Short Stuff

Prom night.

Considered by many to be the apex of adolescent memories. A time where innocence is traded away and adulthood is gifted to teenagers wrapped in tuxedos and transported in overpriced limousines. Like many boys his age, Chad Munteanu dreamed of magic occurring on his prom night--and like many boys his age he was greeted with disappointment when that night came. As he waited in his date’s house he felt the judging of her mother’s eyes, the glare of her father as he seemed unsure if Chad was capable of protecting his little girl. Chad, for the most part had been dealing with such discrimination the entirety of his life for a matter he could not control.

Chad, like millions of Americans, happened to be born short.

From the moment he began schooling he was subjected to the countless acts of discrimination modern day American’s tend to ignore out of convenience. Chad‘s mind is riddled with various memories of his ‘vertically challenged’ state and unfortunately they’re very rarely good memories.

“One of the earliest memories I have was when I was about seven years old,” Chad who stands at about five foot five said with his distinct and contrasting deep baritone voice, “My father, who happened to not be height impaired took me to a carnival and I wanted to ride the bumper cars…we waited for thirty minutes before the engineer sneered at my dad and said,” Chad paused as he put on his best ’hill billy’ accent “Sorry, your kid is too small for this one!”

Tragic stories such as the one told by Chad have been sprouting up throughout the United States since it’s inception. This has a large part to do with the fact that there has never been any reputable short person portrayed in the media. The only reliable leading man below 5’9” is Tom Cruise, who routinely wears lifts, married a tall Australian woman, AND is also considered no less than ‘batshit insane’. Other short role models include the trollish Danny Devito or the imperialistic and generic super villain Napoleon Bonaparte. Short people have consistently been chastised for ambition (The Napoleon Complex) and mocked for their lack of athletic prowess by many due to these media perceptions.

Furthermore, it is hard for short men to carve a future for themselves. Living in a constant state of competition for mates with their tall counterparts. Much like how the media has portrayed short males as Napoleonic batshit insane trolls. Truth of the matter is that women do not seek short men. The social struggles one has to go by choosing an inter-height relationship is often enough to ruin said relationship. While many in society have accepted inter-racial couplings and legislation is being fought for today to allow same sex couplings, there has been no struggle for legislation to welcome short marriages and the actual relationships between a short man and a normal sized woman has been characterized as nothing short of awkward.

Let’s go back to the scene at Chad’s date’s house. The mother judging the height impaired young man who had managed to steal her daughters affections, the father trying his best to intimidate the boy in a purple suede tuxedo. As the seventeen year old girl walked down her stairway and she stood next to Chad a look of panic was etched on her face and a look of rage was plastered upon Chad’s. The normal prom night greetings were exchanged, pictures were taken and fixed upon countless computer screens as they made their way through facebook. The two remained silent with their respective expressions remaining on their face until they were alone in the limousine.

“I can take them off if they bother you…”

The words however were empty to young Chad who had endured seventeen years of mocking and was ill prepared to handle it coming from this young lady. He grimaced as if he had just drank an entire gallon of liquid soap and shook his head so quick you’d think he was suffering from Tourettes.

“Keep on the damn heels, it’s fine.”

Chad has a dream that one day, short little boys and tall little girls will be able to go to a dance without having to coordinate shoes or purchase lifts. It is up to the nation to make sure that it does not remain a dream, at least forever.

Motherhood

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

-Oscar Wilde

When I was in tenth grade my mother walked out on me for the first time.

2006 was the year that I really began noticing women for the first time and as such it was also the year that the most influential woman in my life left it. Much like I had spent the entirety of my high school career searching for older brothers, filling the void that my mother left was also very important. My mom was special in the sense that she provided me with that uneasy confidence that I could do no wrong. It’s a mother’s job to do that for young boys, to pat them on the shoulder, to tell them that they’re handsome and that a constant menagerie of women would be lining up at their door any moment. I suppose that’s what made my whole relationship with women uneasy, my mother mocked me at sixteen for my virginity, she popped anti-depressants regularly, and I was often the one telling her to stop smoking weed.

