I was a naive twenty-year-old when I went to Key West in the winter of 1970. I was an Eagle Scout college student studying anthropology who still trusted law enforcement, the rule of law, and conducting myself honorably. This is in spite of the war raging in Vietnam, producing American anti-war protests, as well as witnessing the raid on illegal commercial shrimp fishing boats. I was in that innocent state of mind walking the sidewalk back to the docked Pollyanna one evening when a Key West police squad car pulled alongside me. Through a rolled-down window, the single, friendly officer asked if he could talk with me. A cooperative “sure” was my response as I leaned towards his idling squad car. He suggested I get into the squad car to be more comfortable as he had several questions. I climbed into the rear seat with the kind of cooperation only ignorance can produce. I heard all the door locks slam shut. Then I heard him say over his radio, “No, he is cooperating”, as three or four other marked and unmarked vehicles suddenly appeared.
I was feeling confused when several of those unmarked vehicles escorted the squad with me as a witless passenger to the Naval/Air Force Base at Key West. The driver in the lead car flashed something that motivated the guards to hurriedly open the gated entrance to the military base. As darkness fell, two very serious men in suits, one on each of my arms, led me into a low cement block building somewhere in the mix of military structures. I was one scared Eagle Scout.
I was ushered into a stark room where another serious and suited man demanded answers to his questions. The first was ‘what was I doing in Key West?’ I told him I was a sophomore student at Michigan State University working on a shrimp boat as an anthropology project. I was also working on creative writing credits. He wanted the names of my professors. He made notes, then left. A different man came in with the same questions. He made notes, then left. Then the questions changed. “What are you doing with….?” He mentioned three names that I have since forgotten. But I knew who he was asking about.
I would occasionally drink beer with those three men at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, Earnest Hemingway’s favorite place to eat and drink. I was a young man having an adventure, and these three older guys’ stories seemed part of that adventure. They jointly owned a shrimp boat but came into that partnership from different careers. One was a Wall Street broker, one owned radio stations in the Midwest, and the third claimed to be an heir of a Savanna shipping magnet. Their appearances varied from straight-laced to out-and-out hippie. I had met enough genuine characters in Key West to have no doubts in the stories they told me.
Interesting people seemed to abound in the Florida Keys. The Keys and Dry Tortugas had a long history of piracy, smuggling, artists, and writers. The American Navy and military have long been established there in sharp contrast to underground illegal activities and avant-garde artists. Appearances were sometimes deceptive. Like the guy Captain Cooper hired to repair some torn-up nets. He sat shirtless on the back deck, quietly talking with me as I watched. I noticed scars on his torso that looked like healed knife cuts and bullet wounds. When he found out I was a writer, he asked if I would do his correspondence. Turns out he could neither read nor write. When I agreed, he pulled a crumpled, unopened piece of mail from his back pocket. It was a letter from Paul Twitchell, the leader of a religious movement called Eckankar. (Temple of ECK is still located in Chanhassen, MN) This illiterate, scarred-up man was studying astro projection, the conscious development of soul travel to other etherial planes. I had never heard of such a thing. My piqued interest led me to agree to do his correspondence during my time in Key West.
Other folks caught my attention. The chief of Key West police was a hard man who scoffed at my anthropology inquiry about the contrast in violence at the shrimp docks compared to the rest of his city. The artistic designer at Key West Print Fabrics, a high-end, silk-screened textile company, also frequented Sloppy Joe’s. Then there was Tommy, a sometime crew member on the Pollyanna. He was a drunk who couldn’t keep a job but had me figured out. Whenever our boat was at dock he knew I would have money to give him for buying cheap wine and Bugler’s tobacco. He invited me to drink with his buddies. My curiosity only went so far after meeting that assemblage. Tommy’s drinking buddies were all homeless, sleeping probably on docks or under an unsuspecting someone’s porch. One had both hands amputated and replaced with stainless pincher hooks. Another guy had to help him drink and smoke. The third guy opened his tattered wallet to show me a picture of a well-dressed man, woman, and child, which he claimed was his former family in Toronto. He had some unspoken crisis that ended his career as an architect. He scared me. If what he said was true, I wondered what crisis might damage me enough to join this very sad group of men. I continued to give money to Tommy when he asked, but I never sat with those guys again.
I also never sat again with my interrogators after those serious, well-suited men let me go at about 1 AM. I don’t remember any more details other than that different guys would keep asking me the same questions. Mostly about the three guys and their shrimp boat. Had I ever been on the boat? No. Over and over again until they finally escorted me off the military base. No explanation. No apology. No transportation back the miles to the docks where I bunked on the Pollyanna. One of the last times I sat in Sloppy Joe’s, one of the other shrimp boat crew members whispered a rumor to me. He had heard those three guys were using their shrimp boat to smuggle guns to the Sandinista revolutionaries somewhere in Central America. I don’t know if that was true, but based on my Key West experience, I have no reason to doubt.
When I returned to Michigan State University for the spring semester, my Anthropology and English professors asked what the heck I had gotten mixed up in? They had individually been awakened from sleep by the FBI to verify my purpose for being in Key West. The youthful naiveté I had when arriving in Key West was erased by that event. I returned to East Lansing more world-wise and traumatized by that awakening and several other events I have yet to tell you.
