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.