My mother began leaving my home periodically around that time, I ended up dealing with the first real serious dejection and heart break around that time as well…

Thinking back to my valued highschool days I remember a girl in my AP European History class. She was extremely pretty, pretty to the point that even now I’m a little nervous thinking that she’s going to read this work and know I’m talking about her. She had the same little hipster traits I would find myself in love with for the next four years: she was artsy, intellectual, confident, a little bit of a smart ass and much like every relationship with women I had ever had…most of our talking was done through the written word. I could always weave a sentence much better than I could speak it, I appreciated the backspace button on my keyboard, the pause between IM’s…

Regardless she knew where she stood with me.

She knew I was the loud, obnoxious, and somewhat charismatic dorky kid who had never touched a girl and feigned confidence. She knew I found her ridiculously attractive and she also knew that humoring me provided nothing but enjoyment.

She rejected me pretty easily and with little effort when I finally did convince myself it was worth a shot.

It was a testament to her that there was no feelings of resentment, that we both knew where we stood, that I’d be a foot note and acquaintance and that she’d be a myspace or facebook for me to creep on. A story for me to tell and exaggerate.

It was a testament to the fact that my mother was much less tactful than a fifteen year old girl that I was filled with such resentment when she left. My mother left me with nothing but hate, she was a story for me to seethe with and I was a myth for her to gain sympathy from her friends. A story for me to hide and be ashamed of.

I have forgotten or perhaps refuse to remember how significant of an effect my mother had on me. I’ve replaced her with the female teachers who mentored me and told me my writing was amazing, the same women who I had burdened with another son silently, whom I expected to feel some sort of magical concern for my deeds. Perhaps because I came from a ruined family I will spend my entire life trying to build a functional one. Collecting my older brothers to come with me and guide me into battle. Collecting my mothers to nurture me and build confidence in ways my father could not…

The girl from my AP History class became a mother herself recently. Today she commented so eagerly on my choice of career, she patted me on the back with her ‘like’ of my status and my excitement for the first day of school. I imagined her using the same voice she used when she would seductively tell me ‘goodbye’ and when she would pretend to care and laugh at my jokes…

Were some people built to be mothers? To have the strange skill to build confidence and be the most magical people you know? Was it just because she was a mother that I put all this weight in her statements and attempts at small talk…

Or maybe as a man and more so as a man without a mother my own opinions and visions of what a mother is supposed to be is twisted.

The Island pt. 2

“Chad! Yo, wake up!”

I had found myself asleep on the beach--a practice that I had almost made into a ritual over the course of the last three months. The beach was special in that regard--it made being homeless seem easy. More than once I had thought of just living on Miami Beach, begging tourists for beers, fighting seagulls for pieces of bread, and just sleeping on the sand and bathing in the warm night water. Unfortunately I found myself better than such actions. One of the truest things I had ever read in a college textbook was the fact that men -from a very early age- already have an established sense of self worth that cannot be effected by the actions of others. We have a very strong sense of where we are on the food chain, we can doubt if we’re right…but we’ll either settle for less or be happy with more. A man’s required amount of respect is very apparent from the day he finally decides to stop sucking on his mother’s breast.

I fumbled over and stared at my friend, squinting my eyes in the state of drunkenness mother nature gives to you as soon as you wake up. The eerie feeling of knowing exactly where you are but having absolutely no sense of where your mind is at…

“What man?”

“The waves bro! They’re coming in super strong, let’s hit the water! It’s hot as fucking balls right now.”

I blamed Muse on the fact that moments later I was jumping into waves and getting pushed around by the ocean like the 125lb mound of flesh I was. The idea that when I was with my friends I was Invincible was directly perpetrated by them. The fact that we could fight one another, run up and down for hours getting beaten up by the very forces of nature, and eat fattening foods and still say I was fine. It was directly their fault.

It’s sad to say, but almost every bad decision you will ever make in your life is enabled by your friends.

You don’t think it, there is a joy with believing that every decision you make is your own. That you’re a leader and everyone surrounding you is a follower. Being pushed around the waves, I couldn’t help but realize how false that was. The waves were dictating my movements, but we were clearly in different classes. Isolating yourself from your own comrades is a very real practice as we’re all inclined to think that we’re either lower or of a higher class than the people we hang with. We compare every aspect of our being to the people we consider allies and we pick things we’re better at than them to hold on to. The people on the beach were better looking than me, they were making more money than me, and they were overall happier than me -- but I was smarter than them, so upon my own little island I sat content.

