But all that came to an end on a foggy night in July of 1956, when the family was returning from Europe on the luxury liner Andrea Doria. Off Nantucket Island, the ocean liner Stockholm sliced into the Andrea Doria and sank her. Si and Dolly Cohen were killed instantly, and young Simon was discovered miraculously alive in the twisted foredeck wreckage of the Stockholm, clutching his teddy bear.
The traumatized Simon Jr.—and the teddy bear he keeps with him to this day—returned to Alabama, where his Orthodox aunt Shirley and uncle Merv raised him. “He was such a nice Jewish boy before the accident,” his aunt used to repeat like a parrot to anyone who would listen.
It may have been the trauma of losing his parents in a ship collision or just growing up Jewish in Alabama, but whatever it was, Simon Jr. found his own path in this world.
It didn’t hurt that his journey was probably made a bit easier by the fact that at age eighteen, he inherited $17 million from his parents’ estate. So, in the fall of 1966, the young multimillionaire from Fairhope bought Uncle Merv and Aunt Shirley a nice house on a kibbutz in Israel and saw them off at the dock in New York. A day later, he legally changed his name to Sammy Raye Coconuts, bought a flat in Greenwich Village, and charged out of the closet and into the world to pursue the thing he really loved most—music.
Having inherited the Midas touch of his father and the nimble fingers of his mother, Sammy Raye Coconuts became one of the biggest songwriters of first the folk, then the folk rock, then the disco era in New York. Luckily his flamboyance, along with his flatfeet and fat wallet, kept him out of Vietnam. He was an investor in clubs, musicals, Key West and Fire Island real estate, computers, and the development of liposuction technology. He kept an array of boy-toy models busy waiting on him hand and foot and even bought a yacht, on which he circled the island of Manhattan partying until dawn, though foggy nights at sea still gave him the creeps. You would think all the fame and fortune would have been enough for Sammy Raye, but by age forty, he had burned a gross of candles at both ends. He was still alone, and he was ready to go home.
Sammy Raye returned to Alabama, bought a sprawling cattle ranch and pecan orchard on the Magnolia River south of Fairhope, and named his estate Pinkland. For the next ten years, he used Alabama as a base for his sojourns, which started in the Caribbean but eventually took him to the far side of the world.
He bought a big private jet that flew across oceans, and that is what he did for several years, buying plush getaway hotels. During all those years of travel, he never missed his annual pilgrimage to Graceland to pay homage to Elvis and gather ideas for his own mansion on the shores of the Magnolia River.
It was the most recent run to Memphis, and a drive through the Arkansas countryside, that placed Sammy Raye on a counter stool at the Chat ’n’ Chew. After tasting Donna Kay’s chicken and dumplings and coconut banana cream pie, Sammy Raye Coconuts dropped to one knee and began quoting Thoreau. “He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise,” Sammy Raye passionately recited to the startled Donna Kay, who was flipping burgers behind a counter full of customers.
Sammy Raye Coconuts turned his soliloquy into a generous job offer as his private chef at Pinkland. The leftover cash from my lottery-ticket money had felt tainted, so Donna Kay had used it to improve her karma by donating the whole thing to a battered women’s shelter. She had just about given up her dream of owning her own place when Sammy Raye made her the offer.
The next thing Donna Kay knew, she was on Sammy’s Falcon jet that he had sent to Blytheville to pick her up. “It’s called a Falcon Fifty. It’s French, and it’s fast,” the well-dressed pilot had told her.
“There I was, tucked into a rolled leather seat on a rocket ship at forty-one thousand feet going five hundred fifty miles per hour, sipping a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and nibbling a hot croissant. Something told me my life was about to change for the better.”
Forty minutes later, the plane descended over the shoreline of Mobile Bay. Donna Kay stepped off the plane into the invisible but identifiable smell and feel of the Gulf Coast that she remembered from her days in New Orleans.
“I’m afraid I could get used to that kind of travel very fast,” she said to the pilot.
“They say it’s a worse habit than heroin,” the pilot replied with a smile and a tip of his hat. “Welcome to Alabama.”
