It's located in a really bad hard-to-find spot on a block of Clearwater where not much goes on, but Gala's Gelateria will hopefully collect such a following by word-of-mouth that it doesn't matter. It's in the 331 Building at the corner of Cleveland and Osceola.
I had a chocolate and peanut butter gelato sundae. Well, after trying two dozen free taste spoons.
The notion of "the haunted doll" is one that recurs in classic horror fiction, and Florida is home to one of the prototype real-life examples: Robert the Doll. He's had quite an interesting life, but currently resides at the Fort East Martello Museum and Gardens on Key West.
The painter Robert Eugene Otto was born in October 1900 to a wealthy family in a lavish mansion at the corner of Eaton and Simonton streets. They employed an extensive staff of servants from the Caribbean and the Bahamas. He was primarily raised by his nanny of Bahamian (some say Haitian) descent, who gave him a primitive doll for his 4th birthday. Some versions of the story say the doll was already wearing a sailor suit, others say it was dressed that way by the boy to match his own. Some versions say the nanny gave him the doll as a sincere gift, whereas others suggest it was a deliberate curse on the family because the nanny was disciplined for practicing hoodoo in the yard.
The boy soon developed a strange relationship with the doll, more so than your average child and toy - he took it everywhere he went, dressed in an identical sailor costume, and would have conversations with it at all times, even when alone, discussing things in low conspiratorial whispers. Eventually he demanded that he only be called "Gene" so as to avoid confusion with the doll named Robert.
Then things gradually got creepier and creepier.
Neighbors reported walking past the house and seeing the doll looking at them from a window. If that wasn't disquieting enough, sometimes on the walk back they saw the doll had changed windows and was now peering out from a different one. Some grown-ups were startled to hear - or think they heard - Robert actually speak in response to Gene. The child, precocious though he may have been, was likely not a ventriloquist.
With increasing regularity, incidents of mischief occurred around the home which Gene, when accused of being responsible, would blame Robert. At first they didn't believe him, of course... until the night when the entire family, so the legend is told, actually witnessed the doll moving by itself.
Years passed. Gene grew up, got married, settled down and inherited the house he grew up in. But he still kept Robert. And renovated a turret room in the house's attic as an apartment for the doll, complete with his own furniture. Needless to say, Gene's wife thought this was bizarre, and whenever they would have a quarrel, Gene continued in adulthood to blame it all on Robert. When Gene died in 1974, his wife chose to just leave the doll in the attic and sold the house with him up there. The next family to move in found him, and gave him to their young daughter. It was a gift they'd soon regret - the girl began screaming out in the middle of the night, claiming that Robert got up and walked, and attacked her on multiple occasions. Years later as an adult, she was still frightened by it and still insisted to interviewers that Robert the Doll was alive and wanted to kill her.
The doll was ultimately donated to the Key West Art and Historical Society, who in turn placed it with the Fort East Martello Museum. And in May 2008, Robert left Key West for the first time, to be on display at TapsCon, a paranormal convention held in Clearwater. It was here that Robert's picture was taken with some sort of special "aura-capturing camera", though apparently not a Kirlian one, and that sure enough, Robert's photo showed a purple mushroom-cloud aura around his head and a blue glow around his body.
Robert, who if nothing else has the claim to fame of being the inspiration for the "Chucky" movies, remains on display in Key West. Visit him at your own risk, and don't think unkind thoughts. He can hear them.
In February 1948, beachgoers in Clearwater were shocked to find enormous three-toed footprints in the sand, extending for two miles along the shore. Police were called in, and scientists were consulted, and newspaper articles were written, but no one had any explanation.
Incredibly, the mystery didn't stop there. Over the next decade, the footprints of the "Clearwater Monster" kept showing up again and again, in various nearby locations such as Clearwater Beach, St. Pete's Beach, Indian Rocks Beach, Tarpon Springs, the Courtney Campbell Parkway, Honeymoon Island, and even as far south as Sarasota. Famed cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson inspected the footprints and, after some study, declared them to be that of a giant fifteen-foot-tall penguin.
