Ceiling fans stir the fetid air, giving a gentle flutter to the dusty flags that hang down over the bar. A painted marlin arches across one wall, and Hemingway’s great rock of a head stares back at me from the black back-cloth behind the band.
Kevin talks fast, his clipped New York delivery jarring amongst the southern drawls of Florida. He brushes aside any questions of what books of Hemingway’s he may have read. His is not a literary thing, it’s a mind thing.
‘I’m a man of action. A romantic activist. I’m a chaser of bulls and a dodger of boredom. Boredom’, he says, fixing me with a manic stare, ‘is a very, very scary thing.’
From what I’ve seen, Kevin’s fellow contestants look an amiable bunch. Does he detect a generosity of spirit amongst the look-alikes?
‘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.