Capt. Tony Tarracino swears that he won the Key West women`s vote with one sentence. It popped out, unrehearsed, during a candidates debate shortly before last November`s election.
During the public question period, a woman had stepped to the microphone, angrily waving a newspaper. ”A very heavy bull-dyke, I know her and I love her,” Capt. Tony recalled. ”She holds up this writeup about me, and she says: `Capt. Tony, in the paper here you said all women are liars and cheaters. What do you have to say for yourself?` ”
Capt. Tony peered into a stormy sea of female faces and felt a sailor`s calm. He had survived rougher rides in his gunrunning days. For example, there had been that long-ago night off the coast of Cuba, or so the legend goes, when an American named Slim swam toward Capt. Tony`s boat in a hail of bullets; Capt. Tony tried to tug him aboard only to discover that the soldiers on shore had blasted everything below Slim`s belly button halfway to Miami.
The captain also knew a thing or two about how to mollify women, having married three, lived with 10, and sired 13 children.
So Capt. Tony, mayoral candidate, rummaged around in his bottomless grab bag of sweet talk, dirty talk, tall tales and come-ons and pulled out the best line he could find. In his clipped New Jersey accent, the accent of movie con men, he said, ”There isn`t a woman in the world I`ve ever gone to bed with that it wasn`t a privilege.”
Winning ways
Now Capt. Tony-part-time gambler, one-time gunrunner and full-time hustler-is Mayor Anthony Tarracino. He won election after five failed campaigns, one of them managed by Jimmy Buffett, the local hero who started his singing career in Capt. Tony`s Saloon. He beat a former mayor who was backed by the Chamber of Commerce and just about every other respectable group in town. His campaign slogan was: ”All you need in this life is a tremendous sex drive and a great ego. Brains don`t mean (expletive).”
To anyone who suggested that, at 73, he was too old for the job, Capt. Tony replied, ”When a beautiful woman walks by and I don`t look at her buns, then I`m too old.”
Capt. Tony`s victory was a vote for a waning era, for the time when this remote, 3 1/2-mile-long, 1-mile-wide dollop of land in the warm, glittering waters between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico was America`s southernmost bohemian outpost.
It was a vote of protest, against the big new hotels and tacky new condos and their private beaches; against developers dying to flatten out all the island`s kinks and quirks and pave the streets with gold Visa cards; against all those downtown shops stocked with enough Ernest Hemingway T-shirts to clothe every American who ever read a Hemingway novel.
Voting for a legend
It was a vote for a legend, no matter how self-made.
”Key West is an insane asylum,” Capt. Tony said, sitting behind the desk in his coral-walled City Hall office. ”We`re just too lazy to put up the walls or fences. I want to retain that mystique. Used to be everybody who came down here was a character. Now these kids who come down, they`re vegetables. Hair`s the same, socks`re the same. They look like a TV commercial.
”I wanna bring back the old school spirit. I wanna. . . .”
He paused, cocked his head, propped his elbows on the desk. He squinted through the smoke of his unfiltered Lucky Strike. ”I would really enjoy you in bed.”
Excuse me?
”I could do things with my hands you`ve never imagined.”
Pardon?
”I`m serious.” He grinned. The huge pouches under his blue eyes swelled. The grooves in his forehead, the ones he calls ”the scars of life,” deepened.
”How`d we get on this subject?” he said. ”I thought we were talking about Key West.”
Capt. Tony considers himself a family man. When he began having children, he looked at the naked lady tattooed on his inner right arm and decided he should do the responsible thing. He had a bikini put on her.
He talks fondly and often of his seven daughters and six sons, who range in age from 4 to 54. ”You can have my last one,” he said. ”Be no stud fee.”
”He`s a great family man,” said his wife, Marty, 41. ”He`s more of a friend to all of his kids than you could believe.” As for his womanizing, she said, ”It`s all part of his zest.”
After midnight on the night he was elected, by a scant 32 votes out of 6,066 cast, Capt. Tony went home briefly and peeked in on Marty as she slept with their 9-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. Then he got in his car and drove around. He drove down narrow lanes lined with old cypress cigar-makers` shacks, down shady streets flanked by flame-red poinciana trees and white Victorian mansions, through the tattered neighborhood of Bahama Village.
He drove until dawn, a Lucky Strike between his lips, the radio on low so he could hear the announcer say over and over, ”Capt. Tony Tarracino was elected mayor of Key West tonight. . . .”
”I realized I was responsible for 28,000 people now,” he said. ”I kept asking myself, `Can you do it, Tony?` ”
Hustler to mayor
Imagine. Tony Tarracino, the Italian immigrants` son who learned to hustle because he was too small to fight, the street kid who hitched to Key West on a milk truck in 1947, on the run from New Jersey bookmakers.
