Key Largo, Florida
Part 1

Finally agreeing on the name 'Island Palms' for Harold and Oswald's Key Largo guest house was fraught with all kinds of petty disagreements.

"Island Palms?" Harold pouted at Oswald's suggestion. "Most of my life I've heard of Rosie Palm and her five sisters. Do you intend our establishment to be encouraging that type of activity? Or perhaps you've been engaged in it a tad too much yourself lately."

"You've spent far too long living in Texas, Harold, clomping around in those ridiculous butch boots of yours. This is Key Largo, Florida Keys. Palms are part of the landscape here. Or haven't you noticed? What's the matter with you? Have you lost all sense of romance and fantasy?"

But disagreeing was pretty typical of the two gay eccentrics in their mid fifties. They'd been arguing about almost everything for the best part of their twenty year partnership. There was never a question of their splitting, though. They both understood that while living together meant constant fireworks, living apart was not an option.

"Besides, there's not a person alive who could put up with your idiosyncrasies, Oswald."

"Ha! You should talk!"

"Bitch."

Apart from the name of the guest house, there were also arguments about decor, color scheme, furnishings and whatever else. Eventually, though, all bickering had been settled, and Island Palms, at the time of writing this story, had already been open for business for a year.

There was nothing upmarket about Island Palms. It was a meandering weatherboard structure, a relic from the 1930s, that had had bits and pieces tacked on over the years. But it had oodles of old-worlde charm and character, with wide, cool, covered verandahs that ran along the entire lengths of three sides of the building, made all the more charming by its green corrugated-iron roof that blended in well with the lush tropical vegetation.

The building was was actually two-storeys, resting on tall piers that raised it about seven feet from ground level. The extra space provided plenty of undercover parking and storage, as well as protection from high tides in the event of a storm.

Inside the spacious house, the timber ceiling was lined with cream-painted boards, suspended ten feet above the polished hardwood floors. Large ceiling fans, with cane inserts in the blades, were a feature of all main rooms and guest rooms. And at various intervals along the long, central hall were decorative wooden fretwork arches. Intricate fretwork also graced the tops of a row of timber posts that ran along the perimeter of the verandah, and supported its roof.

Most of the guests - usually numbering between fifteen and twenty at any one time - were vacationers, coming and going with frequent regularity. But three of them, having decided they liked the place so much, had become permanents. They were all single retirees who had bonded - well, sort of - and had become the only 'family' they really knew. Or perhaps preferred. Island Palms was their home; their security. They also enjoyed the company of casual visitors. Constantly meeting new people without having to actually go anywhere was a bonus. And if they didn't like or approve of one or two, it was no biggie because the offenders would be gone in a week or so, to be replaced by the excitement of more new faces.

What Island Palms lacked in sophistication, it more than made up for with position. It was right on the beachfront; 40 miles of it. The grounds featured a swimming pool - nothing too fancy, but adequate. And inside there was a pool room, dining room and TV room. Guest rooms didn't have their own ensuites. The amenities blocks were at the rear of the premises. But no one seemed to mind that minor inconvenience. Hey, Island Palms' rates were very reasonable considering it was smack bang in the middle of a tropical paradise. And it had a nice, homely feeling about it.

Staff was minimal. Harold and Oswald did most of the chores, including cooking. But they did have help with the cleaning. Dorothy, a single mother of a teenage son, Robbie, would clean the guest rooms and amenities blocks each morning and sometimes help out in the kitchen.

A couple of local lads, Cody and his buddy Wingnut, looked after the grounds and pool on weekends. Cody was at college studying marine biology, and grateful for any extra spending bucks, while Wingnut was still at high school.

The hiring came about one day when Harold was checking the gardening section of the local services guide. "We've got enough work to do around here without mowing lawns and whatever, Oswald."

"True, Harold. But we don't want some old fart doing the grounds. Actually, I've been thinking about that..."

"You know what happens whenever you think, Oswald."

"The thing is, we don't want this place full of boring old fogeys. We need a bit of gawk material to liven things up. I say we put an ad in the paper, and offer the job to a student."

As it happened, Cody and Wingnut were among many young applicants that were eventually narrowed down to just two. Harold and Oswald couldn't agree on which one to choose, so they decided - albeit after some debate about finances - to hire both boys.

"Think about it. We get the lawns and pool done, and we improve the decor at the same time. It's a bargain!"

Another staff member was Steve. He was the dining room's waiter. Tall, blonde, exceptionally good looking, and also a friend of Cody and Wingnut. All the lads were keen local surfers.

"Have you had any experience at waitering before, Steve?" Oswald asked.

"Not really, sir. Sometimes my mom asks me to take my plate to the dinner table at home."

"Have you ever tripped or fallen on the way?"

"Nope."

"Excellent. You're hired."

One of the permanents, Nancy, was rather perturbed when she noticed so many young boys being hired to work at the guest house. Nancy was well into her 70s, and even more eccentric than Harold or Oswald could ever hope to be. She was in the habit of wearing the most outrageous hats; large, ostenatious creations, littered with flamboyant feathers. The rest of her garb was equally dazzling; yards and yards of colorful [usually floral] material that was obviously designed to hide her enormous bulk. And she had a major obsession with shoes; dozens and dozens of them with a common purpose; to make her large, clumsy feet look dainty.

