Finding Little Miss Magic
“I was never the damn pirate,” he once said, referring to his dirge, “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” But he was telling a lie. He was always the pirate. Key West local Phil Clark may have been the official inspiration, at least as far as liner notes and biographies are concerned, but the heart and soul of the song – and everything it lamented: the loss of romance; the Melville-like sentiments of man and sea and death – was pure Jimmy Buffett, no question about it. Or at least, it was the Jimmy Buffett that Jimmy Buffett wanted to be, once upon a time. Perhaps a distant time.
Buffett, these days, is closer to eighty than forty. He was born on Christmas Day, 1946, the same day W.C. Fields died. And in the three-quarters of a century since, he has managed to avoid cancellation by, both, the wokesters (Fifteen will get you twenty/ But that’s alright…), as well as the conservative pin-stripers (like this author) who can never seem to outgrow the Buffett catalogue even as they outgrow the slew of things a Buffett lifestyle represents; i.e., unlike the pirate in “Pirate,” I may be looking at forty, but I haven’t been drunk now for over two weeks for a long, long time.
Of course, I am not sure I am the typical Buffett fan; nor are those who listen to Jimmy as I listen. Maybe we are typical. Maybe not. I’ll let you decide.
The parrothead prototype is a middle-aged fellow wearing a t-shirt with a witty beach slogan written across the excess cloth of its belly. He is usually full of tequila or Landshark beer; or both; he fancies himself a rebel; and he tends to behave as though he is “growing older but not up.” The flair and the reckless abandon he displays at tailgates reflects an effort to maintain an unrealistic devotion to that great DeForrest Kelly dream: having one, last, big chance to get away from it all. This dream survives in spite of, and also perhaps because of, mounting bills and pressing deadlines and some fleeting honey-do lists piling up at home. Yet much of this escapism is empty and hollow cosplay. How many parrotheads, if given the chance, would realistically trade in their current programming for a chance to actually live like the Twelve-Volt Man? Probably very few. This is because living life blender to blender is great for spring break in your twenties. But people tend to get used to things like Keurigs and Roku sticks and fast-food delivery and the Twitter-verse and being told what’s what by their government overlords (Mask UP!), whatever else they may otherwise wish about themselves in moments of grass-skirted fancy.
If this seems harsh, let us also consider Mr. Buffett, who is not that different from Mr. Parrothead. Richer, yes. But complicit in the same lie. And also victim of the same lie:
Today, you will find, in many of Buffett’s hotels and bars, plastic imitation road signs telling you the distance to Havana or to Singapore, as if you were island hopping the southernmost reaches of the Caribbean or the South Pacific; beneath this signage, one might sit restfully and a-splay, lounging among the tacky, island-themed décor while ordering up a bellyful of steeply overpriced margaritas. The treasure exacted for these indulgences – for the stay at the hotel, for the margarita, for the replica of the replica Singapore road sign – is probably counted by Mr. Buffett from his cool Long Island mansion, which rests many miles north and many lightyears away from a Stock Island tire swing. Taffy Brodesser-Akner described it this way: “Jimmy Buffett,” she wrote, “doesn’t live the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle,” which is true. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of it. It’s not simply that Mr. Buffett, the beach bum, became a businessman and cashed in on his gulf-rock persona; it’s that the same man who once wrote a John MacDonald-like excoriation of jet skis in Where is Joe Merchant?, and whose songs have been flatteringly covered by Dylan, and who lamented that “most of the people who retire to Florida are wrinkled and they lean on a crutch,” and who penned such masterpieces as “Death of an Unpopular Poet” and “He Went to Paris” and “Somewhere Over China,” is also the same man who currently runs a multimillion-dollar empire of overpriced cheeseburgers and plastic memorabilia and bad frozen seafood and retirement communities.
These criticisms may seem like the makings of a Lester Bangs gripe session. But fair is fair, as they say, and it is nothing but fair to point out that the king of the Margaritaville empire, an empire built on the backs of weekend warriors spending down their retirement on overpriced Landsharks, once sang scathingly of convention-goers for their weekend-warrior partying. (We’re stayin' in a Holiday Inn full of surgeons/ I guess they meet there once a year /They exchange physician stories/ And get drunk on Tuborg beer / Then they're off to catch a stripper/ With their eyes glued to her G/ But I don't think that I would ever let them cut on me). Granted, “Miss You So Badly” is a bit of a deep cut, perhaps, but not so deep we should ignore the juxtaposition.
