The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (39 page)

DATE: DECEMBER
2005
VENUE: MIAMI BEACH CONVENTION CENTER, MY APARTMENT
CELEBRITIES: JEFFREY DEITCH, DAVID LACHAPELLE (RUMORED), MADONNA(RUMORED), SOFIA COPPOLA (RUMORED)

Art Basel Miami Beach is perhaps the only time each year when New York aesthetes bother with Miami. The art fair is an offshoot of Art Basel in Switzerland, and it attracts a lot of very wealthy people. These were a different sort of wealthy people from the banana-yellow-Hummer-driving, highly leveraged "rich people" who were always cutting each other off on I-95. Suddenly my neighborhood hamlet of fake tans, silicone breasts, and hair gel was invaded by pale androgynous people with Italian glasses. The first rule of fashion in Miami was that you wear nothing that might make you look androgynous or poor. These people all looked like shit, but wonderfully so, expensively so.

I spoke with my friends on staff at various hotels, who told me that Sofia Coppola had been spotted at the Delano, and that Madonna was at the Visionaire party last night, and that David LaChapelle's poolside installation at the Setai had a live transsexual made of silicone lounging naked in a glass house in the middle of a swimming pool.

DATE: JANUARY
2006
VENUE: THE DELANO HOTEL
FOOD: SURF AND TURF
LIQUOR SPONSOR: DOM PERIGNON
CELEBRITIES: BILLY JOEL, SNOOP DOGG, JAMIE FOXX, LUDACRIS

I ended up at Jamie Foxx's album release party on New Year's Eve because I accepted an invitation from a man twenty years older than me who was the local correspondent for a prominent celebrity tabloid. "You're the only person I know who is superficial enough to actually enjoy this," he said, kindly.

I decided I would enjoy myself. The problem was that as soon as I stepped into the lobby of the Delano, with its gossamer curtains and high ceilings, and as soon as I was served champagne by models dressed in silver angel outfits, and primal hunter-gatherer food (fire-blackened meat, stone crab claws, oysters, caviar, lobster tails) by a waiter dressed in tennis whites, I was overwhelmed by a profound sadness.

But 2006 was going to be a good year, or so promised Jamie Foxx when his press handler escorted him over to us. He was covered in distracting surfaces—mirrored sunglasses, diamond earrings, polka-dotted shirt—and graciously shook our hands.

"An excellent year," he promised, and I believed him.

Then he performed the song "Gold Digger" against a backdrop of more gossamer curtains and dancing angels and pewter candelabras, while we watched from the lawn around the pool, where the grass was cut short like a tennis lawn and tiny white edelweiss-like flowers sprouted. I held my glass of Dom and my high heels sank into the soil. Snoop performed, looking shy and grinning goofily, then Ludacris, and then fireworks exploded over the Atlantic Ocean and a new year began.

I ended the night without my escort, at a bar called Club Deuce. In Florida, unlike in Brooklyn, the dives are really dives: neon lights shaped like naked ladies, wrinkly alcoholics, obese bartenders, all in New Year's crowns, blowing horns and throwing confetti. I was in a cab heading home alone by 4
A.M.
, my gold shoes somehow full of sand.

DATE: APRIL
2006
VENUE: STAND OF PALM TREES, KEY BISCAYNE BEACH
LIQUOR SPONSOR: BYOB

I celebrated this birthday with my friend Krishna, who made close to six figures a year as a waiter at the most expensive hotel in South Beach. Krishna had grown up in a yoga ashram in central Florida and then gone to Brown. The son of his ashram's guru was now a big-time real estate broker in Miami Beach with a boat and a BMW and an apartment in the Mondrian. Krishna was gay and surrounded himself with down-to-earth, interesting people. He was a real friend, not a fake friend. Things were changing for me. For example, I started taking tennis lessons. I started hanging out with people I act ually liked. I stopped shooting the shit with Brett. I would nod on my way out the door, when he was sitting there having a cigarette, but I didn't go swimming with all his friends in the evenings, and their parties got so depressing. One night, I agreed to drive one of them to "pick something up." I was just trying to be neighborly. On the way, the guy failed to warn me about a helpless animal crossing the road. I know that as the driver I was technically at fault, but he saw this animal, this doomed raccoon, and he just let out a slow "Whoa." Then I ran over the raccoon. In the rearview mirror I watched the raccoon drag itself toward the curb. I hadn't even properly killed it. I was furious. I was furious at this poor creature for trying to live on Miami Beach, at myself for having maimed it, and especially at this guy for being too much of a stoner to stop me. It wasn't quite fair, but that's how I felt. From then on, when Brett's drug-dealer friends offered cocaine when I stepped out of my apartment in the morning I would be outright rude. At some point Brett had lost his job selling boats.

