Physical State of Matt #24: FLORIDA
- 50statesofmatt
- Jun 14
- 15 min read
Florida. The name conjures images of bright sunlight sparkling off of aquamarine water, golden beaches, and Disneyland. I experienced none of those things during my week there.
I visited Florida sooner than I had been planning to. I was fleeing as far from the Arctic Blast as I could get. The freakishly cold weather that had been chasing me down the East Coast was about to have its most intense week.
CHARLESTON & SAVANNAH
The first leg of the long drive from North Carolina took me first through Charleston, South Carolina.
I had visited Charleston twice before and had really enjoyed my time in the city. The first time was on the same road trip that brought me to Wilmington in 2005. Then years later, my friends Kevin and Caroline got married there. Their wedding was over Halloween weekend, so their rehearsal dinner was a costume party at the Palmetto Brewery. I was a member of the hacker group fsociety from the TV Show Mr. Robot and my former partner was Susan B. Anthony.
Charleston was the closest place on my way to Florida that had an official Apple Store. I had scheduled a mid-afternoon appointment to finally get my phone fixed. When I arrived, the store was packed. They quoted me $500 (ahhhh!!) and told me it would take 5 hours. In fact, given how busy they were and when the store closed, they couldn’t even guarantee that they would be able to complete the repair that day. What a nightmare. Strike three. I had a late lunch and moved on.
I stopped for the night in Savannah, Georgia. The year after working on “Dreamer” in Louisiana, I had returned to the South for another job - a TV pilot called “Hollis & Rae”. It was a quirky southern female-driven police procedural.
The project had a powerhouse creative team. Callie Khouri was the writer and director of the project. She had won an Oscar for writing “Thelma & Louise”, and had directed “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”. Steven Bochco, who won 10 Emmys and created “Hill Street Blues”, “L.A. Law”, and “NYPD Blue”, was producing. T. Bone Burnett, Oscar winner, Grammy winner, and Callie’s husband, was doing the music. He’d done the music for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, “Walk the Line” (the Johnny Cash biopic), and “The Big Lebowski”.
Sadly, the pilot wasn’t picked up, but working on it gave me the opportunity to live in Savannah for three months and work with some moguls of the industry. Savannah is a curious place and I enjoyed my time there. The historic downtown is ridiculously picturesque. Spanish moss drips from the massive trees that line the streets which were designed to create 22 different grassy squares.
The people are an odd mix of old Southern money, tourists, and art students from SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design). Its unique and quirky culture is captured well in the book, and its film adaptation, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”.
Before I crashed for the night, I visited two of my favorite old spots. I had dinner at The Crab Shack on Tybee Island, where they have a pool with live gators you can visit before having a down home seafood dinner.
Then I stopped for a nightcap at The Original Pinky Masters. Established in 1953, it is one of the original bars in downtown Savannah. I lived around the corner and spent many an evening there talking with the bartenders and the eclectic group of customers that came through. If I didn’t finish my $2.50 PBR tallboy, I’d pour it in a plastic cup and take a “roadie”, a proud Savannah tradition.
Fun trivia fact: Savannah is home to the second largest St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the country - after New York, but before Chicago and Boston. Our schedule on Hollis & Rae ran through St. Patty’s and we had to move shoot days and locations around to avoid the chaotic scene downtown that day.
FLORIDA
Florida is complex and unique. Miami ranks as the second most famous US city in YouGov polls, despite a population of less than half a million. Miami is a majority-minority city. Over 70% of its residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 60% are of Cuban origin. 66% of its population speaks Spanish as their first language. In fact a new dialect of American English called "Miami English" was recognized in 2023. The words are English but it incorporates a lot of Spanish sounds and grammar.
Florida is omnipresent in the American media in part because of its critical role in national elections as a swing state. Florida controls 30 electoral votes out of a total 538, the third highest of any state. It has voted with the winner in 10 of 12 last presidential elections. The infamous recount in 2000 that swung the election to George W. Bush over Al Gore took place in Florida. In recent years, Governor Ron DeSantis has made national headlines with his controversial stances on issues including LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, social security, and school curriculum.
Florida, with its year-round balmy weather and advantageous tax laws, is the most popular state for retirement. A stand-up comedian (for the life of me I can’t remember which one) once quipped that Florida is just “old people and their parents”. Florida has the second largest percentage of people over 65 at 22%, just after Maine.
