The Sunday Special: Backgammon with Hemingway
A short visit to Bimini included a brush with literary history
My first job out of college was also my last job while in college — serving as assistant manager for a hamburger fast-food job.
But my second job — that’s what launched my career as a writer, and gave me my first brush with Hemingway.
I’d been doing some freelance writing around town — both paid (covering the County Board of Supervisors for a local news agency) and unpaid (reviewing LPs for a monthly heavy metal magazine). My roommate had lined up some very part-time copy editing gigs via a college friend, and as the articles for this oversized cultural magazine all came in at once and needed immediate editing, he asked if I could edit some of them for some of them money, so he could make deadline.
That part-time job quickly turned into full-time employment for both of us. The magazine was the love affair of a young guy only a few years older than us who came from tremendous wealth and was still finding his own way of what he wanted to do in life.
The magazine was edited and designed in our offices at an uber chic loft in San Diego’s East Village (less than a block from where the Padres’ Petco Park home now stands), but was mostly distributed in New York City.
As we only had four issues a year, a lot of care and planning went into each issue. While we had some brilliant writing and some big-name contributors, the overall result was what you’d expect from a group of idealistic and talented but largely inexperienced 20-somethings.
After we’d put out a few issues with our newly expanded team, David, the publisher decided the editorial team should decamp to Bimini the week before Thanksgiving — “get to know one another better” he said.
Since he was footing the bill, there were no complaints.
Bimini is in the Bahamas, which did not require a passport for American citizens when we visited some 35 years ago.
We took a puddle jumper over from Miami in the late morning, landing on South Bimini Island’s air strip, then caught the water taxi (piloted by the same man who had been the customs agent only minutes earlier) to Alice Town on North Bimini.
We checked into our rooms at the Blue Water, and then David, herded the six of us over to The Compleat Angler.
I’d never heard of it, but David knew I was a huge fan of Hemingway. And as we walked into the bar, it was quickly apparent that Hemingway was The Compleat Angler’s claim to fame.
There were photos of Hemingway on every wall, in every nook of The Compleat Angler: Papa with a big fish, Papa with a small fish, Papa with a beer.
It turned out that Hemingway had rented a room above the bar in the late 1930s — rumors were that he’d written “To Have and Have Not” here, and possibly much of what was later posthumously published as “Islands in the Stream.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Lost in Cyberspace to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.