The Short Happy Discussion with Papa

I must have been shitfaced at the time. I had to be, but to tell the truth, I hadn't had much to drink, maybe three, possibly four pint drafts of the local island-brewed craft beer. Hell, that 4.7 crap doesn't usually affect me. It normally takes at least a half dozen to start the slur. The stuff wasn't bad, although not quite hoppy enough for my taste. My preference would have been a double-hop IPA craft beer, but in Key West, you're lucky to have any craft beer that isn't laced with coconut or key lime. Gotta confess, it's kind of a she-she town, or whatever that thing is called where testosterone is at low tide. Of course, I headed for Sloppy Joes, one of the two bars in town claiming to have been Hemingway's hangout where he wrote much of his work. He was the author that started me down this long, lonesome road of rejection. I was in high school and couldn't give a rat's ass about anything my English teacher said unless it contained the word 'girls'. I listened only enough to get the homework assignment and perfunctorily plodded and nodded through Shakespeare and Coleridge. My negativity mitigated somewhat when I hit Hersey's Hiroshima, but after that, the slide back to boring continued. Then Mr. Burns turned the page and got us into the short story, and one in particular, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber blew me away. (It blew Macomber away, too.) It was just a short story, but it was rife with underlying meaning.

My lady and I had decided to spend a week in Key West at a VRBO rental during the offseason. We weren't Parrotheads, but we had heard a lot about the place and decided to go. We quickly discovered it was a pretty dull place, all tourism crap and drinking establishments. Not much interest for Franki (my wife) and me who had traveled the globe, been on safari, and climbed Mount Everest - well, almost climbed Mount Everest. We made it as far as the North base camp, 16,900 feet elevation. Franki couldn't handle the rare atmosphere and had difficulty breathing and had to be evacuated to a hospital in Katmandu, where she recovered without complications.

We were bored as hell after days of doing the tourist thing, visiting the Truman summer white house, getting blasted in surrounding pubs, and boinking each other's brains out while watching porn. I had to take a break from all those things, so I told Franki I was going to grab a couple of beers at Sloppy Joes, the place rumored to have been the watering hole for Ernest Hemingway. She was limping gingerly when I told her, and didn't make a peep that she wanted to go with. I told her not to wait up, but the truth was she would have feigned sleep even if I came home at 8:00. Whatever.

Joes was only a short walk, and it was a warm night, but that goes unsaid. Every night in the Keys is warm - and muggy. When I got to the place, the air conditioning inside felt good. It wasn't cold because a cold room is not conducive to drinking cold draft beer. Smart move on the owners' part. But the temp was adequate. To a bar aficionado, it was a pretty neat place: a large rounded bar with hard stools of varying wood colors, a colorful marquee of drinks over the liquor island announcing the various libations available, mostly "island" specialties and classic mixed drinks like Martinis and Sidecars. You were on your own for craft beer selection. You had to walk up to the area where the taps were and read the spigot labels or ask the barkeep. Everything was wood - the bar, the stools, the floor. No laminates that I could see. A good sign to me. Pictures of Hemingway adorned all the walls, one a mug shot on a LIFE magazine cover blown up to four times size, shots of the man fishing, drinking, laughing, meeting with various dignitaries. An enormous stuffed fish was mounted on a wall way up high. I'm no fisherman, but I'd say it was a swordfish. The second bar was just off to the side and was also rounded, but a lot smaller. There were two guys sitting at opposing corners carrying on what appeared to be a disagreement about something.

Offseason, Tuesday evening, not many people in the place which I thought was unusual given its notoriety, maybe eight or ten customers at the large bar, and two at the smaller one. I walked to the area of the taps and studied them, and seeing no brands of craft beer I recognized, ordered a Funky Buddha Hop Gun IPA. The name was a little crazy, but IPA sold it for me. No way was I going to order one of the others; Mermaid Kisses, Strawberry Wheat Ale, and Key Lime Coconut Ale. What the hell is wrong with people who drink that crap?

