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by P. Scott Cunningham
This past weekend I represented
The Florida Book Review at the 27th Annual Hemingway Festival Days in Key West. Not that I’m
bragging, but I know I was chosen for this assignment because I’m the most Hemingway-heroic writer on the staff.
The following diary is a “captain’s log” of my journey into the realm and psyche of “Papa.”
Tender-hearted and -footed readers should stop here
July 19, 9 am: I shave off my beard, leaving a very tough, very Hemingway-circa-1932
mustache. See photo. I would not want to meet me in a dark alley right now.
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| The author sports a new mustache and wonders if there's a 70's Porn Star Look-Alike Competition |
July 19, 4 pm: While stopped at a light just outside of Old Town, I spot a potential contestant in the Ernest
Hemingway Look-Alike Competition in the car next to me. The contest, in its 27th year, is the
main event of the weekend and my primary focus as correspondent. 130 pudgy old men descend from all over
the world into Sloppy Joe’s Bar in order to be crowned “Most Unresembling Themselves.” This
guy is a dead-ringer: white hair, white beard, big belly, but instead of rolling my window down and asking if he’s here
for the contest, I stare at his profile until the light changes. I spend the next ten minutes rationalizing
why Papa would have done the same thing. July 19, 5 pm: Redemption! After
getting set up in the Band House at the Green Parrot—the bar Hemingway would drink at if he were still alive—I
score an interview with George Burley, Papa 1992, who is sipping a beer on the steps of the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum with
other past winners. These men are not difficult to spot and, fortunately, they have their real names sewn
into their khaki fishing shirts. Burley is probably the shortest of the Papas, but he has one of the fullest
heads of hair, a main component for any Look-Alike. “If a guy wears a hat, we make him take it off,”
he says. “If he’s bald, the crowd boos.” Burley wore a cable knit sweater when he was
competing, a replica of the one made for Hemingway by Pierre Cardin and featured in the famous photo of Papa that adorns the
Sloppy Joe’s Bar logo. Besides an uncanny resemblance in body and dress, a contestant needs to prove
his commitment to the Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Society, according to Burley. The group, consisting of
past winners and regular competitors, donates all proceeds from the competition and corresponding auction to a scholarship
fund that benefits Key West High School and Key West Community College students. “It’s tough
for a first-timer to win,” says Burley, because the judges want to make sure the guy is committed to growing the scholarship
fund. Apparently, one winner was never heard from again, and the Papas want to elect someone who shares
their philanthropic spirit and “regular Joe” camaraderie. Burley, quoting his fellow Papa Bob Anderson, says he
votes for guys he’d “like to sit down and have a beer with.” Burley says he would have
offered me a beer but I arrived too late.
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| Who's your Papa? Contestant Paul Gagnon printed up t-shirts and signs proving his resemblance. |
July 19, 6:30
pm: Round One of the Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Competition at Sloppy Joe’s
bar. Imagine what the political primaries were like 150 years ago and replace the placards and signs for
“Grover Cleveland,” “Horace Greeley,” and “Schuyler Colfax” with placards and signs for
“Bob,” “Gene,” and “Larry.” The Bob crowd, wearing all lime green,
seems a little wild for me so I mix in with the Larrys, who are an older crowd carrying red and white “Larry”
signs affixed to broom sticks. “Larry” happens to be Larry Austin, an insurance agent from
Palm Harbor, Florida. This is his tenth year competing, his crowd tells me. When he
takes the stage, his group cheers and waves the signs, knocking me on the head several times in the process. They
apologize and I’m tough, so I let it slide. Larry himself is the tallest contestant I’ve seen
thus far. A little thin on the top maybe but a good likeness, and he seems sober and intelligent when he
speaks. The highlight however is Kevin Sullivan, an Irishman by blood and New Yorker by birth whose Bronx
accent comes right out of a Scorsese movie. He looks absolutely nothing like Hemingway but has been competing
for 18 years. As in professional wrestling, he is booed incessantly, but the crowd clearly loves him.
