Some Funny Things That Happened On The Way To The Hemingway House
Back in maybe September 2007, I was sitting in one of the smaller auditoriums at Tropic Cinema waiting on a movie to start. My cell phone started buzzing, so I opened it and walked out of the auditorium. I said hello. A man asked if I was Sloan Bashinsky? I said that probably depended on who wanted to know.
He said his name and that he was with a nationally syndicated talk show in New York City. He had read online my suggestion that the City of Key West offer its homeless people jobs as litter cops dressed like pirates, and pay them to patrol Key West uttering avast! and arrrrrr! and other pirate words, and waving plastic pirate cutlasses and pistols at litter bugs and threatening them with walking the plank and keel-hauling if they did not pick up their litter and put it into a waste container. As back up for litter bugs who did not heel to the threats, the duly authorized and sworn in pirate litter cops whipped out citation pads and wrote out real citations for littering.
I said arrrrr! (yeah), I was that Sloan Bashinsky.
He said, “We have Sloan Bashinsky, candidate for Mayor of Key West, live on the air with us!”
I asked, “We are live, on the air now?”
“Yes,” he said.
I said, “Wow.”
In a past life, I probably had been interviewed 200 times on radio programs, including a few nationally syndicated shows, but that was the first time an interview had started with the first phone call from a station. The first call historically had been to set up an interview.
The radio host said he thought my idea for homeless people being paid to be litter cops dressed like pirates was brilliant, he loved it, he hoped it happened, and he wished me well.
That led to several other calls from radio stations around the US, including a station on Ohau, Hawaii. But, arrrrrrgh! no stations in Key West or the Keys interviewed me about giving homeless people jobs as litter cops dressed and behaving like pirates. And, arrrrrrgh!, Key West did not go with the idea, or even talk with me about it, even though I knew Major Morgan McPherson and the city commissioners and the city manager and the assistant city manager pretty well.
Now flash back to a past life, early September 2002, when I was homeless.
A professional psychic I had known by phone and correspondence since 1990, as the result of a radical book that had pushed hard through me about treating legal problems like unwelcome messages from God to the person with the legal problem, told me of a dream she’d had of me drawing beautiful mandalas on the sidewalks of Key West. People were walking up and paying me $20 for them, and some people came back later and paid me even more. I was dressed like I’d been outfitted from Lands End and was wearing loafers.
So, I spent a little of the money I had on a set of Crayola watercolor markers and some pencils and a pencil sharpener and a black fine point ink pen – I had no artistic training – and I started sketching and coloring in abstract images on cardboard box tops. Back then, Key West let sidewalk artists set up anywhere they wanted to set up and offer their art for sale. I set up on various sidewalks in Old Town, displaying the drawings, but I only sold one. Arrrrrgh!
I gave a soul drawing to Dennis Reeves Cooper, owner and publisher of Key West the newspaper. On it I was,
“The pen is mightier than the sword, thus the sword defends the pen.”
That was when Dennis and many other people, including myself, were working hard to get Key West a Citizens Review Board, to watchdog the city police.
When one day I asked Dennis if he had hung the soul drawing in his office?, he said no. I said if he didn’t want the drawing, I’d like to get it back. He said he would look for it and I could come by and get it, which I did. I don’t know what then became of the drawing, but if I still had it, I would give it to Naja and Arnaud.
As time passed, I pedaled my bicycle up to the Ben Franklin store on North Roosevelt Blvd. and bought a tablet of 140# 9 x 12 acid free water color paper, and drew soul drawings on real art paper and tried to peddle them on the sidewalks of Old Town. Arrrrrgh! Still no sales.
Yep, sometimes I set up in front of the Hemingway House on Whitehead Street, where a very fine visual artist, George Salhofer, an Austrian ex-pat who had lived in Key West for quite a while, set up most mornings. As time passed, we became friends. It might have helped that George saw, arrrrr!, I was not selling any of my soul drawings, thus competing with him. Arrrrrrgh!
Flash forward to early 2006, when my financial circumstances changed via an inheritance from my recently deceased father. I commissioned George to do a painting of the old light house across the street from the Hemingway House. George’s passion was abstract painting, but he sold very little of that in front of the Hemingway House. I told George to jazz it up, not do it like he would do it for tourists.
I said I was hearing something about balloons, so George jazzed it up with three helium balloons of different color rising up one over another. He jazzed up the sky and foreground a little, too. That painting, maybe the only one George ever sold to a former homeless person, hangs today in my bedroom. Every time I see George, he is glad to see me, says he still reads and saves my daily ravings, which I email to him. Arrrrrr! It takes a nut to know a nut.
