Fort Lauderdale Beach Legend Mickey Clean Really Was a Famous Punk Rocker

"He just makes everyone happy," says Jeff Rudd, owner of the Treasure Trove, an open-air bar and predominantly local hangout on AlA two blocks south of Las Olas Boulevard. "He's here every day, like a fixture on the beach." Rudd estimates that he's poured Mickey well over 1,000 beers in the past decade (all gratis) and says that Mickey will be welcome as long as he owns the bar.

"Mickey is the first on the scene and the last to get mean," says Ryan Bloom, the night manager at the Beach Package Store, the liquor store at the corner of Las Olas and A1A.

Photo by Michael McElroy

A couple poses for their picture. Mickey's drawings dot the walls of many beachfront bars.

Photo by Michael McElroy

Mickey with his wife, Cathy, in their Victoria Park neighborhood.

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• Jeff Rudd
• Blondie (Band)
• Robert Redford
• Mickey Mouse
• The Ramones

Chrys, the bartender at the Pirate Republic Bar, says at least three people ask about him every night. "Mickey is everybody's favorite Fort Lauderdale character," she says. "A lot of people think he's homeless or some crackhead, but you know he's not, right?"

"That guy is a landmark around here," says Blake Wareham, a bouncer at quintessential pool hall/pinball mecca Dirty Blonde's.

"When he's not at the beach, it's like the beach is missing something," says Smoky, who for six years has sold hats he makes out of palm fronds in the alley next to Dirty Blonde's. "No matter what mood you're in, when you see Mickey, he puts you in good spirits."

Marie Correa, a promoter and hostess at nightclub Exit 66, says it's hard to imagine a day at work without seeing Mickey walk by, his cigar box, papers, and beer in tow. "Even if you think you're not going to see him one day, he pops up right around the corner."

As Dave Cassel, a regular at the Elbo Room, the area's oldest watering hole, says, "It's like he walks from bar to bar all day, sprinkling his good charm on all the drunk people. He's like the patron saint of Fort Liquordale."

But not everybody adores Mickey. Some bouncers tire of his drunken antics and hearing the same bad jokes day after day. The nighttime door guys at the Elbo Room sometimes won't let him in. One bouncer calls him "an annoying crackhead." A doorman at the swanky Ritz-Carlton says of Mickey, "We'd certainly like to discourage that element here."

At the Treasure Trove one night, Mickey approaches a blond and asks if she's a mail-order bride from Russia.

"I've been to Russia," he says, "when it was still behind the Iron Curtain." He brags about having fronted one of the first punk bands in the United States: "Before the Sex Pistols, before the Ramones, before any of them," he said. He said he'd played at CBGB in New York, that he'd been on some big TV show in the early '80s. That he graduated from a great art school in Boston and even taught for a little while at Harvard.

They're stories the regulars have all heard. Few of them probably thought there was a chance the stories were true.

Each day, Mickey wakes up around 9:30 a.m. and eats either eggs or lox for breakfast. Around noon, he packs his cigar box and his papers into a canvas satchel and bikes to the beach.

One of his first stops is the liquor store, where he buys a bottle of Beck's and makes a phone call to his wife. If his cigar box is beer-drenched or beaten up, the guys at the liquor store give him a new one. As a matter of fact, Mickey gets all his materials from people in the neighborhood. Chrys, the bartender at the Pirate Bar, buys his crayons. "Every time, he opens the box like a little kid opening a Christmas present," she says. Jeff Rudd, owner of the Trove, gave him a new bicycle for Christmas last year. He says it goes back to the tradition of saloonkeepers taking care of their drunks.

On the hunt for his next caricature subject, Mickey ducks in and out of every bar and drops by every bit of outdoor seating. "When one group wants one, everybody wants one," he says. "And when nobody wants one, it's the same way."

He works his way from the Treasure Trove up the beach to the Elbo Room, to the people drinking outside touristy restaurant Spazio's, to the alley in front of the Pirate Republic, to the tables in front of Dirty Blonde's, to the patio of Exit 66, to the gallery in the Beach Place shopping center — where people call down to him from the third floor, "Hey Mickey!" He waves back, hops on his bike, and pedals away — to people sipping cocktails out in front of Cantina, to the upscale, Mediterranean-styled Casablanca Café, up to Sunrise Boulevard, to McSorley's Irish Pub and the Caribbean-flavored Parrot Bar, then all the way back again.

He draws a group of teachers having frozen margaritas outside Rock Bar. Then four college students in bathing suits and backward hats. Then a biker and his wife. An older couple from Plantation. A group of port workers sharing beers after a long shift. A lonely-looking man with a bartender. A personal trainer and a waitress showing some out-of-town friends a good time by the water. Hour after hour, day after day, he tells the same jokes and the same stories about his past.