A stretch limousine pulled out into the parking area next to the plane. She was greeted by a polite chauffeur named Bransford, who quickly put her one suitcase in the trunk and whisked her into the backseat of the car. Fifteen minutes later, Bransford slowed the limo and turned off on a red dirt road past a sign that read WELCOME TO WEEKS BAY MARINA. There, she was handed over to the crew of a dazzling speedboat that looked more like a varnished piano than a watercraft.
Donna Kay stretched out on the seat in the back of the piano boat and took in the view. Pelicans cruised by overhead, and small mullet sprang from the water in front. As they made the turn from the bay up the channel of the river, the dorsal fin of a dolphin effortlessly broke the surface of the water.
They moved slowly upstream past cottages, mansions, and piers, then around a long, narrow bend in the river where a man stood at the end of a wooden dock beneath a pair of matching flagpoles. On one, the American flag rode on the morning breeze. On the other was a large pink flag with the single letter P.
Del Mundo met her at the dock and introduced himself as Mr. Coconuts’s chief of staff. A pair of large golden retrievers, whom he introduced as Si and Dolly, roamed the dock and the beach, chasing fiddler crabs. A waiter in a starched linen jacket appeared, holding two matching glasses of iced tea, garnished with mint and pineapple. “Sweet or unsweet?” he asked.
“Sweet,” Donna Kay replied. As she sipped her tea in the rapidly accelerating heat of the early morning, Del Mundo told her that Sammy Raye was in a meeting and would see her soon, but he had instructed Del Mundo to take her on a tour of the property. Waiting at the end of the dock was a horse-drawn carriage. “I felt like I was in a movie,” Donna Kay told me. “I only hoped Sammy Raye would be more like Cary Grant than Vincent Price.”
The carriage rolled slowly along the grass roads with Si and Dolly trailing behind. Del Mundo pointed out the sculptures and manicured gardens of azaleas, camellias, and dogwoods that covered the landscape and what they meant to Mr. Coconuts. They toured the guest cottages, then the chef’s living quarters, which, Del Mundo pointed out, came with a Jeep, bicycle, and the Boston Whaler, which was tied to a small crabbing pier behind the cottage.
“What exactly does a chief of staff do?” Donna Kay asked without thinking. She instantly wished she hadn’t said it, but it was too late.
However, Del Mundo just stifled a laugh. “Everything, honey,” he said. Then he continued the tour without missing a beat.
Donna Kay got out of the buggy and walked around the lovely little cottage that could be her home. She was picturing herself swinging in the rope hammock that hung in the shade of two magnolia trees that faced the river when she heard a muffled transmission from the radio Del Mundo carried. Del Mundo responded to the voice, then turned to her and said, “Mr. Coconuts is ready for you now.”
Sammy Raye Coconuts stood on the giant veranda of the main house at Pinkland, dressed in white linen Polo shorts and a flowery Hawaiian shirt that sported coconut trees and guitars. He was not as big as Marlon Brando, but he was getting close. He personally escorted Donna Kay on a tour of the main house, ending at a glassed-in, air-conditioned porch that offered a view of the Magnolia River all the way to Weeks Bay.
Sammy Raye got down to business. He told Donna Kay that he really loved her cooking, but the sad fact was that no chef had ever stayed at Pinkland for more than three months because he was basically an aging old queen who suffered from menopausal depression and was a pain in the ass. He had seen several therapists, hypnotists, and yogis over in Pensacola, but nothing had worked to make him
more agreeable, other than traveling around the world on his jet. He ate out when he was on the road, and therein lay the problem with Donna Kay’s predecessors at Pinkland. It was not too much work that drove them crazy. It was the lack of it.
Donna Kay just asked Sammy when she could start.
Donna Kay broke the endurance record for Pinkland chefs by two months, at which time Sammy Raye was once again on his knees. He had flown all the way back to Fairhope from Thailand to beg her to stay on.