In 1988, local practical joker Tony Signorini admitted to journalists that he and his friend - the late Al Williams - had staged an elaborate hoax for years, for no other reason than because it was fun messing with people's heads. As reported in the St. Petersburg Times:
When Williams died in 1969, he left the secret of the “Clearwater Monster” with Signorini for safekeeping. Encouraged by his friends Bud and Joanne Lobaugh of Largo, Signorini agreed to bring the “monster” out of hiding. All these years, the “monster” was tucked away in its cardboard box under a workbench at Auto Electric. The real “monster” is a pair of cast iron feet with high-top black sneakers.
Signorini lifted the feet, each weighing 30 pounds, out of the box and put them on. “You see, I would just swing my leg back and forth like this and then give a big hop, and the weight of the feet would carry me that far,” Signorini said, explaining the 6 foot stride of the creature. “The shoes were heavy enough to sink down in the sand.”
Signorini, who was Williams’ partner at Auto Electric, and, with his son and daughter, still runs the business on Greenwood Avenue in Clearwater, said Williams came up with the idea for the “monster” tracks. It seemed an appropriate prank: The Loch Ness Monster was still making news. Dinosaur remains had been dug up near Albuquerque, New Mexico, the year before, and during the war years Gulf residents had been constantly on the lookout for German submarines.
And that, as they say, is that. Of course, there do seem to be a lot of odd discrepancies, such as the size of the iron feet not always matching the size of the footprints, and something about the way Signorini tells the story almost sounds reverse-engineered to me. Could this actually be a hoax of a hoax? I try to imagine Mr. Signorini wearing the thirty-pound iron shoes (never mind that experts who examined the prints insisted they must have been made by something much heavier) and hopping in them to create six-foot strides, for more than a few minutes. Then I picture him doing it for two miles, and then I attempt with great difficulty to postulate him doing it, over and over and over again for seemingly no great purpose, for ten years.
Does that sound believable to you? It does? Okay. I'll sit down then.
Oh, and by the way, just to complicate the matter further, there have also been people who somehow reported seeing the creature, or a creature - in the vicinity of the footprints. In July, 1948, four students from the Dunedin Flying School said they spotted it off Clearwater Bridge, and that it resembled "a furry log with a head shaped like a hog's". (So much for penguins.)
Signorini insists he and Williams had nothing to do with that.
When I lived in Clearwater awhile back, this American Green Tree Frog was always hanging around my trash cans in the mornings. We'd chat about baseball as I sipped my coffee and had my morning cigar.
You're probably too young to remember this, but in 1905 the greatest restaurant in the solar system - Columbia Restaurant - was founded in Ybor City. Today it has numerous branch locations around Florida, including St. Augustine, Tampa and Clearwater, but the one nearest and dearest to my heart is on St. Armand's Key. This was the first Columbia's I experienced, so I suppose I've been imprinted on this one.
(Yes, I am a habitual indiscriminate adder of apostrophe-S to places whose names lack them, at will. Sue me.)
If I could choose only one thing to eat for the rest of my life, dear reader, it would be Columbia's Steak Palomilla - and I think it might take a billion years before I began to get bored with it. Maybe two. It's a very holy thing, and words cannot convey the alchemical magic that occurs in this dish, so I won't even try. I'll just say that even if you don't take seriously any other opinion proferred herein on this blog about matters culinary, listen to me on this one. Columbia's is the alpha and omega of Florida foodiedom.
And then there's the drinks. I usually have a pitcher of Mojito or Sangria but sometimes indulge in random stabs like the Absinthe Sazerac (pictured above.) The server sets up a folding table beside you and mixes your drinks (as well as your salads) tableside while you watch. I still remember years ago, watching in awe the first time I ate here, as our server Cecilia squeezed the limes and poured the rum and conjured up a pitcher of Mojito that was more than the sum of its parts. You never forget your first time.
