“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
― Robert A Heinlein
It happened again this morning. After walking down to the coffee bar for a latte prepared by my favorite Ukrainian Natalia, I returned upstairs to find the key card for our room inoperative.
Down to the lobby I returned. "Flop flop flop" went my flip flops with every step on the slick, dirty pavers. I hate flip flops, hadn't worn them for years after shattering a toe in a drunken game of crud with a 300 pound former squadron mate. Now I recalled why I never cared for the footwear. "Flop flop flop." A nice middle-aged couple looked up from their phones on the patio, drawn to look for the source of the racket echoing across the stucco walls. I felt a little embarrassed.
There was no one at the front desk, so I walked back into the filthy, cluttered office to find a sullen twenty-something woman, of some sort of equatorial descent, idly thumbing her phone with her knees pulled up against her chest. She didn't look up.
"Excuse me. Are you working today?"
She shot me an annoyed glance, huffed out an equine exhale from her oversized nostrils, and stomped up to the front desk, where we resumed our exchange. A few seconds later I had my new key cards, and she informed me coolly that she'd send security to check the lock as she strode back into the office to resume her tik tok session.
I was given several minutes to cool my heels in the hall outside our room, because of course the new keys didn't work either. Finally a sweaty, corpulent young man of the same descent as the desk clerk grunted up to the door, politely informed me the batteries in the lock were dead, and began struggling to replace them as I walked the space in search of an ice machine I figured I'd need later.
His work finally completed, here I am back in my rather spartan room in this "luxury" hotel.
The Casa Marina was built as a monument to the man whose somewhat deranged vision helped put Key West on the map. Henry Flagler's unlikely railroad across the Keys was to have made this place into a major port when it was completed in 1912. He died a year later, unaware that things here would take a different turn. The hotel was completed in 1920, a luxury destination that hosted presidents and movie stars. It had its ups and downs over the years, but the photos on the walls down in the lobby and the coffee bar attest to its glamorous past. There's Rita Hayworth, and Truman Capote. Harry Truman poses with a freshly caught fish.
And for the most part, everyone's dressed to the nines, men in dinner jackets and slim women in heels. Even their beach-wear is stylish and understated. The building in those photos is immaculately appointed and maintained. The staff wear ties.
But this is 2022, where every day is casual day in America. The staff and I are the only ones in the building wearing collared shirts. There are ballcaps in the dining room. Every single person has a tattoo, usually several, and is showing enough skin to leave no one guessing on this point.
Yesterday afternoon I ventured down to the pool to get out of this crumbling guest room that feels like a lodging for an apparatchik during the Brezhnev era, all beige and worn and out of date. I was relieved to see the signs directing guests to either the adult or the family pool. I'll take "adult", thank you very much, and strode with hope toward my vision of a cool dip in a quiet space, maybe with an umbrella drink.
As I approached the pool deck, I was greeted with emphatic thumping rap played at a volume that allowed folks to enjoy the vibes all the way down in Cuba. The two towel boys, or towel men, were the source of the awful noise, and smiled ironically as they handed me a towel. "Take two!" How very generous of them.
Around the pool lay several thousand pounds of white-turning-pink, tattooed, corpulent vacationers in various states of undress. Ever heard of a pannus? Or better yet, seen one? I saw several out there, floating in the pool like slightly drunk walruses.
Two black couples in their thirties were also in the mix, neither fat nor poorly dressed. They looked a little baffled at what surrounded them, the prize for playing by the rules so they'd have a career and be able to afford the ridiculous prices here. Living the American dream. This is what you get if you win. Worth it?
Finally I gave up and returned to the room to work until Peg got home after six and we went looking for supper. The Thai restaurant was excellent, although the dining patio was next to a busy road and we were surrounded by more tank tops and deformed feet crowned by fungally destroyed toenails, all on display in flip flops.
This whole Key West thing has put us in a bad mood, not getting along particularly well as Peg endures the professional insult of reacquainting herself with the horrible corporate medical care offered here in the southernmost part of the South, while I'm trapped in this hell hole of a hotel trying to bill enough to cover the shocking price tag of this whole adventure. We probably should have left me in Panama City. No one is having fun.
And part of our discontent flows from what Key West has become, here in the wake of the cruise ships that spill the detritus of the demographic and social earthquake of America onto the wharf. This little island is a densely concentrated dose of the steaming turd that is life in the United States at this moment. Dreadful health care. Its public spaces transformed into a torture chamber for all of one's senses: a sauna bath peppered with outdoor bars featuring amplified, live country music of the genre preferred by the MAGA crowd, with the sweaty, ponderous haunches of that crowd rubbing against you and insulting your nose with their aroma and your eyes with t-shirts usually featuring an F-bomb and some "funny" quote about their alcohol or sex addiction, or love of Trump--it all derives from the same canine corner of their desiccated brains.
If you left a little room in your suitcase, there are even souvenir stores where you can buy your very own MAGA t-shirt to let them know back home that you're part of the tribe. This is a typical offering.
To quote W.C. Fields, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. And that's saying something.
Oh, and among these vacationing forklift operators from Nashville and realtors down from Peoria, one encounters towering transsexuals dressed to excess, leathery old drunks wondering what happened to the easygoing Conch Republic they thought they'd found four or five decades ago, sullen charcoal Haitians cleaning up the puke left by the cruise ship commandoes after too many blender drinks, Cubans who escaped a dictator but sure wish we had one of our own here.
But Key West isn't an anomaly; it's just an amplified experience of us as a country, at this moment. Even the environment is redolent of the times, with its blazing heat and water standing everywhere because sea level rise means nothing drains anymore. It's not entirely clear how they make their toilets flush.
So we'll endure another 3.5 days here, and God and weather willing we'll fly back to Wyldswood Friday afternoon for a very short respite before heading north to Corning and its boring, lovely kindness and civility, an island in a nation gone both tacky and mad.
Which leads to the ridiculous Dobbs opinion. But let's save that rant for tomorrow. I'll sit in this cell and bill until discipline fails and I venture down to the beachfront bar to drown my sorrows until the thumping "music" and incessantly flashing headlines on TV screens hanging from every wall drive me back up here to mourn the ghosts of what once graced this formerly beautiful old hotel.
コメント