Margaritaville and Me
Now that I’m back in Key West, I live literally next to Margaritaville Resort. When you open my door and step out into the parking lot, the first thing you hear is the soundtrack to other people’s vacations.
Unless it’s very early and the Buffett empire thinks you’re not quite ready for eggs with a side of Marley, there is the low, constant hum of music that makes tourists from the Midwest feel as though they have right and truly arrived elsewhere.
I am not exasperated by this. The part of me that believes in tarot cards and that my rising sign determines my very best haircut also secretly thinks that I have manifested it. Don’t ask me if I also think I have manifested the things in my life that are mostly a shit sandwich—I like to pretend complete innocence in those affairs. But I never fail to congratulate myself for living one short expanse of asphalt and chain-link fence away from the consistent swell of other humans drunkenly chorusing “Bubbles Up.”
My meditation teacher tells me that I should always “lead with love.” If I do, says he, beard sage and white, hands tucked into prayer pose, I will reawaken the sacred center of my being.
I want to tell him that I have a connective tissue disorder and can freakishly do that prayer pose thing behind my back as well, occasionally reaching up to touch the back of my own head if I have stretched enough beforehand. And I also think that I am not entirely certain that Bob from Ohio, next door at Margaritaville, high as a kite on well tequila and a now-blistering sunburn, isn’t substantially closer to the sacred center of his being. Because isn’t our universal spiritual inheritance supposed to be joy? Even and especially if it isn’t a composed and static, deep-breath-filled kind of joy?
Anyway, I have a tree between me and Margaritaville that is full of honeybees and butterflies. It looks not unlike an AI creation, and the bees don’t sting you even if you kind of stick your face into their tree. The only human they seem interested in at all is my 16-year-old son, Gabriel, who does not, I assure you, smell like a person that anyone would imagine attracts honeybees. I tell him that it’s his sweet disposition when one lands on the wall beside him or tries to tail him like a puppy into the house. I’m not really sure what it is, but pursuant to the above point about Bob from Ohio and his spiritually-sound Margarita, I think that maybe what attracts the bees is the sacred center of Gabriel’s being, which responds mostly to video games and cars, but also still to being hugged like he’s six instead of 6’3.
Sometimes when we’re bored, my 14-year-old, Sebastian, and I wander over to Margaritaville and pretend to be tourists shopping for $30 hats emblazoned with sharks and/or plumeria blossoms. Bastian is convinced that if he pretends visitor well enough, there are some free spoils of travel that he can con the hapless workers into giving him. He lingers at the door, picturing stealthy entrances into a continental breakfast stocked with banana pancakes and juices that did not just squirt frozen from a tube 10 minutes before.
The only thing I have ever personally gotten for free at Margaritaville is some guy’s beer poured entirely into my left Birkenstock while I was splashing around in the pool with some visiting friends. My buddies said they wouldn’t probably stay there again after that, and I tried to rehabilitate the Birkenstock even though it cracks underfoot and smells patently yeasty.
But still, there is the music every morning.
And I guess that is a freebie if I sit across the parking lot with the bees and a cup of coffee, contemplating how love leads with many things—not excluding sunburns, tequila, and the sacred sting of a well-earned hangover.