Being Ernest
By J. Adrian Betancourt
I arrived in Key West wearing linen pants I had no business wearing and a white cotton shirt that had seemed like a good idea when I bought it online.
Before leaving Miami, I studied myself in the mirror with the seriousness of a man preparing for war, or worse, for literature. The shirt hung open at the chest. I had not shaved. Hemingway would not have overgroomed himself, and neither would I.
Of course, Hemingway would not have driven down in an air-conditioned SUV listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon either.
Still, the road helped. The Overseas Highway has a way of washing away one’s pretenses. By Islamorada, the city had loosened its grip. By Marathon, the sky widened. By Seven Mile Bridge, the world was unfathomably blue.
May had not yet become summer, but it was rehearsing. Heat rose from the road. Sunlight flashed on the windshield. Boats moved across the shimmering flats. I had come south for one reason: to spend a day being Ernest.
That was the working title I had written in my notebook months earlier. Being Ernest. At first it meant Hemingway: the myth, the appetite, the sentences, the fish, the war, the nerve. Then the phrase bothered me. What if my admiration was only camouflage for envy? What if I were just copying Being John Malkovich?
These are the questions a man avoids by planning a trip.
I parked near Whitehead Street and walked to the Hemingway House, already sweating through my shirt. The house looked as it always had: yellow walls, green shutters, lush landscaping. One of the infamous six-toed cats slept on a stone path with the entitled attitude of someone who owned the property.
Inside, tourists moved from room to room in slow, reverent clusters. They photographed the bed, bookshelves, typewriter, pool. I listened to the guide tell the familiar stories: Paris, Spain, Cuba, Key West, the wives, the fish, the discipline, and, yes, the tragic end.
When we reached the writing studio, I stood too long, annoying the gawkers waiting their turn.
The room was simple. Desk. Chair. Typewriter. Windows. Light.
I had hoped to feel something come over me; Hemingway’s lingering energy seeping from the walls into my soul. But this did not occur.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a wrinkled docent, “but others are waiting.”
And so, I moved on.
I expected inspiration. Instead, I felt exposed. A typewriter is not romantic when it is waiting for you. Neither is a blank page. Neither is the life you keep promising yourself you will begin when conditions are perfect.
I left before the tour ended.
By noon I was at a bar on Duval Street. I ordered a daiquiri because it felt required, then another because the first went down too easily. These were not the daiquiris of Hemingway’s day, of course, but cheap, blended concoctions for today’s fructose-addicted patrons. More Jimmy Buffett than Ernest Hemingway.
The bartender was a woman in her sixties with silver hair tied in a red scarf. She had the clear-eyed patience of someone who had seen every species of tourist arrive costumed and leave sunburned.
“You’re doing the Hemingway day,” she said.
I looked down at myself. “Is it that obvious?”
“The shirt gives you away. The serious expression confirms it.”
“I’m a writer,” I said.
She nodded as if this explained nothing. “Published?”
“Working on it.”
“You and everyone else.”
That should have annoyed me, but it made me laugh.
She set a glass of water beside my drink. “What are you writing?”
“A story. Maybe about a man trying to live like Hemingway. A man trying to become him.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“The lifestyle?”
“The hiding.”
She moved down the bar before I could ask what she meant.
I carried the water outside. Key West roared around me: scooters buzzing, chickens strutting, music spilling from doorways, the smell of sunscreen, salt, beer, and fried grouper in the warm air.
I walked toward the Historic Seaport, always my favorite part of the city.
Near the end of a dock, an old man sat beneath a canvas awning repairing a cast net. He had brown hands, a straw hat, and a face creased by sun that does not flatter but does not lie.
I do not know why I stopped. Maybe because he looked like The Old Man and the Sea.
“Going out?” I asked.
He did not look up. “Every day going on sixty-one years.”
“Do you take passengers?”
“Sometimes.”
“How much?”
“For fishing or for pretending?”
This was the second stranger in an hour to see straight through me.
“For fishing,” I said.
He looked up then. “Fishing is five hundred dollars, plus tip. Pretending costs extra.”
His name was Pedro. His boat was small, blue, and smelled of fuel and fish guts. We left the harbor without trouble. The island began to shrink behind us. Ahead, the water opened.
I stared at the horizon to avoid getting seasick. It beckoned like a sea witch’s mirage meant to lure delirious seafarers to their deaths.
Pedro cut the engine near a patch of darker water and handed me a rod. “You fish?”
“Not well. Always loved the idea more than the act itself.”
“The act, you say? Interesting choice of words.”
For an hour, we caught nothing. The boat rocked. The line trembled. The sun burned my neck. My romantic idea of manhood melted into ordinary discomfort and boredom.
I told Pedro about my project, trying to make it sound less foolish than it was. I said I admired Hemingway’s courage, hunger for experience, refusal to live half-asleep, and, of course, his writing.
Pedro listened without expression.
Finally he said, “My father fished with him in Cuba.”
“Really?”
“Everyone’s father fished with him in Cuba,” he said. “That is how stories work. And no one tells a better story than a Cuban.”
I laughed.
“He was brave, maybe. Sad, maybe. Talented, yes. But you people come looking for the wrong things.”
“What should we look for?”
He pointed to the water.
At first I saw only glare. Then the boat shifted, the sun slipped behind a cloud, and the surface changed. Shadows appeared beneath us, long, silver, shining… fish.
“You want the hat,” Pedro said. “The drink. The big fish. The famous room. But the work is looking until the water gives up what is hidden.”
Suddenly, the line jerked hard in my hands.
For one second, I became pure reaction. I tightened. Pulled. Fumbled. The rod bent. The reel screamed. Whatever was below moved with a force that made my chest open.
Then the line snapped.
I stumbled backward onto an old cooler.
Pedro laughed, not cruelly, but completely.
“That was your marlin,” he said.
“It was probably a barracuda or tarpon.”
“Perhaps it was Ernesto himself, trying to pull you in with him.”
I expected disappointment, but what I felt was awake. My hands shook. My heart hammered. The broken line waved in the breeze like an unfinished sentence.
On the ride back, the light changed. Key West rose ahead, not as a shrine but as an island: roofs, masts, palms, laundry, traffic, kitchens, bills, songs, cats, bars, ghosts. A real place. Better than a legend because it was imperfect, a contradiction much like Hemingway.
Pedro tied up at the dock and refused the extra cash I offered.
“You paid,” he said.
“For pretending?”
“For being, if only for a moment.”
I walked back through town with my shirt damp, my face burned, and my notebook in my pocket. At the bar, the woman with the red scarf saw me pass and saluted with two fingers to her brow. I saluted back.
That evening, I returned to the Hemingway House after it had closed and stood outside the gate. The tourists were gone. The cats had retreated. The palms moved in the warm wind, and the upstairs studio absorbed the day’s last light.
For months, I had imagined what would happen. I would go somewhere, wear something, drink something, survive something, and return as the kind of man who could finally write the truth. Having lived it.
But the truth had been there all along, irritatingly simple. Hemingway had not become Hemingway by being someone else. And I would not become myself by being Hemingway.
I sat beneath a flowering tree and opened my notebook. For a while, I did not write. I listened. A scooter passed. A gate creaked. Somewhere, a woman laughed. Somewhere else, ice dropped into a glass. The air was warm, the page white, and my sunburned hand waited above it.
Then I crossed out the title I had written weeks before.
Being Ernest.
Below it, I wrote a new one.
Being Earnest.
Perhaps I had learned something here after all.