"Those boys! They're always running around half naked! They're giving the place a bad name."

The other permanents were Ralph and Father O'Malley, both retirees. Ralph had worked all his life in the recreational vehicle business, a legacy from which was his pride and joy, a Honda motor cycle he polished and cleaned more than he rode. And the Rev? He was handy to have around the place to bless various things and counsel people when they needed a bit of divine inspiration or consolation.

*********

It was a typical Saturday morning. Harold and Oswald were in the old fashioned kitchen, frantically cooking breakfast for the guests. Breakfast was served between 6:30 and 7:30 in the dining room. There was no room service. Late-risers were required to fix their own if they were hungry, and expected to clean up afterwards. It was the same deal with Dorothy. If guests hadn't vacated their rooms by 9am, they wouldn't be cleaned. Bad luck. But the rules didn't bother most of the guests. The place had such a homely feel about it, people more or less just accepted things the way they were. After all, it wasn't the Ritz.

The breakfast menu was never anything fancy: bacon and eggs, hashbrowns, sausages, a choice of cereals, toast, marmalade, etc, fruit juice, and coffee or tea.

Harold and Oswald, as usual, were both cooks and waiters, busying themselves in the kitchen, then delivering orders to the tables in the adjacent dining room. But their workload was often made lighter by willing help from the permanents, Ralph and the Rev, the latter having the quaint but pleasant habit of blessing the food with a sign of the cross after he'd placed it in front of the guests. Then he'd bless them as well.

Nancy? Yeah, right. She wasn't an early riser, and would rarely surface until after 9 or 10. Usually, more nineish than tenish on Saturdays, though. 9:30 was when the boys arrived to do the gardening, and the place would reverberate for about an hour with the ear-shattering sounds of a mower and whipper-snipper... enough racket to wake a hibernating bear in the middle of winter... which, in fact, Nancy often resembled.

"God save me!" she mumbled as she held her dressing gown before her, turning it this way and that, trying to figure out where the armholes were. "Don't tell me it's Saturday again already." Then she stepped into her slippers and made her way down the hall towards the back door; ignoring other guests as she went. "Where does the damn time go?" She paused as usual outside the ablutions block to wave her fist at the two shirtless gardeners before disappearing inside.

"It's a wonder she has the damn nerve to face the world in such a disheveled state," Oswald commented to his old bud. "Hair all over the place, and looking like something the cat dragged in."

"One very large cat, Oswald. Even an eight-foot lion would have major problems with that one. Can you imagine it? Some massive king of beasts trying to drag Nancy even an inch? Anyway, by mid afternoon, she'll be dressed to the nines again, looking like the star of some lavish pantomime."

By about 11:30, Cody and Wingnut had finished their chores, and were taking a refreshing dip in the pool with some of the guests. The boys would always arrive wearing their Speedos under their shorts. But they rarely stayed on for long. Both boys enjoyed wrestling and goofing off in the water, so Speedos had a habit of being grabbed from behind, disappearing down a pair of muscular legs and being thrown through the air.

"Who belongs to these?" Father O'Malley asked after he'd stooped to collect the crumpled Speedos from the lawn.

"They're mine!" Wingnut yelled before having his head dunked and silenced by his bud.

"Make him come and get 'em," Cody laughed.

Well, that was one for the books. Suddenly everyone in the pool was looking at the Rev, and wondering what he might do next: throw them to Wingnut or place them back on the lawn? "I think we might have to put it to a vote," the old guy smiled after studying the looks of expectation on all the faces in the water. "Raise your hands all those in favor of giving Wingnut his swim suit back."

Only one hand appeared, and that was no surprise. The black-haired, well-built teen exited the water, strode up to the Rev large as life, thanked him for handing him his Speedos, then promptly stepped into them. But not before everyone had had a good gawk at the young fellow's ample furniture. There wasn't a single female in the pool who had turned her head away. Nope. They were all guilty of gawking, as indeed was the Rev, who got the best view of all, and everyone was obviously impressed, judging by the applause. Wingnut knew it as well as he took a bow - young face beaming - and was probably glad for the chance to parade his family jewels by "accident" before diving back into the pool.

Naturally, when Nancy found out about the impromptu show, she warned Harold and Oswald about that kind of activity being reported to the authorities by someone.

"Who?" Harold asked.

"Some people find nudity offensive. It could be any one of your guests."

"I doubt it, Nancy. They're just a couple of kids having a bit of fun. No one complained."

"Actually," Oswald added, "the audience applauded."

"Was that the noise I heard? Well, it just goes to show the extent of moral decline these days. I'm a resident here, and I expect this establishment to be respectable."

"For Pete's sake, Nancy, it was just a boyish prank. Anyway, you look absolutely stunning."

That did the trick. "I do?" she gushed. "Oh, it's nothing really. Just something I ran up on the sewing machine in my room. I'm glad you like it."

The problem with diverting Nancy's attention away from complaining about something, to talking about her clothes, was that she would go on and on and on about where she bought the material, usually at a sale, and what she said to the salesgirl, etc, etc. That would inevitably lead to God-knows what else. Conversational tangents were a Nancy specialty, confusing not only her audience but herself. And that left Harold and Oswald with only one sanity-saving option. Find any excuse to vanish.

(c) 2003. All rights reserved. MrB

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