‘No, they hate me. They can’t stand me.’ He smiles cheerfully at this and his eyes go slightly misty.
‘I’ve been taking abuse down here for ten years … and now I’m like a local. Ask anybody, I’m a local legend down here now.’
He has a plan for tomorrow’s final. For his presentation he’s going to team up with an even more venerable local legend, an 83-year-old by the name of ‘Shine’ Forbes, who boxed Hemingway back in the thirties. I should come along. This could be Kevin’s year.
I accept his invitation to be a sort of unofficial second, but I’d like to meet Mr Forbes for myself.
A local cartoonist called David Laughlin offers to introduce me to Shine. Laughlin is slim and softly spoken, with long hair and a golden beard. He was raised on an Amish farm in Ohio, thinks laid-back Key West is becoming too rich too fast and is contemplating a move to New Zealand. He has a healthily sceptical view of the local life-style and particularly the Hemingway worship. In one of his cartoons a bull sits pounding away at a typewriter beneath a head of Hemingway sticking out of the wall.
Shine Forbes’s house on Fort Street feels more Caribbean island than American mainland. This is the cheaper end of town and has a quite different and much more seductive atmosphere than the manicured main drags round Duval Street. It’s known as Bahama Village.
Shine sits out in a small patch of yard, drinking a Bud from the neck in the shade of a tree. Chickens scratch and strut in the dust. I’ve noticed chickens all over Key West, occasionally causing cars and bikes to skid to a halt as they potter across quite busy roads. ‘Why do the chickens cross the roads?’ I ask Shine. He tells me that many of them are descended from the roosters who were bred for cock-fighting, which, until two years ago, was a common occurrence in Key West, and one of the reasons Hemingway liked the place.
Shine, whose real name is Kermit Forbes, is amused but not greatly impressed by the celebrity that being Hemingway’s sparring partner has brought him. He lives modestly in a rented single-storey clapboard house which was once a dairy. Now it’s home to Shine’s rich collection of memorabilia. There’s a pair of boxing gloves with the stuffing spilling out, masks from the Halloween procession, beads, necklaces, a Conch Republic flag, a young child’s woollen dress, soft toys, bar mirrors, two teddy bears in a net, a cactus growing from inside a bright yellow kettle. And that’s just outside.
Indoors there’s barely room for the two of us amongst more mouldering toys, baseball hats, birdcages and photographs of Shine with various friends, which hang from the ceiling as densely packed as leaves in a tropical forest. On one wall is a picture of young Shine, fists raised in fighter’s pose. Next to it is Hemingway, his great barrel chest bared, a cloak around his shoulders, beaming broadly as he leans on the ropes of a boxing ring.
One day, some time in the 1930s, Shine was acting as a second to a young boxer who was taking quite a pasting. Shine threw in the towel. The referee refused to accept it. He did it again and once more the referee kicked it away. Furious at his refusal to stop the fight, Shine climbed into the ring and swung a punch at the referee. Only after the fight was Shine told that the referee he had assaulted was the famous writer Ernest Hemingway. He was made to go round to the house and apologise straightaway.
Shine knocked on the door of the grand house at 907 Whitehead with deep misgivings, but Hemingway, far from being angry, asked him and his friends in for some sparring practice and told them to come round any time.
And they did. One Christmas, Shine recalls, they were walking up Whitehead, short of cash, when they saw a light in the Hemingways’ house and knocked on the door. Hemingway was holding a party and the boys earned $200 sparring by the pool as an entertainment for his guests.
Shine finishes his Budweiser and sends the bottle skimming across the yard. One of those sparring friends, who went by the name of ‘Iron Baby’ Roberts, is being buried this morning but Shine doesn’t think he’ll go along. He doesn’t like funerals. And he looks like the sort of man who doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do.
He stares for a while across to the chain-link fence on the other side of the street, which surrounds a now abandoned military base. He flicks a fly away. I ask him if he ever hurt Hemingway. He rubs the flat of his hand across his bad eye and chuckles.
