THE SHUN ALSO RISES : An Intrepid Hemingway Imitator Is Ignored, Again

It was traumatic enough failing to make the finals of the annual Imitation Hemingway Competition for the second straight year. But then, to be banned from the press party!

Each year, Harry’s Bar and American Grill in Century City awards a free trip to Harry’s in Florence, Italy, (where Hem once hung out) for the best page of bad Hemingway (you have to mention Harry’s “nicely”). For those of you under 30, Ernest Hemingway was a writer of the “lost generation” whose laconic style and obsession with virility and stoic courage made him the Sylvester Stallone of his day.

I’ve been trying to win the contest off and on since finishing second in 1980. Last year in this space, I castigated the screening judges for not including either of my terribly clever entries among the 27 finalists (out of 2,624 submissions).

This year, my terribly clever piece, “The Toes of Kilimanjaro,” failed to make the final cut of 17 (out of 1,783 entries). Ditto for my nearly-as-clever submission, “To Almost Have and Have Not” (I figured it for the runner-up spot).

I used pseudonyms and a borrowed address to avoid detection, but the organizers must have found me out and shredded my little masterpieces. Or maybe my entries got lost in the mail. Or else the screening judges are a bunch of stuffed shirts and blouses. What other explanations could there be?

“To Almost Have and Have Not” was a fish saga (“the sea was flat like the belly of the cocktail waitress called Paca”). But since our own Jack Smith--a perennial finals judge--wrote recently that entrants shouldn’t write about fish, I’ll skip it.

Which leaves room to print “The Toes of Kilimanjaro,” set amid the frenzied dancing at a yuppie disco called Club Kilimanjaro, in its near entirety. Please note the terribly clever parody of some of Hemingway’s most famous lines, many from his classic “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (which probably went right over the judges’ heads):

“The marvelous thing is that they’re painless,” he said. “That’s how you know that they’re Reeboks.”

“Are they really?”

“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.”

“Don’t! Please don’t.”

The man leaned against the back bar, wedged against an anorexic blonde in a Guess? jacket, and as he looked out past the glare of the strobe lights there were a dozen black dancers moving rhythmically while a hundred Caucasians tried to look as cool.

He had been coming here for weeks, certain that if he could move as gracefully as the blacks, life would somehow be better. He and the woman had danced feverishly, even risking the difficult fusion numbers that taxed their spontaneity. They had perspired and developed calluses and felt primal. Now she was breaking up with him because he would not change his socks.

“You give a damn about so many things that I don’t,” he said.

“Not so many, Eric.”

“The socks though.”

“Yes, the damn socks.”

It wasn’t just the socks, he thought. She was sick of the smoke and the high decibel level and the narcissistic men in French jeans who said, “Hey, babe” when she went for the Heinekens.

Inside the Reeboks, there was only numbness.

“I suppose I should be concerned about gangrene,” he said.

“Please don’t talk that way.”

So this is how it will end, he thought, bickering over personal hygiene. He was superstitious about changing the socks before he mastered the Watusi for Oldies Night but he could not tell her that. There were things a man could never tell a woman and it could muck things up but that was how it was.

“We could go to Harry’s,” she said. “We could go to Harry’s for dinner and forget the dancing and try to start over.”

He could no longer move his toes. He knew then that she was right. Now he would never make the moves on the dance floor that he had saved until he knew enough to make them well.

“You can find everything on earth at Harry’s,” he said.

“Except, possibly, happiness.”

“I’ll damn well find happiness, too,” he said. “Happiness, as you know, is movable feet.”

Am I bitter? Let’s put it this way, you won’t find the winners’ names printed here.

(Editor’s note: Husband-wife Dave and Diana Curtain of Orange County took first place for “In Another Contra.”)

The big question now is whether to try again next year. There’s a time when an aging matador, rent by too many horns, should withdraw with what dignity is left. Screw the ears.

Maybe if I promised not to enter, they’d invite me back to the press party. I have to confess, I missed the cuisine, the camaraderie and laughs, emcee Digby Diehl’s wit and the general joie de vivre.

OK, I missed the free drinks.

After my indiscreet words here last year, I suppose they had a right to exclude me.

Not very manly, though.