“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.
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