I FIRST WENT TO Key West with my family as a fourth grader. My father drove us around the island in a couple of hours. I’m not sure that we ever got out of the car except to have milkshakes on a narrow, remote beach. More than anything, my parents loved to act unimpressed by famous places. Before sundown, we got back in the car and drove to a Holiday Inn in Miami for a good night’s sleep before our Bahamas cruise the following morning.

A few rules about Key West...
Rule number one: You don’t drive around Key West. You cover it on the ground.
Rule number two: At some point Key West will be your final destination, not a side trip.

I ran away from a job a year after my high school graduation and met an older guy in the Jacksonville Greyhound station. We rode the bus straight to Key West holding hands, then stayed in a weathered Victorian-house-turned-motel locally known as the Tiltin’ Hilton. I had never suffered such glorious dilapidation. I was nineteen, attempting a romance in a town that was falling, again, on hard times — this one because of AIDS. I was a college dropout but I had been doing my reading. We were two years into a disease that was thinning out crowds in every community. At the Tiltin’ Hilton, I selected paperbacks from a pile, all by authors who’d lived there or made long, seasonal stops in Key West, and I mourned the passing of a time I would never know: the Key West of Steinbeck, Herlihy, Capote, Vidal, Bishop, and Tennessee Williams.

I wouldn’t return to the island for 12 years, this time with my partner, author Edmund White. Suddenly I was in the company of living writers in their prime: Robert Stone, Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, John Malcolm Brinnin, Joy Williams, Alison Lurie. It is fashionable to say of any place that its sheen has gone off. What’s great about Key West is that if you look closely enough on your strolls, it still wears the pockmarks and flaking paint of its sleepy, impoverished past. You see patinas of history going back 200 years or longer — wood cured by the elements or the lace of keyhole-sawed gingerbread woodwork, flaking and awaiting renewal. In the subtropical honey light, you realize that even though you’re in the United States, you’ve never been anywhere in the world like this.

Rule number three: There will always be another place where people greet you without a single hesitation. It is a special, special place, and its appeal can’t be described.

In “To Have and Have Not,” one of Hemingway’s only two novels set on these shores, a busted millionaire has harbored his yacht in the Key West harbor, biding his time.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

I made friends with bartenders and restaurant owners, all of whom had elected to make Key West their home. I go home from the bars at their 4 a.m. closing. The streets are lit from above, streaking down light through the arches of trees that mimic curving cathedrals made from bent branches. There is a perfect silence. You have lived an entire life in a few hours. And you’re now alone.
This solitude is Key West, but it is not a nervous or agitated solitude.

You’ve breathed the subtropical air. You’ve witnessed the changing light. And you’re alive. More than anything, you’ve toured the town that tells you that life is interesting; it isn’t only what you’ve known back home. Drunk and happy, you finally get this sensation.

To be honest, in coming here with Ed for 25 years now, I didn’t originally take to the town’s languid pace. Even on the most beautiful days, I was locked in my room trying to write something startling and original. I was kind of missing the point. I should have been outside exploring. The point of Key West is the people who inhabit and invade it. Eventually, I understood that Key West was about the stranger, like you. The stranger who longed for something different, something refreshing. Strangers in the street — whether they’re guest-housing or stepping off a cruise ship for the day — have instinctively found their own peculiar reason for washing up here.