I chuckle every time I read where Donald Trump, Fox talking heads, Republicans and MAGA call a liberal “woke”, not realizing they have called themselves the “unwoke”.
Email yesterday, from a retired Birmingham lawyer I lived across the street from in the Crestline side of the upscale white Mountain Book suburb, aka The Tiny Kingdom.
J
To: K, sloan bashinsky, ASubject: Re: My new address
K,
Sloan is the half-crazy lawyer/Key West legend I mentioned to you.
Sloan,
Keith is a soft spoken computer wizard who was not only born in Key West, but has family roots there that extend back before the railroad arrived. And if you have computer issues, or need him to build you one to suit, he's your man!
I thought you two might have a few tales to share. And I stirred in A because he always has something to add😉JOn Monday, August 12, 2024 at 09:51:25 PM CDT, K wrote:Thanks J!Sloan, my grandpa had a restaurant in Key West. The last one was The Piccadilly on Southard St.My uncle Roy worked for the Spottswoods in Key West!I'll be in Key West on Oct 5-6.Alex, I might be in Birmingham in September! If I do, hope to see you.I'm living in Key Biscayne now.Thank you,
I replied:
Thanks, J
Nice meeting you, K, A.
I knew one of the Spottswoods somewhat, he was a lawyer, his law office was on Fleming Street, just off Duval Street, across from where I slept many nights in a business doorway in the winter and spring of 2001.
I arrived in Key West in December 2000 by Greyhound, homeless, and slept the first night on a sidewalk beside the Pegasus Hotel’s side street entrance near Duval Street.
I left Key West shortly after my 6th run for mayor, mid-November 2018. Never came close to winning, thank goodness.
In those days, even now, an outfit originally called Hometown! PAC, now just Hometown!, whose master of ceremonies was Todd German, who got to know me after I spoke at the first mayor candidate forum in 2003, when I was living in one of Florida Keys Outreach Coalition’s halfway lodges, after I had nearly and recently nearly died of MRSA flesh-eating bacteria, which lives in Key West and all Florida Keys waters, but the locals don’t tell the tourists that. The local doctors and divers know about MRSA, though. Go into the ocean after shaving and having a razor nick, you very well catch MRSA. A super aggressive antibiotic resistant staph bacteria - think brown recuse bite- similar.
During the 2013 mayor race, at a Pirate Radio mayor candidate debate, I told the listening audience about all of that, and the incumbent Mayor Craig Cates, who after he won the first time in 2009, thanked me for getting him elected without a run-off - I had told people to vote for him, if they did not vote for me, and definitely not vote for the other two candidates, Morgan McPherson, who was the incumbent, and Mike Mongo, with whom I also had history.
When the mic was passed to Craig by the Pirate Radio host, he said I was mistaken, the ocean around Key West was clean and beautiful. Craig won that race without a runoff, and he won 4 more mayor races without a runoff, and he term-limited out and could not run in 2018.
Hometown!'s first event every March was a meet the candidates gathering at Salute Ristorante on Higgs Beach. Declared and thinking about declaring candidates for various local, and state and national offices got 90 seconds to introduce themselves.
In 2009, as Craig was introducing himself, two very pretty young women friends of mine, it was their idea, showed up on their bicycles, took off their halter tops and rode by Salute hollering, “Nude Beaches for Key West! Sloan for Mayor!” The more buxom of the lasses returned to Salute with her halter top on, and she was mobbed by about 2 dozen men, including the sheriff and state attorney candidates. A Key West Citizen journalist took a photo of the topless on her bicycle, and that photo was on the front page a day or so later. A nude beach was my campaign masthead that year. A lot of nature lovers would come to Key West with their money, if Key West had a nude beach. But the city’s cash cow street Duval Street, which had ample adult straight and LBGTQ establishments, was not interested in a nude beach.
Anyway, when Todd German introduced me in 2018 at Salute, and the packed audience laughed and groaned, depending on who felt like doing what, I took the mic from Todd and said to the audience, “Everyone here knows Key West is an open air insane asylum”, laughter in the audience, “and I am the head lunatic”, laughter and cheers in the audience, “so why not make it official? Sloan for Mayor!!!” Oops, key deer caught in many headlights.
I worked my way up to that finale, inspired by Jerry introducing me as half crazy.
I wrote more last night about my often stranger than fiction political adventures in Key West and the Florida Keys, but perhaps this is a good place to stop this email.
Sloan
My p.s. this morning, after pondering a friend’s recent dream about my homeless Key West girlfriend Kari riding her rodeo horse bareback like a pony express rider, bearing a message she did not speak. In my dream code, a horse tends to represent a candidate for office. About 10 years before I met the very reluctant cowgirl Shaman Kari Dangler, this soul drawing drew herself on to my drawing pad.
J, K, A
Several times, people in Key West tried to get me to enter the Ernest Hemingway look alike contest, where inebriated old white men with white beards in Orvis fishing costumes standing on a stage in a bar hoped to be voted the winner.
I replied that I was not qualified to enter the Hemingway contest, because I didn’t drink and I knew how to write and fish.Here's a link to my blog post the other day about my reluctant shaman homeless girlfriend in Key West, whom I loved dearly, but she would not give up vodka.And here’s a link to Kari's podcast, which has gotten over 500,000 complete watches in the Torrent system. We don’t allow YouTube to run ads in the podcast, so we don’t have access to Google analytics.
