But the station lacked a talk show, and Ray Yates, drinking tequila on the strength of a third-hand invitation, found himself pitching one to the station manager. "In a town with so much going on," he'd said. "So many writers, artists, so many famous people ... An interview show. Early evenings. Call it . . . call it Culture Cocktail."
They'd agreed to talk further, and when Florio hired Yates, the new Key Wester thought he'd done a masterful sell job, though the truth was that the station manager had been having the damnedest time recruiting anyone remotely qualified who would work for what KEY could pay. But Yates was in it for the entree, not the money. His rent was cheap, he had some savings from Chicago, and if he kept his gambling under control, he could get by.
The problem, as he discovered early on, was that Key West was not nearly as sophisticated or culturally vibrant as its reputation—the reputation that Yates had wholeheartedly bought into, and which he now had both to exploit and to perpetuate. Writers' haven. Ha! Maybe two dozen writers, most of them bad sober and worse drunk, perhaps four of whom were actually working at a given time. Artists? Well, if you granted the premise that painting on T-shirts was a major art form, then, yes, Key West abounded in artists. Theater, you could take your pick between drag shows downtown and road companies doing recycled musicals out at the college. True, there were the street performers from Mallory Dock—but juggling was not ideally suited to radio and nothing was surer to make dials turn than a guy playing bagpipes. Faced with the unremitting task of filling air time, Ray Yates had grown every year more grateful for the existence of the Gay Men's Chorus, the Lesbian Political Verse Initiative, the annual Tattoo Show.
Still, every now and then Yates had the pleasure of reporting a real piece of culture news, an item that did not need to be qualified by the diminutive term local, something of interest north of mile marker twenty. On an evening toward the middle of May, he had such a story, and he devoted the last segment of his show to it. He swept off his headset and spread a yellow-highlighted magazine in front of him. He glanced at the big clock above the engineer's booth window. Then he laid his forearms against the cheap veneers of the studio table and leaned in toward his microphone.
"Back live on Culture Cocktail," he said as the producer gave the signal that the hair-salon and dive-shop ads were over. "Friends, it's always been my belief that all of us who love Key West should root for each other, should take pride whenever the accomplishments of one of our own are recognized by the outside world. So I'd like to share with you an art review from this week's Manhattan magazine. The review is by Peter Brandenburg. Some of you might know of him. He's got a reputation as the hardest marker around, someone with such exquisite taste that he doesn't like anything. Except he loves our former Key West neighbor Augie Silver.
"Probably a lot of you knew Augie—knew him as a wonderful companion who loved his food and drink, a man interested and generous toward local causes, a man who celebrated the beauty and uniqueness of the Keys. But I wonder how many of us realized we had a truly major painter in our midst? Honestly, I'm not sure I did—and Augie Silver was one of my dearest friends.
" 'Some painters are badly served by retrospectives.' I'm quoting Brandenburg now. 'Comprehensive shows reveal less of their talent than their limitations. We see the place they stopped growing, ran dry of ideas, almost as clearly as if a black line were painted on the wall, separating the discoveries from the walkthroughs. Such was not the case with Augie Silver. He never reached a plateau and never coasted. He reinvented his vision with every canvas, and in this regard the inevitable comparisons are with Picasso and Matisse—tireless talents who kept exploring and refining till the day they died.'
"Picasso and Matisse!" editorialized Ray Yates. He could not help glancing at the small painting Augie had given him and which hung now, crooked on a rusty nail, on the smudged wall of the studio.
"Farther on, here's what Brandenburg says: 'He belonged to no school, subscribed to no trends. At a time when many painters appeared to care less about craft than about theory, Silver cared only for the quality of what was on the canvas. In an era when artists seemed to feel that, to be taken seriously, their work had to be ugly, jarring, or pointlessly original, Silver clung to a riper, braver, more classic kind of wisdom: His work depicts a world almost unbearably lush, tender, beautiful, and temporary. In his love of color, his unabashed sensuality, he is a pure romantic; yet even in his most gorgeous pictures there is an awareness of death, of decay—the calm, sad resignation of the tropics. And what more poignant and honest reflection of that resignation than that Augie Silver, as if in humble acceptance of the paltriness of human effort, should have stopped working altogether in his final years? This passionate inactivity seems the final proof of his sincerity, his miraculous freedom from ambition. And while his premature death was certainly a tragedy, the current show at Ars Longa will assure him a place in the top rank of contemporary painters. Long after the dreary canvases by this season's art-journal darlings have come to seem dated and dull, Augie Silver's work— eccentric, indifferent to fashion, happily outside the mainstream—will speak to us of the power of untrammeled temperament wedded to talent, possibly to genius.' "