Did I mention that their black bean soup, covered in fresh cut onions, is worthy of being a meal all to itself?
And that their Crema Catalana dessert takes Creme Brulee to a whole new level?
Or that they have their own line of cigars, the mere mention of which has me twitching and jonesing even now? Must cut this short now and step out for a puff by the pool...
To paraphrase Brian Wilson, I've been all around this great big world and I've eaten all kinds of pancakes. But none beat the offerings at one of my very dearest favorite mess halls, Clear Sky in - where else? - Clearwater.
Oh, to be sure, their lunch specials are mighty tasty - such as the lobster roll pictured below - and I had some scintillating cocktails here. Most notably, one happy afternoon was spent tossing back Mudslides on the patio while waiting for the hand of fate to tap me on the shoulder.
But really, I came to Interzone for the pancakes, and more often than not, whenever I'm in CW I come to Clear Sky to get a steamin' platter of big round mapley things before adjourning next door to Havana Cigars and getting a stogie to stroll on the beach with.
Hulk Hogan lives in Clearwater, by the way, and has a surf shop right across the street. From your vantage point at Clear Sky you can often see him coming and going from his store, and I even bumped into him (not literally) shopping for groceries at Nature's Food Patch.
There's a lot of things I miss about Kentucky, but most of all I miss the days of life in St. Matthews when I had a house with a wine cellar and a walk-in humidor for that most Floridian of fancies: cigars. Talk about your "man caves"; I camped out down there literally for days at a time, like a Franciscan in a monastery studying illuminated manuscripts. (Except my manuscripts were moldy old pulp fiction and the dusty old dregs of comicdom.)
After I moved from there to the JSH Plantation in Anchorage (Kentucky), I tried to set up a primitive cellar and humidor in the unfinished basement, but it just wasn't the same. And from there, I entered into a still-ongoing period where I constantly go out and forage for a few cigars at a time, rather than keep them hoarded at home. I don't do those little-bitty desk humidors; they're a pain in the ass to fiddle with and it's strangely far easier to keep a whole room properly humidified than a small cedar box on your desk.
In Louisville, hustlin' sticks was easy, for the most part. With Riverside Cigars just over the puddle in Jeffersonville, Indiana (Where I scored Nat Sherman, Drew Estate Undercrown and the Riverside Cigars Casa Especial), J. Shepherd's in the Highlands (where I got my Leccia Black, Jaime Garcia, Tatuaje, La Duena and Tarazona 305), Kremer's downtown (Kristoff, Ashton VSG, Quesada Tributo), Oxmoor Smoke Shop in Oxmoor Mall (Perdomo Lot 23, CAO Sopranos) and - if I was really desperate enough to pay inflated prices for poorly-kept sticks - several Cox's and Liquor Barn locations. I even came to know all the lesser-known little nooks and crannies where cigars could be found, like a place on Bardstown Road that sold glass pipes and crap like that, but also had a small walk-in stocked with goodies like the LFD Airbender. And Claudia Sanders Dinner House, of all places, had an innocuous little humidor of stogies quietly sitting off to the side in their little-used upstairs.
But now that I'm in constantly on the go in Florida, traveling for work (the great work), I continually have to re-suss the lay of the land wherever I go and try to let my nervous system's cigar-detecting antenna reach its invisible tentacles out, sniffing, feeling, searching for those elusive boxed beauties until, like a dowsing rod, something begins to twitch and quiver in recognition of its goal.
My tour of duty in Jacksonville started off with a bad omen - a great cigar store had long existed in San Marco Square, just moments walk from my house - but had recently closed down. Fortunately, I soon sought out Tobacco Cove, a great place with a bunch of great old guys loungin' around and talkin' trash. Here is where I got turned on to a lot of this year's faves, like my current all-time #1 stick, Alec Bradley Nica Puro. I got in such a groove on those, I actually had to stop tweeting my cigars for awhile because it was Nica Puro every day and got just plain redundant.
