The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Part 11

I woke up the next morning and drove to work. I a.s.sumed that the rest of the city still had electricity, but it turned out that almost n.o.body did-some wouldn't get it back for two weeks. Downtown Miami was deserted. The stoplights were out. The only movement was that of a tribe of vagrants deeply concerned with the transportation of fallen palm fronds scattered across sidewalks and intersections. I arrived at the New Times building. Its parking lot was empty except for palm fronds. I sat there for a full minute, engine idling, before turning around and driving back down the Biscayne Corridor. Even the windows of the Latin American Cafe were darkened, the spy shop shuttered, the sidewalks damp and empty but for the Sisyphean struggle of man versus palm frond. You wouldn't think electricity makes that much of a difference during the day, but it makes a world of difference.

The MTV Video Music Awards.

DATE: AUGUST 2005.

VENUES: p.a.w.n SHOP LOUNGE, THE REDROOM AT Sh.o.r.e CLUB, BACK SEAT OF A POLICE CAR, LA CARRETA 24-HOUR TAKEOUT WINDOW, HIBISCUS ISLAND, SOMEONE'S YACHT.

LIQUOR SPONSORS: VARIOUS.

FOOD: EMPANADAS, ROAST SUCKLING PIG, CIGARETTES.

ATTIRE: COWBOY BOOTS.

CELEBRITIES: KANYE WEST, CARMEN ELECTRA, JESSICA SIMPSON, BLACK EYED PEAS.

GIFT BAG: ONE SLIM JIM, ONE SLIM JIM T-SHIRT.

Brett was closing on a big Internet boat deal "with some Mexicans" the weekend of the MTV Video Music Awards, and the one party I'd been invited to was canceled because of storm damage. The publicity buildup for the awards had been extensive. I kept seeing press releases on the fax machine at work that said things like HOTEL VICTOR LANDS A s.p.a.cE IN THIS YEAR'S MOST COVETED GIFT BAG. P. Diddy had flown in to a local marina wearing a rocket pack and a white linen suit to announce the nominees. I couldn't go outside without returning with souvenirs like a free Trick Daddy Frisbee handed to me from the trunk of a Louis Vuittonupholstered muscle car. But my lack of party invitations made me feel sorry for myself. When an event happens in Miami and you have no parties to attend you start to doubt your own self-worth, even if you're a pale myopic person with the salary of a rookie civil servant who has no business at any Miami party, let alone the fancy ones.

Then a friend called from Los Angeles to see if I would go out with his friend, who was in town for the awards. This friend was a Jewish rapper in a hip-hop group called Blood of Abraham, who also co-owned something called a "lifestyle store" in Miami's Design District. The Design District, much like the Wynwood Arts District, was more of a semiotic hypothesis than a reality. Most people still knew it as Little Haiti, and in spite of skyrocketing housing prices it was one of the poorest urban zip codes in America. Average T-shirt price at the store, which closed down within the year: $70.

This friend of a friend, whose MC name was Mazik, picked me up with a cousin or two in a shiny white Land Rover. He was wearing a pink polka-dotted shirt and a green sweater vest. He announced that Kanye West was performing downtown and that we were going to see him. I was wearing cowboy boots and a dress I'd bought at a Savers in Little Rock, but somehow Mazik and the cousins and I managed to talk our way into a p.a.w.nshop-c.u.m-nightclub through leggy models in stilettos. Kanye West showed up for five minutes and then Carmen Electra performed a ch.o.r.eographed dance with four anemic-looking girls in spangled costumes. The free drinks tasted like lemon drops and when we left we were presented with a gift bag containing a Slim Jim and a Slim Jim T-shirt.

We continued on to the beach, to a hotel called Sh.o.r.e Club. Mazik again was on the list. Outside, under a cl.u.s.ter of Moroccan lanterns, I saw Jessica Simpson sitting on a bench looking lonely. She was very small-midget-size, almost, tan and tiny. In the VIP room I saw a member of the Black Eyed Peas get into a fight. My new friends got peripherally involved, in a drunken inept way, but at least they didn't take off their shirts. Somebody else did, at which point Jessica Simpson was whisked away by what looked like a bodyguard detail dressed up as county sheriffs. We left. The following night, Suge Knight would be shot in the kneecap in that very spot.

Miami is connected to the island of Miami Beach by a series of causeways. The General Douglas MacArthur Causeway, I-395, is the main artery into South Beach, the palm treelined promenade that Crockett and Tubbs were always driving down on Miami Vice. I drove back and forth across the causeway almost every day of my time in Miami, and it never lost its air of serenity. Because of Florida's flatness, the sky is bigger there; the clouds pile into endless stacks of white Persian cats and mohair bunnies. The MacArthur is bordered on one side by the port of Miami, where ma.s.sive cruise ships and freighters come and go. When I was heading toward the beach, the view was of glittering white condominiums and yachts. When I was heading toward the city, it was of downtown: luminous skysc.r.a.pers growing up from a rickety forest of cranes, half-finished high-rises, and canvas-draped rebar skeletons.

At night sometimes the moon would rise large and yellow over the water and packs of scarablike motorcyclists on Yamahas would whir around my car, occasionally doing wheelies. Even when traffic was bad, the environment was glossy: the shiny surfaces of moonlight on the water, of streetlights on freshly waxed cars; the palm fronds rustling and the revving of German motors and the glow of LCD screens through tinted windows showing p.o.r.nography.

At the end of the night, inside the marshmallow-white Land Rover, I clutched my Slim Jim gift bag. A row of blue lights flashed behind us. We pulled over and a group of police cars somehow screeched into formation around us, cutting us off in front, reducing traffic on the causeway to a single lane, and leaving our car with two thirds of the highway and a very wide berth on all sides. I'd lost count of how many lemon-drop c.o.c.ktails I'd had, but I was drunk. We were all drunk. I can say fairly confidently that the driver was drunk, and that all the other drivers on the causeway were drunk too. It was 4:30 on a Sat.u.r.day morning, and now we were going to be arrested.

