Toby has lived on the streets for most of his adult life, other than for a short stint in the Army, when he served in Vietnam, and a couple of failed attempts at holding down a ``real job, living square.''
''No one wants to hire a drunk,'' he told me. ``I went home once, a long time ago. My father had Alzheimer's but was labeled senile. I couldn't take it. I hit the bottle hard and never stopped. Been in and out of hospitals and probably the local lockup in over 40 states. Usually for vagrancy. I guess I'm a lost cause.''
According to Toby, his service record was a good one that almost ended badly. His first year in Vietnam, he was in the thick of it, served with valor, saw a lot of blood and guts, held the hand of a couple of good friends while they died.
He had been wounded and later returned to the front lines, where he assaulted an officer.
''Big mistake,'' Toby admitted. ``I still feel bad about that. The day after I hit him, he got killed.''
I met Toby on a sparkling Key West morning near the chickee huts that border the one-block-long county-owned Higgs Beach, where a large number of homeless people congregate each day.
This beach and its environs are a microcosm of Key West, a diorama, explicit in its portrayal of the southernmost city.
It offers a sometimes acute, sad, joyful, eclectic, heartening and disheartening jambalaya of parallel universes aware of each other's existence yet totally self-centered in relation to each other.
From the beach you can see people playing volleyball, sunbathers slathered and shining, joggers, bikers and lovers holding hands.
By noon, the restaurant at the edge of the beach is serving cool drinks and colorful appetizers.
Fifty feet away is the ghost of the now-defunct mobile soup kitchen that at one time set up on Sunday mornings to serve nourishment for the body and a word of encouragement for the soul.
But Monroe County put a stop to that practice two years ago.
People stroll through the adjacent Civil War-era fort, ogling the best that the local garden club, now located there, has to offer. There is yoga on the beach, the White Street Pier for fishing or sightseeing.
The chickee huts are, for much of the day, a refuge for the homeless and their quest for relief from the unrelenting Key West sun. Several men, looking like discarded rags, curl fetus-like in the shade of a palm tree.
Toby told me about going home and visiting his hospitalized father in the weeks before he had died.
``I visited him every day. And each day he would sit staring into space with a puzzled look on his face. Never said a word. One day he snapped out of it. And he told me that his mind was spinning out of control, his life's story swirling around faster and faster like test tubes at the end of a centrifuge. And the faster his life sped by, the more confused he got. It became a blur of colors and sounds.''
Toby paused. A dog barked, a child shrieked and a seagull cried.
``My father told me that he couldn't sort it out and that it hurt trying to. He went to sleep and died the next day.''
Toby pointed to the dogs.
``That's the life. See that couple with the gray puppy? I come back, I wanna come back as their dog. Nice people. I can tell by looking at them. Those dogs over there all got a better life than me.''
Toby's sadness was palpable. And he shook his head and took a long swig from a bottle.
His father died trying to remember. Toby probably will die trying to forget.