It is a few minutes after sunset at Mallory Square, when the clouds over the Marquesas explode with color, and a guy named Kevin is squeezing his body through the head of a tennis racquet. "This is actually very difficult," he informs the crowd, "to watch." Yes it is, and he milks the struggle for comic effect as he subluxates his shoulder for us.
Roughly 90 minutes before sunset at Mallory Square, the band gets going at El Meson de Pepe. They play salsa in a shed opposite the bar, which sells oceans of mojitos and margaritas to people who normally sip chardonnay or bourbon. The music tells them that they're on vacation, and the bravest and the happiest dance. It's hard not to feel happy walking up the cobblestone alley between the bar and the band that leads to the sunset celebration in Key West. You're walking towards the light, and going to the circus, so why not dance a little on your way?
Mallory Square is our circus and, like the kind that travels from city to city, a community unto itself – a family, some will tell you. Let's go see.
It's too early for the performers, so I check in with Kaley Bentz, an artist friend who sells her paintings here. Lately she's added painted straw hats to her installation. They're not big sellers but they give people another reason to look. Whether you're a vendor or a performer, attention is currency, and I prove it by buying a hat.
Friendship and commerce being served, I ask if she's seen Randesh tonight. I want to put him in a story. Randesh Gopaul has the coconut franchise at Mallory, but what people really come for is spectacle. He's an artist with a machete. Kaley has her doubts that he'll show tonight. She saw his car in the shop this morning and his baby mama is in town. But you never know with Randesh.
In the slender shade of a brick arcade, a few acrobats are killing time before their shows. They are lithe and muscled as whippets. Reid Conklin, who performs as ReidiculousReid, straddles a sinister-looking black crate labeled Whips & Chains. Last time I saw Reid he was doing a Rolla Bolla balancing act with knives. Now he's added whips for the same reason that Kaley's doing hats. "Every street performer has a whip," he tells me. "You can crack it once and get a crowd. But not many people develop the skills." During Covid, he had the time.
Reid Conklin is a Key West boy who lives with his mom in Newtown ... when he's here. Being a street performer is the most portable job in the world if you can gather a crowd. You can see him do headstands around the world on his Instagram page.
Meanwhile, Tobin Renwick was performing at a stoplight in New Hampshire. "I'd do 45 seconds, bang-bang-bang! and then hold out a cup on a six-foot pole." He got the biggest tip of his life in that cup.
If you want to make street performing a life, circus skills are essential and starting young is advised: Conklin was juggling with two little buddies at twelve. All three now do this full time, playing Mallory Square and anywhere else their hearts take them. Think about that. Wouldn't it be great if Europeans paid you to go there?
Tobin Renwick and David Graham have performed together since boyhood and now, as The Red Trouser Show, do four hundred shows a year. Their current act features juggling, knives, and a 20-foot extension ladder. "We started doing circus stuff when we were kids," David says, "then we moved to street performing."
The difference is profound. People buy tickets to the circus but there's no cover charge for a street. "You have to learn how to engage the crowd," David explains. "Either people walk away or they stay. And then they decide whether or not to pay you."
During a show, performers seed the idea of tipping with humor. Kids who volunteer to help out are paid on the spot and exempt from tipping. ""I don't want your ten dollars, Isabelle," Tobin assures her. "I want your mom's twenty."
It pays to be funny, but the real art here is gathering a crowd and making it yours. Before a show the performer lays out a perimeter with rope; and there is a moment when they will ask people to move right up to it. "At first it's good to have them spread out, looking around to see what's happening," David tells me. Other people walking through get caught up in that net of people looking. "But if you leave them spread out for too long, it doesn't feel like anything special is going on." When it comes, the invitation to move up to the rope is an invitation to commit to the show, and half the battle.
An hour before sunset Mustafa glides in on his bike to set up by the seawall. He plays Island Music in the mellow northwest corner of the square, away from the shows and shouting. When he takes off his Army jacket he's all in white. He is a Muslim, born Mustafa Abdal-Khallaq, and I ask if the white's for Ramadan. "No," he laughs, "my mother told me that she liked me in white." He's 84 now, and she'd like that it stuck.
A foursome of tourists from Maine stakes their claim in the mellow corner, where there's a low wall to sit on while you watch the sunset. "We gotta get as much sittin' time as we can!" one of them announces.
Mustafa brings history with him every night. He was a musician in the Army and became a soldier of another kind during Mississippi's Freedom Summer of 1964. "The call went out for young people to go there and work for voting rights," he remembers. At first, the job was familiar: to entertain the troops. "I played music. A lot of it was old gospel songs that we turned into protest songs." He still slips a few of them into his set. When he sings Amazing Grace, he always tells the story of the repentant slaver.
While Reid does his show, Tobin and Kevin chat with Catman, who still comes by the square. Catman is Dominique Lefort, a Mallory legend for his lion-taming act with house cats. There were five of them all living together in a motorhome. The cats did all the usual lion tricks – leaping through a hoop of fire, when they felt like it – as Lefort yelled incomprehensible commands in Franglish. He is still a little hard to interpret, even for humans:
Me: Are you retired now?