She told him that she had fallen in love with life on Weeks Bay and knew it was where she was meant to be. She thanked Sammy Raye for giving her the opportunity to work at Pinkland, but she really wanted to move on and was hoping to open a little restaurant of her own in Fairhope.
They were sitting in the air-conditioned porch where she had first talked business with Sammy Raye, and it was there that he moved their relationship to another level with the words “How about the bait shop?”
Sammy Raye told her that he owned a fleet of shrimp boats and a processing plant down in Bon Secour, and there had been a restaurant and a bait shop that had a not-so-successful history as a honky-tonk, health-food restaurant, and biker bar. At the present time it was sitting empty due to damage from the last hurricane along with complaints from his neighbors about the heavy-metal bands. Sammy Raye Coconuts told Donna Kay that if she stayed three months longer at Pinkland and found him the right replacement when her time was up, he would give her the bait shop and restaurant property and back her in the restaurant business.
Sitting in the banyan tree, Donna Kay took a sip of wine and continued. “So that is why I never wrote back to you . . . after that . . . letter and everything.” Off on the invisible horizon, a telltale cluster of bright lights moved slowly along. “What is that?” Donna Kay asked.
“I would like to say we have visitors from another planet, but it’s just a floating casino bound for Cozumel.”
“It could be one of Sammy Raye’s,” Donna Kay said.
“He owns cruise ships in the Caribbean?”
“Honey, Sammy Raye Coconuts is a living Monopoly game. He started on Baltic and Mediterranean and ended up on Boardwalk and Park Place. I can’t keep up with all the stuff he owns. All I know is that he is good at what he does, and he is a fair partner.” She paused. “Sammy Raye is a man of his word and did what he had promised me. In turn, I trained the replacement chef and taught him dishes that Sammy Raye liked to eat, and everybody was happy. As for me, there wasn’t a happier resident last fall on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay than Donna Kay Dunbar, the proud new owner and operator of the Pickled Oyster. We’ve been open for five months, and in that time, we’ve been featured in Southern Living magazine and on the Today Show. Even the Allman Brothers Band stopped their tour bus and had lunch one afternoon.”
“You’re famous?” I asked.
“Well, I have a cooking show on the local channel in Pensacola. Remember the ladies at your secret swimming hole?”
“How could I forget?” I answered.
“Well, I guess you could say that I’ve had my fifteen minutes and people do ask me to sign menus and aprons.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “So that’s what all the fuss was about in the swimming hole—those two ladies taking pictures and everything.”
Donna Kay laughed. She climbed out of the hammock and walked over to the rail and leaned out, watching the cruise-ship lights disappear behind a cloud. There was a very long moment of silence, and then she said, “Tully, I am not just here for a vacation. I needed to come talk to you.”
“Uh-oh,” I muttered.
“No, no, it’s not about that lame excuse for standing me up in Belize. I mean, boy, was I pissed at the time, but then because of that, things took a different turn in my life, and I was able to forgive you. Well, actually I figured out that you were just that way, and I doubted that you would change. I didn’t think I wanted the job of trying to change you, no matter how much I was attracted to you.” Donna Kay could get a lot of information into a short speech. She came over to the bar and took a big gulp of her wine.
I stayed frozen to the bar stool as I felt my legs start to become rubbery, and my palms began to sweat. I braced myself for what was coming.
“Tully, things are about to change in my life.”
A preview of what she was about to say flashed across my mind. Donna Kay was about to utter the big C word. She was going to ask me to come back to Alabama with her, give up my life down here, and commit to a relationship. I was going to have to finally face that dragon that I had brought down to Punta Margarita with me.
So when I heard the words “Tully, I’m getting married,” at first it didn’t register. Then I felt Donna Kay squeeze my arm. “Did you hear me?” she asked.
“Yes. You said you wanted to get married,” I whispered. “Donna Kay, I can’t. There is something I have to tell you. . . . It’s about that trip to Belize. And, well . . . it’s about everything. It’s about why I couldn’t come back —”
“Tully, stop!” she ordered, taking my other arm. She turned me so my eyes looked directly into hers. “Listen carefully,” she said slowly. “I am getting married. You are staying here.”