I thought as I continued to chase waves under the illusion of friendship that I was always isolating myself from them in some ways.

When I laughed at their jokes but really thought of my own troubles; When I disvalued their own relationships and hyped up my own shallow nonexistent ones; When I belittled their life experience and marginalized their sadness in comparison to my own. A personal obsession with being right, a sad fact was that even though we had taken this trip to achieve some sort of communal enlightenment…I was being selfish.

The truth was that examining my own island on my own was far more important than being on an island with four other just as confused men.

I rose from the waves, breathing heavily. My friends continued chasing after the crashing torrents with the utmost fervor, but I guided myself to the beach and plopped myself down on the sandy towel I had brought with me. I cupped my face with my hands and then turned my gaze to the sea…

Alone on the beach, Soldiers Key never felt so small.

The Island pt. 1

Far away.

That was the whole point of this trip, to get far away from everything that was holding us back. To get away from the streets that had plagued our vision for the last ten years, to get away from the women who had plagued our beds and left our hearts in ruin over the course of our lives, to get away from the problems we couldn’t name and the solutions we couldn’t find. It was a stupid plan, get on a boat and head right on to a private Key five miles out. Chase Mahi-Mahi and dreams for no reason other than the fact that we needed an experience of substance to supplement our lives that took haven in caves of monotony.

I was running away, running far away.

What issues was I trying to escape? Was I mad like the countless other boys pretending to be men? Mad that I had one parent who didn’t know how to raise his son and another who wanted nothing to do with raising her son? That I had been chased down a dark hole filled with heart ache and mistrust, that I had been nurtured and breast fed utilizing lies and deception? Your parents are your models for God, they’re both loving and vengeful. We spend our lives trying our best to please them and then revering them when they get old but it becomes extremely hard when you’re exposed to their all too human qualities. When your mother is a manic-depressive compulsive liar who is more content to run away than to face her problems. When your father is a headstrong blue collar man who is raising and begging three children for approval whilst struggling with the fact that his father had never given him anything resembling it.

I hadn’t been taught much by anyone in life, but I had picked up on enough bad habits to make a nun blush.

“Chad! We’re not that far from Soldier’s Key, right?”

Soldiers Key.

One of my earliest memories of this tiny little island five miles away from Key Biscayne is catching Barricuda with my brother. I never understood why people were scared of ‘Cuda and that’s more of a fault of my own twisted life experience than anything. It was an invicibility that could only be bred in childhood, when me and my brother spent an entire day baiting and making the feared reef predator our collective bitch. It caused me to laugh when I would watch Animal Planet and see people who had limbs bitten off by the fish, they were the fools. They had been chased down and maimed by a creature an eight year old boy was capable of neutralizing.

“Yeah, we’re almost there man, ‘bout three miles out.”

My friends were running for different reasons…

Escaping failure was very different than being confronted with success. One of us was escaping our own mistakes, the other was escaping his own future, the other was escaping heart break.

“I need to get fucking laid right now man, for real man, I know it sounds fucked up…but a good piece of pussy? It’ll set things straight man.”

That was a lesson I had to learn.

Because, I wasn’t chasing pussy, I had spent the entirety of my romantic life looking for a good woman. She didn’t exist. There are some women who can make you feel exceptionally amazing with their bodies and souls, but these are the same type of women who will take pleasure in ripping out your heart. Men, for all of our false bravado and degeneration are the loyal ones, the ones that generally feel love. A man is skilled at providing, physicality, and introspection -as you’ll never find a woman who knows more about herself than a man does about himself-. Women were skilled in lies, deception, and damnation.

It’s strange that the prescribed teenage solution to having a problem with women is to simply find more women.

The island came up on the horizon…

Whether what we were trying to escape could be escaped, whether our sadness could be propelled away in only a few hushed breaths from the sea breeze, whether our sins could really be washed away on the ocean shores--didn’t matter.

As we had already traveled five miles out looking for redemption and answers, there was too much time invested in enlightenment to turn back now.

Synapses

“What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.”

-Invisible Monsters

I’m sitting on the beach.

And I’m baked.