Finally, what discussion about Florida would be complete without a reference to the “Florida Man”? Florida has become the butt of many jokes due to the off-the-wall nature of many of its news stories. The articles almost always start “Florida Man [did something insane]”.
For a good laugh, you should do the Florida Man Birthday Challenge. Simply Google “Florida Man” and your birthday, then read the first couple articles that come up. Here are mine:
KEY WEST
The Florida Keys are a coral cay archipelago that stretches from the tip of Florida south-southwest 120 miles. There are about 1700 islands that comprise The Keys. Of those, 882 are charted, and only 30 are inhabited. The first main island off the mainland is Key Largo.
Key Largo had been my first choice when deciding on a place to stay for the week, mainly because of the film of the same name. I went through a period in my late teens and early 20's where I was obsessed with old detective thrillers and classic film noir. I read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, I watched The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. When I moved to LA, my going away party had a film noir theme.
1948’s Key Largo was the fourth and final pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Directed by John Huston, it tells the tense story of a group of people stuck together in a hotel during a hurricane with a gangster, played by Edward G. Robinson.
I decided eventually to stay in Key West. I figured why not, since I was going to be all the way down there anyway, go to the very bottom of the country? There is a single road that connects the main inhabited islands. The drive takes 2.5 - 3 hours, and traverses 42 different bridges. The longest of these is Seven Mile Bridge which runs between Marathon and Big Pine Key.
As I drove this long stretch of concrete, I couldn’t help but think back to the scene in 1994’s action comedy True Lies where jets blow up Seven Mile Bridge to keep terrorists from delivering stolen nukes to Miami. That film was made when CGI effects were still in their infancy and the scene was shot practically. It made a big impression on this young film enthusiast.
When I arrived at my destination, the temperature was in the mid-60's and it had just started to drizzle. As frustrated as I was by the lousy weather, I tried to imagine how pissed off I’d be if I had saved my money all year long for a family vacation to Florida in January, only to find it like this.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but accommodations on Key West were exorbitant. I opted for the cheapest (but still criminally overpriced) option, the Ibis Bay Beach Resort, right off the main road at the beginning of the key.
"Resort" was a generous term for the place. A series of two-story buildings stretched through the property, set up like a classic motel or motor inn. My room was on the second floor, it's walkway/balcony overlooked The Stoned Crab restaurant next door and the adjacent pool. I didn't see a single person in the pool the whole week I was there.
After letting myself into the room with my old-school metal key, it's keychain just a numbered bottle opener, I found the quarters cramped. I could barely stand up straight in the shower, the mini fridge had a certain je ne sais funk to it, and the doll-sized table rocked harder than the Stray Cats. The heater kinda sorta worked, but not enough to fully take the chill out of the air.
I spent the rest of the afternoon exploring downtown Key West. My first stop was the buoy marker for the southernmost point in the contiguous US. It was a total tourist stop, but it had to be done.
I could see that the water around the buoy, when hit with the usual bright sunlight, would have sparkled with the shocking aquamarine of travel brochures. That day however, it was giving more dirty turquoise ashtray.
The bright red of the buoy was a drab burgundy in the dim, overcast light, but that hadn’t stopped loads of people from queuing up to take pictures with it. Each person was taking their sweet-ass time, snapping dozens of variations for every social media platform. Rather than stand around for a half-hour, I grabbed a quick shot from 20 feet away between posers and moved on.
The first Key West lighthouse was constructed in 1835, shortly after the US Navy established a presence on the island. This lighthouse was completely destroyed in The Great Havana Hurricane of 1846. A new one was erected to replace it in 1848, and that’s the one that stands today. When the US Coast Guard decommissioned the lighthouse in 1969, it was turned over to Monroe County.
The 88 stairs to the top were narrow and vertigo-inducing. Passing someone on their way down required some very close and personal maneuvering.
The balcony at the top delivered the stunning 360 degree views I had been expecting, though the dense cloud cover and muted color palette made it hard to get too excited about them.
Across the street from the lighthouse was The Hemingway Home & Museum. Ernest Hemingway lived here for eight years in the 1930s. He wrote some of his best known works there including “To Have and Have Not”, and “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.