‘I could never get near him. He was a big man.’ He mimes Hemingway’s long arms. ‘I had to look up to see him.’
I ask him if Key West has changed a lot since the days when he helped milk a cow in the house he now lives in.
He looks around, never hurrying to answer. ‘Sure.’ His eyes come back to mine. ‘No one’s hungry any more.’
As we’re leaving, Basil notices a cockerel lying in a corner of the yard. It’s been very still for an awfully long time. He brings it to Shine’s attention. Apart from confirming that this is an ex-rooster, he doesn’t seem much interested.
‘What do you do?’ Basil enquires solicitously. ‘Bury him?’
‘We’ll bury him.’ Shine yawns expansively. ‘Or throw him over the fence. He’ll go over the fence one day.’
As will we all.
Seven o’clock in the evening outside Sloppy Joe’s and Kevin the cop is not a happy man. His chance to win the Hemingway Look-Alike competition at the eleventh attempt is only an hour away and Shine Forbes has not shown up.
‘Goddamit, where the hell is he?’ mutters Kevin, puffing nervously on his cigar, his eyes flicking over the growing crowd.
Kevin is not the only one of the twenty-four finalists to be displaying uncharacteristic jumpiness (though Hemingway himself once said that the only two things that really frightened him were snakes and public speaking). Most pace quietly up and down, like little boys before a school play. ‘Just talk loud and slow,’ one contender is counselled. Another sits quietly with his wife and daughter, dressed, like Kevin, in the all-white strip and red neckerchief of a Pamplona bull-runner, every now and then running his tongue over dry lips.
Meanwhile the judges, who are all previous winners, are behaving with the assurance and swagger of those who know they have the destinies of others in their hands. Wearing medal ribbons round their necks, they’re photographed and eyed-up and accorded all the guarded respect of school prefects.
Kevin’s loyal friend Devin is quite sure that the secret of a Hemingway winner is social. The oligarchy of previous winners who run the Look-Alike Society are searching not for a Hemingway replica but for someone they’ll all get on with. According to Devin this counts Kevin out.
‘If there were twenty-four contestants, he’d come twenty-fifth.’
When I see his act I’m not really surprised. He skips up on stage to a raucous but generally friendly welcome and, wielding his cigar like George Burns on acid, goes into a suicidal routine, berating Shine - ‘that prick’ - for not having turned up to fight and roundly abusing every one in sight before ending with the observation that now JFK Junior is dead he, Kevin, is the sexiest man in the USA. The packed crowd boo and hiss him like they might a pantomime villain.
He comes off-stage, wild-eyed, hyped up and delighted.
Most of the other acts confine themselves to anodyne statements of admiration and respect, though I quite like the middle-aged man who does a strip-tease, peeling off his safari shirt to reveal a firm if ample belly over which he proudly rubs his hand. ‘A vote for me is a vote for Hemingway in his prime.’
Predictably, Kevin the cop fails to win again. Equally predictably, he is already making plans to come back next year. Devin, doubtless adept by now at consoling his friend, wonders why nearly all the contestants want to look like Hemingway when he shot himself. Which is a fair point. The image of Hemingway sanctioned by the Hemingway Look-Alike Society and Sloppy Joe’s Bar, joint organisers of the event, is the bearded, poloneck-sweatered likeness, complete with tired eyes and thinning hair, captured on camera by Karsh of Ottawa four years before his death.
There is no place here for a young, fit Hemingway, a Hemingway w
ho looks like the way Hemingway did when he lived in Key West.
We’re about to leave the sauna-like climate here at the end of America. Sixty-six summers ago Hemingway too was planning to escape the sub-tropical summer.
Over a farewell margarita or three made for me by Joan, the barwoman at La Concha, I reflect that what motivated Hemingway to travel, apart from natural curiosity, was a mixture of boredom and boastfulness. Having sought new places and new experiences, he used all his old reporter’s wiles to make it seem that he was the first to discover them. So, whether it was ambulance-driving in World War One, or marlin-fishing, or bull-running at Pamplona, Ernest Hemingway had the canny knack of being the first to tell the world about it.