Daily ravings at goodmorningkeywest.com, which came to life in early 2007 as a result of the inheritance I had received from my father the pervious year, which ended my being homeless. Later in 2007, goodmorningfloridakeys.com got started. Except for not making any money, I liked writing and publishing online a lot better than I liked writing books for publishing houses, and later self-publishing, before I became homeless in 2000.
To put it simply, I ran out of money. Before that, for a long time I was unable to make a living wage. I was spirit-blocked, there was nothing I could do about it. I finally concluded being homeless was something God apparently wanted me to experience, and boy did I experience it! Arrrrgh!
I slept in Key West doorways on Fleming Street, next to the bookstore. I slept on park benches, fishing piers, beaches, yards behind churches, in loaned vehicles, in spare rooms, in tents near Smathers beach, in Florida Keys Outreach Coalition shelters, at KOTS (Keys Overnight Homeless Shelter), in my own vehicle when I had one in 2005, before I had to give it away to someone the angels who boss me around apparently felt needed it more than I did – arrrrrgh!
I ate hundreds of meals in soup kitchens in Key West, and was grateful. I got to know a lot of homeless people. Lots of them were Vietnam war vets suffering severe post traumatic shock. A man living in his car was an ordained Episcopal priest. A woman living in her van was an ordained Methodist minister. A man was a former CIA or something similar covert agent, who knew how to make anyone feel awful for messing with him. The most well-read person I had ever met.
They all had come from something mainstream respected, but something had happened, a tragedy had occurred, a screw had come loose, and they became homeless. This was before the great swoon in the local and national economy after Hurricane Wilma flooded out Key West and the lower Keys in the fall of 2005, which economic depression flooded Key West with a new and different kind of homeless person.
I also got to know quite a few gypsy-like people who lived in their vans by choice, and came to Key West in the winter, then went somewhere else for the summer. Mostly very interesting people, who today are criminals in Key West simply because they live in their vehicles.
I learned what homeless people most fear in the Key West area is MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which doctors have told me is pandemic in the Florida Keys, in mainstream and homeless populations.
I nearly died of MRSA in mid-2003 – arrrrrgh! – not long before Father Stephen Braddock, CEO of Florida Keys Outreach Coalition, and City Planning Commissioner Bill Verge paid my filing fee so I could run for Mayor of Key West, which was the first time I ran.
Arrrrrgh! I hated kissing babies and cutting ribbons and being nice and polite, and I hated politics even more. Arrrrrgh! Fortunately, in a dream I was told to do all I could to get Jimmy Weekley re-elected, if I knew what was good for me. So I set out to do that, and then Jimmy got accused of paying me to campaign for him.
By then, KW Police Chief Buz Dillon and I were best friends, and he was reining in his cowboy cops who were harassing homeless people for sport. By then, I also was close to Bob Tishenkel, Key West’s city attorney; and I was close to assistant city manager John Jones, originally from my home state and city, Birmingham, Alabama; and I was pretty close to city manager Julio Avael. I had lots of conversations with them about homeless people.
I told the Key West City Commission in Old City Hall many times that only God can change long-term homeless people, and they looked down at me from the dais like I was daff. They also didn’t seem to care for my telling them, that because Key West had adopted One Human Family as its creed, God had decided to use the city’s homeless people to see if Key West was really serious about its creed. I felt Jimmy Weekley believed homeless people were part of God’s One Human Family.
Early this year at a city commission meeting, I offered myself to Mayor Craig Cates and the city commissioners as a homeless expert who would advise the city for free. They did not respond. They do not seem to like what I tell them about homeless people. What they seem to want, to be blunt, is do whatever it takes to get homeless people out of Key West. That is why they want a new, bigger homeless shelter on Stock Island.
However, while this still is America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, homeless people can use city sidewalks and streets and parks and beaches and piers. Homeless people can still ride city buses and their bicycles, and get around and go into local businesses and buy what they can afford.
Well, you might think I am a raving homeless advocate. I am not. I am very hard on homeless people when they act out, cause trouble for themselves, other homeless people and mainstream people. I get onto them about fighting, drinking and using other narcotics. I tell them, when they do that they don’t do themselves or God any good.
Back to Naja sporting a white Ernest Hemingway-esque beard in my dream.
I told her that during my senior year at Vanderbilt, I took literature courses because I had already taken the required courses for my major (economics) and minor (business administration). I said, in a American novels course, my professor said you always knew who was going to turn out to be the bad guy in Hemingway’s novels, because he was introduced as someone who did not drink.
I have not been able to drink for some time; it makes me ill in my G.I. tract. Right, I’m the bad guy.
