What finally brought on this nostalgia was a group I came across on Facebook, for people who had lived in South Beach in its heyday of the early 90s. Looking through the scanned polaroids people had posted, I finally got a glimpse of the world I had fantasized about for so long. It’s weird that the only thing that could trigger my South Beach nostalgia should be a collection of photos of people I never met from a time in South Beach that I never saw.

When I got to South Beach, people told me that the glory days had just ended a while before my move. That the last interesting boutiques on Lincoln Road had just closed and that the last interesting performers had just left.

I had a hard time getting to like South Beach. South Beach wasn’t very forthcoming. I didn’t know South Beach before getting here. South Beach didn’t care about that. I, though, was living on the edge of a precipice. I knew what was behind me in North Carolina, and the only thing ahead of me was a void. I was suspended over the void, surrounded by boys who were not my North Carolina boyfriend and by weird Christmas lights hung up in the heat.

Any time I walked past Lincoln Road’s new Gap, Williams-Sonoma, and Pottery Barn with someone from work who had lived there longer than me, they would tell me about what it was like a couple of years earlier, when Lincoln Road had tumbleweeds and the only people on Lincoln Road were the artists who found affordable studio space there. How much it had changed and how quickly. So much more expensive now, too, to eat out on Lincoln Road. What if I had visited South Beach a few years ago for spring break with the other students, and walked down Lincoln Road then, and seen it for myself? Would I have been able to pick up on all this enough to appreciate for myself how different it was now?

Another time during that first year, I saw a collection of art that had been produced in the time people were telling me about. It wasn’t particularly memorable. But in this collection, there were included a few snapshots of the artist’s kitchen. Apparently neighbors often stopped over at his kitchen for breakfast. His kitchen was a place where peopled talked and projects started. That got me thinking not only about what it would have been like to walk down Lincoln Road at that time visiting it long before my actual move, but about what it would have been like to already live here then. What artists lived next to me, and were they good or bad, did it matter. Did they pop over at weird hours to eat something or ask for help putting something together. What about the drug addicts and old people and other people who had been living in delapidated apartments keeping the city’s rents low. Was it exciting to live here or scary. Probably both, but what did that actually feel like on any random day?

Throughout my first year on the Beach I felt massively out of place. No one paid attention to me; it was all about muscled model-types who worked — I guess! — at Gap, Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn. It already felt like that South Beach that people were telling me about little by little had already disappeared so completely that there was not even any trace of its ever having been there. I had drug addicts for neighbors still, but they were neither interesting nor scary. They just kept getting evicted and replaced.

So I started to live in that mythical South Beach in my mind during my first summer in town. I wrote stories and sewed things and tried to cultivate friendships with anyone remotely interesting. I thought a lot about the “old” South Beach and figured that if I re-built it, they would come back.

In the meantime, I listened to everyone’s piecemeal stories of life in 80′s-90′s South Beach, and filled in the gaps myself. This is what I came up with.

Gay men came down from NYC starting in the 80s, many of them coming because they had AIDS and the medicines at the time left them especially vulnerable to the cold northern winters. They gradually took over apartments that had been deserted by the younger generations of Jewish families and subsequently neglected by Marielitos and random drug addicts. They fixed up their little apartments and then gradually revamped the entire Beach, helping to get it protected as a historic district. All the while, they were able to continue the heddy artistic vibe of 1980′s NY in this new place. Whether you were straight or gay or experimental didn’t matter; it only mattered that you wanted to have fun and make things beautiful no matter what you were. But actually you were probably gay. There were dozens of gay bars and clubs to go to, but everyone went to Warsaw. At Warsaw everyone had the wildest time every weekend. Celebrities went too, but you didn’t care because you were already having a good time without them. That’s why they kept coming.

The government turned a blind eye to everything. Your presence was edging out “undesirable” residents on its own, so the police just sit back and let you do whatever you wanted — even if that involved partying with the same “undesirables.”

We had the same little local free weekly newspaper, The Wire, but it was interesting then. Everyone read it and everyone wanted to write for it. There were “blind item” gossip columns. It was a big enough town that there was always something to gossip about, but small enough that everyone saw through the blind items. Some of the sights reported in The Wire happened at the 11^th Street Diner next to Twist: unlikely dinner companions, that sort of thing.

