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It might be fair to say the neighborhood of Coconut Grove is a co-protagonist in Coconut Grove Chronicles, author Matthew Bamberg’s debut coming-of-age novel released last fall. The 45-chapter, 300-page paperback novel takes the lead character, Marvin Hammerstein, from birth to college. Bamberg based much of the novel on his real-life experiences growing up in the neighborhood in the ’60s and ’70s.
“Nobody, I felt, had documented what Coconut Grove was like back then,” Bamberg tells New Times. “It was wild and crazy. You had the drugs, the love-ins — it was like Florida Man ten times over.”
He took it upon himself to document the era in the book, including its politics — Hammerstein grapples with coming out at a time when Anita Bryant is screaming about family values in South Florida. “The story starts with the protagonist being born,” says Bamberg. “His mother wants him to be a girl. Gender is a very big issue for the character.”
One of the novels that influenced Coconut Grove Chronicles was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, about an intersex man with feminine traits. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was another strong touchstone, with its depiction of a platonic relationship between two unlikely companions.
Bamberg began working on Chronicles more than twenty-five years ago. “I kept putting it down and coming back to it,” he says. “At first, it was called Bienvenido a Miami. The last few years, I put on the gas pedal. I started working with a tough editor who ripped me apart and made it a learning experience.”
To release the novel, Bamberg formed his own publishing company, Know Not Florida Press, whose next book will be his memoir.
Speaking to Bamberg over the phone, it’s clear he’ll have a lot to mine for that project, too. He moved from South Florida to San Francisco when he was 24, then wandered to San Diego, and later to Palm Springs, where he currently resides, in part because he says the desert town reminds him of how Coconut Grove used to be. Amidst all his travels, Bamberg became a journalist writing for The Desert Sun and Palm Springs Life, a photographer, and an educator.
But it was always his childhood in the Grove, and Sunrise Harbour in particular, that most fascinated him. “It was so peaceful you could sit on the bay by the boat ramp and see all the fish and the sting rays in the clear water. We had a little boat, not bigger than ten feet, and we’d drag it across a vacant lot to get to the water. It wasn’t wealthy back then. Now there’s a mansion at that vacant lot.”
Still, he contrasts those idyllic daytime scenes with the hedonism that went on at night. “There were love-ins every single night in Merrie Christmas Park,” he remembers. “Night after night, we packed the pit, and people groped each other and smoked pot.”
Speaking with Bamberg, it seems he put a lot of himself into Marvin; they both have names that start with “Ma-,” they both attend a high school that starts with the word “Coral” (Gables in Bamberg’s case; Reef in Hammerstein’s), and they both befriend someone who turns out to be a narcotics agent.
The author acknowledges the parallels. “We both worked at a head shop and were taken in by well-known women from Guatemala. We were both laughing stocks,” he says. In Chronicles, Bamberg shares those laughs with his readers.
