I used to spend a decent amount of
time in Miami for various reasons, living in North Florida, the real
south, I could always find a few reasons to escape the calm and sometimes
repressive culture embodied there. Miami was a breath of fresh air.
Most of the times I was down there it was alone, I used to work in
Key West all week then take the rental car up A1A to south beach, or I was
with a woman. The latter was always a problem. I was never the type
of man to stray while in a relationship but with all that eye candy
around, at times it was difficult to keep your attention focused on your
own personal version of sweets. So one weekend, at this point
totally single with zero prospects, my best friend and I, he being totally
single and recently divorced, ventured down to do Miami right. He
had never set foot inside the city limits and was anxious from my stories
of South American hotties, booze filled nights and smoking days on the
beach and around the pool.
It didn't start out as planned.
It was raining and not in the usual south Florida, late afternoon
way; it was torrential and all day. So we drove out to the shops at
Bal Harbor which may sound like some typeof suburban hell, and to Carpaccio for
lunch. Eating in a Mall is not usually my idea of fine cuisine and
great atmosphere but here, it is. The shops there are basically Madison
Avenue and Caarpaccio is Nello, actually a recently closed down Madison Avenue
establishment La Goulue has an outpost next door. There's a lot of
money, a lot of fashion and where those two reside there is always
beautiful (while maybeshallow) looking women. Within minutes of sitting
down my friend's apprehensions were put to rest when we were seated to a
table of South American women drinking Bellinis and dressed for Saturday
night at one in the afternoon.
After we drove back to The Delano, a
place that we for some reason couldn't pronounce and resorted to calling it
Del-More as in the character who Rambo goes to visit and finds dead in the
first Rambo First Blood, we went for a swim in the ocean even in the rain,
until it was time to get ready for the night and head out. The
Delano at the time was the place to be and for good reason. The lobby has
thirty foot high ceilings, flowing curtains and applies the original
Art Decco architecture with
a more modern style. There's a few bars, couches and the like which
in a few hours would be filled with beautiful people or at least those
trying to be. Coming down after changing "Rich Girls" was
the first song I heard. It was the year that it was released and
probably all over the radio (do they play songs on the radio anymore?) but
walking down and into the lobby, scoping the scene with the bass thumping
in the background while Donald Cummings muttered "We walk around,
pretending..." people started moving in slow motion, glamour was
multiplied by an exponent of ten, in my mind I was ten pounds lighter and
a thousand times richer. Years later Heineken would bottle that
feeling in their commercial with The Asteroids Galaxy Tour.
That was the first of many times and
as Miami is, you either feel very cool or very uncool in that town, usually it
depends on the amount of cash you have on you or the woman on your arm.
But that weekend we didn't have either. We had a beat up old Range
Rover and two boys that have been kinda beat up themselves over the years but
when The Virgins came on, that bass, static guitar and I don't give a fuck what
you think voice came on we were in the right and we were in the now.