Last time I was on the beach I was in such a drugged up and in a drunk haze that I was literally passing out between thoughts. I was fried then, I’m baked now. I know I’m baked because I literally feel the tightening and browning of my skin. People who say that they’re smoking or drinking in the name of artistry are lying because there is nothing artistic that comes with being drunk or high, there’s no story that can be told better when thoughts are compromised. Emotions are the very soul of life and life is the very essence of writing--compromising one obviously means the other will suffer drastically.

They key is synapses.

The time between thoughts, the time between drinks, the time between spliffs, the time between everything and anything. You cannot write as you experience. Writing is a tool used to document dreams or document the fact that you’ve failed to attain those dreams. I’m sitting on the beach reading Palahniuk and pondering about my own writing, it’s ridiculous but I also think that maybe Palahniuk is me. Maybe he went back in time to when I was a child and wrote all these stories in a way that would motivate me.

And in the synapse of that thought Chuck’s words flash off the page like a cheap neon sign telling me where I can find Hot Nude Girls.

“Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.”

It’s when I wait and see what this really means that it really hits me, this common revelation that people use to avoid calling their work plagiarism. I had heard it before, I had even said it before to appear artsy and knowledgeable, but I had never really waited for it to sit in. In order for pain to reach your brain you have to wait for your neural synapses to be completed, the same could be thought for knowledge, for ideas and philosophy. I had been moving rapid speed, I had not allowed any of my knowledge to reach my brain.

Friday I was blasted, Saturday I was sober, Sunday I am planning to be blasted…

But in that between time I’ve thought more thoughts, I’ve read more books, I’ve written more stories and pieces than I have done in months. Two days time. The synapse for pain is almost instantaneous…for knowledge it is more of a slow process. Pain is stir fry, it grills quickly and can be eaten quicker. Thoughts are wine, they must be fermented for years before they really hit you.

Knowledge by itself is not the key to anything, it’s merely the address.

The key is synapses.

Perspective

"Just wakin' up in the morning gotta thank God, Iunno but today seems kinda odd"

-Ice Cube

There are something’s that people just don’t want to read.

They don’t want to read about a kid talking down to himself, they don’t want to read about people getting messed up, and they don’t want to read about anything ‘good’. Positivism genuinely means bragging. Negativity means whining. Introspection is only interesting to people who enjoy gathering up dirt on others. Bukowski wasn’t a genius, he was a drunkard. Hemingway found his answers looking straight at him with two 50 millimeter shells for eyes. Realism is just a name people give their work for it to be synonymous with relatable and surrealism is the same concept except strung out on peyote.

I’m not going to talk about any of those things.

There’s this girl I know.

She’s not really pretty but she has a nice body and a good heart. She’s stuck in a small town with a guy whom she no longer wants and she really likes me. It started off as a shallow relationship, me talking to her to get some cheap gratification and feel like I had some amazing power over women and it slowly twisted into me caring for her. It’s strange when you come to realize that you’re doing the same thing all these heartbroken writers complain about: faking love in order to avoid causing heartache. Accepting companionship you don’t want to avoid the loneliness you want to avoid more.

There’s a funny thing about the truth, it makes almost everything else seem like a lie.

There’s a group of people I know.

They spend their days getting wasted and walking around without a care. They get money, they get laid, and they live this fantastical life in the gutter of my city. I juxtapose my own life with theirs, but the truth of the matter is that we’re cut from a different cloth and that cloth is primarily colored by arrogance. These people are cooler than me and probably happier than me, but I’m smarter and envious of them. Intelligence isn’t a burden but intelligence without modesty is. Right now I’m writing confessions they will never read, perhaps because they don’t know how to read. I’m an outsider looking in, I touch upon their lives sporadically as I inhale their stories through countless grape blunts…

And then I romanticize it because just smoking weed in a car falls into another thing people don’t want to read about.

There’s a writer that I know.

He stays up late jotting down ideas and thinking about stories people will love. He calls himself a would be novelist but he lacks the patience to construct a story worth telling and he lacks the talent to write a coherent thought. He’s a writer who isn’t concise enough to be a poet. He thinks he’s going to be the greatest writer alive or at least he says it enough to convince himself of such a thing.

Arrogance with a dash of talent and an ounce of insecurity equals the next generations Bukowski, except it will be dirty south hiphop and Tom Waits who will provide the soundtrack to his writing as opposed to jazz.

Today I had planned on writing something.

