During that stay I went on one of my few acid trips.
Soon I was going over to the neighbour's porch and smoking Kents and drinking weak instant coffee out of a blue Fiestaware cup and chatting about the first thing that entered my head and letting long silences accumulate. He let me have it free for a couple of weeks in January. His place had just three or four rooms, as I recall.
I've never again been able to find his house, but it was one of five or six surrounded by a fence and hidden from the street in an unpretentious compound. Tim, who'd been a Christian Brother, had left holy orders to lead a gay life in the big city, but there was still a part of him that liked nothing better than sitting on a front porch and soaking up the heat or chatting with a neighbour. I was first invited to Key West in 1978 by the poet Tim Dlugos, a friend from New York who'd just published a zany collection called Je Suis Ein Americano.
If you're afraid of ageing and dying (as she was, as I am), then torpid small-town life in the heat is the best solution – events start to creep by in a place that is almost tropical (it's the southernmost point in the US, just 90 miles north of Havana). The poet Elizabeth Bishop lived in Key West because it made time seem to go by more slowly.
