Beyond.

From a 1980 Washington Post article ...

Writer Jim Harrison, 42, newly successful, and wintering in Palm Beach, still was quite ready for a sudden return to the honky-tonk of Key West. He was looking for the old bad flash . . . walking home drunk on certain dark new moon spring nights when the music mixes with the smell of flowers and garbage and you get the feeling that the very next second might be the most important of your life. The lesson he'd learned over 12 years of fishing and carousing there was that the shrimper with the knife on Caroline Street and the mystery lady with the loose dark hair turning north off Southard can either kill you or cure you. Neither one will just pass by.

Harrison, whose new collection of novellas, "Legends of the Fall," has been hailed as work that might save traditional American outdoor toughness from the Hemingway blight of sentimentality, made the trip down in a Porsche Turbo 928. At the wheel was another Key West alumnus, Jimmy Buffett, the singer who turned the island into Margaritaville and then moved to Aspen. The Rolling Stones were on the tape deck and between them was plenty of drink and appetizers. They were telling stories about the old days and averaging 80 miles an hour on the Florida Turnpike. Word of their coming was out around the Chart Room and the Full Moon Saloon and the old friends were gathering.

These included Dink Bruce, son of Toby Bruce -- Hemingway's caretaker, factotum and drinking buddy from the '30s -- crusty old charterboat captain Bob Hall, who's in charge of Harrison's new $20,000 sportfisherman Revenge (named after the most violent of the novellas, which paid for it), an interchangeable flock of slinky dark barmaids, a knifemaker from northern Michigan where Harrison owns a small farm, various journalists, editors and publishers eager to make contact with this pair of living legends.

Nobody was disappointed. By 1 a.m., Harrison and Buffett, man and minstrel, were buying drinks fro everyone at two big tables in the Full Moon Saloon. The Porsche was sitting outside cooling off, but they were picking up speed. You understand that the Full Moon Saloon is the plastic unassuming roadhouse kind of place that tourists and the New York set now taking over Key West can't stand. If one walked in now, he'd se a raucous cluster of riffraff presided over by a short, powerful gat-toothed man with a Pancho Villa mustache, wandering walleye, and Apache chief facial structure. pThe tourist would do a quick U-turn, pretending to have forgotten something, never knowing how close he'd come to rubbing shoulders with a man that even the staid London Sunday Times allows has "immortality in him." And he probably wouldn't care . . . because Harrison's particular immoral qualities can be as violent, romantic and beyond the constraints of 9-to-5 civilization as a wicked two-day binge.

Jim Harrison sat there spinning tales at the Full Moon, unconnected stories joined together by a run of beer bottles and long-lost buddies: The time he caught a striped marlin on a fly rod in the Humboldt Current off Peru; why he loves hyenas and hates Erica Jong; the time his partner in Key West marginalia, novelist Tom McGuane, got hold of a Dupont Blaster's Manual and developed an exploding softball; the agony (including projectile vomiting and two days in a hot bath) of getting truly groined; and, he claims, the night he watched Bruce Jay Friedman throw Norman Mailer over a taxicab outside Elaine's. He and Buffett have interlocking riffs, like jazz musicians, looking at one another to signal takeover. Key West Sonata. On past closing time, into other locales, past sunrise, and Harrison found himself out in the street with a little bit of what he'd come for ...

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