A Pirate Looks at 50
By Jimmy Buffett
Random House, 458 pages, $24.95
Parrotheads will probably buy boatloads of Jimmy Buffett’s latest book, which is part autobiography and part travelogue, an account of the trip Buffett took to celebrate his 50th birthday — sort of a greatest-hits tour of all those spots south of Key West that have become part of the Margaritaville legend.
We should all be so lucky.
Take your wife, kids and a half-dozen or so friends, pile some of them into your Cessna Citation jet while you play Indiana Jones in your newly acquired Grumman Albatross seaplane. And make sure to load a few crates of Parrothead swag — Buffett CDs and T-shirts — in case there are problems with the authorities.
People everywhere know who you are, and recognition does have its rewards. Buffett has no problem with being a well-known face. “I thank the gods that I did not come to Earth as a lobster or a rice farmer in the Mekong Delta,” he writes. “Nothing against either creature, but I like who I became just fine. That’s the way life is. We all try to make something out of our lives, and some of us are just luckier than others.”
The best parts are the memoir moments, when Buffett leaves his wife and kids in Costa Rica or wherever and gets sidetracked for a few pages. He writes about his early days in New Orleans and Nashville, and when he was living with Jerry Jeff Walker in Miami’s Coconut Grove in the early 1970s. “I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew it was the right spot to leave from,” Buffett writes.
Buffett knows where he’s going on his 50th birthday trip, but the travel section of the book offers a little too smooth a ride. Buffett calls himself a pirate but doesn’t do anything nasty or remotely illegal on this trip. His kids weren’t always around, and Buffett had plenty of chances with the seaplane to do something sneaky. He certainly had the inclination.
“One of the great thrills and insane justifications of having this big plane is to be able to see a flat from the air, land nearby, drop the dinghy in the water, and go fishing,” Buffett writes. Too bad he never does it. Buffett gets dreamy about the history of the Albatross and his longing to own one, but time and again he refuses to bring the big bird down on the water, landing instead (or having his pilot pals land it) at airports. This bothers him. Buffett describes purgatory as trying to get permission to land a seaplane south of the 20th parallel. “All that lovely seaplane water, and we still can’t get her wet,” he writes after avoiding a nightmare of red tape in Grenada.
Not until the last chapter of the book, after three weeks and 4,700 miles of cavorting through various fleshpots of the Caribbean and South America, does Buffett land his Grumman on the water in the Bahamas. Buffett should have brought his friend Hunter Thompson along for the ride; this trip could have used a few jolts of gonzo and Thompson’s twisted-geek act.