The Depths Of Weirdness

He was past the guy who was dressed as Carmen Miranda and past the guy who was strapped to the portable electric chair, but before the human six-pack of Heineken. He was 250 pounds of body hair sporting spiked heels, a slinky cocktail dress, the big do of a Denny's waitress and a beauty-pageant sash that read MISS ING LINK.

And now we had a problem. Was this the weirdest, the most bizarre, the tackiest thing my photographer and I had seen so far in the Florida Keys? Or was it the guy who puts dead fish in his mouth and feeds them to moray eels? Or the 30-foot-long lobster replica outside a gift shop? What about the Bat Tower? And the guy who, for a tip, will lie on a bed of nails and have another man place a concrete block on his crotch and shatter the block with a sledgehammer?

You think it's easy trying to find the weirdest, the most bizarre, the tackiest person, place or thing in the Florida Keys? You try it. It's like trying to find the straighlest noodle at Kraft or the worst shirt in Paul Shaefer's closet. The Keys are the Bloomingdale's of questionable taste. We had six days to find the loss leader.

Not that weird, bizarre or tacky means bad. The truly tacky, for instance, is wonderful. The truly tacky is so godawful that it comes all the way around toward respectability, like really bad yard statuary or a 50,000-watt Christmas-light collection left up all year round. If it contains a shred of cool, it is not within a Japanese drift net of tackiness. If it is Pepto-Bismol pink and lime-rickey green, if it juliennes potatoes and is made mostly of conch shells, we've got to have it.

Our plan was to start at the northern lip of the Keys, in Key Largo (Mile Marker 106), and slowly, inexorably sink, bridge by bridge, toward the capital of kitsch, Key West (MM 0), where we hoped to run smack into the infamous Fantasy Fest parade, the Holy Grail for America's weird. Naturally, we started our search as any of you would: at an underwater hotel.

One thing we learned right away is that nobody is actually from the Keys—"except the fish," as one man told us. Most maps of the U.S. don't even show the Keys. They're like P.O. Box 1000, Atlantis. According to most histories, the Florida Keys were settled by a slow leak of weird people from Cleveland (which is due north of Key West, by the way), people who just kept drifting south until they could drift no farther and clung to a coffee-shop stool or a surfboard. Keys people are all part of the Great Disattached, and when you are disattached, rules tend to mean squat. The societal standards that work in the northern 48 seem to disintegrate in the American Caribbean. Traditions spring up in an instant, and inhibitions come off like wedding dresses.

Why else would a man build an underwater hotel? Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo (MM 103) is the only one of its kind in the world, and we had reservations. For instance, we had reservations about how we were going to get to our rooms. We had reservations about what would happen to our luggage. We had reservations about the whole damn thing.

Luckily, when we met the friendly proprietor, Neil Monney, we stopped worrying about such silly little things. Instead, we began to worry about dying. This is because Mr. Monney informed us that if we wanted to spend the night in the hotel instead of on the gravel driveway, we would need to scuba dive down in the next 45 minutes, before the sun set. "Do you see those bubbles out there?" Mr. Monney said as he pointed out to a vast and murky lagoon. "Your room is 30 feet under those." Hey, an ocean view!

We were sort of thinking along the lines of glass elevators whisking us undersea to our rooms. Or futuristic tubes or maybe a minisubmarine. Wrong. You dive to Jules' Undersea Lodge or you call Howard Johnson's. Not that there was any real problem with this, except for the small fact that we had never dived in our lives.

So we learned. Still, it is one thing to have learned to scuba dive in the last 45 minutes and to try out your new skill in the shallow end of your local YMCA pool. It is another thing entirely to have just learned to dive and to be on your way to live underwater for the evening. Tough. As we began our descent, we noticed that Mr. Monney was in a very good mood. "You might see all kinds of things down there tonight," he said. "There's been a shark hanging around lately."