pushing through the crowd of cheering revelers.

The lead singer, Rae, is the son of Mr. Trae Pierce. Rae had the good fortune to be born into a world of music, and the joyous energy that he transmits to the crowd is completely overwhelming. It is impossible not to boogie down. Quite simply Rae is a music machine.

These gentlemen have been playing together for 3 years and they are meshed on an elevated level. I had the opportunity to chat with them and while they are all charming they are serious about their music. More to come on David D1 Grant, co-creator, producer and keyboardist, watch this space for news on him. This band is as good as my original love Xperimento, and I did feel a little bit like I was two-timing.

Thank You Key West, thank you Green Parrot and especially thank you to the band.

www.TraePierceAndThetStoneBand.com ❤︎ heal thyself. 

As Rae says, ‘This ain’t your ordinary blues!’

The sailors knew they had a good one writhing on the line.

The violence made the crude sailors cackle which was not sporting since the victim had no chance. But the fish worked every technique from slamming at the hull with mouth open and teeth flashing where it could gain no more purchase than a punch in the face, to returning under water, swimming deep and fast with a temporary sense of bravado. Except the hook caught it short. Then he rolled, a last resort in ocean warfare, here things worsened, breathlessly expiring.

The sailors watched it doing their work for them. They laughed. They air-toasted one another with phantom tankards of years of hard labor, ‘blood and tonic on the rocks’, if you please.

After years of ugly a person can become insensate to that which once made him human.

Sailors feel nothing at the sight of death, the smell tickles their appetite. Usually.

But the incident with the mermaid changed each forever, one went mute. Like everyone from around there they’d heard the legends which no one believed, absurd vignettes of female beauties with seaweed to their hips, to the scales. Buffed metallic royal blue like a pimped-out ride.

Ashore the sailors talked while no one listened, safe for the bartender, pouring drinks and laughing at the jokes of these men maundering on about the ‘incident’. She played along, asked no questions, instead coddled her customers, topping up drinks, tucking back her long hair she whispered invocations. Breath on a feather.

‘Got one!’ an alert sailor called, and the crew sped into position. Tugging the taut line, keeping it straight, they watched the prey hauling hard.

‘It’s big!’ Someone laughed.

After a display of determination the escaping beast was subdued and reeled. So tangled the men could scarcely make it out, trussed as it was in seaweed. For sure it was dead. They cut the ties and leapt back, soberingly profoundly shocked. They’d killed the mermaid.

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‘Flash, right?’ She asked the man when he got off the stage.
‘Yes?’ Tall, tired, he smiled.
‘Where are the fans?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re the big musician in town. Where’s your following?’
‘You can be my following tonight, what are you drinking?’
‘Thanks but I’m going home.’
‘Wanna ride?’ he offered.

The car, every American boy’s dream, a convertible from the 70s, huge and wide-open like a boat. Mint blue, funky fins. He opened the passenger door and she slid onto the stitched white bench. She figured he was the original owner.

It took him so long to circumnavigate the auto she wondered had he returned to the bar. She swiveled and there he was easing into the driver’s side. Which is when she noticed in place of a key in the ignition was a pair of pliers and lounging across the dashboard lay a rubber shark and the windshield, a short inward leaning thick piece of glass, was fractured in a fireworks pattern.

‘My friend did that,’ shaking his head causing lines to fold, mirroring the cracked windshield. ‘I was in the parade and he pelted me and broke the glass, jackass!’

‘I don’t think that’s your problem,’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’ he countered, whistling back at the acclaim from stargazing men of all ages fascinated by the groovy car.

‘This type of jalopy will only help you pick up guys. If you’re looking for girls you need to get a dog.’

‘Are you interviewing me?’ he said, waving to friends as they trundled down Duval Street.
‘It’s just that you’re a big name in this small town. I figured you’d have Barbarella on your arm.’
‘You’re here,’ he grinned. ‘You’re the girl.’
‘No sir,’ She said, ‘but thank you. I’m a scientist from L.A.R.S.’
‘Mars?’ he slurred.
‘Yes,’ she smiled.

‘Can I have a kiss?’ He asked when she got out at her corner and gently closed the door.
‘Nope,’ and she vanished.

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A year later he calmed down and was over with the rampage, his midlife crisis as he now referred to it. Later he would reflect upon those months and the women he had emotionally clawed as harshly as he could, avenging the demolition to his ego after the end of his marriage.

When he thought about that era he chastised himself. And when he thought through the women he remembered every name and detail of the pile-up of brief encounters. All of them except that Aussie bartender with her tough demeanor and her boyish body. What was her name? He remembered that she didn’t say goodbye when he took her home. She was hot and chilly all at once. She was the last of his one-night-stands. Maybe her obvious disinterest snapped him from his chaotic spiral.

A year or so later and one day his eye caught a new sign planted firmly in the front garden of a Victorian cottage and on the shingle was painted Jasmine & Co. It was a shot to the head. Jasmine was the name of the bartender. A private chuckle for him.