The police had their weapons drawn, and emerged from their cars shielded by bulletproof car doors. They yelled into a loudspeaker and we followed their instructions. I stepped out of the car and held my hands in the air. I walked backward, a breeze rippling the palm fronds and my dress, my eyes on the asphalt where normally cars speeded and now all was quiet. I knelt, gazing up at the soft, purple sky. Then I was cuffed and put into the back of a police car next to an empty pizza box, where a lady cop began demanding information about our firearms.

I was suddenly a lot more impressed with the people I'd been hanging out with. They had weapons? I quickly confessed that there had, in fact, been a fistfight. But then it emerged that no, the police had simply confused our car with another white Land Rover. Someone in that Land Rover had fired shots at a police officer. We were sheepishly released, our drunkenness apparently not enough to merit attention from the law. We drove to Little Havana and ate empanadas.

There was one more party that weekend, on Hibiscus Island. We were transported by boat, and the theme was sort of luau-meets-Vegas: tiki torches, roasted suckling pig, and girls in uniform carrying around piles of loose cigarettes on silver platters. I think American Spirit sponsored the party, but maybe it was Lucky Strike. We removed our shoes and climbed onto a yacht moored against the mansion's back dock. Out in the gulf, Katrina was growing and New Orleanians were preparing to flee, but the Atlantic was quiet now. It was pretty, with the lights and the palm trees and the views of South Beach, and a little rain that would fall for a minute and stop.

Driving Brett and Andy to the Airport DATE: SEPTEMBER 2005.

VENUE: TOYOTA COROLLA.

PHARMACEUTICAL SPONSOR: BRETT.

GIFT BAG: A VERY SMALL ZIPLOC.

Brett and a friend of his, an Australian male model named Andy, were going to Burning Man. I agreed to drive them to the airport. Their flight left early, and when I knocked on his door Brett emerged baggy-eyed and smelling like a mildewed sponge soaked in tequila. We picked up Andy at his girlfriend's. She was also a model, tawny with dark brown eyes and a minimalist figure. As they said good-bye they were orbited by what seemed like a dozen teacup Chihuahuas but might only have been two very light-footed teacup Chihuahuas.

We merged onto the highway. Brett, in the back seat, began emptying his pockets, pulling out bags of pills and empty mini-Ziplocs coated in a residue of white dust.

"Should I put those pills in a container?" asked Andy.

"I guess. I don't know. You think?"

"I guess."

Brett pa.s.sed a baggie of prescription pills to the front seat and Andy put it into an orange case with a prescription on it.

"But what about the cocaine?"

"The cocaine?"

"The cocaine?" I shouted.

"Somebody gave me all this c.o.ke last night. I can't bring it?"

"Don't bring it on the airplane."

"Really?"

They decided there was only one thing to do with the cocaine. As I nervously pulled up to the airport, Brett put what remained in the well next to the gearshift. He looked at his nostrils in the rearview mirror and took a Percocet. I quickly put the baggie in the glove compartment. Off to Burning Man! We waved to each other. I drove to work feeling lonely.

Hurricane Wilma DATE: OCTOBER 2005.

VENUE: TED'S HIDEAWAY, SOUTH BEACH.

Wilma hit Miami in the middle of the night, and by the time I woke in the morning the city was silent, void of electricity. The air felt a way that it would never feel again in Miami: crisp, dry, and cool like a New England fall day. I walked to the beach. Men with surfboards ran past me to catch the only surfable waves there would ever be on South Beach. The wind was still blowing and pelicans loitered miserably, too worn out to flap their wings even when the surfers barreled toward them. Somebody spoke up for the pelicans and ordered everyone to leave them alone while they were tame like this, docile with exhaustion.

People wandered the streets with cameras, taking photos of smashed cars under fallen trees. One parking lot between two buildings had formed a wind tunnel. The cars had piled up like leaves. This was a popular spot with the photographers. My trunk, which had been stuck shut since a British woman in a gleaming chrome SUV rear-ended me, was suddenly open and filled with the branches of a nearby ginkgo tree.

A curfew was called for nightfall and the city forbade driving after dark. My neighborhood bar was crowded and candlelit, but outside the strange autumnal chill remained. My neighbors picked their way through the darkness, stepping over fallen trees. They held flashlights and lanterns and the landscape seemed odd, like they were going to a Halloween party in Sleepy Hollow. The stars were bright over the darkened city.

Some parts of the city were without electricity for weeks, but my place regained power after three days. Miami Beach with its tourists is always a priority. For the remainder of the time I lived in Florida, skysc.r.a.pers had plywood over the places where windows had broken. In poorer neighborhoods blue tarps covered damaged roofs for years. But the significance of Wilma didn't register at the time. Now people say that was the moment when the manna curdled in Miami, when the fragility of its physical location started to affect property values, when the logic of building taller and taller high-rises in a natural disasterp.r.o.ne peninsula started to seem suspect. Wilma wasn't even a real storm, it wasn't an Andrew or a KatrinainNew Orleans, but it was enough.

Art Basel Miami Beach 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and hair gel was invaded by pale androgynous people with Italian gla.s.ses. 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 s.h.i.t, 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 transs.e.xual made of silicone lounging naked in a gla.s.s house in the middle of a swimming pool.

New Year's Eve 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 alb.u.m 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 sungla.s.ses, 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 gra.s.s was cut short like a tennis lawn and tiny white edelweiss-like flowers sprouted. I held my gla.s.s 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.

My Twenty-fifth Birthday DATE: APRIL 2006.