Ryan White - Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way

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Copyright 2017 by Ryan White

Previously published in 2018 by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by Tom McKeveny

Jacket photograph by Stephen Anderson

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: White, Ryan (Journalist) author.

Title: Jimmy Buffett : a good life all the way / by Ryan White.

Description: New York : Touchstone, [2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016052808| ISBN 9781501132551 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501132568 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Buffett, Jimmy. | Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC ML420.B874 W55 2017 | DDC 782.42164092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052808

ISBN 978-1-5011-3255-1

ISBN 978-1-5011-3256-8 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-5011-3257-5 (ebook)

For Stella.

Dream big.

C aptain Tonys Saloon, at 428 Greene St., Key West, Florida, was once an icehouse, and then a morgue. Actually, it was an icehouse and a morgue simultaneously, because thats a smart use of resources on a little island.

By the time the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898, the building had become a telegraph stationthe first to receive the news, and from there it moved to the rest of the nation. They say the tree growing up through the bar these days was the hanging tree, from which sixteen pirates and one murderous woman (in a blue dress) met their endbut they say a lot of things in the tropics. It was the base of the mast for the DeForest Wireless Telegraph install in 19051906, Monroe County historian Tom Hambright says. Captain Tony Terracino, who died in 2008 at the age of 92, did enjoy mixing his facts and his fictions.

For a while, the building was a cigar factory. But for the most part, 428 Greene has been home to barsa whole bunch of bars: legal and illegal, gay and not specifically, and all manner in between. Now, as it was in the beginning, Captain Tonys is a place to cool off.

Sloppy Joe Russell opened Sloppy Joes there in 1933. Hemingway drank there back before where Hemingway drank meant much to the bottom line. Aside from his tab, anyway. No one had thought to put him on a T-shirt. And T-shirts in general, while popular on the shrimp docks and in the bars, hadnt been turned into a business plan because there werent enough tourists to keep a T-shirt operation in the black.

In 1937, the buildings owner tried to raise Joes rent from $3 a week to $4 a week. Disinclined to pay such an outlandish amount, he moved Sloppy Joes a block up the street to the corner of Greene and Duval.

Anthony Terracino arrived in Key West in 1948 and for the same reason so many have landed in Key West over the years. He was running away. Specifically, he needed to put some distance between himself and the gangsters whod left him for dead in a New Jersey dump. In 1958, he bought 428 Greene from David Wolkowsky, whose grandfather had opened a store in Key West in the 1880s and begun collecting properties David would spend much of his life managing, renovating, and enjoying.

Authors photo

Captain Tony would, over the years, build a rsum like a Dos Equis adthe most interesting man in his world: saloon proprietor, bootlegger, gunrunner, raconteur, lothario. All you need in life is a tremendous sex drive and a great ego; brains dont mean a shit, he liked to say. And so when people figured out you could move a lot of T-shirts, they put that slogan on Captain Tonys T-shirts. Then they put it on posters. The beer koozies say Oldest Bar in Florida.

Captain Tonys was the hangout at the dawn of the seventies, one of them at least. Novelist and poet Jim Harrison was there, working out alongside friend and fellow writer Tom McGuane. Theyd gone to Michigan State University together and so Harrison would hit town from up north and crash at McGuanes place on Ann Street.

Tom Corcoran was a kid from Shaker Heights, Ohio, just out of the navy, six-feet-five, fit, fresh-faced, and not as innocent as he looked working a taco cart on the street.

What are you doing? Harrison said to Corcoran one night, giving him a good look over.

Selling tacos, Corcoran said.

I can see that. Are you a poet or something?

Corcoran said he was indeed a writer, and he eventually showed Harrison some poems and lyrics. Harrison asked Corcoran to send six of his pieces up to Michigan, where Harrison was planning on publishing a journal of poems. Corcoran never sent them. He still has them marked in a folder and kicks at the memory, but he had a taco cart in Key West back then. He was busy.

The navy sent Corcoran to Key West in 1968. Not long after he left the service in 1969, he headed north to Montreal for a few days, and then south until he ran out of money around Fort Lauderdale. He got a job digging ditches and slept on the floor of an ex-girlfriends apartment. Hed hoped for more than the floor, but ditch diggers cant be choosers. As soon as he got his first paycheck, he dropped the shovel and pointed himself farther south to where U.S. 1 runs out near the ocean. It was winter 1969. It was cold as hell in Ohio when he walked into Captain Tonys. And I thought, Shit, this is exactly what I need , Corcoran says.