Creative NonFiction Final (Installment 2)
Sarasota, Iconic
There are several ways to talk about a city. I suppose the one we're most familiar with is the Travel Guide, updated every year by faceless writers who strive to remove themselves from the text as completely as possible. Devoid of context and personal encounter, the books read like business listings festooned with little black stars that tell you how good the food will be at this restaurant, or how bad the service was at that hotel. Then there is the quasi-mystical travelogue, like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. That book is usually shelved in fiction, but it recounts conversations that could have taken place between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. In it, Marco tells the Emperor about the fantastic cities that he's seen in his travels, cities of memory, cities of desire, cities of endless streets and people. There are sociological studies, maps and charts, and USA Today bar graphs that can tell you what the air quality index was on 05 July, 2004. Sure, when people talk about abstract cities, they talk about landmarks, crime, and climate. But when people talk about what their city is like, they talk about the characters. And since all a map really is is a collection of characters, this is my map of Sarasota, Florida.
First I want to introduce you to the two Joes. Let us consider them the North and South axes. I worked with both of these Joes, and to me they illuminate the whole town better than a pie chart ever could. Joe G. was (is?) a tall , round shouldered man with a gray mustache and a grayer mullet. Mid forties, loud, prone to tucking his shirts in when he didn't have to. Of course he wasn't from Sarasota, practically nobody it seems is. He ran the music department of the large bookstore I worked in. He liked eighties music, football, and really expensive speakers. His living room was a temple to the Gods of Surround-Sound. He talked constantly of leaving, of going someplace bigger and doing something better. Not in the way that angry teenagers talk about ditching whatever shitty town they happen to have grown up in, Joe talked like he was almost there. For him, Sarasota was a permanent vacation, like Aerosmith. The transformative power of classic rock was going to transport him to his better city. If he could just capture the perfect note from the purest speakers, a power chord would make him free. Joe represents the discontented slumber that is Sarasota. Quite a lot of the angry twenty-year-olds living there now are going to become Joe G. in their middle age. He is the broad street that runs through the town, but never quite reaches the city limits.
The other Joe is actually a Jo. She is Jo M., and I also worked with her at the same bookstore. She was in her mid-sixties, short, and pugnacious. I have a Halloween picture of her in a strap-on pig snout that she wore every year for that purpose. It's truly frightening. She, too, is not from Sarasota, although she'd been there since the seventies and thus could claim honorary native status. She was working out her retirement, fat and...I hesitate to say happy, because she was rarely sunny. She'd spent her youth doing water gymnastics from the back of jet skis, and kidnapped the man who became her husband because he was too shy to ask her out. She dressed as most plump older ladies do - in maroon blouses that hung just a little too low and capri pants for hot days. She adored Russell Crowe. You've heard of When I Am Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple? That was Jo. Every Thanksgiving she would throw a bash at her place for those of us who were too far from home to go back and who had no family in town. She would drink and swear, and some of us would excuse ourselves to go outside and throw a football around. She was the contentedness of Sarasota, the soft settled sand and gentle water. Why don't you stay?
Let's fill in some dotted lines and curves, like a Family Circus cartoon. The sunny, transient nature of Sarasota could easily be defined in a girl that once lived with my roommate and me over a summer. Her name was Kacy, and she was just a tourist, down to see her Dad who was an unrepentant old drunk in a trailer near the beach. Kacy was from upstate New York – Binghamton in fact, the same city that David Sedaris is from. She liked Irish music, alcohol, and knew the words to a lot of Billy Joel songs. Almost always happy, she enjoyed the town for what it was, stayed a bit longer than she'd planned, and generally brightened up the place. She described a meandering curve around a sandy coast that doesn't quite ever go anywhere.
