Monday, October 13, 2008

Stories of spring breakers who became Key West locals are common, but in the case of Tony Gregory, it was the teacher, not the student, who found it hard to leave the island after one glorious week in March 1975.

It was a different time in a different town, and it all clicked for Gregory, a Baltimore native who was teaching art in Annapolis when he first visited Key West.

"I came down for a week, and then I lived the whole rest of the year to come back down here," Gregory said on Friday, while hanging a "Going Out of Business" sign in the window of Art Attack, the store he has operated in the 600 block of Duval Street since 1982.

He made Key West his home in 1976. It was the '70s, and Gregory got a job as an airbrush artist when he walked into a shop, looked at an airbrushed shirt and told the clerk, "I can do that."

"She said, 'If you can, you've got a job, because the other guy just quit,'" the bespectacled Gregory said this week while preparing to move to his new art gallery and studio at 830 Caroline St.

"The shop started as an outlet for my airbrushed and splattered T-shirts," he said. "Then it became accessorized with jewelry and became known as a Dead Head store. Some items have actually gone retro twice since I've been in this location."

That first airbrushed T-shirt led to a 30-year career that has included airbrushing, tie-dyes and, of course, body painting.

Gregory, with his shock of curly, salt-and-pepper hair and schoolboy animation when telling a story, is one of the original Fantasy Fest bodypaint artists. The secluded backyard behind his shop serves as the bodypainting home base for five other visiting artists during the festival. The yard is filled with people of all ages, sizes, shapes and, when Gregory's finished with them, colors.

But Gregory first applied paint to flesh about three years before Key West's Tourist Development Association created a little event called Fantasy Fest.

"The first body I painted was in 1976 for an erotic art show in the 700 block of Duval Street," Gregory said.

The host was the ex-husband of legendary Key West arts patron Marion Stevens.

Gregory shakes his head when he thinks of the changes -- and the madness -- he has seen on the street around him.

"Back in the '70s, Duval Street was still partly residential," he said. "You'd have a bar, a shop and then someone sitting on their front porch."

In the 1980s, a man walked into Art Attack and bought a pin that said, "Oh, S@$t." When the man pulled out a credit card to pay, Gregory joked that at least he had a famous name: Stephen King. The customer had more than a famous name. He had the bestselling novels to accompany it.

"It really was Stephen King," Gregory said. "And while he was in here, The Righteous Brothers were on the radio. Stephen King got down on one knee and sang, 'You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin' to the woman he was with."

In addition to celebrity sightings, Gregory watched the Copa nightclub and Antonia's restaurant burn down in 1995. He saw a fire explode through the T-shirt shop in the ground floor of the Pegasus Hotel.

"The police actually used my photos of that fire to try to prove their arson case," he said.

As photography gradually replaced airbrushing as Gregory's medium of choice, Art Attack evolved into a photography studio and office while still offering silver and beaded jewelry along with tie-dyed shirts.

But his reign in the 600 block of Duval Street has come to an end. Gregory and his partner, Christine Scarsella, have opened Art at 830 Gallery on Caroline Street, in a building they own.

"Now I won't have to pay rent for the first time in 30 years," he said.

The gallery represents several artists, and Gregory has a photography studio upstairs.

This could be his last year for bodypainting during Fantasy Fest, as he will be relinquishing the famous backyard when he vacates Art Attack, but the artist remains undecided.

One thing he does know is that he is ready for the relocation.

"In a sense, I will miss it," he said. "But I'm really ready to go."

As if to punctuate his readiness, the city's code enforcement crews arrived as he was hanging the "Going Out of Business" sign in the window, and told him he needed the city's permission to hang it.

Gregory just shook his head.

mbolen@keysnews.com