Juxtaposition aside, one must not begrudge Mr. Buffett his money, nor his station in life, nor his success. Who in his shoes wouldn’t have similarly sold out? I certainly would have. It still seems odd, though, to consider that our buccaneering pirate-fantasist of the 1970s has gone all-corporate, selling snake oil in Landshark bottles to people who – and this is the kicker, which can’t be expressed enough – clearly don’t believe in the fantasy any more than he does. They know that he knows that he knows that they know. A symbiotic relationship of plastic palm trees and fin-hatted baseball caps for thirty-five dollars a pop.
Maybe this is harsh… but as I said, fair is fair. So, try this for some turnabout:
For while it is fair to quarter Mr. Buffett on his duplicitousness, perceived or real, it is likewise fair to press his legion of fans. Most are in on the duplicity, it is true. But a few of us are not. Yet, aren’t we few, we happy few, we merry band of snobs guiltier of a greater sin than the sellouts precisely because we aren’t in on the wrestling-is-fake joke? Do we not owe it to ourselves, as consumers and connoisseurs, to be genuine and truthful to the art we consume? If we’re miffed at Buffett for selling out, why are we not miffed at ourselves for not living out the same songlines that Buffett no longer observes? Buffett sang of following the equator (and actually followed it), but how many of us have dared likewise? Buffett sang of flying into sunsets, but how many parrotheads – the diehards, not the weekend warriors – ever climbed into a sea plane out among the doldrums? Buffett sings often of throwing caution to the wind, but parrotheads are only people and people tend to be hypocritical. Die-hards most of all.
2.
His name is Fingers McGee and he’s been a friend of mine for as long as I can remember. We’ve always called him Fingers because he can twirl a whiskey bottle like Brian Flannigan and pick a guit-fiddle like George Harrison and he once had a finger roll that netted like Allen Iverson; in fact, he was one hell of an athlete back in the day, but that was many years and many packs of Parliament 100s ago. Many Blue Ribbon beers, too… A heavy beer that Pabst Blue Ribbon. It sits low in the stomach, like an anchor. Or a bowling ball. Fingers knows this well because he has been a professional drink slinger for the last two decades. Thanks to this Greek-chorus profession of his, he has learned very little about himself, but he has learned an encyclopedic amount about other people, which may not make him all that different than anybody else, but he gets to at least discharge his unsolicited advice while serving properly made old-fashioneds, which tend to make the advice go down better.
We were sitting, not long ago, at Fingers’s bar, catching up. This was right after I learned I was going to be somebody’s old man. I wanted to tell Fingers the news in person. We don’t hang much anymore. Such is life. But I owed him a face to face that he was going to be an uncle. I suppose he’ll be a black sheep uncle, but children sometimes need those, too. It was a black sheep uncle of mine who introduced me to Buffett. Also to the Beatles. To Seger. To the Boss. He died young. I inherited his music collection. He and Fingers would have really hit it off. Neither ever seemed to me compatible with the main.
After Fingers congratulated me on my soon-to-be-fatherhood – this would have been after the second or third Pabst – I rolled some silver into the jukebox. The opening notes of “He Went to Paris” sauntered across the stale open air.
“You still listenin’ to that?” he asked, his Parliament dangling from the corner of his lip.
“You know,” I said, “funny you should ask.”
“Why’s that?”
“When I learned that the missus was pregnant, I had a sentimental moment there where I listened to the whole discography. But it’s the first time I’ve listened to him in a while.”
Fingers laughed. It was a smug laugh. The smug laugh of a bachelor who feels part pity and part jealousy toward his friends as they matriculate the checklists of life: college; marriage; houses; children. “That’s because,” he quipped, “you’ve outgrown him.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s not part of your life anymore.” He shrugged as if he were explaining to me that the world is round or that midday is noon or that women are from Mars. Or Venus. Or whichever.
“And the Dead Fetuses are a part of yours?” He had just been to a Dead Fetuses concert – not the sort of thing I picture thirty-eight-year-olds patronizing. Of course, I haven’t been to any concert in years.
“Different.”
“How so?”
“You’re a yuppie, the backside of one anyway. Idiots in sandals singing about margaritas and beach chicks doesn’t fit. It ain’t spring break anymore. And we’re not eighteen.”
I shook my head. “Plenty of parrotheads are bankers and lawyers and drink slingers Monday through Friday. It’s a getaway, not a lifestyle.”
“Escapism.”
“Precisely.”
