The Truth About Floy

David Wolkowsky hosted his annual downtown rooftop party to celebrate the start of the Key West Literary Seminar. This year’s fete was in honor of poet Billy Collins. Only for my dear friend David would I make the monumental effort to dress like an actual grownup. I’ll confess I toppled in my high heels.

Again, only for David, would I break with my commitment to fiction, or ‘friction’, as I prefer to call it. So when David asked me to pen a piece about his friend Floy Vance Thompson, I agreed. 

‘You know I don’t write ‘serious’?’ At any rate, I wrote up the piece and sent it in to the New Yorker of Key West aka Konk Life. The Editor received the following letter.

Dear Guy,
Christina Oxenberg’s article is interesting, but confusing.
She notes that Floy arrived in Key West in 1962 and “soon enough met Norberg Thompson”. Norberg Thompson died in 1951. Did he have a son Norberg Jr.?
Furthermore, while it is true that Norberg occasionally fished with Hemingway, it was his brother Charles who went once, not frequently, on a safari with Hemingway and Pauline. Hemingway’s book about the safari, Green Hills of Africa, calls Charles “Karl” which is also confusing because Carl was Norberg’s and Charles’s brother; Carl donated the land for the library at the corner of Elizabeth and Fleming.
Perhaps Ms Oxenberg could write a correction.
As ever,

So I was acutely aware of just how badly I had bungled the details, because obviously Floy did not marry a dead man. 

But then things got far scarier, when, at David’s party everyone present was an old friend of Floy Thompson, and had read my article. I was accosted by that small throng of elite conchs from old Key West families, the ones with streets named after them. They railed at me and my gross disregard for the truth in my story on Floy. 

I had no defense. Facts and I, what can I say, we are not on the same page.

But I stood my ground, I said, ‘Please forgive me! You are all correct. I messed up. But I hope the essence of Floy was conveyed. I’ll return now to fiction. Glad to know the locals read Konk Life!!!

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