Catman: My last show was March 15, 2020 ... but my next show will be in two weeks.
Me: What are you doing these days?
Catman: I just play with my brain. I play with my neurons. I only have two left now.
Me: Two neurons?
Catman: No, two bobtail cats – Minute and Jester.
On the other side of the square, I finally catch up to Randesh. He is another disconcerting fellow to talk to. Right now he's engaged with two or three people at once while he slashes at a bright green coconut with a machete. You can't not watch that blade. He flips the three-pound fruit around with his left hand as he chop! chop! chops! its top into a point. Which he then slashes off to open a quarter-size hole, like the crater in a volcano.
The coconut water inside is mildly sweet and loaded with electrolytes, but don't expect a straw. "You gotta hug it with your lips," he tells a customer. The machete never leaves his hand. It's part of his conversation. Slash, slash.
He goes by the one name, Randesh, like Beyoncé, and introduces me to some customers from New Jersey as his stepfather. "Dad's from The New York Times," he adds, "he's writing my story." Randesh will say almost anything to provoke a reaction. Tonight, for these tourists, he's from India, just like I'm from the Times. In real life, he's from Guyana.
Randesh harvests his coconuts from people's yards, so his cost of goods is nil. Most locals don't mind that their coconuts disappear, because they turn into flying balls of doom during hurricanes. Randesh turns every coconut into a performance, and you pay what you think it's worth. "This is not a market!" he harangues a lady from St. Louis. "You want a price, go to CVS or Häagen-Dasz." She slips a ten into an empty coconut.
Mustafa wasn't prepared to be on the front lines in Mississippi, but when the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee organizer who ran the Freedom House in Vicksburg had a heart attack, he was moved up. Right away he gained some insight into the heart attack: "We would get phone calls, and a voice would say 'There's dynamite under the house and it's going off at midnight.'"
The hell of it was you never knew. Maybe the boys in the woods would blow your people up if you stayed; or shoot you if you ran out. And maybe they were just messing with you. A couple of months after Mustafa went back north, the Vicksburg Freedom House was destroyed by a bomb.
Straight jobs never worked out for him. He was stewing about his prospects in New York City when he noticed a subway musician's guitar case. It was full of money, so he started playing his music down there. He played under New York, Boston, Chicago, and D.C. He played under parts of Canada and Europe, too, until 1990 when the winters started to get to him. Miami seemed like the answer until he got there. It was December and 40 degrees. "So I kept on driving down U.S. One until it stopped." He played Mallory Square that first night.
One thing you won't see at Mallory Square is a fire act, which is a sore point with the performers. Reidiculous Reid does fire, and so do the Red Trousers. Ramblin' Rabble has a fire dance as hypnotic as a cobra, and breathes it, too. But not any more. The city banned fire at Mallory Square with "no timeline for reinstatement." That's City talk for you.
Tie-Die Mike tells the story. Two years ago a fire-spinner from the mainland accidentally lit up a tourist who had to be extinguished by pitching her into the harbor. "The guy who did it was out of town inside two hours," Mike remembers, "because the local performers wanted to kill him." Still do, you ask them.
Mustafa hadn't been in Key West long before he went on a pilgrimage, which he lyrically describes as a "walking prayer." He joined a group that was tracing the slave trade in reverse: from the money in Massachusetts to the entry port of New Orleans, to Cuba and Guyana and across the Atlantic to Africa's west coast.
"On our journey," he says, "the Christians found churches. The Jews found synagogues; the Buddhists found temples. I was the only Muslim and it was difficult for me to find a masjid. I had to look for places using pay phones." Back in Bahama Village there wasn't a masjid to find by any means. If Key West was going to be home, Mustafa Abdal-Khallaq decided, he wanted his people to have a place to pray.
He held on to that idea for 17 years until he was able to open Masjid al-Maalik, a walk-up on Southard Street between a barber and a bike rental. It is the only mosque in the Keys, and the Muslims who visit our island are grateful for it.
The sunset celebration at Mallory Square is always different and always the same. Every day of the year, it dances to the rhythm of the Sun. As the performers begin their shows, the sunset sail fleet heads for open water, and any cruise ship in port will cast off its lines and go.
When the Sun kisses the horizon people raise their cameras, watching it melt into the sea through their screens. There is always a cheer, and Tie-Dye Mike's best customers applaud the old-fashioned way, like the hippies who started this celebration back in the day. Then, as the glow fades and the acrobats finish up, the party boats slide home again under running lights. Finally, in full dark, elves come out in their yellow vests to clean the whole place up for another day in paradise.
Randesh demonstrates the proper way to drink a coconut: “You gotta hug it with your lips.”
What a great story, Chris. I felt like I was right there in Mallory Square at sunset.
Thank you Christopher for reminding me how special Sunset at Mallory Square is. Living here, I have taken it for granted. Before I lived here I wouldn't miss it.... BTW, I am in the process of training Ozzy my cat to apprentice with "The Cat Man".....