The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Part 12

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 s.h.i.t 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 racc.o.o.n, and he just let out a slow "Whoa." Then I ran over the racc.o.o.n. In the rearview mirror I watched the racc.o.o.n 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. Hanc.o.c.k 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. k.u.mquat 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.

Nightly Barbecue, Guantanamo Bay DATE: MAY 2006.

VENUE: LEEWARD DORMITORIES, GUANTaNAMO 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 Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo. 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 Guantanamo 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 c.o.c.kpit, since one sat practically inside it. The windows were pockmarked and scratched. The engine thrummed a steady ba.s.s 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 Guantanamo, 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 Jose 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 a.s.sortment 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.

NBA Finals 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.

Fidel Puts Raul in Charge 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 Cafe 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.

Dinner with a Psychic DATE: SEPTEMBER 2006.

VENUE! THE HOME OF UNIVISION'S MORNING SHOW'S VISITING PSYCHIC.

I was writing about the first h.o.m.os.e.xual 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.

Weeknight Shindig at Brett's DATE: SEPTEMBER 2006.

VENUE! OUR APARTMENT BUILDING.

This year Brett came back from Burning Man with an announcement: he had fallen in love. Kellie, an eighteen-year-old from Truckee, California, arrived shortly thereafter. She immediately found work as a c.o.c.ktail waitress and started supporting him. I gave her my old driver's license so she could get into bars. We had other news as well: our building was going condo.

Art Basel Miami Beach DATE: DECEMBER 2006.

VENUE! Sh.o.r.e CLUB.

This year I went out a little more at Art Basel. I went to a Vanity Fair party. We got rubber bracelets, like Lance Armstrong testicular cancer bracelets, but hot pink and stamped VANITY FAIR. My aunt, who lives in southwest Florida and paints pictures of children on beaches flying kites, came to see the art, but what excited her most was watching someone write a $400,000 check in a particleboard boothlet.

A Celebration of the Jade Collection of Thi-Nga, Vietnamese Princess in Exile DATE: FEBRUARY 2007.

VENUE! THE SETAI, COLLINS AVENUE.

The paper a.s.signed me an investigative piece: discover the true ident.i.ty of Princess Thi-Nga, a Miami Beach philanthropist and supposed member of the exiled imperial family of Vietnam. She was on the board of the Ba.s.s Museum of Art, where the parties were always sponsored by Absolut Vodka. Her collection of ancient jade sculpture was on display at the Ba.s.s at the time, which some people saw as a conflict of interest. My editor thought she might be a fraud. I failed to uncover much evidence of this. I failed to uncover much evidence at all, actually. It appeared n.o.body was paying close attention to the lineage of the former royal family of Vietnam. I too didn't really care.

I met Thi-Nga at the Setai, the hotel where my friend Krishna worked. A room at the Setai cost upward of $1,000 a night. Its bar was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and its couches upholstered with manta ray skins, or something like that. According to Krishna, when a guest of the Setai arrived at Miami International Airport, he or she had the choice of being chauffeured in a Bentley or a Hummer (a question of personal style). In the car was a wide selection of bottled water brands and an iPod.

Thi-Nga was launching her jade sculpture exhibition with an elaborate party at the hotel. I met her there for breakfast the day before the party. I ate a $12 bowl of muesli. It was the most delicious bowl of muesli I have ever eaten.

For her party, Thi-Nga had rented an elephant named Judy. Adorned with gemstones, Judy led a parade down Collins Avenue on Miami Beach that also included dancers: Thai ones with pointy golden hats and splayed fingers and a Chinese lion that batted its paper eyelashes to the rhythm of cymbals. The princess rode in a silver Jaguar convertible behind them, seated next to the mayor of Miami Beach, waving to confused pedestrians who tentatively waved back. Then all her guests went to the Setai and ate salmon.

Brett Moves Out DATE: APRIL 2007.

This party is in fact only theoretical. My neighborly relationship with Brett had deteriorated to the point of mere formality, so I'm not sure if he had a good-bye party or not. I hope he had a big party, where the lava lamps oozed and the cigarette b.u.t.ts acc.u.mulated and the dollar bills were dusted in cocaine. Our building was depopulated now. The call girl was gone; the dumb stoner who had been my accomplice in the murder of the racc.o.o.n was gone. The apartments upstairs had sold for phenomenal amounts of money. My apartment had been purchased by a tennis pro, who informed me that I could consider him a landlord upgrade. I took him at his word and purchased the air-conditioning unit with the highest Consumer Reports rating, paid the alcoholic handyman who hung around the neighborhood to install it, and deducted the whole production from my rent check. Going condo was amazing.

Unless you were Brett. Things weren't going well for Brett, who was still unemployed and being supported by his teenage girlfriend. He and Kellie had recently been arrested for driving someone else's car that happened to have a felony-size quant.i.ty of crystal meth in the glove compartment. I encountered them on our stoop after they had been released on bail. Apparently everything would be all right; they had agreed to rat on some drug dealer. But still, this on top of moving. They were heading up to 8th Street, a part of South Beach that remarkably had retained its seedy character, and whose apartments, though as expensive as everything else in Miami, were terrible to live in. I'd had a friend who lived on Brett's new block; her floor was often inexplicably littered with millipede exoskeletons. She would gamely sweep up the hard brown sh.e.l.ls and claim that they were harmless, but I vowed that I would draw the line of s.h.i.tty-apartment-living at mysterious worm infestations.