In the sticky heat of July 1933 he was putting final touches to what was to be another world exclusive. And, for him, a new continent.
AFRICA
‘I like to shoot a rifle and I like to kill and Africa is where you do that.’
So wrote Hemingway to Janet Flanner, in April 1933. Hemingway had taken to life in the United States with enthusiasm. He had produced a second bestseller, A Farewell to Arms; Death in the Afternoon, an authoritative work on bullfighting; and a short-story collection, Winner Take Nothing.
There were rumblings of criticism - Max Eastman’s review of Death in the Afternoon was headed ‘Bull in the Afternoon’ - but on the whole his reputation was high, and he was enjoying the attentions of Hollywood, which had just made A Farewell to Arms, the first picture from his work. Yet none of his plans for 1933, outlined in a letter to Arnold Gingrich, publisher of a new magazine called Esquire, seemed to include his native land:
‘I go across to Cuba in a small boat April 12 to fish that coast for two months in case go to Spain to make a picture, if not, for four months then to Spain. Go from Spain to Tanganyika and then to Abyssinia to shoot. Will be back next January or February.’
His wanderlust had returned. Though he never made the picture in Spain, he did, thanks to a generous loan from Pauline’s Uncle Gus, make his first visit to Africa, disembarking at Mombasa, Kenya, on 8 December 1933.
Early January 1999 and I’m standing, drinking my Tusker beer, in an open porch at the front of my tent at the Tortilis camp, on the edge of the Amboseli National Park in south-eastern Kenya.
My guidebook notes that ‘Mount Kilimanjaro, at 19,340 feet (5896 metres) the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain in the world, dominates the landscape.’
I can’t see it anywhere.
I’m told that you have to be up very early to catch sight of the mountain, as her vast bulk generates an almost impenetrable layer of cloud for much of the day.
To be able, even theoretically, to see the snows of Kilimanjaro less than twelve hours after leaving Europe adds an edge of guilt to my exhilaration. I feel I should have done a little more work to get here. Hemingway’s first sight of Kilimanjaro came after a three-week boat journey from Marseilles, an overnight train ride to Nairobi and two days’ driving. And then he fell ill almost immediately, and was forced to return to Nairobi, where, from his hospital bed, he reported back to Esquire readers as ‘Your amebic dysentery correspondent’.
Symptoms of a.d. run from weakly insidious through spectacular to phenomenal. I believe the record is held by a Mr. McDonald with 232 movements in the twenty-four hours although many old a.d.men claim the McDonald record was never properly audited.
His illness didn’t put him off. He was captivated by Africa.
A brown land like Wyoming and Montana but with greater roll and distance … Nothing that I have ever read has given any idea of the beauty of the country.
What land I can see, beyond the fence of the camp, is studded with thorn trees and a light carpet of grass. The local Masai, unmissable in brightly patterned red cloaks, pass by on their way between the villages.
The abrupt transition from a small crowded country to a big empty one lends an air of unreality which I know will, like altitude sickness, take a day or two to clear.
‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon.’ Hemingway noted this on his second, longer trip to Africa in the 1950s and for everyone, from pampered tourist to native goat-herder, the hour of dawn is the best time.
It’s prime time for Kilimanjaro spotters too. At 6.30, having been woken by the traditional on-safari cup of tea, I stick my head out of the tent and there, so close and so high that I think it must be a cloud formation, is the rim of the great mountain, peeking out above a cornice of dark cloud.
By the time I’ve found my notebook and pen it’s disappeared again. Hemingway complained that on his second trip the mountain didn’t show itself for three weeks and I become despondent, but by the time I’ve dressed and walked up the hill to the spreading timbered and thatch-roofed space where we eat breakfast, the cloud has rolled back to reveal the whole long crest of the mountain, ‘as wide as all the world’, as Hemingway described it in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’. It is an unbelievably powerful sight. On the eastern tip of this great ridge a glacier catches the sun.