I sat at the large bar, away from the regulars who were enjoying drinks and conversation. Occasionally, someone would come in and sit near me, order a beer and leave. Some of them would make small talk with me. Apparently they were tourists, or at least non-regulars. After my third beer, and ensconced in the Hemingway zone, a strange thing happened. I thought at first the lights had been dimmed, but then I noticed it was as bright as ever, but the colors were fading. I mean the colors of everything, the marquee, in particular, caught my eye. The words printed in reds and blues turned gray all of a sudden. What the hell is going on? I rubbed my eyes. Nope, didn't help, all black and white with levels of gray. The massive flat screen TV overhead disappeared, and in its place was a monster CRT 21-inch black and white TV. I was about to rush out of there and look for an eye doctor, when I glanced over at one of the tables. As if Scotty had beamed him aboard, a flashing, shimmering figure of a man started to appear, and then the full man could be seen. Lord, help me. This was just too weird. He was sitting at one of the small tables and poring through a black floppy leather notebook and furiously writing. It looked like...it couldn't be...but it was. The Grand Master of Short Stories himself - Ernest Hemingway. In black and white no less. WTF. He's dead, isn't he? I rubbed my eyes again, and when the image was still there, I chugged my beer. I sat and watched, dumbfounded, staring at the ghostly image. He kept writing and on several occasions glanced up from his work to see me staring at him. He said nothing at first, but it finally got to him, and he laid his pencil down, put his hands folded up in front of his mouth, lowered them again and held his arms outstretched. "What? Is something wrong?" He spoke in a friendly manner, not at all unkind. Thinking his question was rhetorical, I just sat there like a dummy without answering. He kept staring. "Well. Is something wrong? Is there a problem?"

All the hubbub in the noisy bar ceased, and I felt everyone staring at me now. I had to say something. "No, nothing wrong. You just remind me of someone."

A sardonic smile appeared on his handsome white-bearded face. "I remind you of someone, eh? Who would that someone be?" Before I could answer, he filled in the blank to his question. "I know. You think I look like Ernest Hemingway. Is that it? I get that all the time."

I felt relieved I wasn't the first one to see the likeness. "Why did you come to Sloppy Joes?" he asked. "There are a lot of other bars around."

"I heard it was the place Hemingway frequented and I wanted to have a looksee." He laughed heartily.

"But why, son. Are you, were you a fan?"

"Yeah, I was," I said, almost sounding indignant.

"What did you like about his writing, I mean, what was your favorite, The Old Man and The Sea, For Whom The Bell Tolls? Something else?

"I liked his short stories best."

"Which ones?"

"Well, I've read them all, but the one that stands out, for me, at least, is The Short Happy Life of Vincent Macomber."

"You mean Francis Macomber."

"What? Oh, yeah, Francis Macomber."

"Well, come on over and set a spell. Tell the barkeep to make me another one of these," and he held up a large rocks glass with a greenish tinted liquid and a couple of ice cubes. "Get whatever you're drinking and tell him to put it on my tab."

I didn't know who this Hemingway-lookalike was, but I thought it'll be nice to have a conversation about Hemingway with a local. So I ordered the drinks and carried them over to the man sitting at the table who was smiling as if he knew a secret that I didn't. I sat and pushed his drink in front of him. "What're you drinking? Is that Absinthe?" Apparently, everything I said was funny to this guy, and he laughed again.

"No. Absinthe, the real stuff, was made illegal long, long ago. They claimed it was an aphrodisiac. It wasn't the alcohol content they objected to, but it was a dangerous drug that caused hallucinations. You can get stuff today they call Absinthe, but it's not the real stuff. This is a Gin Gimlet I'm drinking. Gordon's Gin and Rose's Lime Juice."

"You sound like you've had Absinthe before. The real stuff, I mean."

"Oh yeah. A long time ago. I spent quite a bit of time in Paris hanging out with friends during the '20s. We drank a lot of it. And, it was brutal. I would wake up naked three days later, not knowing where the hell I was."

"Paris? You lived there?"

"Well...sort of. I spent a lot of time in hotels over a four year period. And I crashed with friends when I had to."

"What were you doing in Paris? Work or play?"

"I was lucky enough to earn a living in Paris, but yes,...it was work and play."

"What did you do?"

"I wrote articles for newspaper and magazines."

I knew then I was talking to the real thing. I didn't know how or why, but I knew this guy was no imposter. To check my newfound enlightenment, I stood and introduced myself. He didn't stand, but he shook my hand and said, "Nice to meet you, Jack. I'm Ernest." I fucking-A-well knew it -- Papa Hemingway himself.

"So, tell me," he said. "What did you like about my story?" I knew Hemingway realized I knew who he was now, and was comfortable with it, so he stopped using second person pronouns and reverted to the first person.

"Hell, Ernest. You've had quite a life," was what I started with.

He lowered his head, looking forlorn. "My life is all a public record, even those parts I would rather have kept to myself. The bastards that wrote it got a lot of it wrong."

"What are some of the things they got wrong?"

"My death, for one. That was their biggest mistake. They wrote I was depressed because of a lot of unfounded reasons. My war wounds which hurt, my worries about money, the FBI surveillance on me - that bastard Hoover - yadda, yadda, yadda. Of course, all those things contributed to my undoing, but there were more important factors."