He jabbed the smoking end of the cigarette in my direction. “Yeah, but, see, they always saw it as a getaway. They never knew Jimmy as anything else. It’s like the Tarantino bit about Superman. He’s really Superman. Clark Kent is the alter ego. Nobody ever really wanted to be a fuckin’ pirate. Just you.”
“What in Jesus’s name are you talking about?”
“I’m just sayin’.” He dragged hard on the Parliament. “You’re in a different stage in life. You’re having a baby. But it’s not just that. People grow. Tastes change. Your music tastes…” He shrugged as his teeth clinched the heater. “Your tastes have grown.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Why? You’re about to have a baby girl. You’re a lawyer. It’s okay to like better music.”
“No, I mean that’s not fair to Buffett.”
He inhaled half the Parliament and smiled. “Isn’t it?”
3.
The thing is, Buffett’s appeal was never about the beaches or the margaritas or the goddamn boat drinks. Not with me. Even when I was a teenager and it finally became cool – or at least not uncool – to listen to Jimmy, it was never the party songs that turned me on. This was true even when that cute brunette took me by the hand and said, “I just love ‘Fins.’” She said this to me on a starlit night long ago. One would think the moonlight, the perfume, and the charm would have made great apologia for “Fins,” but what can I say? “Fins” is only “Fins.” It’s just fine. No more than fine. There’s nothing wrong with “Fins.” Nothing wrong at all. But in “Fins,” Jimmy doesn’t sing I read dozens of books/ About heroes and crooks/ And I learned much/ From both of their styles. In “Fins,” there’s nothing as lyrically impressive as Headin’ up to San Francisco / For the Labor Day weekend show/ I got my Hushpuppies on/ I guess I never was meant for glitter rock and roll. I mean, “Fins” is fine. And so is “Margaritaville” and “Pina-Coladaburgh” and “Remember That Time We Went to the Beach with Kenny Chesney and Zac Brown” and whatever else parrotheads like to get off to. These are all fine songs, and everyone’s taste differs, and music is subjective, etc., etc., etc.…
But Buffett’s prowess as an artist was always in his literary skills. It was the soi-disant “novelist’s eye” that set Buffett apart from many of his contemporaries. He always wanted to be Mark Twain with a guitar. And he was always honest about it – pay close enough attention to the interviews over the years and you’ll understand his Serious Southern Writer ambitions. It’s simply that his skillset manifested as a lyricist, not a novelist. But he did in fact have a novelist’s eye when it came to story arcs and character and plots. There’s real punch to some of his songs; genuine introspection; and subtle regret. Take “Incommunicado”:
Travis McGee's still in Cedar Key/
That's what John MacDonald said/
My rendezvous's so long overdue/
With all of the things I've sung and I've read/
They still apply to me/
They all make sense in time/
But now I'm incommunicado/
Drivin' by myself down the road with a hole in it/
Songs with no vibrato/
Takin' the long way home/
It’s not just the lyrics. There’s also real depth in the structure of some of his work. Music people tell me the chord progression in “Come Monday” was ahead of it’s time. But the writerly instinct is far greater than the musical workmanship. Consider the shifting point of view in “Livingston’s Gone to Texas,” which is as good of a country music song as a fellow could write, with all due respect to Hank or Chris Ledoux or whoever wrote for George Strait.
There’s also a real novelist’s penchant in Jimmy’s work for writing without autobiography. Consider the protagonist of “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown,” which once I loved. As a young man, I always thought: “Nashville” isn’t subversive so much as it’s thoughtfully articulate, putting the listener in the shoes of a gypsy soul who is running away from home, from traumas we only really understand conceptually because the real hurt is reserved only for the protagonist. Jimmy never explains why the young girl in “Nashville” leaves her well-to-do home. We intuit the emotion, which is enough. That’s good writing.
Like other songs in the catalogue, these songs are really short stories put to tune and middlingly sung by a masterful storyteller. Hence, the Buffett appeal, as I said, was never about the beaches or the margaritas or the boat drinks. It was always about the ne’er-do-wells, and the pirates, and the barflies, and the needles who wished to stay hidden in stacks of other needles, somewhere southeast of disorder, amid the tropical frontiers and rusted shrimp boats and the desolate bars of broken dreams and discordant tunes. Buffett’s characters were Hemingway characters and Conrad characters and Twain characters and Louis L’Amour characters, peeking around the corner from the turn of an earlier century, “wonder[ing] why we ever go home.” Buffett wasn’t a party. He was a writer trying to sing a story. And the stories were good.