My relationship with Miami changed. I went to fewer parties at hotels. The gift-bag influx slowed. I stopped being around so many people who sold real estate, who picked me up in luxury vehicles, who drank lychee martinis and said things like, "Well, I was talking about this with John Stamos at Mansion the other night." I still pursued unlikely friendships out of curiosity—I went on a date with a paparazzo who had netted his fortune from a single portrait of Paris Hilton with her tiny dog. The funny thing was that this paparazzo had a tiny dog of his own that would nuzzle and burrow under your arm when you held it, like a little cat.

I stopped writing e-mails to my friends in New York about my mirth at outrageous Floridian real estate nonsense. The billboard advertising a condominium project on I-95 that was simply a photo of a man's hands unhooking a woman's bra was no longer delightfully symbolic of everything that was wrong with the real estate boom, just depressingly so.

To live in a place like Florida is to destroy the earth. I watched snowy egrets and great blue herons picking their way through drainage ditches outside Costco. I covered county commission meetings where the merits of building suburbs in the Everglades were proclaimed and posters of digitally rendered high-rises were offered in exchange for slackening of the zoning laws. I went to the Everglades and saw anhingas flitting under the boardwalk, their tails expanding like fans in water stained brown like tea. I thought about how in Florida, a bird like the anhinga was useful only insofar as it provided local color in the names of housing developments. The names of new housing developments grew more and more offensive. I started keeping a list. The idea was to make some sort of game out of it, like that Internet game that generated Wu-Tang names. I thought I could make a Florida subdivision name generator.

Here is an excerpt of my list: Villa Encantada. Gables Estates. Old Cutler Bay. Journey's End. Hancock Oaks. Cutler Oaks. Pine Bay. Deering Bay Estates. Old Cutler Glen. Cocoplum. Saga Bay, Serena Lakes, Lakes by the Bay, Three Lakes, Cutler Estates. Swan Lake. Arabesque. Arboretum Estates. The Sanctuary at Pinecrest. Gables by the Sea. Tahiti Beach Island. Snapper Creek Lakes. Banyans by the Gables. Coco Ibiza Villas. Kumquat Village. The Imperial. The Moorings. Trocadero in the Grove. Gladewinds. Killian Oaks Estates. The Palms at Kendall. Poinciana at Sunset. Villas of Briar Bay. Las Brisas at Doral. The Courts at Doral Isles. Porto Vita. The Terraces at Turnberry. Lychee Nut Grove. Flamingo Garden Estates. L'Hermitage. The Palace.

DATE: MAY
2006
VENUE: LEEWARD DORMITORIES, GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE
LIQUOR SPONSOR: NAVY PX

A senior reporter at the paper quit, and they sent me in her stead to report on the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay. Cuba fell under our purview as a Miami newspaper, even if Gitmo was four hundred miles away. Before I left, I watched
A Few Good Men
, the basic-cable mainstay about a military cover-up at Guantánamo. When Demi Moore and Tom Cruise visit the island to look for evidence, Demi, in curve-hugging Navy whites, accuses a flippant Tom of goofing around. "Are you going to do any investigating," she demands, "or did you just come here for the tour?" I came for the tour.

I flew Air Sunshine. A lawyer, a frequent flyer on Air Sunshine propeller planes, had told me that taking the airline's shuttles from Fort Lauderdale to Guantánamo Bay was like traveling in a "minivan with wings." The nine-seater's decor was peeling blue pleather accentuated with protruding bits of orange foam. A front-row seat afforded a detailed view of the cockpit, since one sat practically inside it. The windows were pockmarked and scratched. The engine thrummed a steady bass vibrato. The air smelled acrid with fumes. As the plane tilted to land, a container of shoe polish rolled across the floor.