People had breakfast on their balconies and playfully taunted friends they saw passing on the sidewalk. Their apartments were extensions of their studios, and they often woke up in someone else’s. Your friends opened boutiques to sell each other’s stuff. You spent a large amount of time at their boutiques getting ready for parties. You did not bother going to a party unless you wore a costume, or at least some special look. At one of these parties you saw your crazy neighbor dressed up in an outlandish look and gained a new respect for them. When friends came to visit, you had to hope that they liked the beach a lot or that they would hit it off with your friends because there wasn’t a lot else to do. Who are we kidding; of course they hit it off with your friends. I think they’re married now.

You knew you were living in the ruins of something fabulous that had been only partially restored, and you kind of liked it like that. You could see in your imaginary mind the rest of the course that the renovation would take, and it looked fabulous there, in your mind’s eye, so fabulous that the rest of the renovation did not actually need to happen. If it did, the landlord would charge you more than your usual $350 rent, and might make you re-paint your walls something more “upscale.”

Everyone probably carries in their head some idiosyncratic version of the local history of their neighborhood. That’s what makes you feel like you know a place, that you fit into it somewhere. But I think I was maybe living according to my own imagined South Beach history more than most people I shared the sidewalk with. I think the reason why these photos of the old South Beach made me so nostalgic, even though I never even visited the town back then, is that THAT was the South Beach that I was living in, even if it was only in my mind. I had never before seen a picture of my fantasy town, because you can’t take a photo of a fantasy. But someone had. Here they were, finally!

The people who had been here then were not much older than me, if at all. But they had lived through something I never would, which made them permanently different. It is unclear to me that this kind of time can exist anywhere anymore; everything is so strictly controlled and already has a chain store before anyone moves in. South Beach may have been the last frontier.

At first I thought that it was weird that the only thing that could trigger my nostalgia should be these photos of people I never met. But actually, one of the photos was of someone I did meet once. Someone named Juan Valdez, who I knew as Elena. I met Elena out one night at Twist, with a group of new friends. One of these groups of new friends I would meet one night and think were my gateway into some actual South Beach community I figured had to exist, until they too moved away or disappeared. Elena danced with us, and it was explained to me that she was a friend from the old days and that she was very sweet. I would see Elena walking down Lincoln Road dressed just as a man, and we would say hello and I think we exchanged small talk once or twice. Turns out she died one or two years ago. Geraldine told me when it happened, but I wasn’t sure we were thinking of the same person because Elena went by many names. I only knew one of them, but you knew more.

I never really met you, but somewhere out there, your future vision of a repainted, upscale South Beach whose impending arrival you always wanted to forestall meets my borrowed memory of a bygone free-wheeling South Beach just beyond my reach. I don’t know where that somewhere is but maybe it’s in my kitchen, and maybe someone will take a picture.

it is a day of joy.

i IMed with li’l pony for some time this morning.

i didn’t get any phone calls.

the gardeners did not wake me up with their lawnmowers at 7:30.

my dog dohbie pooped on the appointed occasion.

i read many pages of octavia butler’s fledgling, a freaky-as-shit book.

i bought myself two pandori bauli for the handsome sum of $36 which i put on my mom’s credit card, confident of her eagerness to buy them for me.

i ate two venezuelan panettini with sweet sweet ham rolled up inside.

i took my dog into the store and though the venezuelan owners didn’t understand the concept of service dog they did understand the concept of italian and paesani are paesani, plus everyone knows laws are just suggestions for us descendants of the glorious fascist state of italia.

i ate two slices of my pandoro while thinking vaguely of li’l pony and his new ll bean boots.

it is a day of joy.

What I had many of were nice, solid-colored polo shirts and t-shirts with beautiful designs on them. Then I realized that a t-shirt with a beautiful design on it did not necessarily make a beautiful t-shirt. At least as worn by me. I needed a collar on my shirt to look good. So I would only feel comfortable wearing the polo shirts. But I would still wear the t-shirts too, because I didn’t want them to go to waste. Or more precisely, I didn’t want to waste my precious polo shirts on just any regular day. I had to save up the polo shirts for special days.

Eventually, my t-shirts all wore out and I was finally left with just polo shirts. Then I noticed myself saving up the blue polo shirts for special days, and resigning myself to wearing the green or red ones on just normal days. When I finally allowed myself to wear a blue polo shirt, I would wear it for as many consecutive days as possible, so that I could get the most out of it before having to return to the other-colored shirts. A blue-shirt day was a special day, and I wanted more of them.