Of course, Sarasota also had hippies. There wasn't too much of an actual counter-culture there, but on any given Sunday night the town was able to muster enough people for a drum circle on the beach. The usual makeup of the circle would be art students from the Ringling School of Art & Design (who were living off of their parents' trust funds and looking for something vaguely rebellious to do), bewildered tourists, and a few baked beachcombers trying to dress like Jimmy Buffet. As a whole, they were pretty self conscious as hippies, always making sure not to dress too outlandishly but making damned well certain they didn't look like the well-fed yuppies they were. They kept the town's few vegan restaurants in business, and sometimes they would stage elaborate political protests outside the Barnes & Noble on Sunday night, because nothing else would be open. The hippies were like public parks – you only miss them when they're gone.
The beating alcoholic heart of the town was Howie. Howie ran one of the most exclusive bars I have ever been in, the Cock and Bull pub, which was about as British as Sonny Bono. I have witnessed him kick out a patron for daring to ask for a Budweiser, and he thought Guinness was too common (in his words, “whorish”) to serve. He was a beer snob's beer snob. Short, stout, and Jewish, Howie was my introduction into the world of beer. I suspect a large number of other underage drinkers were likewise spoiled by the concoctions that he acquired. Beer made by Belgian monks, beer from Liechtenstein, beer you had to add fruit syrup to in order to drink. Since he ran the most popular nightspot in town, Howie had complete control over most drinking men in the city. He wore his authority like a crown, dispensing wisdom with the suds and receiving tribute in his metal tip bucket. The bar has since relocated into a renovated barn on the outskirts of town, but people still reference other landmarks from the Cock and Bull. Howie's is the tallest statue in town, even if he is only 5'6”.
A brief segue here to explain something about the town – it's really a beachfront halfway house. Sarasota is filled with people who drift in on the tide of a mid-life crisis...recent divorcees, factory closing layoff victims, English majors unable to find a decent job anywhere else, etc. All of them come planning to stay a few years, save up money, and maybe meet that special someone and escape to more interesting climes. But along the way, something happens. Sarasota oozes idleness from the sidewalks. The months turn into years, the years click by, and soon you're a native by adoption. It's an easy place to live, and it eats ambitions like candy. I would still be there if I had been 20 and able to live with failure. But I was just 20, and I did fail at something, and her name was Emily.
For me, she was the real soul of Sarasota – elegant, educated, and unwilling to leave. She was a talented artist, six feet tall with long dark hair and and intermittent smile, like an electrical short. I was aiming pretty high – she had a college degree and a bevy of would-be suitors whom she all ignored with equal parts innocent disdain and self-deprecating humor. Like Sarasota, she had impossibly high standards and more culture than she knew what to do with. In the city this was manifested by building grandiose condos that tried to resemble Italian villas – in the girl it was represented by locking her door and surrounding herself with the ephemera of grace, like a Jeff Buckley album. I was cooked, and good. I was able to be, I think, her closest friend for two years with what seemed to me a sound strategy of conversation, remembering her birthday, and taking her out to dinner and trying to get her to leave Sarasota. But she never would consent to taking any chances, and even though she dreamed of accomplishment and importance – her car stayed in the garage. And she certainly wasn't about to date a boy, even one who made her really good mix-tapes. Even after I'd given up on trying to seduce her, I still tried mightily to get her to leave her native soil. But she always had ready excuses not to leave her home and her comfort, and eventually I surrendered. By that point, I couldn't experience Sarasota at all without somehow experiencing Emily at the same time. The town and the girl had merged, and, since I couldn't change either one, I left.
If I seem a little ambivalent toward the town and people, I'm not. The fake Italian architecture, expensive cars, and pretentious art school baloney seem in hindsight to be as completely ridiculous as anything Disney ever put in a park. On the other hand, the people you read about here, the people who really defined the town, are outside of that manufactured contentment. They are the reason I stayed as long as I did, and they are the reason I remember it at all. It was an important part of my life, but not one I could ever revisit while staying true to my vision of Sarasota. A temporary escape from reality, a fitful sleep, and a nice place to visit - but I wouldn't want to live there, again.
