A coconut must have fallen on my head because I woke up in the middle of fourteen thousand white people dancing away in Madison Square Garden. Edward and I were watching a caricature of our new life and what we had become. All around us the crowds were rocking, beers sloshing over the lips of their plastic cups onto their plastic leis.

This was Jimmy Buffett’s “Year of Still Here” tour come to New York, a collision of our two worlds: the endless summer of the beach and the honking flashing working street.

Jimmy Buffett, a pioneer of my fantasy, was barefoot on stage. This sixty-one-year-old immensely rich man, honestly bald, wearing Bermudas, was, as usual, “starting the weekend early.” He had his plastic palm trees, his flaming island torches. Beach balls were batted through the crowd. On stage, the tiki bar stood open as the master strummed and sang his anthem:

Pour me something tall and strong

Make it a hurricane before I go insane

It’s only half past twelve but I don’t care

It’s five o’clock somewhere

Or, in my case, four o’clock somewhere.

Jimmy Buffett’s “Parrotheads” follow him from place to place chasing the dream of outlaw boozy laziness. They are adolescents where the air is hot on the tar of a parking lot somewhere with an ocean in sight.

Manhattan Margaritaville—somehow the words do not go together. “No shoes, no shirt, no problem” is not at all the attitude of New York or the former us, for that matter.

I consider us: I am wearing an orange chiffon Chloe blouse to approximate a Hawaiian shirt. I have forced Edward, a good sport, to wear a T shirt under his linen jacket a la Don Johnson in Miami Vice. He happens to look great, but is not exactly bien dans sa peau..

“He has very cold eyes, as if he’s counting the house,” Edward says as Jimmy Buffett sings “Cheeseburger in Paradise”:

Not zucchini, fettuccini or bulgur wheat,

But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat

Cheeseburger is paradise…

I’m just a cheeseburger in paradise

Have we become cheeseburgers in paradise?

Jimmy Buffett’s days of bumming around, are long gone with no bad consequences because he made an industry of them. He mentions Max’s Kansas City and says he once lived in the Chelsea Hotel, my haunts in the days when I knew people called Tinkerbelle and Candy Darling—both dead—and Viva, and a photographer who painted naked people silver, and knew them well.

Buffett reminds everyone that New York is the island that gave us Captain Kidd. We have come here from a veritable pirate haven. We had them all on Amelia Island, hiding where the St. Marys joined the Amelia River—Captain Kidd, Pierre and Jean Lafitte, Blackbeard, Red Legs (he wore kilts) Greaves, Mary Reed who dressed as a man, Gasparella, Luis Aury, who ruled the island in 1817. Pirates are the symbol of our small island, we have streets and school teams named for them. We have pirate parades with natives blackening their teeth and covering their chests with beads and jumping around–arrrrrrrgh– with cardboard scabards.

I look at the audience. You could pick it up and transport it to Cotton-Eyed Joe’s or the Redneck Yacht Club in Yulee, where the motorcycles park and trouble regularly blooms.

Can’t you feel ‘em circling honey?

Can’t you feel ‘em swimmin’ around?

You got fins to the left, fins to the right,

All the arms in the Garden –excluding Edward’s –are up making fins.

And you’re the only bait in town.

Suddenly, I spy people from our old crowd. I see Hillary Clinton’s big backer, her East Hampton host, with the editor of Sports Illustrated. The big backer is wearing the only navy blue Wall Street Money suit in Madison Square Garden.

“What are you doing here?” we both say.

Excuses, more excuses, I’m faintly embarrassed to be caught, splashed with our neighbor’s fifth beer, among the Parrotheads.

“Have you seen him before?”

“Me, neither. This is my new life,” I say for at long last I have presented myself in full flaming regalia and worse– pretending to be young —to those of the old life.

Shoes, shirt, problems, too.

 

Long ago a real pirate had loved me and we spent time on his pirate ship anchored in the East River. The old ship rocked and groaned and reeked of diesel fuel and lost causes. The captain, Abie Nathan, was involved in a well meant but obviously lost cause. In 1966, he had rented a plane—he had been a Royal Air Force pilot– and flown a daring solo flight from Israel into Egypt to see President Nasser and ask for peace. Nasser refused to see him and he was sent back to Israel, where he was regarded as a charming heroic rogue and a beloved nut. Just my type at the time, which was anyone forbidden, anyone as far as possible from the white-gloved Jewish boys of Miss Viola Wolff’s Dancing Class now in their grownup Wall Street modes.

The ship we were on then was a pirate radio station and Abie needed money to keep it afloat. Once a sort of playboy, he became one of those who fed the starving in Biafra and Cambodia and Ethiopia and tried to make peace between implacable historic enemies. Born in Abadan, Persia he went to school in Bombay, was a combat pilot in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and his future would bring hunger strikes, jail terms, a noble persistence. He fed people and talked to them in his radio voice with a lovely English accent.

I was one of his lost causes. He spent a night in the cold under a lamppost outside my window on Ninth Street, wrote me a fifty page letter which he tore up, and in 1972 my Jewish pirate sailed off to broadcast elsewhere.

I had a penchant for bad boys. Starting at age fourteen, when I saw my first one kicking a soccer ball in the Trinity schoolyard, I fancied those who were trouble, those who would end badly, those who eventually would drive into lampposts or be incarcerated. The heroic, the piratical, the surely doomed.

Once, I had a good laugh over this taste of mine with the actor Mickey Rourke. We were sitting at a fashion show and he was wearing naughty boy leather pants without underwear, joggling his pointy toed boot as the models—among them Carla Bruni, the future first lady of France– came down the runway.

“I call that one ‘The Sleepwalker’,” he said. “She always looks like she is walking in her sleep.”

“I bet you could wake her up,” I said.

“I bet I could,” he said in a hoarse whispery voice that encouraged people to lean in dangerously close. He turned to me slowly, and I saw stubble, thick grease on the hair, the darkest shades over crinkled nightclub eyes, the complete too many nights-on-the- beach look–and we both laughed because he was such a total bad boy.

Bad boys are born to kick girls out of bed and make them take a cab home. Women love them because they are pretty in a kind of overdosed, starved way with eyes that say “This is it for you, babe.” Or, at least, “This could be it, if I decide to bother.” They are bums, with or without the beach. This was a taste I had conquered long ago.

 

I tried to keep the pirate spirit alive when we got back to the island so I dragged Edward down to Wicked Davey’s on the waterfront in Fernandina, a place where everyone looked like they were up to no good. The air throbbed with the old lawless spirit of the Crackers.

This section of the island was once the scene of much misery with slavers and smugglers and men in chains, outbreaks of yellow fever. I read about it all in a 1947 novel by Frank Slaughter The Golden Isle.

Here at the port, the crews of The Fischler Prawn Company once sat on the docks mending their nets and local black men stood before great troughs of ice breaking the heads off the shrimp.

By then the pirate spirit in me had died. I had been in places like too long ago so we left and went out into a warm silvery semi-tropical rain.