Bravo! Really.

I once spent a week in the Keys — Spring Break sometime in the late eighties, I think it was — and the trip left me with two very vivid memories: first, the spectacle of my friend Jim, hungover and soaking through a city-issue orange jumpsuit, picking trash off the shoulder of Ocean highway — as punishment for having been caught on the street the night before with an open container of beer. A bunch of us drove back and forth past him on the highway for hours in a beat-up station, our videocamera pointed out the window, the whole lot of us goofy on snuff and Italian ices spiked with cheap vodka. We taunted him mercilessly. Because that’s what friends do.

Christ I wish I knew where that videotape was.

Second, I remember the ocean water, which I expected to be blue and clear but which was brown and quite kelpy. Oh well, so much for paradise. At least the bloody marys were first rate (the bartender we befriended topped them with a healthy sprinkling of ground celery seed) and the locals remarkably friendly. Being drunk and tan all the time will soften up even the toughest of cusses, evidently.