There are several ways to talk about a city. I suppose the one we're most familiar with is the Travel Guide, updated every year by faceless writers who strive to remove themselves from the text as completely as possible. Devoid of context and personal encounter, the books read like business listings festooned with little black stars that tell you how good the food will be at this restaurant, or how bad the service was at that hotel. Then there is the quasi-mystical travelogue, like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. That book is usually shelved in fiction, but it recounts conversations that could have taken place between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. In it, Marco tells the Emperor about the fantastic cities that he's seen in his travels, cities of memory, cities of desire, cities of endless streets and people. There are sociological studies, maps and charts, and USA Today bar graphs that can tell you what the air quality index was on 05 July, 2004. Sure, when people talk about abstract cities, they talk about landmarks, crime, and climate. But when people talk about what their city is like, they talk about the characters. And since all a map really is is a collection of characters, this is my map of Sarasota, Florida.
First I want to introduce you to the two Joes. Let us consider them the North and South axes. I worked with both of these Joes, and to me they illuminate the whole town better than a pie chart ever could. Joe G. was (is?) a tall , round shouldered man with a gray mustache and a grayer mullet. Mid forties, loud, prone to tucking his shirts in when he didn't have to. Of course he wasn't from Sarasota, practically nobody it seems is. He ran the music department of the large bookstore I worked in. He liked eighties music, football, and really expensive speakers. His living room was a temple to the Gods of Surround-Sound. He talked constantly of leaving, of going someplace bigger and doing something better. Not in the way that angry teenagers talk about ditching whatever shitty town they happen to have grown up in, Joe talked like he was almost there. For him, Sarasota was a permanent vacation, like Aerosmith. The transformative power of classic rock was going to transport him to his better city. If he could just capture the perfect note from the purest speakers, a power chord would make him free. Joe represents the discontented slumber that is Sarasota. Quite a lot of the angry twenty-year-olds living there now are going to become Joe G. in their middle age. He is the broad street that runs through the town, but never quite reaches the city limits.
The other Joe is actually a Jo. She is Jo M., and I also worked with her at the same bookstore. She was in her mid-sixties, short, and pugnacious. I have a Halloween picture of her in a strap-on pig snout that she wore every year for that purpose. It's truly frightening. She, too, is not from Sarasota, although she'd been there since the seventies and thus could claim honorary native status. She was working out her retirement, fat and...I hesitate to say happy, because she was rarely sunny. She'd spent her youth doing water gymnastics from the back of jet skis, and kidnapped the man who became her husband because he was too shy to ask her out. She dressed as most plump older ladies do - in maroon blouses that hung just a little too low and capri pants for hot days. She adored Russell Crowe. You've heard of When I Am Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple? That was Jo. Every Thanksgiving she would throw a bash at her place for those of us who were too far from home to go back and who had no family in town. She would drink and swear, and some of us would excuse ourselves to go outside and throw a football around. She was the contentedness of Sarasota, the soft settled sand and gentle water. Why don't you stay?
Let's fill in some dotted lines and curves, like a Family Circus cartoon. The sunny, transient nature of Sarasota could easily be defined in a girl that once lived with my roommate and me over a summer. Her name was Kacy, and she was just a tourist, down to see her Dad who was an unrepentant old drunk in a trailer near the beach. Kacy was from upstate New York – Binghamton in fact, the same city that David Sedaris is from. She liked Irish music, alcohol, and knew the words to a lot of Billy Joel songs. Almost always happy, she enjoyed the town for what it was, stayed a bit longer than she'd planned, and generally brightened up the place. She described a meandering curve around a sandy coast that doesn't quite ever go anywhere.
