The Last Set at the Green Parrot

Coleman Fry has been playing the last set at the Green Parrot, on the corner of Whitehead and Southard in Key West, for so long that the bar's owners have stopped putting him on the calendar. 'You don't schedule the sunset,' the current owner, a woman named Frances Delacroix, told me. 'It shows up, and you turn off the overhead lights.'

Coleman is seventy-three years old. He arrived on the island in 1984, ostensibly for a two-week gig at a hotel that no longer exists, and never left. He plays a battered tenor saxophone that he bought in New Orleans in 1971 and has not, to his knowledge, ever had professionally serviced. 'It sounds like Key West,' he said, when I asked him about the horn. 'That's a maintenance schedule.'

His set begins, most nights, around eleven. It ends when it ends. On the Thursday I spent with him, it ended at 1:47 a.m., with a very slow reading of 'Body and Soul' that seemed to gather up every conversation in the bar and hold it, briefly, in one long note before releasing it back into the room. A woman at the front table wept, quietly. A man at the bar took off his hat. Coleman did not appear to notice either of them. He wiped his mouthpiece, nodded once at the bass player, and stepped down.

I asked him, afterward, on the sidewalk, what he was thinking about when he played that final chorus. He considered the question for a long time. 'I was thinking,' he said, 'that I have played this song about eleven thousand times. And that I do not yet know it.' Then he walked home, in the direction of the ocean, with his horn in a canvas bag over his shoulder, and the bar behind him closed for the night.