My friend who knows these things says that retail interior design companies always prepare at least two proposals for their clients: the design they think would be best for the workplace, and a “blue option,” which is the same design but all in blue. They do this because they know that if it is a man who is making the purchasing decision, he will always pick the “blue option.” Maybe that is what I am doing. Or maybe I am just picking a shirt that will go well with my eyes. I have very blue eyes!

Anyway, I decided to cut out the middleman and stock my closet with only blue shirts. I went around town scouring TJ Maxx and Ross and Old Navy and Target for cheap, fitted blue polo shirts. I found a bunch of nice ones at Target, which I snapped up. Then I found cheaper ones at Ross to fill more hangers. And then they held a sale at Old Navy, where I was able to fill out my closet very nicely indeed. If I found enough blue polo shirts at different places around town, I would almost never have to go to the laundromat again, yet I would not have to stretch any one polo shirt more than one day.

But guess what. I do. Because some blue polo shirts are just better than others.

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there are people i cannot stand

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imnotproudofit

Let’s say, for example, that I work on an assembly line, manufacturing — I don’t know: paper. I work in a paper mill, OK?  Most days, my concerns center around the quality of the paper we are putting out, and how I can cut the corners off the paper in an exactly symmetrical way. Or maybe I work in another part of the paper mill, the distribution center. There we are most worried about how we can ship our paper to the space station in a timely fashion, and how to stabilize the eight-sided paper inside the boxes. Should we use rectangular boxes, hoping that the four main sides of the paper will hold it in place inside the box? Or should we use eight-sided boxes? Seems like the eight-sided boxes waste a lot of space.

I have a lot to think about at the paper mill. And it doesn’t help that everyone is so suspicious and on-edge these days, what with the occupation and all. My biggest worry used to be whether the management had put spies in our midst to inform them about union organizing. But now I have to worry about cylons, too? Which of my trusted paper-packers, which of my factory foremen are sleeper agents? It is too much to bear sometimes.

when the pony asked for a red velvet cupcake, the bakery’s owner, who is some variety of european to judge by her accent, said she had two velvet cupcakes. the pony said, “i’ll have one.” the owner said, “two?” the pony replied, “one.” the owner rejoined, “two?” patiently and politely, the pony said, “one.”

this reminded me of when i was a young ‘un and did the grocery every day for the whole family. it was around the end of the 19th century and we did daily grocery shopping. it took a sizeable chunk of the day because there were many shops to visit: the bread and egg shop, the meat shop, the cheese shop, the veggie shop, the newspaper shop, the tobacconist shop, etc. you did it all on foot. that was just the way it worked. i didn’t particularly like it. by the end the bags were heavy and i was tired. (it was also cold and snowy, and we had wooden shoes and threadbare hoseries: but that’s for another post).

the worst was the cheese place. the cheese guy would always give me as least 50% more cheese or cold cuts than i asked for. if i asked for 1 hg, he’d give me 1.5 hg. if i asked for 2 hg, he’d give me 3. it was very painful for me, because i didn’t know how to stop him. when i joined the line i’d rehearse what to say to him: “and i mean 1 hg!” or, “did you get that i said just 1 hg?” but it never did any good. it only made me feel anxious and defeated.

while i was in line i checked if he did the same to the other people, older, maturer women, grown-up women, but i don’t remember it now. what i know is that no-one said any of the things i did. maybe the women accepted the extra stuff, or maybe they asked for 2/3 of what they really wanted and ended up satisfied. i would never have done this myself because i hadn’t yet learned The Practical Approach to Life and was practicing instead The True and Just Approach to Life. let me tell you before you read any further: the True and Just Approach to Life must be practiced very seldom and for a very, very good reason. if you are in any doubt whatsoever, go for the Practical Approach to Life with a clear and light conscience.

when i asked for cold cuts i’d keep a keen eye on the scales and shout “enough!” the moment the scales reached the amount i wanted. the cheese man would continue unfazedly to pile slices till he added another 50%. my fury knew no bounds.

when i think of it now, i wonder why i didn’t just hand him back the rolled package, tell him to take 1/3 off. at the time, it seemed unthinkable. the package was wrapped and sealed, the price scribbled on. it was over. i had lost my round.