"Like what?"

"They failed to mention that all of my closest friends had died, and that did depress me. But other things caused my downfall. The Absinthe I consumed is one reason no one has mentioned. You asked me about it. It destroyed my ability to maintain mental equilibrium for very long. After falling prey to the Green Fairy, as it was called, along with booze, plus my absolute hatred of complacency, I was no longer the same. My writing came in spurts after my time in Paris in the '20s. Days of lucidity followed days of depression. When I was at the Mayo Clinic in the early '60s, they treated me with drugs and electroshock therapy, maybe twenty times. If frazzled my brain. That was the beginning of the end. When we returned to our home in Ketchum, Idaho, I had had it. I knew it was time to go. For my family's sake, I didn't want to end it that way, but I knew it was the only way. I was in so much pain, with so much depression, and I was such a burden on my wife and family, I ended it like a man; with my old trusty shotgun, leaving no chance of resuscitation." He sat silently for a couple of minutes after telling me this, his hands folded together, and his elbows resting on his knees. He looked down at the floor, reminiscing perhaps of the event itself.

Having broached the subject of the elephant in the room, I continued his line of thought. "But Ernest, if you...if you are..?"

"Dead? Say it. It's okay." He looked at me quizzically. "It was you who summoned me here."

"Me?" I was flabbergasted. "What do you mean I summoned you here? I had nothing to do with it."

He laughed. "Jack. I was...I was...someplace else. You were sitting in my hangout, thinking about my works, and my life. And wishing you had answers. It was you who yanked me back." He looked as if I had already known this.

Confused at this disclosure, I was frantic to change the subject and restarted our talk about Vincent - I mean Francis - Macomber. "I think that was your greatest short story ever, Ernest, and I am not alone with that thinking. You ushered in a whole new way of writing, and I think that story was at the zenith of your style."

"Thanks, Jack. I wrote it in the '30s, late in the '30s, I think, maybe 1938 when I was flashing in and out from the Absinthe. I must say when I was in the throes of literary lucidity, good things happened. I had been thinking about that short story for years before I actually wrote it. The Absinthe hallucinations made it possible. Did you understand my underlying thoughts within the story?"

I thought about his question for a while. It had been quite long ago I had read the story and I was trying to recall it. "Was the wife ever charged with murder? That's the first question comes to mind."

"Well, murder it was. You got that right. But no, she was never charged. She was never even arrested for suspicion."

"Jeez, Ernest. It was clearly evident she murdered him, especially given how she castrated the man at every opportunity. And she wasn't charged?"

"That's the point, lad. Look at the whole picture. The woman controlled everything. She was a beautiful woman who became the trophy wife of a wealthy man. She dominated him and treated him like scum. They both had an unknown agreement with each other. She couldn't leave him and lose the money. She was a bitch gold digger. He wouldn't leave her because of her beauty, her appearance to his friends and business associates. So they were stuck with each other as long as he was less than a man in her opinion and she dominated him. When he turned and ran during the lion hunt, it gave her more fuel for the fire, and she openly had sex with Wilson, who was nothing more than a male prostitute. Her husband was a coward. He knew, but there was nothing he could do about it if he wanted to keep her as his wife. But then he started to show signs of bravery, courageous man-type bravery, when he faced the buffalo. She knew then she was losing him, that he would never again kowtow to her, and would leave her to find another woman. She could not live with that, so she quickly decided to get rid of him and keep all the money. So she shot him."

"But I don't understand. If she killed him, and it was apparent it was murder, why was she not charged?

Ernest laughed at this. "Think about it. Throughout the story, Wilson broke the laws. He was shooting from a moving vehicle, totally against the law, and was bagging game that was protected by the laws. He was using ammunition and guns that were not approved for the sport. Francis had warned him early not to let his wife get anything "on" him as she would use it against him. So, in the end, both Wilson and Francis' wife had something on each other, things neither of them could divulge for fear of reprisal. And so, he testified it was merely a hunting accident." Abruptly, he looked at his wristwatch, a Rolex Oyster I noticed. "Uh-oh, gotta go. Nice talking with you, Jack." He looked me square in the eyes and said "I'll see you next time. Call again." And as he spoke those words, his body started to shimmer, and after a couple of seconds, he was gone completely.

I picked up his empty glass and along with mine, returned them to the bar. I looked at the drink menu marquee and noticed it was color-coded again, and turned to the TV, noting it again was a large flat screen, showing a soccer match somewhere in the world. In full living color. And as I walked through the door to the outside world, I heard the bartender say, "Welcome to the club, Jack."

l"/>