Espinosa is another brand that was new to me until Tobacco Cove, as was the Esteban Carerras Chupa Cabra.
Meanwhile, I discovered four other great places - Island Girl Cigar Bar (with three locations!), Art of Cigars, Aromas and Smoke City. I mostly played it safe at Island Girl and propped up the bar with old standbys like Alec Bradley Black Market (I still worship this cigar for some reason, even though they're often too tight and have a real vegetal quality at the very end) and Drew Estate Liga Privada No. 9. Smoke City, whose dinosaur we've already discussed, provided me with stuff like Revolution, Upper Cut, Gurkha Ninja, and Gurkha Evil. At Aromas I got a little more experimental with oddball stuff like Pura Sangre, a Ventura offering which initially smelled like a cage at the zoo but once lit, honestly was a delicious, powerful and tantalyzing spicy smoke. I miss it. Good times.
Then came Clearwater. Not so good. Once again, I found there had recently been a cigar store - very close to where I was living - on Fort Harrison Avenue, but it had given up the ghost. I quickly determined there to be a number of cigar shops over the bridge in Clearwater Beach but they mostly specialized in hand-rolled stuff - and just between you and me and the microphone in the potted plant, dear reader, I'm a real snob about my hand-rolleds and hard to satisfy. Fusion Cigars carried a decent line of name brands but unfortunately they don't open until 3pm and I usually stepped out to fetch my fineries in the mornings. A little joint in a strip mall called Smoker's Paradise turned out to be my primary smoke source while in CW, and they got me obsessed with Nish Patel's XEN cigar, which is a creamy-tasting Connecticut-wrapper "breakfast cigar" that puts off a lot of billowy smoke with a real ass-kick to it.
Finally, my cigardian angel led me to a place way out Highway 19, called Smoker's Den who showed me the San Lotano love and the ways of Asylum 13 as well as stocking my XENs. But aside from a rack of My Uzi Weighs A Ton baitfish packs at Smoker's Paradise, there wasn't a serious Drew Estate to be had in the whole damn city. Mark my words, there's a real market void waiting for someone to fill it: there needs to be a serious cigar shop that sells the good high-end collector's stuff right in downtown Clearwater, preferably on Cleveland Street.
Now I'm on Siesta Key, that wacky party-island off the coast of Sarasota, learning the ropes all over again about where to find the rope-a-dope. For the third city in a row, I found a shut-down cigar store that had been right at the top of my street, practically. These are apparently tough times for the stick-store business; watch yourselves, boys, keep sharp.
As luck would have it, I soon found a hip liquor store called Siesta Spirits that has a goodly humidor full of can't-go-wrong crowd-pleasers like Arturo Fuente Hemingway and Drew Estate Natural Clean Robusto. Over on the mainland, I discovered Mardo's, a place run by a guy who was very knowledgeable in some ways (he could rattle off the entire history of many of the companies and knew the exact composition of every cigar he stocked, right down to the country of origin of the filler) but then said some baffling things too (like, regarding several new upstart companies I mentioned, he muttered dismissively, "Ehnh. All those places get their cigars from Oliva and put their own band on it, who needs it?")
Most recently, I was relieved to find Bennington's on St. Armand's Key (who also stocks my local snooty-grocery, Morton's, with their cigars) carries the XEN and a boatload of other good stuff including some new to me, such as Giacomo's and Flor de las Antillas. And then there's Norman's Liquors way out Clark Road - they have a way deep walk-in with an old favorite of mine from back in the Kentucky days, Perdomo Patriarch. But it's Sarasota's Maduro Cigar Bar that takes the prize for the place to go - crazy-complete selection of sticks and a dark cozy atmosphere, where a man can hibernate, drink craft beer, and ponder his sins. When I saw they had cans of Drew Estate's Papas Fritas I knew the hand of providence had placed me right where I belonged.
Papas Fritas are an exercise in audacity that not many other than Jonathan Drew might have attempted - selling an expensive product that is openly admitted to be a recycled short-filler amalgamation of leftover table sweepings from construction of Liga Privada cigars. But these Frankenstein french fries really are tasty.
