Looking for Hemingway
by Tony Castro
In the fall of 1975, when my wife decided she wanted a divorce, I moved into a quaint, though dilapidated cottage in an obscure rain forest corner of River Oaks where the only amenity was being awakened every morning by a raccoon rummaging through our kitchen.
The address was 8 Ashbury Place, and it belonged to a struggling novelist named Peter Heiney, who through his connections at Women’s Wear Daily was forever entertaining young debutantes with double last names and lineages to names in Texas history books.
I was too depressed with self-loathing, pity and half-baked plans about moving to Paris in search of Hemingway or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of personal oblivion. To his credit, Peter didn’t try to dissuade me and instead indulged my delusion. His previous roommate who had inhabited my bedroom, he enlightened me, had once sat on Hemingway’s lap in some grand villa in Spain. His parents had been wealthy American expatriates who entertained Hemingway, A. E. Hotchner and the group that followed Hemingway when he was there for the running of the bulls...