here is something i’m proud of, though. one day, when she was still doing the grocery shopping herself, my grandmother came home furious because the fish monger had sold her fish other than the one she had requested. seeing my grandmother so upset gave me the courage i later failed to find for myself. i went out into the street as i was (no coat) and marched to the fish monger. there was a fair crowd at his truck. i elbowed my way to the front and said with a big and indignant voice, “you cheated my grandmother! shame on you, cheating on an elderly woman! i want all these people to know that you are a grandmother cheater. shame on you!”

everyone was very quiet. the fish monger was very quiet. i turned on my heels and marched back home. it was a fine moment.

this morning, when the baker pretended not to understand that the pony had asked for only one cup cake, i felt bad for her. this is america, i wanted to say. this is america.

when i came to the US i didn’t buy an english-italian dictionary. by that time i had realized that dictionaries were useless. it was much easier to ignore the words i didn’t know and get the general meaning from the context.

now that my english is all right, when there is a word whose meaning i don’t know i ask simsby. if he’s not around i ask li’l pony. if neither is around i don’t ask anyone. i figure sooner or later i’ll figure it out.

there is a site that will send you an email with a new word every day. it’s called A.Word.A.Day. someone gift-subscribed me to it. i knew the first two words i received so i felt rather pleased with myself and even smug. since then i haven’t known one single word. until three days ago, i’d look at the word carefully, read the definition, and look at the usage. i’d tell myself that i’d try to find a way to use the word that very day. but the occasion never came up and by the following day i had forgotten the word entirely. three days ago i stopped opening the emails.

i do remember, however, snake eyes, because that seemed a really important word (well, two words). snake eyes is when you get two ones on a pair of dice. since this is the lowest possible outcome (i had to think a second on that, on account of not being very good at math, but of course it’s true), snake eyes also means bad luck. i hope i’m remembering this right. these words stuck with me because i like gambling, as a concept. for instance, i really, really like movies about gambling. i think i would like novels about gambling if i could understand them.

i never gamble in person unless my mom is in town. when my mom is in town we go to the casino on the miccosukee reservation and gamble away $10 each. we stay at the slots until we finish the $10. the last time we went it was touch and go for a bit because the casino had replaced the usual slots with new ones and for the life of us we couldn’t understand how the new ones worked. finally we asked a slot attendant and she told us. the explanation was very difficult and i didn’t understand it (my mother didn’t even bother following). the young attendant had to think a little to figure out what the easiest machine in the house was, then walked us to it and told us its very basics. she told us not to touch this or that button because it would make things too difficult for us. we managed to play for a long time with our $10. we felt cool and also a little smug, though there was no reason for the smugness whatsoever.

I already knew certain things about girls, before this class. The year before, in fourth grade, my friend Lucia told me, à propos of nothing, not to bother her because she was in a bad mood. I had learned by then that this meant you were supposed to ask “why are you in a bad mood.” So she took out a sheet of paper and a pencil, and started drawing a circle, dragging the pencil lead around and around and around and around, obsessively, for a really long time until she had a huge black circle on the paper. That’s how I learned what a period was.

It was later, in seventh grade, that the health teacher gave us a lesson on the male anatomy, the vas deferens, the urethra, nocturnal emissions, why some boys like to do their own laundry, etc. She let us ask her questions anonymously. So we all put our timid anonymous questions into a hat. I remember the teacher fishing out one question that went something like this: “Wouldn’t it be fair to say that nocturnal emissions are kind of like a boy’s period?” It’s not that bad of a question, is it. It sticks with me because I remember thinking that there must be some boy in my class who was jealous of all the fuss over menstruation. This Q&A session came after a particularly moving demonstration, involving a large glass of water, of how tampons work.

My next chance to take a class like this was at my all-boys Catholic high school, senior year. You learned Church teachings on who you could and couldn’t marry. The big controversial one was no cousins. (This was the 80s.) I learned this from friends who took the class. I opted out.

so here is the beginning of a series on good miami things (things are not as meticulously screened by the mind as memories are, and sometimes fly under the radar screen of the positivity-annihilating laser beam, a horribly mixed metaphor if i ever saw one).