Hemingway would probably have been out by now and bagged a gazelle or two, but things have changed. Most people who come to Africa nowadays shoot the animals with Leica and Pentax rather than Mannlicher and Browning. National Parks have been created to protect the animals (Amboseli opened soon after Hemingway’s last visit) and white hunters have largely been superseded by black rangers and game wardens.
Hemingway, obsessive hunter though he was, was not the kind of sportsman to shoot from cars or hides or after dark when the animals were blinded by powerful lights. For him tracking on foot, using the knowledge of animals inculcated in him by his father and grandfather, was the best and fairest way for a man to hunt.
Today I’m going out into the bush in that spirit, in the company of my two guides, Jackson, a Masai, and Ali, a Kenyan Moslem.
It is the day to christen my Hemingway Jacket, which I spotted in a magazine at the Chicago gun range and which I find is still produced by Willis and Geiger to his original design.
What do I get for my $153? Well, as far as I can gather from the catalogue, a walking munitions dump. ‘Added shell pockets, recoil pad, expandable chest pockets, two huge bellowed cargo pockets for shells and a sleeve pocket for shooting glasses.’ The last item is a reminder that Hemingway suffered from poor eyesight for most of his life and, before dealing with a charging rhino, had to pop on a pair of little round specs which made him look more like a professor of poetry than a great white hunter.
First we drive a couple of miles or so to Lake Amboseli which, despite a year of drought, still retains water from the El Nino downpours of the year before. The grass cover is still green, and rich stands of vegetation mark fertile lava flows from the mountain.
In the near distance we pass ostriches ruffling their feathers and a pair of zebra mating and the occasional elephant plodding, but the most common beast in the bush is the cow, usually preceded by some solitary walking figure, often no more than a child.
A larger herd of elephant is indicated by footprints on the track, so we climb down off the vehicles and proceed on foot - something generally discouraged amongst tourists.
Jackson wears his Masai cloak, red with yellow stripe, thong sandals, and a coloured bead head-strap. Ali is in his green safari gear.
The presence of any large animals is advertised in advance by numbers of white birds called cattle egrets that ride the big game around with a proprietary air. The bigger and heavier the creature the more the egrets like them, for their feet break up the soil and bring to the surface fresh supplies of the locusts, flies and grasshoppers on which the birds feed.
There are maybe a dozen elephant, including young, making their way slowly towards their next meal. They have almost insatiable appetites. A fully-grown elephant chews up 300 lbs of vegetation and drinks thirty to fifty gallons of water every day, but their metabolism is poor and less than half what they eat is digested. So they make their way ac
ross the bush rather like a line of combine harvesters, stuffing it in one end and depositing it, semi-digested, from the other.
Jackson and Ali approach the herd slowly and carefully. Elephants’ eyesight, like their digestion, leaves something to be desired. They walk with their head and eyes down and are more likely to see you approach from the back or the side than they are from the front.
Ali says you can get to within a dozen feet of a herd if you’re upwind of them. He bends down, picks up a handful of dust and tosses it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.
As he does so the elephants’ ears flap and their highly sensitive trunks are up sniffing for trouble. As there are young with them Ali keeps his distance. I’m not complaining, just watching them is therapeutic. Elephants have a combination of mass and grace that is impressive and compelling. When they are threatened they can transform their bulk to a powerhouse of aggression which, once seen, is something always respected and never forgotten. Even Hemingway would never shoot an elephant.
The lion is another thing altogether.
Being British, we regard the lion as a symbol of pride and invincibility. To the Masai he is Simba, killer of cattle and Public Enemy Number One. Jackson was in his teens when he was one of a group of ten young Masai who confronted a lion and killed it with spears. I ask him from how far away.
He grins. ‘As close as possible.’
Which, when pressed, he reckoned to be no more than four feet.
Though the Masai see the lion as a pest, the tourist sees him as a star whom he will pay good money to see. There have been recent moves to try and reconcile these positions. Any agreement ultimately rests on whether the Masai believe they can make enough money from tourism to justify the loss of their cattle.
Hemingway Adventure (1999) Page 12
