Instead of tracking straight down the eighteen mile stretch to the Keys northern end of US 1, Marlow detoured them one last time off the beaten path just south of Florida City onto state route Alt 905. It winds through the glades and salt flats to a rustic place out in the mangroves.
In troubled times, people look to escape from reality more than ever. The media was saying the economy was in crisis. No one needed daily 30 point sized newspaper headlines to know that gas prices and unemployment were way up, while home prices were way down.
This hideaway was one of those special places, where an occasional cool breeze mixed with the ceiling fan gusts to chill locals looking for an hour or two of respite.
Alabama Jack’s is nestled at the northern foot of the Card Sound Bridge. Floating on two roadside barges, AJs is the focal point of a ramshackle houseboat community. Locals have dubbed it the official “Downtown of Card Sound.” As a throwback to an earlier South Florida time and place, this roadhouse provides working class redneck boys and girls affordable, homemade food from family recipes.
Listening to juke box tunes — live music on weekends, folks sip cold beer straight from long neck bottles or drown their sorrows with distilled spirits. Appropriately when these riders entered the joint, the chorus of Lowell George’s tune Dixie Chicken was blaring from the music system. True to form, there were several Tennessee lambs seated at the bar eating the daily special accompanied by plastic cups of Coke and some low-down southern whiskey.
In Marlow’s ten years of patronage, he’d never seen a Barbie Doll type woman in the place. Female patrons’ calloused hands there didn’t lift flutes of champagne to their lips while noshing on canapés.
Patrons flocked there because their tender hearts required a honky-tonk where Skynyrd, L’il Feat and George Strait were played over the smell of yam fries and burgers.
In between food and drink deliveries, their 50-something waitress told her story of love gained, lost and found again. All of her life’s threads seemed woven into the down-on-your-luck fabric of Alabama Jack’s. She said that the place’s music and dancing helped her forget her problems.
They departed with a full bellies and hearts reconnected to the world’s harsh realities from which they had been escaping during past five weeks.
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