Boats are launched. So perhaps it is by some unconscious pull like a tide in the Gulf of Mexico I have selected the one and only ‘Captain Tony’ to start my first in what will hopefully be a surprising list of what I call ‘folks’ here that I’ve come to casually meet or, in some cases, know over the decades of this life.
Captain Tony Tarracino was a legend in a town known for them. He seemed to be immortal. He lived his life in ways many would think too large and too daring to attempt. You can read his bio but that is not the point of “Folks”. My first memories were kind of ghost ones. Like a just missed the poker game he was part of in the back room of a picaresque Key West bar. Not that I would have been invited to play or had the money to. Just to have been a ‘fly on the wall’ during what would have been memorable. A scene like at the long gone ‘Becky’s Bar’ or now much changed ‘Bottle Cap’. Almost everyone on the planet knows he had his own bar at 428 Greene Street. It is still there. When I rolled into Key West in the early 70’s none of what was about to blow up to be ‘Margaritaville’ was on anyone’s radar. Except maybe the Captain’s. He was born for myth making. I was just shy of 21 when I arrived so visiting ‘the original Sloppy Joe’s’ was not in the cards. The open double doors of the yellow wooden structure, former ice house and morgue, sure made me curious. So did the 10,000 bras dangling from the rafters. When I returned two short years later and got a job right down the street slinging barbecue in a 24 hour joint named, “The Midget” I would stop and have a cold beer before my shift began. Or two. BBQ is hot work. Sometimes I would see him sitting on a corner barstool reading the newspapers and smoking. An aurora around his thin shoulders and shaggy hair. He was a wiry guy with a ‘don’t fuck with me face’.
No one knew who the blonde haired musician with an Alabama soft accent was that was playing at the saloon back then. No one outside of a handful of other musicians in town. But it was Jimmy Buffett playing his six string and singing songs like, “I Have Found Me a Home”. Key West was pure magic to me. The photo you see is of a man who lived a pirates’ life. That he even knew my name was a treasure.
© 2024 Norman Van Aken