Of course, Sarasota also had hippies. There wasn't too much of an actual counter-culture there, but on any given Sunday night the town was able to muster enough people for a drum circle on the beach. The usual makeup of the circle would be art students from the Ringling School of Art & Design (who were living off of their parents' trust funds and looking for something vaguely rebellious to do), bewildered tourists, and a few baked beachcombers trying to dress like Jimmy Buffet. As a whole, they were pretty self conscious as hippies, always making sure not to dress too outlandishly but making damned well certain they didn't look like the well-fed yuppies they were. They kept the town's few vegan restaurants in business, and sometimes they would stage elaborate political protests outside the Barnes & Noble on Sunday night, because nothing else would be open. The hippies were like public parks – you only miss them when they're gone.
The beating alcoholic heart of the town was Howie. Howie ran one of the most exclusive bars I have ever been in, the Cock and Bull pub, which was about as British as Sonny Bono. I have witnessed him kick out a patron for daring to ask for a Budweiser, and he thought Guinness was too common (in his words, “whorish”) to serve. He was a beer snob's beer snob. Short, stout, and Jewish, Howie was my introduction into the world of beer. I suspect a large number of other underage drinkers were likewise spoiled by the concoctions that he acquired. Beer made by Belgian monks, beer from Liechtenstein, beer you had to add fruit syrup to in order to drink. Since he ran the most popular nightspot in town, Howie had complete control over most drinking men in the city. He wore his authority like a crown, dispensing wisdom with the suds and receiving tribute in his metal tip bucket. The bar has since relocated into a renovated barn on the outskirts of town, but people still reference other landmarks from the Cock and Bull. Howie's is the tallest statue in town, even if he is only 5'6”.
A brief segue here to explain something about the town – it's really a beachfront halfway house. Sarasota is filled with people who drift in on the tide of a mid-life crisis...recent divorcees, factory closing layoff victims, English majors unable to find a decent job anywhere else, etc. All of them come planning to stay a few years, save up money, and maybe meet that special someone and escape to more interesting climes. But along the way, something happens. Sarasota oozes idleness from the sidewalks. The months turn into years, the years click by, and soon you're a native by adoption. It's an easy place to live, and it eats ambitions like candy. I would still be there if I had been 20 and able to live with failure. But I was just 20, and I did fail at something, and her name was Emily.
For me, she was the real soul of Sarasota – elegant, educated, and unwilling to leave. She was a talented artist, six feet tall with long dark hair and and intermittent smile, like an electrical short. I was aiming pretty high – she had a college degree and a bevy of would-be suitors whom she all ignored with equal parts innocent disdain and self-deprecating humor. Like Sarasota, she had impossibly high standards and more culture than she knew what to do with. In the city this was manifested by building grandiose condos that tried to resemble Italian villas – in the girl it was represented by locking her door and surrounding herself with the ephemera of grace, like a Jeff Buckley album. I was cooked, and good. I was able to be, I think, her closest friend for two years with what seemed to me a sound strategy of conversation, remembering her birthday, and taking her out to dinner and trying to get her to leave Sarasota. But she never would consent to taking any chances, and even though she dreamed of accomplishment and importance – her car stayed in the garage. And she certainly wasn't about to date a boy, even one who made her really good mix-tapes. Even after I'd given up on trying to seduce her, I still tried mightily to get her to leave her native soil. But she always had ready excuses not to leave her home and her comfort, and eventually I surrendered. By that point, I couldn't experience Sarasota at all without somehow experiencing Emily at the same time. The town and the girl had merged, and, since I couldn't change either one, I left.
If I seem a little ambivalent toward the town and people, I'm not. The fake Italian architecture, expensive cars, and pretentious art school baloney seem in hindsight to be as completely ridiculous as anything Disney ever put in a park. On the other hand, the people you read about here, the people who really defined the town, are outside of that manufactured contentment. They are the reason I stayed as long as I did, and they are the reason I remember it at all. It was an important part of my life, but not one I could ever revisit while staying true to my vision of Sarasota. A temporary escape from reality, a fitful sleep, and a nice place to visit - but I wouldn't want to live there, again.