Tony Tarracino, the 9th-grade dropout who had wanted nothing more in life than to be like Frank Sinatra, with a line of credit in Vegas and a beautiful dame on his arm.
Tony Tarracino, the kid who grew up wearing Salvation Army shoes and who, when he finally got that Vegas credit line, went out and bought a pair of $300 Italian shoes that he wore once and put in the closet, where they`ll stay until he`s buried in them.
Tony Tarracino. Mayor of Key West.
”Tony`s a very interesting mayor,” said Robert Gray, the city attorney. ”When he first got into office, he didn`t fully understand what he`d gotten himself into. But he`s a funny guy. He gives the impression that he`s just a character. But let me tell you, he`s really sharp. And he`s got a heart of gold.”
Mayor Tarracino didn`t know anything about Robert`s Rules of Order, and the closest he`d ever come to a budget was his saloon cash register, from which he sometimes borrowed a couple of hundred so he could bet on the dogs. He spent most of the first City Commission meeting silent and smiling, largely because the batteries in both hearing aids had gone dead.
But Gray and many other skeptics began to be impressed shortly after his election. One night, when two white police officers were shot and a drug dealer was killed during an altercation in Bahama Village, Capt. Tony went to the black neighborhood at 2 a.m., alone, to seek out black leaders and plead for calm.
Not long ago, as the city faced a state deadline for moving its garbage dump, Capt. Tony told staff members they were going to Tallahassee, the capital, to beg for an extension. Gray went along, skeptically. He watched, astonished, as Capt. Tony handed out posters of himself. He grew more astonished when state officials treated Capt. Tony like a celebrity-and promised to seriously consider an extension.
”A lot of people think the guy`s puffing,” Gray said. ”I`m beginning to think he`s not.”
”You know what`s shocking to a lot of people?” said Capt. Tony on a bright evening, driving over hot streets still steaming after an afternoon squall. ”I`m a good mayor. I go to the Pantry Pride, all the old ladies come up and kiss my hand. I`m down to the bologna counter, I`ve got four of them telling me their problems.”
At Mallory Dock, where hundreds of artists and sightseers gather for the nightly ritual of sunset, he got a hero`s welcome. Young women kissed him hard on the lips. Young men with earrings asked for his photo. The sword swallower introduced him to the crowd as the most famous man in Key West.
”This is my family, these are my people,” Capt. Tony said.
Several months ago, when some local bigwigs tried to lease the pier and drive away the nightly carnival, Capt. Tony fought them off. He is now hailed as the man who saved sunset.
”What every man wanted to do, he`s done it, defied all law there ever was, stood up for the common people,” said Mark Carpenter, 29, a tourist from Tampa. ”He`s a legend.”
It`s a legend that Capt. Tony, king of the barstool yarn, helped fabricate, abetted over the years by journalists who tracked him down looking for outrageous quotes and an excuse to write off a big Key West bar tab. In publications around the world, he has been immortalized as the man who partied with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Hemingway.
”I hardly knew Hemingway,” he said. ”I met him in the late `50s, but I never got to know him because I never met him sober. Wanna know something?
. . . He was very rough, disgusting, foul-mouthed.”
In 1980, a Hollywood filmmaker enthralled by Capt. Tony`s tales of running guns to Cuban rebels during the revolution made a cheap movie about him. It was called ”Kill Castro” and starred Stuart Whitman. The Motion Picture Guide gave it zero stars.
The Capt. Tony legend has grown so big, like a photo enlarged until it`s fuzzy, that even Capt. Tony seems unsure where the Capt. Tony hype ends and the real Capt. Tony begins.
”Who am I?” he said. ”I`m whatever you want me to be. If you want me to be a jerk, a clown, a hustler, fine.”
A couple of years ago, worried about his family`s financial security when he`s gone, Capt. Tony sold his saloon to a Ft. Lauderdale doctor who paid him $650,000, plus $300 a month to drop by and be Capt. Tony, local legend.
Some nights, after most of the nearby bars have closed and the Jimmy Buffett imitators that fill them have headed home, he sits on the wooden bench outside his old saloon. He sits for a long time, smoking, talking to the passersby, feeling the breeze blow in off the gulf, waiting for the sky to brighten in the east.
He`s a little lonely these days, but still angling for the action, still counting on the breaks. That`s what it`s all been about, he said. The action. The breaks.
”When I die, an era`s over,” he said. ”But that won`t happen soon. Only the good die young.”