I’m thankful when the finalists are announced and Sullivan is among them. I’m not as
thankful when the last name called is Larry’s; his crowd cheers; and I get hit in the head again.
July 20, 8 am: Somehow one or two enterprising mosquitoes managed to sneak into my room last night, and after
approximately ten minutes of blissful sleep, I awoke to bites on my ears, forehead, and most embarrassingly, my upper lip,
which quickly swelled to the size of a golf ball. This has never happened before. I
was forced to pull the covers over my head and sweat out the night, occasionally lowering the blanket to take luxurious sips
of fresh air. Which was more terrifying to Papa? The very large or the very small?
July 20, 10:03 am: Contrary to the Hemingway-esque schedule I’d prepared for myself, I have just sat down at
my laptop to write my new short story, tentatively titled, “9 and a Half Hours.” A couple gets
hitched in Vegas on a whim, then annuls it, then gets married again, all within—wait for it—nine and a half hours!
When he wasn’t on a fishing trip or a safari, Hemingway averaged 300 – 700 words a day, writing straight
from 8 a.m. to 1 or 2 p.m. I stop at noon with exactly 500 words, but then cut 498 of them.
The surviving two are a description of the gigantic bed in their hotel room. Not king-sized but
“Dictator-sized.” Awesome, huh? Wait…that’s technically one
word…
July 20, 1 pm: I go on a pilgrimage to the Hemingway house at
907 Whitehead Street, noticing first the stone wall that Papa’s handyman and pal Toby Bruce built around the edge of
the property in 1937 to keep nosy tourists away. Now, it just keeps out the ones who haven’t paid
$11, and it keeps the famous six-toed cats from escaping. The house is nice, but, because I’m in
the midst of redecorating my own home, I’m most impressed with the Art Deco bathroom tile and the marble sink built
into the corner. Good luck finding a contractor today who will do that for you!
July 20, 3 pm: While twenty or so of the Papas are fishing off a dock with purposefully historic hand lines, I sit at the bar drinking
with Bob, a non-contestant from Tennessee. Within the span of a few minutes, I learn that Bob has just
gotten divorced and quit his job at a bank, and now he’s hopping from place to place, searching for a new home.
Right now he’s crashing with his brother who lives on nearby Little Torch Key, and he’s seriously considering
moving to Key West, or maybe Mexico. “Definitely near the ocean,” he says. I
tell him that he’s probably the most Hemingway-esque guy around. Bob didn’t know about the
competition, so I explain how I’m single-handedly redefining coverage of the event: writing like Hemingway, boozing
like Hemingway. Bob looks down at my drink and says, “A margarita is not very Hemingway-esque.”
July 20, 6:30 pm
– 8pm: Round two of Look-Alike Semi-Finals, and I’m thinking
of other names for this event: The Sean Connery Look-Alike competition. The Kenny Rogers Look-Alike competition. Russell Banks.
Paul Newman. Richard Dreyfus. I’m also learning that there are several “go to” jokes
for the contestants whenever they have to speak to the crowd. There’s the “My beard just turned
gray” answer to “Why are you competing?” There’s the “I’ve never seen
so many good-looking guys” one-liner. The “My wife doesn’t know who to go home with”
one-liner, and the slightly cleverer, “Let’s go rob a bank!” one-liner. I interview contender
Tom Grizzard (pronounced “Griz-ahhrrrd”) from Leesburg, FL, who has been a Top-5 finisher the last two years and
who has, by far, the largest contingency at the competition. In their yellow tank tops and paddles, they’re
easy to spot. Other names on display tonight: George, Terry, Rick, John, and Gus. Some
stranger names with no posses: Dante (who is indeed from Italy), Lucian (who’s from Texas?!), and “Intense Cuban
Guy,” whose name I didn’t catch. Through him, however, I learn that there’s a hidden
sound guy who cuts the microphone feed if the contestant goes on too long during his Q&A, which the Intense Cuban did
with novelistic flair. Face red, eyes bulging, he belted out his credentials, and when they tried to stop
him, he cried, “Please! Just one more minute!” as if they were about to remove his breathing tube.