Other cities I find myself often in include St. Petersburg, where I recently discovered the joys of Central Cigars, a really dark can't-see-my-cigar-till-I-light-it saloon with one whole wall of smokes going off practically into the vanishing point. In several visits to St. Augustine, I've learned where every cigar is to be had - but usually go to St. Augustine Tobacco, hidden deep in the labyrinth of the Colonial Quarter. Ybor City, of course, is such the cigar capital that you can't throw a rock without hitting a tobacconist.
And then there's Orlando. Well, the less said about Orlando, the better.
Sooner or later my Steampunk Tiki-Bar concept, the Pulcova Club, will be up and running and then once again I will have a wine cellar and walk-in humidor to lord over, like an evil genius in his doomsday fallout shelter. You're welcome to join me... until then, I'm out there on the hunt, constantly vigilant, searching the seaside for the sweetest sticks, day by day, hour by hour, to help serve the cause to which we all are so devoted.
Stay tuned; developing.
This is your man in Clearwater, reporting live from the front lines, with a keyboard and a kindle and a cigar and a cat. Three months now I've been officially a citizen of the Sunshine State - not just one of those supercilious snowbirds - and like my associate J.T. Dockery says, lately I've been too busy leading the life to write about it. I spent the first two months on a tour of duty in Jacksonville, but during that time made many jaunts and expeditions to points like Neptune Beach, Ponte Vedra, Tallahassee, Ocala, Bradenton, Sarasota, Tampa, Ybor, Palmetto, St. Pete, Pass-a-Grille, Gulfport, Gainesville, my beloved St. Augustine, and my home base on Perico Island.
I've also begun taking on a whole raft of new business opportunities and responsibilities, which is needless to say biting off far more than I can chew but I'd rather throw 1000 rusty darts at the carnival balloon than two sharp ones. I don't have any tattoos, but I did, I might get Han Solo's "Never tell me the odds" rendered on my bicep. Some of it is related to PR work, some of it the ignoble pursuit of law which I find myself sucked back into no matter how hard I try to disengage, some it relating to theatre, the JSH Book Club and my any-minute-now-wait-for-it Tiki Bar concept, The Pulcova Club. Most of the rest is classified but you can easily obtain security clearance by buying me a Mai Tai at Roy's.
Many theories have been put forward about what makes Florida so special. Some say it's the fragmentary diversity of its people, others say it's simply the fact that so many Floridians are not actually originally from here and the resultant morphic field is always in flux. Me, I think it's something far older, something under the soil, something that happened long, long ago in an unspeakably antediluvian age. But the "specialness" is real, it is palpable, it is even measurable by laboratory equipment. So here I am, wandering these swamps and sandy back roads, trying to define that elusive energy, in search of answers. Or at least smokes. I came to Interzone for the cigars, really.
As compared to back home, the cost of living in Florida is equally fragmentary. Some supermarket items are exorbitant compared to what I would have paid at my old Middletown Kroger, while others are astonishing in their inexpensiveness. And the staggering variety of exotic foods here, even at the most mundane grocery, makes you realize you're not in Kentucky anymore, Krampus. And recently at the farmers market portion of the Beach Blvd. Flea Market in Jacksonville, my appropriation of William S. Burroughs' term "Interzone" to describe Florida (he used it to describe Tangier) seemed all the more apt with its scores of vendors of Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, Indian, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Honduran, and Arab extraction all talking over each other, beckoning to passersby, hawking all manner of mysterious goods day in and out. It was here I recently scored some mamey fruit from an Asian woman who corrected my pronunciation (it's meh-MAY) and showed me which specimens were the choicest. "This one, you eat tomorrow", she said, ever so slightly applying pressure to the fruit as she held it in her hand, and "this one another week", tapping a firmer one with her long paisley enamel decorated fingernail. Other vendors sold products I couldn't even identify, and still others sold such exotica as Santeria paraphenalia and live giant snakes and lizards; presumably for pet purposes, we hope, and not for eating.