1. the beach. man, the beach. miami beach, with its colorful lifeguard cabins, the sun, the white sand, the perfect and imperfect bodies, the boardwalk, the cruising, the leaving alone, the being who you want to be, the cold beer, the packed-dirt track, the in-line skaters, the bicycles, the jewish retirees, the non jewish retirees, the burnt-to-a-crisp tourists, the dog walkers. (honorable mention: key biscayne, to which i only went once and which i loved).
2. the sun. man, the sun. the miami sun. you haven’t seen sun if you haven’t seen the miami sun. miami’s sun gives california a run for its money, and that is saying something. thing is, you won’t ever actually see the miami sun. you’ll spend all of your time squinting your way through it, blinded and dazed and hot and on the verge of sunstroke. miami’s sun is sun that kills.
3. the gays. man, the gays. the gays of miami beach, a place where being gay is not only okay but de rigueur. the gays of miami beach give you a glimpse of a world in which heterosexuality is “the other way.” they make you want to grab the hand of your boy/girlfriend and give it a long squeeze, then walk back to the car and go home, because even in miami beach some things cannot be done publicly, thank jehosaphat.
4. scotty’s landing, where you can count on black & tan every day and cheesy live music just about every weekend, and where the staff is exceedingly forgiving. i smoked my last cigarette at scott’s landing, or at least that’s what i like to think.
5. u of m. okay, i’m not joking. it’s a beautiful campus, and, more often than not, you’ll run into someone you’ll be surprised to be really happy to see. and they’ll be happy to see you. they’ll be in a hurry to get to class or to a meeting and so will you, but you’ll smile really broadly and sincerely to each other and wonder, if briefly, why you are not making more of an effort to hang out. also the books, available for free at the library, late fees always waived if charged at all.
6. coral gables and coconut grove. man, the green. and the crazy architecture. and the sweet illusion of luxury and money. jaguars parked nonchalantly in driveways. hedges hiding lexusues and lamborghinis. not a soul on the sidewalks because there is no sidewalk. the chirping of birds. the barking of dogs. the otherwise silence.
7. the biltmore, where you and friends once got drunk on $7 ¼ bottle pellegrino water and it was worth every penny.
8. the downtown public library. i should have put it first because i love it so much. all the three times i went there i spent my entire stay wondering why i didn’t go more often. then had to run to the toilet, because gorgeous libraries act like powerful laxatives on me. oh, the books, the mixture of people, the solicitude of public librarians, their go@&amn helpfulness. absolutely wonderful. (honorable mention: the whole government center, where the library is located).
9. the airport. one of the most dysfunctional airports in my meager international experience, but who can forget the slices of sbarro pizza gobbled down in a hurry between runs to the bathroom (airports = libraries in this respect) and bouts of hysterical tears? or the pastellitos devoured serially at the über-crowded international terminal, teeming with people and boredom and anxiety and, occasionally, the heartbreaking joy of a long-deferred reunion?
10. versailles. don’t get me started on versailles. i fucking love the place. man, do i love the place. on the day that castro almost died – the first of his multiple almost-deaths – i went over and chatted up the people. i knew it was risky but who am i to draw back from risks? i sat at the café and partook of the enthusiasm. i won’t celebrate castro’s death (he’s done nothing to me, plus i wouldn’t celebrate anyone’s death), but the cubans sure know how to have fun.
11. the lesbians i met while canvassing for kerry. okay, this is less of a thing and more of a memory, but those lesbians, man, i really thought i had finally cracked the miami lesbian scene. the day kerry was defeated i never heard from them again. i thought we were friends but apparently they didn’t feel the same way. i really dug their houses, though, and the cool lesbian party we crashed.
12. M, T, jules… okay, i’m getting sentimental. i’ll skip this point.
13. denny’s. i have always loved denny’s, and i cannot say that i don’t have absolutely lovely memories of denny’s dinners taken during long car trips (i can think of one on the way to the grand canyon and another with my sister between l.a. and san fran, just after i got my fucking doctorate). but denny’s in miami has acquired a whole new dimension, a semi-hagiographical status. once, very early in my miami life, i drove alone on a night on which i was too bummed to sleep and stopped at a denny’s near homestead for a cup of joe because that seemed the right thing to do. when i got my first (and current) digital camera, i stopped at denny’s and took a million fabulous pictures. later, when M and T joined me in denny’s fellowship, denny’s pictures became a staple of the miami visual canon, but that was the first time. two words: grand fucking slam.
14. milkshakes. i cannot deny that milkshakes had a place of significance in my los angeles life, but miami has made them larger than life in j.v.’s imaginary. milkshakes are food for the individual soul and food for the soul of relationships. milkshakes are to be fought over lovingly and sometimes snarkily. milkshakes allow friends to come to grips with differences. milkshakes provide endless food for conversation. milkshakes nourish, bitches.