I felt like such an asshole.
Donna Kay sat down on the bar stool next to me.
“So that’s why you swam away from me before we left the altar?”
“It was tempting, believe me, but I just couldn’t.”
“Of course not,” I muttered in defeated agreement. “So who’s the lucky guy?” I asked.
“Remember Clark Gable?”
11
Tree House of the Mayan Moon
The world is full of victims and habitual whiners these days, and I try not to be one of them, though it is hard not to go there. Donna Kay was getting married, and I hadn’t even been a long-shot choice as the groom.
I liked Clark Gable—he was a cutting-horse trainer I met back in Alabama. He was the one who hooked me up with Captain Kirk, and Kirk had introduced him to Donna Kay. But the news was confusing to my sense of self-worth. It hit me like one of those giant rogue waves, crashing in avalanche fashion over the bow of a ship in a storm, and my reflexes sent me immediately to that self-centered preservation zone known as survival mode.
I avoided my initial impulse to fall to my knees, let go of a flood of tears, and scream to Donna Kay, “What about me?” Somehow I managed to keep one hand on my ship as the rogue wave engulfed me, then washed astern. Already my thoughts of having some kind of a romantic relationship with Donna Kay were turning into storm debris and scattering.
I poured the last of the La Tâche, and Donna Kay took a sip of wine. Then, in her matter-of-fact style, she relayed the story of her engagement in a concise, three-act melodrama. The first was “Tully stands me up in Belize City and takes off for Punta Margarita.” I listened as she described that scenario as a selfish, unconscious, typically male, nearly unforgivable event.
Though it had been a year since it had happened, it was still very fresh in her mind. She also reminded me that in the year since I stood her up, other than one lame excuse note, she hadn’t heard one word from me. Act two could have been titled “Get Even,” but knowing Clark as an honest and thoughtful guy, I knew that Donna Kay’s description of him helping her remodel the restaurant, helping her train her horse, taking her to Horn Island and New Orleans for weekends, and finally popping the question were genuine expressions of his feelings for her. I was just pissed off at myself that the guy Donna Kay was describing wasn’t me.
She told me that Clark had really wanted to come with her, but he felt uncomfortable, given that he believed he had stolen Donna Kay away. She had told him that the past was between her and me, and she felt she could better explain the situation alone.
Donna Kay seemed her old self as we climbed down from the banyan tree. Back on the ground, her usual confidence and candor surrounded her like a bouquet. Coming down in the dark had taken all my concentration,
but when my feet touched the ground, I realized my knees were shaking, and it wasn’t from too much exercise.
“It’s really simple,” Donna Kay told me. “We both had dreams, but my dreams were different than yours, and I had to chase them. I wound up in Alabama, and you made it to Lost Boys. I don’t think I have to —”
“You don’t know the whole story,” I said, interrupting.
“Tully, I wasn’t finished,” she retorted.
Something had come over me. I could not let her go without telling her what I had fully intended to do when I had stepped on the dock of that shrimp boat a year earlier. “You don’t know the whole story,” I said again.
“Of course I do. You ran out on me for whatever reason, and now that I am getting married, you want another chance.”
“No, you’re wrong. You think you know the whole story, but you don’t,” I said. I was angry now because she wasn’t listening, and it showed in my voice.
“What story?” she asked.
“In your version, it just sounds like the self-centered ex-boyfriend ran off and got what he deserved. Donna Kay, you haven’t even asked me what happened.”
“Well, for God’s sake, let’s hear it,” she said. “Tully, I’ve never heard you talk like this,” she added quietly.
“It’s because I have to. I know all of this is my own damn fault, and I accept the blame. I know I should have told you sooner, but I didn’t, and I can’t change that. I want you to marry Clark. Clark is rooted, and I can’t be. Not now for sure, and maybe never. You have chosen the right man for you.”
Donna Kay didn’t say anything. She just turned around, headed back to the tree, and started to climb. I followed her back up and, finally, that night in the tree house under the Mayan moon, I was about to make the speech of my life to an audience of one.