Meanwhile, the next installment of the JSH Book Club, the science fiction epic Solar Station A, was supposed to come out "in late summer", then was pushed to September. October's nearly over and the book, you may have noticed, has not yet appeared on Kindle shelves worldwide. One of the good things about calling the shots of your own book distribution is the ability to extend your own deadlines infinitely, or even just throw up your hands and say, "you know what? It'll be out when it comes out." The book is turning out to be a lot longer than I'd originally intended (for those of you who said they wished my previous novels were longer, be careful what you wish for) and so I'm taking my own sweet time on baking this biscuit till it's brown. Therefore, the other novel I've been working on, a story of boxing and voodoo set in the 1920s entitled The Alternation of Night and Day, will come out this winter, pushing the book originally scheduled for December, Matilda Heron, to next year. Unless I end up packing up my ukelele and moving to the Dry Tortugas or Bimini or something and disappear into a cask of rum for tax purposes. But even from there, I'll tweet you a copy of the report.
If you'd asked me day before yesterday what the connection was between Jim Morrison and Florida, I would have probably said the infamous incident in 1969 wherein the Doors frontman exposed himself to the audience at a show in Miami. But last night, the datum came across my desk that JM actually lived in Clearwater - twice, no less - during his crucial formative years.
Six months after Jim was born, he and his mother moved in with her husband's parents in Clearwater, Paul and Caroline Morrison, for a time while the father went out and about on his duties as a Naval Officer. Later in teenhood, Morrison's rebellious nature so exasperated his parents that he was sent to live with his grandparents again. He attended St. Petersburg Junior College in 1961-62, then transferred to Florida State University, where he studied acting until Fall 1963. Interestingly, among his classes, he took a course in "Philosophy of Protest", where he got a B.
It was on at Pier 60 on Clearwater Beach that Morrison met his true love and soulmate Mary Werbelow. They sat on a beach blanket together beside the pier and played the game Matchsticks, just like in Last Year at Marienbad. As part of a wager made, Jim agreed to get a haircut when he lost the game. That afternoon they had a picnic on the Clearwater Causeway, and that night they went to the movies together to see West Side Story and officially became a couple by the evening's end. Things moved fast in 1962.
When Jim moved to California to attend film school in the summer of 1965, Mary followed him. But his erratic behavior soon led to a breakup. This same summer, Jim began playing music in bars with Rick & The Ravens, a jazz/blues combo that had already made quite a name for itself locally but soon morphed into The Doors.
The old Morrison home, at 314 N. Osceola Avenue, just down the street from where I am currently residing this month, no longer exists, having been demolished in 2005. But the persistence of memory imbues reality.
Almost universally overlooked by locals and tourists alike, the obscure Bird Island is located in the intracoastal waterway between Clearwater and Clearwater Beach.
Just how obscure is it? A search on Google Maps for it brought up Bird Key instead, and Bing Maps brought up a sand bar off the coast of Jacksonville also called Bird Island. Trying to learn much about it is a bit like picking gnats out of pepper, as one of the few articles I found online notes:
You won’t find it on any chart, but most local seafarers know what you mean if you tell them you’re heading over to Bird Island.
Unfortunately, because it's a protected wildlife sanctuary, you can't actually land there and get out and walk around and drink a Hennepin or three. So, we drive by, we sail by, we circle and wonder. I took the above picture this morning standing on the causeway, sipping Starbucks, and pondering the Copenhagen interpretation.
If there's one thing Floridians love - besides rum - it's decorative and waggish multi-directional signposts. These were all spotted within the same hour, whilst I was cruising from Clearwater Beach through Clearwater and over to Dunedin. Some actually point to real places with accuracy, some are completely silly, and some are a mix of the two.
The most famous of such signs, of course, would be the one seen in every episode of M*A*S*H from 1972 to 1983, plus the original 1970 movie.