Years later and with the advent of social media Jasmine sent him a message. This was startling. He remembered she clearly hadn’t been that ‘into him’. He took his time replying, kept things neutral. Next she updated him, not that he’d asked, she was married, had a newborn and coming up on their first Christmas as a family. Her forced cheer revealed her feelings. That she was writing to him said everything. He knew if he asked even one question he’d be in quicksand. He wanted nothing from her. Not now.

Time rolled on and intermittently she corresponded. Sometimes he replied though usually not. To him she was a memory of a mess long ago when he was weak and she was strong and along the way a switch got flipped.

What she will never understand is that he liked her, until she liked him.

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The lives and deaths of writers are often as ugly as they. Readers clamor to know more, they want everything revealed. When that could only spoil the mystery.

Tour buses in Key West bellow out the names of the bars they pass, informing tourists ‘this was Hemingway’s favorite place to drink in the afternoons’. I would be more impressed to find a bar Hemingway did not frequent.

Writers are a tribe oft referenced by the public, but not easy to spot. Which is just as well, because unlike, say, movie stars they are not an attractive bunch. It seems to go with the territory except for the exceptions who prove the rule.

John Hersey, now only known to to the old and learned, long ago bequeathed his 1969 sky blue Mercedes Benz 280 to David Wolkowsky. David is regularly seen chuffing this great car around town. I’ve driven it myself with David for a willing passenger. It’s always fun to rumble about and get stares and photos snapped. Diva for a day.

Long ago I was given a late-90s Volvo 740, grey, automatic, because the owner died and his family did not want it. They only wanted the newer Volvo and the house. Otherwise, they returned the 740 to my cousin, who had bought it in the first place. She’d bought it, along with the house and the newer Volvo because this antisocial head-case, while a socially lauded writer, cost her a fortune.

Writers are expensive pets. My cousin was well padded from a comfortable divorce settlement and she could afford him; today he is almost unknown except to a dwindling few intellectuals. On the day he died, sitting in his chair by a voluble fire, sipping a good bourbon and smoking a cigarette. This his eff you to the emphysema that had come for him. Bitter to the end.

When I inherited the 740 I named it Dead Man Rolling. Eventually it collapsed in the side of a deer in the Hamptons, on a blowy hazy afternoon.

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She’d fallen in love many times before, each real, meaning she’s fickle, meanwhile he had never had a girlfriend, meaning he’s emotionally undeveloped. Coupl’a lightweights.

They were insanely attracted to each other. They played at home, tried on outfits and posed before mirrors and snapped photographs. They cooked together. They laughed. They were twenty-four and in love and they married. Why wouldn’t it last?

But in a love affair you are blind as in a subterranean cave and you bump into walls and you paw them, at least you hope it’s a wall That’s a relationship for you. You never know what’s going on.

You know for certain when it’s over. For example, with this couple, it was coming up on Valentine’s Day and she started hinting. Right away this annoyed him. ‘I can be an asshole all year if on February 14th I bring you a bunch of garbage, it’s all OK?’ he huffed as he shopped. He bought the usual, flowers, a red velvet heart shaped box of chocolates and a beach dress that he knew she liked. Upon his return she tried to conceal her displeasure to receive these things, obviously from the local drugstore, unwrapped. Then it came time to try on the dress and she could not squeeze into it. “Wrong size! Are you saying I’m fat?” she pouted, frowning. She threw the chocolates to the floor. She was exhaustingly dramatic. To save the day he hustled off to exchange the dress for a  larger size.

While he was gone the doorbell rang and the girl met a delivery man with a box. There were twelve long stem roses, as any romantic would relish. She reckoned he’d played a trick on her. She was so relieved. Maybe they had a chance. She read the notecard, it was from somebody else.

The roses, they died.

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I’m playing Mia Borders, her new album Fever Dreams, thankfully available on iTunes, and properly recorded. One thing I’ll say for Ms Mia is she does a good recording. She’s a pro and by the way she does most everything herself.

Mia composes the music and writes the lyrics and she has some signature sounds, for example she bursts out with round pops of sound, audio-light orbs that bespeckle her songs, orchestral confetti. Mia’s voice is an instrument of exquisite beauty and she is in total control. She can sit on a note and play with it and keep it rolling on as long as she wants like a train rumbling through a deep mountain tunnel. Extraordinary.

Endearingly she’s a kidder and prattles one liners between songs, for example she’ll ask the crowd if they need anything, if she can get them anything and then she’ll say that she’s busy and she can’t help and to ask your bartender.

I challenge you to listen to one track. She wrote it for the wedding of her brother, it is pure heavy-duty heart and soul. It’s called My Darling Love. If I’m wrong I’ll reimburse you the .99cents. You have it in writing. Now please go to http://apple.co/2lqlxVq

I’m sorry if this makes you worry about my mental health but I have replayed that song two thousand times. On repeat for the entire flight from America to Serbia, for all my walks around the city of Belgrade and a year later it accompanied me on the return flight to the States. Yeah, I like it and I’m not close to done. Behavior like this might explain why I am single.

But I digress. Hearing Mia live is as magnificent as the jubilant morning awakening-songs of free birds. You’ll experience one of those moments when you feel you understand the purpose of life. Love, heart and soul. Mia Borders resides in New Orleans in case you’re lucky enough to catch her. She plays somewhere every night.