The Hemingway Home houses nearly 60 cats, all of them descendents of Snow White, a white cat that was given to Hemingway by a ship’s captain. Most of these cats are polydactyl like Snow White was, meaning they have six toes. The Hemingway Cats have become so famous they have live webcams and their own app for iPhone and Android. There was another long line to get into the Hemingway House and I was getting hungry, so I skipped it.
I wandered over to Duval Street, the main strip in downtown Key West, to find some lunch. As I walked, I was surprised to see several chickens wandering freely in the streets.
The Key West Chickens are descendents of the original fowls brought to the area in the 1800’s for eggs and meat. As people became more reliant on grocery stores for their food, free-roaming chickens became a regular feature of the island. In 1986, when cockfighting was outlawed in Florida, dozens of roosters were set free, causing a population explosion of feral chickens.
It is illegal to kill the chickens, but it's also illegal to feed them. There are shelters and rescue services to assist the birds, but for the most part they just peacefully coexist with the locals and tourists, occasionally wandering into the odd shop or restaurant. The Key West Chickens have now become a cultural icon of the island.
Duval Street was about what you’d expect for a tourist town - rows of shops and restaurants, dozens of bars with live music. The shitty weather hadn’t deterred all the people who had come out for some day drinking, so it was pretty lively.
Downtown Key West felt like a series of contradictions. On one side there was the 801 Bourbon Bar with its rainbow crosswalks, hosting one of the five long-running drag shows on the island. On the other side there was the Florida government's rhetoric and proposed laws against drag shows and LGBTQ+ rights.
On one side you had the throngs of social conservatives who had flocked to South Florida to celebrate the presidential inauguration. On the other side you had a clothing optional rooftop bar, a weed dispensary golf cart, and a converted ambulance driving around advertising a strip club.
I realize a savvy business owner will cater to anyone and everyone, but the collection of t-shirts I saw for sale really ran the gamut. I was left with the impression of Key West as a strange island steeped in alcohol and hypocrisy.
But Matt, you may say, that sounds like a rather uncharitable review of a place that is usually idyllic and loads of fun. And to that I would say, that's fair. I really wasn't in the best headspace while I was there, and it colored my experience. Truth be told I had been in a funk since Maryland and it was getting worse each week.
I spent most of that week in my shitty hotel room bundled up to compensate for the lousy heater. The holiday lull was over and work was getting really busy. Every day I had more and more meetings. By the time evening rolled around each day, I didn't felt like facing dark 60 degree windblown drizzle surrounded by drunk people, so I'd order take out.
The closest I came to a normal Key West experience was from streaming Bad Monkey, a show based on a Carl Hiaasin novel that was set there.
My last night I forced myself to go out so I could see the nightlife on Duval Street and try to shake the funk off. I started with dinner and live music at Sloppy Joe’s Bar.
Sloppy Joe’s first opened its doors on the day Prohibition was repealed in 1933. A favorite haunt of Hemingway’s in the 1930’s, it has hosted an annual Hemingway Day since 1980, complete with a Hemingway look-a-like contest.
Legend has it that one night in 1937, after a dispute with the landlord over rising rent, the staff and patrons picked up their drinks and everything else in the bar, then moved it all one block away to its current location on Duval Street. Drinks were on the house for the rest of the night.
I ordered conch fritters and a sloppy joe. This sandwich, a building block of school cafeteria nutrition when I was growing up, has uncertain roots. Some claim it was created at Sloppy Joe's in Key West. More say it was created in the midwest. But most say it was created at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Havana, Cuba, after which the bar in Key West was named.
My next stop was at Willie T’s, another iconic spot on Duval. The walls and ceiling of Willie T’s are plastered with one dollar bills, signed with people’s names or messages. I’ve seen this tradition in plenty of places, but not nearly to the extent they do it there. It’s unclear what the origins of this practice are, but two theories prevail.
One theory is that fishermen (or miners depending on who you ask) would pin a dollar with their name on it to the wall at their favorite bar as a method of providing themselves with future credit. In case they were short the price of a drink in the future, they could pull their dollar off the wall and spend it.
The second theory points to aviators’ “short snorter” tradition. Started by Alaskan bush pilots in the 1920’s, the practice subsequently spread to the US military and commercial aviation. Flight crews would sign each other's banknotes to commemorate the voyage and to convey good luck. At any point in the future, someone who had signed the bill could demand that the owner produce it. If the owner didn’t have it on them, they would owe the signer a half shot of liquor - or a “short snort”.