The final contestant of the night, and the one whose camp I was standing in, was John “Hurricane” Wilt,
a former boxer and long-time contestant. Although there was another “Boxing” Look-Alike, Wilt’s camp assured
me that “Hurricane could take ‘em.” Didn’t argue.
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July 20, 11
pm: I’m walking home from an Italian dinner, when a woman runs out
onto the sidewalk in front of me wearing only a pair of white panties. I swear I am not making this up. She runs two houses
down, disappears, then reappears and runs past me back into the same house she ran out of. I take a closer look at the house,
and it’s actually a lawyer’s office. I suddenly understand why Hemingway moved here.
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| The author rides a bull down Greene Street with Hemingway Look-Alike contestants |
July 21, 1 p.m.: Happy 107th Birthday Ernest! The Papas, both winners and wannabes,
are assembled on Greene Street in white shirts and red berets for the “Running of the Bulls.” This annual ritual
entails the crowd of them escorting paper mache bulls around one block of Key West. The Caribbean Street
Fair is happening simultaneously on Duval Street so the parade shuffles past a guy selling “Marshmallow shooters,”
a booth advertising “The most comfortable toe rings in the world!”, and some product called a “neck thong.”
Afterwards, they cut a birthday cake for Hemingway and pose for pictures with the bulls. One Papa
sells me a red beret for $12 (all proceeds go to charity) and tells me next year I should grow a mustache and enter as a Young
Hemingway. “I already have a mustache,” I tell him. “Sort of,”
he says.
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| Winner Larry Austin celebrates with past winners of the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest |
July
21, 6:30 pm: I get to the contest early
and settle in between the Yellow-Clad Grizzard Army and the White-Clad supporters of Paul Gagnon, whose t-shirts read “Who’s
Your Papa?” The tension is palpable. I spy one Papa in the corner reciting his speech off of a napkin.
One of the “Mamas,” as the wives are called, reveals that she feels like she’s “pimping her husband.”
(Strange that I didn’t hear one “Mamas and the Papas” joke…) The twenty finalists take the
stage five by five. Each gets one minute to say something memorable, although I’m pretty sure, based on my interview
with Papa Burley, that this speech has little to do with the selection process. The most memorable are again the New
Yorker Kevin Sullivan, who, when his microphone is cut off by the sound guy, just goes and grabs another one, and Tom Chadwick,
the roundest contestant with the biggest grin and the longest tenure: 23 years without winning. With his trademark Viking
horns on his head, he looks like the bonus prize in a scavenger hunt, and I can’t help but root for the guy. 23
years seems like sufficient proof of commitment, but when the top six are named, neither he nor Sullivan (an 18 year veteran)
are called. Tom Grizzard makes it, as do Paul Gagnon,Larry from Thursday night, and three other guys named Mike, Tom,
and Dave. Apparently one requirement is that one’s name can in no way stimulate conversation. After an auction
in which a t-shirt from the first year of the contest nets $3200 for the scholarship fund and an interim during which I witness
some really bad dancing to the B-52’s “Love Shack,” the winner is announced. Drum roll……Larry
Austin! My Larry from the first night! I ask his camp for a reaction, and his good friend Gary trenchantly states,
“I’m not sure he looks the most like Hemingway but he won.” Larry himself, in an interview in the
middle of the intersection of Green and Duval, reveals his secret to success. “I don’t take it too seriously.”
I’m about to hit up George Burley for a pass to the late-night “Papa Party” when my fiancée calls.
Instead, I do what Hemingway should have done more often: I go home to my Mama.
P. Scott Cunningham is a Florida
Book Review Contributing Editor and a regular contributor to the New Times. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pool, Court Green, Cider Press Review and Mc Sweeney’s Internet Tendencies.
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| Winner of the 27th Annual Hemingway Look-Alike Contest Larry Austin answers questions from reporters |
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