Then one day Brett was gone, and the landlords were happily ripping out the interior of his apartment. One of them, Dave, told me it had been a relief.

"You should have seen the bathroom. Drug addicts. It's disgusting."

Very stupidly, I had never thought of Brett as an addict, just as a guy who did drugs. A certain kind of Miami guy who liked to party. But now Brett was gone. All traces of him were replaced, in a matter of weeks, with granite countertops and track lighting.

I saw him one more time that summer, on 5th Street, when I knew I would be leaving Miami. I was walking home from the gym when I was waylaid by a torrential downpour, the kind where I could see the violent wall of water approaching from across the street. I waited under an overhang, staring at nothing, until it retreated. In the dripping aftermath, the sidewalks gray and clean, the palm trees still quivering, I encountered Brett on a street corner. Brett wasn't a pessimist. Everything was going great, he said, the new apartment was fantastic. Later, when the recession came, I took comfort in knowing that, like me, Brett was probably all right, because Brett owned nothing.

That was the thing about boom times that later became clear: We now know that boom times don't feel like boom times. They feel like normal times, and then they end. Particularly if one is not a direct beneficiary of the excess wealth and one's salary is measly to nonexistent, boom times are just the spectacle of other people's reckless spending. Their gluttony was my gluttony of course-only a bore would have abstained from the festivities-but their downfall was little more than an abstraction from the vantage point of one with no a.s.sets.

Our downfalls would not involve grand narratives of repossession or foreclosure, just a steadily diminishing ability to keep some fundamental part of the city at bay. In heady days, we conquered Miami, carving out the mangroves, digging up the ocean bottom and slathering it on a sandbar, molding concrete into skysc.r.a.pers, pumping refrigerated air through miles of metal windpipes and over gla.s.s coffee tables and white couches. But here, now, as those with no a.s.sets fled to low-rent holdouts, inland from the beach to paved-over swamps, recession only meant a slow infiltration: worms burrowing through the floor and dying, spores drifting through vents, and terracotta roof tiles uplifted by the autumn winds.

My Last Day.

DATE: AUGUST 2007..

The Corolla was packed up, and as I was about to leave, one of those terrific summer rainstorms. .h.i.t. I lay next to my boyfriend on his bed (for by then I had a boyfriend), watching the rain pound against the windows, the palms lean into the wind, and the cat purr between us. Of the whole tableau, the only thing I antic.i.p.ated missing was the cat. The relationship was ending, my job was ending, and the real estate boom had already ended. I had gotten ornery in the last months in Miami. If another interviewee told me, as we drove in his golf cart through a maze of pink stucco on top of a leveled mangrove grotto, that he "lived in paradise," I thought I might wrestle the wheel from him and plunge us both into the algae blooms of a fertilizer-polluted drainage ca.n.a.l. So I left the place where baby sea turtles mistake the floodlights of condos for the rising sun, where the dogs are small, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s are big, and the parties are ornamented with drag queens in bubble baths.

When the rain stopped I drove past suburbs until I hit the Everglades, then emerged into suburbs again on the other side.

Contributors' Notes.

Notable Travel Writing of 2010.

Contributors' Notes.

Andre Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir and the collection of essays False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. His latest collection of essays is Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (2011). Aciman has also co-auth.o.r.ed and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit, and has written a novel, Call Me by Your Name. Born in Alexandria, he lived in Italy and France. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University and Bard College and is currently the chair of the Graduate Center's doctoral program in Comparative Literature, CUNY, and the director of the Writers' Inst.i.tute there. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New Republic.

Ben Austen is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and writes as well for The Atlantic, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, GQ Popular Science, and Wired. Born in Chicago and raised there, he currently lives in Tennessee.

David Baez is a freelance writer and a graduate of Columbia Journalism School currently working on a book about his recovery from alcoholism and his relationship with his Nicaraguan father.

Mischa Berlinski is the author of Fieldwork: A Novel.

Christopher Buckley is the author of fourteen books, including Thank You for Smoking and Losing Mum and Pup. His awards include the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Washington Irving Prize for Literary Excellence. His novel They Eat Puppies, Don't They? will be published in May 2012.

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on the New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for the New York Times Magazine. Ms. Dowd joined the New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983.

Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He lives, writes, teaches, and edits the literary travel writing journal Nowhere (nowheremag.com) in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction, essays, and nonfiction have been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, Narrative, and The Literary Review, among others. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2008 and 2010 for fiction and nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. Last summer he completed a two-thousand-mile sailing voyage along the Maine coast and he is working on a travel narrative based on the trip. He is also a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Venice Biennale (2009), Ma.s.s MoCA (2008), and New York City's Anonymous Gallery (2009).

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of the magazine N + 1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, a novel. He was born in Moscow and has traveled extensively in the former Eastern Bloc but has never been to Cairo or Mexico City, where, it is said, the traffic is even worse.

Tom Ireland is an editor with the Office of Archaeological Studies in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His most recent book is The Man Who Gave His Wife Away (2010).