JFK ENCOUNTER

King's other encounter with a president-to-be was also out there on the fringes of the law. In 1958, soon after arriving in South Florida, he ran into John F. Kennedy on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. Not as in, ''saw him shopping.'' As in, ``rammed his convertible with a ratty old car.''

Kennedy was not yet president, but he was America's most famous senator, and at the moment, its maddest, too. ''How could you?'' he roared. ''Early Sunday morning, no traffic, not a cloud in the sky, I'm parked -- how could you run into me?'' King knew the truthful answer -- that he was a dumb kid newly arrived from the seedy side of Brooklyn and had been gawking at Palm Beach's fairy-tale boutiques -- wasn't a good one.

'All I could say was, `Senator, do you want to exchange information from our driver's licenses?' '' recalls King. 'Eventually he calmed down, and he said he'd forget the whole thing if we just promised to vote for him when he ran for president. We did, and he drove away -- though not before saying, `Stay waaay behind me.' ''

For all the trouble he got into in South Florida, King still remembers it fondly, not least of all for stuff like that 2 a.m. phone call from the temptress down the street.

''I'd lived in Brooklyn, which was about as sexually un-loose as it gets,'' King recalls. ``And later I would live in Washington, D.C., which is certainly sexual but very private about it. But Miami! There was nothing like the Miami of the 1960s. The palm trees and the ocean. . . . Nothing seemed solid, there was nothing to grab onto. It was loose, so you grabbed onto each other.

``The Playboy Club, the Jockey Club, The Place for Steak and all the other places on the 79th Street causeway, the Bonfire and the Luau, they were just teeming with women at night. Lots of divorcees. The big acts at the Miami Beach hotels, Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme and Dean Martin and Danny Thomas, they'd finish their shows and then they'd go over to the late-hour places. And the women followed.''

Even the celebrities seemed a bit unhinged, King says, remembering an infamous food fight at the Fontainebleau coffee shop that started when Sinatra jostled another diner while reaching for a piece of pie behind the counter. When it ended, the restaurant was such a carnage of cherries, blueberries and meringue that it had to be shut down for four hours and the story was all over the papers.

''The next day I was driving someplace with Don Rickles,'' King says. 'I asked him what he made of it. And Rickles said, `The trouble is Frank cannot accept the fact that Al Capone is dead.' ''

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