Death in Key West

He started to speak, but then the music blared so loud and a bikini-clad Rose bumped into his arm, so he drew me into the lounge. There were so many bodies under the awning on that fantail that I wondered—if only briefly—where all these folks would sleep. Knowing Theo, though, I realized that they’d be doubling up, and in some cases tripling up—and that, these being movie folks, some of them probably wouldn’t sleep at all. We’d have to scrape them off the floor and ceiling of the lounge in the morning after a binge on pills, liquor, and sex in the comfort of international waters beyond the three-mile limit of U.S. law.

That’s what the ship’s captain, a swarthy and somewhat menacing looking South American by the name of Diego Alarcon, said when I accosted him on the way from my stateroom to the fantail, having been summoned by my host, Theo Kline. I’d asked him why we were steaming out to sea so soon after my arrival, and he’d answered that most of the guests were aboard and we were going out to international waters to embark the last guest. We were so close to the blockaded Cuban coast that my mind began to race on just what sort of business Theo had gotten himself into.

“I knew how much you loved that old yacht as a boy, son, and I needed to get you here,” Theo was saying. “I loved the old Final Curtain too, but it’s all about appearances, Clint. You should know that. You were born to the Hollywood culture. You should know that it’s all about image and that reality is just an illusion in Tinseltown. I had boldly declared that Final Curtain symbolized me. But I outlived that statement. I reached a point where having an eighty-year old yacht was thrown in my face. People started saying my movies were old fashioned too, that I’d lost the edge, become passé.”

I laughed at that—out loud. It was ridiculous to think of Theo Kline as passé. He was still larger than life and as handsome a devil as the plastic surgeons, beauticians, and personal trainers could manage. Yes, I could believe this was all an illusion of some sort he was pulling by still being at the peak of a dog-eat-dog career at his age. But he didn’t look his age. And I could hardly wait to get him in the sack and find out if his continued reputation for sexual prowess was now an illusion too—including whether youth had exaggerated my remembrance of the legendary size of his cock when it was hard. Perhaps that was the whole of why I accepted his invitation: to determine for myself if he could still get it up and use it as masterfully as he had done that summer of my deflowering. Perhaps it didn’t have anything to do with seeing the yacht of my youthful dreams again at all.