4.
Fingers was there, but so were seven others, plus myself. Friends for life we were, though most of us did not quite stay friends for life. In that moment, we took our friendship for granted, as young friends do, as they must; what we were not taking for granted was the challenge we’d set before us:
We’d decided on the ultimate road trip. We were hitting the open highway, mimicking the route Buffett took in the 1970s when he left Nashville for the land of the Conchs.
Drawn south like metal to a magnet, we were. And we were a motley sort to boot, still very green and nowhere near as salty as we pretended. As the man himself wrote, we were “impressive, young and aggressive, and saving the world on [our] own.”
Saving the world on our own… Unfortunately, not a lot of world saving has happened in the twenty years since we drove to Key West, although this is not from lack of trying. We became Air Force officers, and firemen, and teachers, and lawyers and political operatives, and professional drink slingers. Despite our efforts, the world is still a terrible place and getting worse by the day, and every single one of us made nary a mark on it at all.
At the time, no one much saw these failures coming, if failures they are – the rest of the crew would surely press against me on this point, and right they’d be to do so; they’re incredibly well adjusted and stable providers and, almost to a man, have been wildly successful. American heroes, actually. Right good men. Superb fathers. Some of the best people I will ever know. The only failure in the group, perhaps, is the dear author of this piece, but that is no matter. What matters for this essay is that we did not live out the songlines. Somewhere along the way, we even threw the songlines out. And yet, when we turned our caravan south on A-1-A, many summers ago, we generally thought – and I expressly so – that we would live out many adventures and perhaps leave something indelible behind. Our destination, in fact, was posterity as much as it was the southernmost point of the United States, where good times and Cuban cigars and jailers and sailors and mango men awaited.
Maybe this is just my own recollection. If I am being honest, I’m not sure what my compatriots thought they were going to find in Key West. Perhaps Fingers is right. Perhaps they were not as ambitious on this front as I was, and good on them for it. I do know they thought they’d find fun. But what else? Whatever it was, the outcome was nothing which would have made for a good, early, Buffett song:
Fingers found a bootleg copy of the Pamela and Tommy Lee video, which he purchased at an adult novelty store from a clerk who wore bad suspenders and Coke bottle glasses and smelled like peanut butter (it’s amazing the things the memory recalls). I’m pretty sure that guy had a back room of snuff films and a basement full of kidnapped children, but I digress…
One of the other guys on the trip found love, for at least a night (he was shown up a year later when, on a subsequent trip, with a different crew, another one of my friends found his future wife, at a wet t-shirt contest on Duval Street)…
Yet another of the guys found a stash of pre-embargo Cubans which were stout enough to put us all down for the count at Schooners sometime that week. I still remember the room spinning. I went back and bought another, which I smoked when one of the boys had their first child. It somehow wasn’t as delicious a decade and a half after the fact. But few things are…
Another of the boys caught a huge damn fish and fed half the island with it. Our fishing guide was a fellow named Captain Eddie. He had a scar beneath his left eye, an earring in the right ear, and he smoked Marlboros like they were going out of style…
As for me, I found a used copy of A Farewell to Arms, which I couldn’t wait to give to a young lady I had been courting back home. I remember calling her from a phone booth in Miami on the way back north. Funnily enough, six months later, I was dating one of her best friends, and six months after that, I wouldn’t speak to either ever again, simply because we each got swept up in separate jet streams. Ce la vie, as they say. (Incidentally, young men calling young women from phone booths on the corners of distant streets in faraway locales is the kind of no-longer existent thing that makes me melancholy…)
These events – the things we found at the southernmost point – were not life altering adventures or the beginning of a grand origins story, as I had envisioned. They were not especially poignant moments, and perhaps not poignant at all, although I often think of that phone booth. Despite my romantic intentions, I never stumbled across Phil Clark or Captain Tony or the ghost of Papa Hemingway. I did, I suppose, see the shrapnel-torn uniform Papa had worn in Italy in the war; and I toured Duval Street by bicycle early before dawn one morning, as the barflies stumbled home, zombie-eyed and pickled; and I saw the sunset at Mallory Square; and I caught a hell of a big damn fish myself somewhere out in the gulf, and unlike the Old Man, I didn’t let the sharks eat my prize on the way back. Most decidedly of all, I vowed that I would return one day, and return I did. Twice, in fact. The first return came the very next April, for spring break during my freshman year; the second return was many years after my first, accompanied by my beautiful bride. Hence, my Key West trips have rather a symmetry to them – the first trip had been during the summer of my eighteenth year. And the third trip came eighteen summers later, at thirty-six, newly married and on the cusp of my first child. In the half of my life in between, my resume had come into form, but there were many things missing from it:
I hadn’t lived on a boat, or smuggled guns or whiskey; hadn’t survived a seaplane crash or a hurricane; hadn’t run with the bulls, backpacked Europe, seen any front or roughed through any theater, or met the needles who were hiding with other needles in ne’er-do-well stacks of needles; I had ridden a bull, I suppose, and lived out many worthwhile tales which took me from Atlanta courtrooms to Texas boardrooms to John Lennon’s London flat to a near barroom tussle in Jacksonville with one of those Van Zant guys (not entirely sure which one). I’d also lost a couple of statewide runs and managed to publish a couple of things commercially, but to no real avail and certainly for no real pocket money.