I told people, who from time to time tried to get me to enter the Hemingway look alike contests Sloppy Joes holds annually in Key West, that no way would I do that. I’d have to buy a fancy expensive fishing outfit and pretend I was Ernest Hemingway. I’d have to be around drunks, and I don’t like being around drunks, even if they are rich drunks like Ernest Hemingway was.
Flash back to law school, when I loved drinking beer and read Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest Hemingway. I hoped some day to be a famous novelist in Hemingway’s ilk.
After law school, I read Carlos Baker’s compilation of many of Hemingway’s handwritten letters. By the time I was done reading that, I had concluded Hemingway was a total asshole even though I liked drinking beer.
In 1990, around the time the radical book about approaching legal problems in a new way was self-published, The High Legal Road I called it, I was invited to be a presenter (expert) at a writer’s conference in my home town. I decided to base my presentation on The Old Man and the Sea, which I’d first read around age ten in Life Magazine serials. I’d fallen in love with that story, and with Hemingway.
In Carlos Baker’s compilation was a letter from Hemingway to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner & Sons. Hemingway was furious over people reading symbolism into the story. The old man was an old man, boy was a boy, the sea was the sea, the fish was a fish. That was all there was to it! Even back in law school, I thought Hemingway protested too much.
From Carlos Baker, I also knew how deeply difficult was young Ernest’s relationship with is father, how much the boy wanted his father’s approval never given, and how hard Hemingway later tried throughout his life to prove his manhood in various he-manly rites, as well as in his writings. And, how much he had reminded me of me.
As I pondered the presentation at the writer’s workshop in 1990, which I decided to name, “Writing as a Mystical Experience,” I had a revelation.
I saw the boy who wanted so desperately to go out fishing with the old man that day, but was left behind, was young Ernest being rejected by his own father. I saw the old man as Ernest in his later years. I saw the sea as Hemingway’s subconscious. I saw the great fish as Hemingway’s quest for his manhood. I saw the sharks which came and gnawed the great blue marlin slashed to the side of the old man’s little boat, leaving on the head and tail connected by a bard skeleton, as Hemingway’s internal feminine come to claim her due for his having rejected her his entire life. I saw the sharks as the beginning of Hemingway’s brain cancer, which slowly drove him mad and eventually led him to man up and put the barrel his favorite double-barreled shotgun into his mouth and his big toe on the trigger and blow his own brains out to avoid spending the rest of his days in an institution. I saw the last novel Hemingway completed as his subconscious suicide note. He had indeed protested to much to Max Perkins.
No, none of that was discussed in the Vanderbilt literature course. The professor had other views of the symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea, which I parroted back to him on the final exam and aced the course even though I had only made a B- on the mid-term exam.
Right, the suicide note version did not go over well at the writer’s conference.
What they most wanted to know was what I did with writer’s block? I said I didn’t get writer’s block. The packed auditorium stopped breathing. I said when I am supposed to write, it flows out of me, I have to write. When it is not flowing out of me, I do something else. Maybe new writing is incubating in my soul, but until it hatches, I don’t try to write.
I asked if they read books explaining how to write? Books telling them to set aside a fixed time each day to sit before a typewriter or computer, even if nothing was coming? They nodded yes. I said that was no way to write. I said some of them might be writers, and some of them of might be painters, or sculptors, or weavers, or jewelers. And some of them might plumbers, or electricians, or lawyers, or whatever. I told them they either were writers, or they were not.
That was in September 1990, at Birmingham Southern College. Ten years before I became homeless.
Thanks to inheritances, I was well fixed financially. I never dreamed I would be homeless. Not me, who had been interviewed by Jane Pauley in early 1985, on the Today show, over my first book, HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter? Not me, who had been interviewed on the CBS Morning News, and on CNN. Not me, who had done over 200 radio interviews concerning books that had flowed through me. Books which never made me a living, although they received rave reviews.
After my editor at Prentice-Hall read the manuscript of The High Legal Road, he said it moved him deeply in some places, and made him want to argue strongly against it in other places. Arrrrgh! He said it was too spiritual to be a legal book, and too legal to be a spiritual book, so they would not know how to market it and would not be able to represent it. That led to my self-publishing it, 5000 copies, all but a few copies of which, arrrrgh!, I ended up giving away. After that, I gave away everything I wrote, because it was drop dead obvious it wasn’t going to sell.
Arrrrgh! Not for want of trying to earn a living did I end up homeless and being called a vagrant, a dirt bag, a degenerate, a leech, and worse, in Key West.
I now, arrrrgh!, have run three times for mayor, and three times for the county commission, and once for the school board, and I still hate kissing babies and cutting ribbons and politics. Arrrr! I’d still much rather be a rich and famous author like Ernest Hemingway. And, arrrrh!, I still would like to be able to drink beer.
Sloan Bashinsky, aka the Fool on Little Torch