This tradition was even carried into space. Throughout the Gemini and Apollo missions, the astronauts each carried one dollar bills with their fellow crew members' signatures. Historic short snorters are a collectors item today, some even carrying presidential signatures.
Willie T’s is mostly open air and they have live music seven days a week. I ordered a beer and sat at the bar, watching one of the people performing that night. He introduced his next song, Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”, by saying that it was written by Shel Silverstein, a longtime resident of Key West.
Knowing Silverstein only for his children's books "The Giving Tree", and "Where the Sidewalk Ends", I honestly thought that the singer was joking. But as I listened to him sing the song, one I’d heard dozens of times, it made sense. Despite the song being a little violent and dark, it has the same clever rhyming and whimsey as Silverstein's other work. It’s not even structured like a song at all, but like a poem.
Legend has it that one night in 1969, Johnny Cash threw a party at his house in Tennessee and several of the musicians in attendance tried out new songs they'd been working on. Bob Dylan played “Lay Lady Lay”, Kris Kristofferson played “Me and Bobby McGee”, Joni Mitchell played “Both Sides Now”, and Shel Silverstein played “A Boy Named Sue”. If true, that party must have been touched by the music gods.
Johnny loved the song and asked Shel to write down the words. The following day he left for California to record “Live at San Quentin”, the follow up to his massively successful album “At Folsom Prison”. His wife June encouraged him to take the lyrics and perform the song there.
Cash later said in an interview, "I'd only sung it the first time the night before and I read it off as I sang it. I still didn't know the words. As a last resort, I pulled those lyrics out and laid them on the music stand, and when it came time that I thought I was brave enough, I did the song." You can tell watching the video that he is indeed reading the lyrics as he sings.
That live recording of “A Boy Named Sue” was released on the album and also as a single. It stayed at #1 on the country charts for five weeks and hit #2 on the pop charts. It became Johnny Cash’s best selling single of all time, and won Shel Silverstein a Grammy. They performed the song together on the Johnny Cash Show in 1970. Watching the old recording, it's pretty clear which one of them was a celebrated singer, and which one was a celebrated writer.
I wrapped out the evening at The Rum Bar with a shot of Ron Zacapa, which I have a fondness for, but hadn’t had in at least 10 years. I sipped my rum in a wicker chair on their patio and hung out with their sweet, rotund mascot, Captain. The name tag on his collar, rather than saying his name, simply said “Don’t Feed Me. I’m Fat”.
I'd taken Friday off and was planning to take a ferry to The Dry Tortugas National Park. But, as luck would have it, an urgent work situation came up at the last minute. I had to take a meeting first thing in the morning, then spend the rest of the afternoon on and off calls. I threw in the towel and just drove back to the mainland. I had to stop several times to take a call or do some urgent work on my computer. What should have been a three hour drive took all day.
MIAMI
I stopped for the night in Miami. I’d heard so many amazing things about South Beach - how beautiful it was, what a great party scene it was. I got a hotel room a few blocks from Ocean Drive.
I walked up and down the strip. Restaurant after restaurant pumped out music, classic cars parked outside of them to attract attention. It was a Friday night, and there was some decent foot traffic, but everyone was bundled up, not in particularly festive moods.
I chose a spot at the bar of Alma Cubana, ordered a Cuban sandwich and a mojito. The mojito came with a length of quarter-split sugarcane which I chewed on, sucking the sweet juice out of it. Both the drink and sandwich were, as expected, excellent.
That night was the coldest night of the year in Miami, dropping down to 35 degrees overnight.
My week in Florida had been bummer - certainly not what I would have expected out of this state at the beginning of the trip. The weather was getting me down. Work was grinding on my nerves. I was feeling lost, struggling to rediscover the purpose of this trip after I'd taken such a long break. I was on my own again for weeks and getting lonely. I was doubting myself.
I had only one more state to complete before another short break with friends back in the Costa Rican sun, and I couldn't get there fast enough. It felt like a real shame to be thinking about the upcoming week as something I had to get through rather than something I was excited about. But each journey has its different seasons, and I was trudging through the winter of mine. The next morning I squared my shoulders and set my sights on South Carolina.
Yes, and…
Matt
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