I was going to get on my skateboard and skate off to a party, I was going to pay for it in quarters, get drunk and pray for enlightenment. Instead I’m sitting here stone sober and typing. Improv on the keys, looking for perspective and looking to reach into a pit of potential…

And that’s what’s the most frustrating thing about being introspective-- you know that you’re not failing to reach your potential, you just need time to reach it.

It’s even more frustrating when you’re impatient.

I don’t know the purpose of the piece, it’s not about brotherhood, it’s not about music, it’s not about booze, it’s not about bitches. It’s just a piece that is being written because it needs to be, because the only way I’m going to make it is if I keep thinking and keep putting things out there.

It’s all about perspective.

Brotherhood

I’ve been a brother since before I was a single year old.

My younger brother represented something wonderful –a friend that never had to go home, a friend that I was allowed to say ‘I love you’ too without being weird, and a person whom I got to wrestle with and punch and it be culturally accepted. I went into highschool very well versed in the older-younger brother dynamic, I had been the older brother for nearly fifteen years and I admitably grew tired of it. My homelife had grown hectic…my mother was on her last hair of sanity and my father and I had yet to become close. My solution to dealing with my family problems was simple: I needed guidance and to get guidance I turned to the only dynamic I had that was stable and I knew a lot about: the older-younger brother dynamic.

During my sophomore year the undisputed king of older brothers was Josue Alvarez. He would pick on me like hell and he would be mean and turn me down whenever I asked a favor…but he was always there for me when I needed him and always ready to offer some advice. We took care of eachother. He guided me through the deepest and most powerful heartbreak I have ever known and I still recall as he affirmed his love for his own girlfriend to me in a hot Brazillian Jiujitsu Gym. Of course all good things must come to an end and me and Josue grew a part in coming to my Junior year, which in turn was a year of change for most of us…

It was my junior year in highschool that I expanded my older brother connections to new levels: I drank vodka for the first time with Jonathan Alvarez, Jose Rosello taught me the value of intelligence and mostly that I was NOT the smartest person in the room, Javier Chavez brought into question the dominance I had in writing, Sebastian Church smoked pot with me for the first time, and I started smoking cigars with Josue just for the hell of it. I came to a revelation my Junior year in highschool: I love being the younger brother. It gives me leeway, it allows me to make mistakes and to know that there is always a constant friend there to pick up the pieces and take care of me. The knowledge that such a friend exists is my biggest safety net, something that gives me more comfort than writing or smoking or drinking or anything else that is theraputic.

I attatch myself to male comraderie more so than I attatch myself to girls, romantic relationships don’t really concern me so much beyond the obvious sexual release I’d get from them…hell my ideal girlfriend is just a bastardized brother anyway. I need this male comraderie more than anything, I need the trust and the love that comes with having an older brother…

But I also need to learn to deal with my mistakes, to take care of myself, to look at my menagerie of older brothers as not guides and safety nets…but as equals and as advisors, advisors that I absolutelty cannot ignore.

Fitting that it took an older brother ostracizing me to teach me that.

Miami pt.2

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."

-Oscar Wilde

I didn’t even know why I was there.

Having been miserably employed for just less than six months and then joyfully giving my two weeks notice four weeks too early it was a wonder as to why Tony Quintana kept me on the payroll and an even bigger wonder as to why he had invited me to the big company dinner at Red Fish Grill in Key Biscayne. I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t like the fact that I had to be there to make sure I leave with some sort of dignity- but getting Christmas bonuses and getting smashed off of free wine instead of ten dollar bottles of vodka seemed like a valid reason. My co-workers chatted and they drank, Tony’s daughters feigned interest and a healthy family life as they joked around with everyone, and his oldest daughter –a law student up in DC- decided that I would be a worthwhile target for entertaining herself.

And not in a way that I would find remotely enjoyable.

“So, you say that you’re at Miami-Dade right now?”

She smiled at me pleasantly, a fake smile, designed to make her look happy and inviting…or maybe I was just drunk enough for the pessimism to kick in. I didn’t trust the law school type: it was a world of stiffs – language parsers and connivers, people who were interested in Control, in dialogue as battle, with one overarching aim – always appear the smartest man in the room. Bent and broken personalities who got off on fucking with each other. She had interpreted my disinterest as higher intelligence and I had interpreted her attention as an overwhelming need to fuck me.