All in all, it’s certainly been a good life. A good life all the way, just like the song says. But the factual fictions never quite manifested the way the songlines had prophesied. There’s some regret about this, obviously, but there’s also a boatload of grace and thankfulness because, had the songlines come to fruition, there wouldn’t today be a beautiful missus – at least not this missus – and there wouldn’t be a beautiful baby girl who often and curiously glances at her old man, as if she somehow can intuit the things I did in those Key West bars those many summers ago. I hope she forgets all about these transgressions by the time she’s old enough to talk.
5.
So, again those songliness… they change. Or maybe, as Fingers told me, the songlines stay the same, but I changed.
I hate to admit it when Fingers is right, which is rare but not rare enough.
Maybe I’ve outgrown the songs. If so, it raises an interesting question. Do I still get to listen to the music if I no longer find the songs resonant? Do I still get to like the music if it doesn’t speak to me?
My initial instincts are “no.” And if the answer is no, I should repent my not-so-veiled contempt of Buffett for selling out. I’ve no right to harbor contempt for the priest when I no longer practice the religion.
Alternatively, why can’t I just listen to the songs and hum along? Yes, I am a pirate/ Two hundred years too late/ The canons don’t thunder/ There’s nothing to plunder/ I’m an over forty victim of fate… If I’m no longer a member of the religion, can’t I still just listen to the music? Call it the equivalent of those idiots who don’t count themselves Christian while telling you “But, you know, Jesus does have some teachings I’m down with.” Why can’t I just be that idiot?
My baby girl loves some of the songs. I’ve figured out she likes the harmonies. She also likes all things acoustic. It soothes her hyper baby brain. She does not necessarily care for – but I like to pretend she does – “Little Miss Magic,” which Jimmy wrote for his own daughter. She smiles when I play the music, even when I play “Little Miss Magic,” and sometimes I get lost for a minute, watching her play, reflecting on phone booths and Pamela Anderson videos and old Hemingway tales collecting dust in old book shops. These are songlines in and of themselves. I specifically reflect on how these songlines differed from the ones Jimmy penned and from what I had envisioned. Like the man quipped, I guess I am often Looking back at my background/ Tryin’ to figure out how I ever got here/ Some things are still a mystery to me / While others are much too clear… And as I reflect on these other songlines, what’s much too clear to me, here and now, is at least this:
Jimmy was always the pirate… until he wasn’t.
I was too, until I wasn’t.
The songs don’t jive with anything I believe in or aspire to love, but despite my misgivings, listening to them, every now and again, isn’t a crime because:
They remind me of how I got to where I got. I suppose everybody has a soundtrack. And for many years, Jimmy was mine.
You don’t lose a soundtrack. Once it scores a part of your life, that part of your life is scored. There’s no undoing that…
…and I suppose I wouldn’t want to undo it even if I could, just like, if Davy Jones rose from the tide tomorrow and said, “I’ll grant ye three wishes,” I wouldn’t redo any of the songlines, regardless of whether they did or did not manifest. There’s still much to write about in this world, even if my daughter is the only one who ever reads anything I scribble. And what I write is worthwhile even if I never survived the Italian front or fought for forty days and forty nights with a great big marlin, because, damn it all, there are some gin joints in the Keys I barely escaped from. I need to memorialize them on paper so my daughter knows which doors never to darken.
That, as they say, ain’t nothin’. Likewise with the poignant-not-so-poignant moments. She will want to read about lonely phone booths in distant towns and about court cases won and lost and road trips taken into the great unknown, because figuring out how I got there and back is the same story as how she got here.
That’s the best songline of all.