Homeless outlaw cowgirl shaman with the blues saved Key West from Hurric...
Here’s the rest of what I wrote last night to J, K, A, but did not send.
You wanna see full crazy, look at this year’s presidential race, look at both sides and at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and you will see sho nuff real crazy.
Besides 6 Key West mayor races, I did 3 Florida Keys county commissioner races and one school board race. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind down there that I thought all real estate developers and their lawyers should be keelhauled backwards in shark-infested waters, and one of the lawyers was a good friend of mine named Jim Hendrick, a convicted felon, after facilitating real estate developers' bribe of a county commissioner.
I met Jim in 2006 at a county commission meeting, when his trial was in progress and he was helping his defense lawyer by cross examining witnesses in Key West’s federal courthouse on Southard Street. Jim sent from the defense table email reports of how his trial as going, well he thought, until the jury returned its verdict and Jim was seized and hackled by US Marshalls and taken to a federal detention center in Fort Lauderdale, where he resided until the trial judge put him on probation, because the main defendants had died or cut a deal to rat Jim out. The ratter called himself, “The Prince of Darkness.”
The US attorney appealed the probation, and a new judge was assigned to the case. A former Notre Dame football player who went law school, he was known to give stiff sentences. I wrote him a letter about Notre Dame and Alabama football games, and about U.S. District Judge Clarence W. Algood,, for whom I had clerked in Birmingham, telling me the goddamned 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which had jurisdiction over that Catholic Judge, had taken the humanity out of judging via its sentencing guidelines, but he, Judge Allgood, had figured out a way around it, but he wasn’t going to tell me how he did it.
The Roman Catholic Judge left Jim on probation, but gave him a heap more community service and put a tracker on one Jims legs, and Jim was only able to leave home to go to his former law office, after he was disbarred, and to where he did community service.
One place Jim did community service was the Catholic Churh on Big Pine Key. The priest was Jim’s surprise witness at the probation hearing before the Roman Catholic Judge. The priest testified Jim helped him give Holy Communion at the church, but the priest did tell the Roman Catholic Judge that Jim did not believe Jesus was the literal son of God, which I knew for fact out of Jim’s own mouth he did believe.
One night over dinner at Jim’s home, Jim’s wife and his girlfriend were there, but I did not know she was his girlfriend, and Todd German was there, he and Jim were good friends. Todd had driven me and to Ft. Lauderdale for Jim’s probation hearing. Leaving Key West, wet spotted a very shapley maybe 30-year-old naked white gal sitting in a lawn chair on a barge being towed by a skiff in a marina, and we hoped it was a good omen for Jim.
Anyway, over dinner, after a few glasses of wine, Jim told me that he would to prove to me that his biggest real estate developer client PS was not possessed by Lucifer, which I had written on my blog, goodmorningkeyesst.com. I told Jim to put on his case. Jim said PS was the best salesman he had ever met, because he could get people to look at what he wanted them to see, and not look at what he didn’t want them to see.” I said, “That’s how Lucifer sells, I rest my case.”
Jim and I played a good bit of chess, he was the better player. We mostly played in his old law office, where he told someone in my presence that he would not try to get his law license back, because he was doing everything he did when he was a lawyer, but go to court.
One morning, Jim called me in my apartment and tried to persuade me to come to his old law office and play chess, instead of attend a county commission meeting. We never played chess in the morning, always in the afternoon. I told Jim that I needed to be at the county commission meeting.
A different real estate developer's development was on the printed agenda, and a lawyer was there representing the developer, and I figured the real lawyer was Jim. I was allowed 3 minutes to speak to that item, and told the 5 county commissioners, and the county attorney, and the county manager and the county planning board, who all knew me very well, that I was putting on my lawyer had to explain that a real estate developers lawyer’s job is to do everything he can to try screw the county, and he doesn’t do that, it’s legal malpractice. Having no more to say, I walked back to my seat in the commission chamber and listened to the developer’s lawyer try to explain away the obvious.
I was the only county commission and mayor candidate who claimed to represent Mother Nature’s beautiful Florida Keys against the invasive species, humans. During my first county commission race, 2006, my campaign mantra was, “No more new development, period, the end. The Florida Keys already are way over-developed, and there is not a person living here who can look and a mirror and honestly argue otherwise."
At a Key West Chamber of Commerce candidate forum in Key West, I proposed getting rid of the Mosquito Control Board, because I thought the chemicals it was using to wipe out Mother Nature’s first line of defense were more dangerous than the mosquitoes. The incumbent commissioner chuckled and said that would create a lot of affordable housing!
The candidate forum audience did not laugh. They did not know the Keys I knew before the new big waterline was run down from the mainland, so there could be new development. The old waterline was maxed out, no new building permits could be issued.
I took J and some of our mutual friends to my father’s home on Lower Matecumbe Key a couple of times in the late 1970s, before the new big waterline was built, when the Florida Keys were truly beautiful.
I was practicing law in Birmingham, and getting a masters in taxation from Alabama's law school, taught twice a week at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. By the end of that course of study, Congress had abolished about half my tax law degree. Maybe that was the first sign from Above that I wasn't going to practice law for the rest of my life?
Ciaosky,
Sloan
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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