“Yeah…well currently just for my AA,” I paused taking a sip from the glass of red wine, “Don’t know where I’ll go for grad school though…”

She smiled again and her mood changed from small talk to saleswoman. It was obnoxious, but she was tall, blonde, and I couldn’t help but thinking of the many uses of her red lips and how in the hell she maintained a tan if she lived up in DC. She leaned closer on the table to speak with me and my heart stopped…an unvoluntary reaction.

“Ever consider a big state school?”, she asked playfully, “Like UF?”

And then my heart started beating again and my disinterest multiplied.

The truth of the matter was that I had already set my sights on going to the University of Miami. It was my dream, my father’s dream, and for some reason I couldn’t see myself living anywhere else. I was pretty confounded by my pride in the city that didn’t seem worthy of any merit. Maybe I just loved Miami because of where I was in my life, maybe- as depressing as it sounded- I just liked getting fucked up and getting fucked and Miami just suited those needs…but I didn’t drink nearly as often as I wanted to and I wasn’t getting fucked either.
It was a grand mystery , I could only hope that it would be solved by my youths end.

My father told me that it wouldn’t.

Everyday I wake up to a beautiful sky –barring that it isn’t summer- and warm air –barring it isn’t winter- and every night I go to sleep messed up or pondering how I should’ve been messed up and how messed up I am going to get tommorow. It’s a perfectly hedon istic ritual and yet it is repeated constantly as if it was a metronome keeping the entire city in rhythm. It was a chaotic balancing act that I could see everyday at Miami-Dade: students coming to class as if it was a club, teachers with reddened eyes trying to preach dilligence, kids going to and from class stumbling with gigantic aviators on their faces. It was the game that we played because we felt we had to…because it cooled us down in the eighty degree weather with 90% humidity.

I was different that the normal intellectual: I hadn’t fled the chaos, I hadn’t sought some logicaL artsy world where nothing made sense and I was trying to adapt…this was my chaos, my disorganized home where I could find everything amongst the piles of clothes and unpaid bills.

And I was perfectly fine with that.

Miami pt.1

“One girl who stands out was this Miami stripper. She still lives with her mother and father, and they know she strips. They call her by her stripper name, Freaky Red.”

-Method Man

I am sitting behind a desk on the Miami-Dade Kendal campus and on my right side there is a man in a wife beater with a gigantic black tattoo of Lazarus on his shoulder, on my left is a girl in a tank top and short shorts: the date is February 10th and these clothes are considered both appropriate for the weather and appropriate for the classroom. Miami is a bizarre place and most people I talk to out of state are quick to criticize my little plot of sunshine as a cultural wasteland or a backwards state where people drinking rum and cokes at their thirteenth birthday is somehow considered morally correct. They’re quick to mention the society of excess, the fact that South Beach can be described as nothing but a bastion of sodomy and a place where neon goes to die…but there is a beauty in Miami that very few can grasp and even the people who live here have a hard time accepting.

Every time I run into someone from my old AP classes in high school they are all saying the same thing: they’re working hard in college so they can go to FSU and get out of Miami, they’re working hard at an auto parts store so they can go up north and finally leave this god forsaken place. These aren’t people who have been robbed or people who are lacking in intelligence: they’re simply men and women who that think there is something in the air that makes Miami not worth living in. Perhaps it is because as intellectuals we’ve never had somebody to identify as Miamian. California has the 2Pacs or the countless artists and musicians who reside there, New York is the fortress where all things literary begin and end as far as the United States is concerned. Miami has none of that and yet is worse for art than some no name town in Middle America: Miami is a place where coke is an appetizer, where our college football team dances after every play, a place where excess is so heightened we have a bar that is literally open for eighteen hours a day.

Art does not profit from excess, hence most artists are starving.

“That’s why I fuckin’ hate this place nigga, it’s to heated!”, Carlos wasn’t a moral kind of guy, rather he was the stereotypical Miamian: short, tan, and high off his ass, “Of course nigga, I’m used to this shit: I’m already a wanted man in Trinidad, shot a nigga in the knee cap…well I don’t know if I’m wanted, but like, fuck I don’t wanna go back.”