I spent ten days at Guantánamo, most of it by myself on the deserted leeward side, where I rented a bicycle from a Jamaican contract worker and went swimming on a rocky beach overseen by Marine guard towers. The detention facilities were on the windward side, where we could go only with military escorts. I toured the camps twice, going through the motions of journalism. The tour was a farce. We saw the prisoners only from a distance. The cells they showed us were stocked with "comfort items" like soap, the "interrogation room" furnished with a plush armchair and an espresso machine. The troops we spoke with told us about their scuba-diving lessons. They lived in a suburb devoid of a city, like an amputated limb with a life of its own, with Pizza Hut and Ben & Jerry's and outdoor screenings of
The Hills Have Eyes 2.
When inside the camp, the military personnel removed the Velcro name tags attached to their uniforms and emphasized that detainees have been known to make threats. On one of the tours our guide was Naval Commander Catie Hanft, deputy commander of the Joint Detention Group. Commander Hanft's previous job was commanding the naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where José Padilla was jailed in an environment of almost total sensory deprivation, never allowed to see the faces of his captors, until his transfer to a federal prison in Miami. Hanft had short hair and a tan. When one of our escorts accidentally called her by name she smiled and interrupted: "Colonel, don't say my name in the camp, please." The mood curdled slightly.

Most nights we would pick up some meat and alcohol at the Navy PX before they escorted us back to the deserted side of the bay. Then we would drink alcohol and grill meat, "we" being an assortment of human rights lawyers, Pashto translators, and journalists. Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, one of the lawyers, told of walking in on his Bahraini client, Juma Al Dosari, as he attempted suicide during a bathroom break the previous year. Dosari, who had made twelve serious attempts, had cut one wrist and tried to hang himself. On this visit, although Colangelo-Bryan noted a couple of new scars, Dosari seemed in better spirits.

On the night before I left, there was a bigger group than usual at the barbecue. Around midnight, when everyone was slightly drunk, a plane came in to land on the base's runway, which was also on the deserted side of the bay. Sleek and floodlit against the night sky, the plane gleamed white and bore the green insignia of the Saudi royal family on its tail. The Saudis had come for some of the prisoners. In the morning the plane was gone.

DATE: JUNE
2006
VENUE: STREET IN COCONUT GROVE

The Miami Heat had had a good season, and as the team advanced to the playoffs people actually started going to Miami Heat games. Everybody in the stands wore white to these games. Later I was informed that the entire sports blogosphere made fun of Miami for doing that. The Heat beat the Mavericks in the finals. I went to an outdoor screening of the last game and watched Dirk Nowitzki run backward chewing his mouth guard with an increasingly frantic air of frustration. Lots of Miami players seemed to be wearing special injury-preventing compression kneesocks and sleeves. After the team won, a friend who was visiting observed the cheering hordes in white on the street. "The most hard-core Miami Heat fan is like one of those girls who wears a pink Red Sox shirt," he said.

DATE: AUGUST
2006
VENUE: CALLE OCHO

Everybody wanted to be in Miami when Castro fell. The
Miami Herald
supposedly had a plan, or rather
the
plan, for the moment of Castro's death. Then nothing turned out as planned. Castro showed up on television in an Adidas tracksuit, looking ill. Then he made his brother president. The streets outside Café Versailles were full of people honking horns and waving flags, but Fidel wasn't really dead.
Fidel Castro was no longer president of Cuba
, he was attached to a colostomy bag and being fed through a tube, but the Berlin Wall moment everyone in Miami expected didn't happen. For the first time, it seemed possible that it might not ever happen. Then again, he's not dead yet.

DATE: SEPTEMBER
2006
VENUE! THE HOME OF UNIVISION'S MORNING SHOW'S VISITING PSYCHIC

I was writing about the first homosexual love triangle in an American-made Spanish-language telenovela. One of the actors, who was straight (it was unclear whether the show's tolerance extended into telenovela casting practices), invited me to dinner at the house of a Spanish-language television psychic named Frances. I had a friend of a friend in town so I invited him, too, thinking he would enjoy the cultural experience. He did not enjoy it. The evening ended with Frances waving a wand around a warbling vibratory instrument called a meditation bowl and ordering the friend of a friend to hug a palm tree. "I'm an atheist," he kept repeating, his face pressed against the palm tree. The next week I got an e-mail inviting me to a gathering at Frances's with some Tibetan monks. I have many regrets, but few loom so large as my decision not to attend.