We smoked and nodded. That was the response to dealing with the ridiculous characters you run in while in Miami. You stay down here long enough and you’ll be drinking or smoking: the kids hanging out in Carol City have their codeine; the rich kids off of Key Biscayne are rolling while drinking Patron Tequila or Grey Goose and the kids in South Miami? We smoke a lot and drink even more. Captain Morgan, rum. Maybe it’s the heat that makes a tropical drink like rum just mesh well with us: or maybe it’s the fact that if we were actually part of the Caribbean we wouldn’t be so unbelievably weird.

“So what about you nigga? What you thinkin’ ‘bout?”

The grape blunt felt warm in my fingers as the cheap paper stuck to my lips. What was I thinking about? The fact was that I was thinking about nothing. There was nothing here in this cheap apartment besides Warioware, weed, and a high Caribbean guy telling us how he shot a man. Perhaps this was the reason why there were no artists in Miami…there was just nothing here but beaches and booze. No stimulation, nothing to be excited about…

I just couldn’t fight the feeling that there was something more to it.

Vodka

“We walk like warriors, we were never told to run.”

-Common

I was a late bloomer to the world of alcohol. New Years Eve, 2008, me and Jonathan Alvarez stood in front of a leaky freezer, holding a near empty bottle of Grey Goose, and pouring ourselves a shot. Vodka snatches a lot of peoples drinking cherries. Women will be drinking it from the time they’re fourteen to the time that they’re forty. Men outgrow it, excluding instances of scarcity or when a morning screwdriver feels better than a morning coffee. For me? Vodka has never tasted good. I’ve taken a straight shot of Bacardi 151, I’ve killed a bottle of Everclear, I’ve taken ten shots of Jim Beam over the course of an hour and nothing burns like vodka. Vodka tastes a lot like what a machine would drink: manufactured, weak, and trying it’s best to immitate the pure strength of other liquors at half the price.

I drank a bottle of vodka this weekend.

Vodka and my tastebuds don’t go well together.

I was a late bloomer to the world of love. A date long forgotten in April, 2006, me and a girl whose name is unimportant sat in front of a Little Caesars. The asphalt cooling our bottoms, laughter coating the air, and me trying not to stare at the awkward girl in front of me. I fell in love with her that day, I forgot her when school ended for the summer, I fell in love with her when I spent an entire movie next to her and she said hi to me again. I put all my expectations on her-- she rejected me. I got angry--she still stood by the fact that I was a nice guy. She got heart broken --I ended up counseling the person who broke my heart about heart break. We forgot eachother, we spoke in passing, and that was that. Most men forget a girl who doesn’t fuck them, doesn’t go out with them, and leaves them be…unless of course they hook up with her on a Christmas break years after those transactions. I’ve made out with strangers, I’ve talked to girls who want nothing more than to screw the living hell out of me, I’ve been rejected and stood up, and nothing ever compared to the hold this girl had –and still has- over me.

I talked to this girl this week.

This girl and my heart don’t go well together.

It’s strange. I’ve had other relationships, I’ve flirted my ass off, I’ve partied, and I’ve built up a tolerance to rejection: but much like vodka, the mere memory of the hurting this girl put on me stays plastered on my mind. An emotional PTSD. This summer I read a book called ‘The Game’, it talked about Oneitis and all that, but this isn’t Oneitis. I don’t talk to this girl anymore, I don’t dote on what she needs, I’ve seperated myself from her. She has this power because of who I am. An emotional packrat incapable of letting things go, a man who projects what he wants on girls and accepts their flaws due to them having strengths that may not even exist. I’m an emotional man who thinks he’s too smart to be effected by emotions.

And I can’t fight it.

Vodka will always be there. It will be floating in the screwdrivers I love, it will be floating in a lot of things. A man called Whiskey told me that vodka is special in that it mixes with anything and tastes good. This girl? She’s vodka. She will be there no matter what I do. I can’t run away from her, I can’t be her friend, and I can’t do anything but think of times where she fucked me over (and the drunk fun that followed). I’m incapable of running from her, I can only carry her with me everywhere I go.

Tio’s Liquors is having a special on vodka: ten dollars for a pint of Russian Exports. With only one hundred dollars in my bank account…me and vodka will be getting really familiar over the next couple months.This girl goes to UM, with a tattoo of Sebastian the Ibis on my back…it’s only a matter of time before we see eachother again.

And I will be ready.