Part 10 (2/2)
Emily Witt.
FROM N + 1.
Villa Vizcaya.
DATE: JULY 2005.
VENUE: VILLA VIZCAYA.
LIQUOR SPONSOR: FLOR DE CAnA RUM.
THE VILLA VIZCAYA is one of those Gatsbyesque single-family mansions that have been converted to event s.p.a.ces. The new owners installed an industrial kitchen to accommodate catering companies and an HVAC system to dissipate the warmth generated by large groups of people. They removed the permanent furniture so gilt chairs could be trucked in for weddings. Guests still had the run of the extensive gardens, but there was no longer anything particularly Gatsbyesque about the place, just a rental tab of $10,000 for a weekend evening.
The Vizcaya was still a very nice event s.p.a.ce. From the parking lot, a jungle of banyans and broad-leafed foliage obscured the house. At night, when picking one's way down a path lit with honeycomb floodlights around the ground, there was a feeling of tropical intrigue, followed by awe when the coral mansion finally emerged from the fronds and the vines, a floodlit beacon in the night. This used to be a Xanadu, a neo-Italianate castle built before Miami was even a city, before Miami Beach was even solid land. Where one person saw a mangrove swamp, the mind behind the Vizcaya saw greatness. Thus the first real estate boom began.
Now another real estate boom was happening, here in Miami, where I had just settled (in the gravitational rather than pioneering sense of the word: for several years I had been sinking in a southerly direction, like the pulp in a gla.s.s of orange juice). This was my first party. I don't remember much-not even what the party was intended to celebrate-and I took bad notes. The mosquitoes were formidable. I was plastered in sweat. The night was thick and hot and the concrete steps in back descended into still, inky water. The moon hung over all of it: the bay, the stone barge, the topiaries. Corporations were the sponsors. They hung banner ads promoting Clamato; girls in miniskirt uniforms served free mojitos with Flor de Cana rum. I picked up a free copy of a magazine called Yachts International. A real-life yacht was moored to the dock out back, and its pa.s.sengers were drunk and tan.
I stood with my friend Krishna, watching fireworks explode over Biscayne Bay, over the girls serving rum, over the maze hedge and the moss-covered cherubs and the coral gazebos. We sipped our drinks and scratched our mosquito bites. He gazed at the explosions and said, ”The fireworks were so much better at the condo opening I went to last weekend.”
Spa Opening.
DATE: JULY 2005.
VENUE: HOTEL VICTOR.
GIFT BAG: YLANG-YLANG-SCENTED BATH CUBE, THONG UNDERWEAR.
I moved to Miami from Arkansas to work at an alt-weekly newspaper. My first order of business, after finding an apartment, was to make friends. I appealed to a girl from work to rescue me from loneliness, and she sent me an e-mail about a spa opening at a new boutique hotel on Ocean Drive, steps away from the mansion where Gianni Versace had met his violent end.
I walked up from my new apartment past the deco and neon, past Lummus Park and the homeless people and mounds of malt liquor bottles beneath the stands of palm trees. It wasn't yet dark-this was an early weeknight party. My co-worker checked us in with the tan girl at the door with the clipboard. From then on there would always be tan girls with clipboards. We were led to an elevator past tanks filled with pulsing jellyfish lit a glowing indigo. The elevator went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt area where the spa was, and when the door slid open an impossibly tall drag queen greeted us, dressed only in white towels except for the diamonds that twinkled from her earlobes.
Petrova, a woman with a thick Russian accent, stepped in front of the towel-bedecked drag queen and handed us champagne gla.s.ses. She said they contained cuc.u.mber martinis, but I think it might have been cuc.u.mber and 7Up. ”Welcome,” murmured Petrova. She took us on a tour that was like a ride at Disney World. Curtains were pulled aside: behind one was a naked man on a slab of heated marble. Behind the next was a woman having her b.r.e.a.s.t.s gently ma.s.saged. ”Ew,” said my co-worker. We stayed twenty minutes, then collected our gift bags, which contained thong underwear and an effervescent bath cube. I didn't have a bathtub.
Hurricane Katrina.
DATE: AUGUST 2005.
VENUE: MY APARTMENT BUILDING, SOUTH BEACH.
LIQUOR SPONSOR: MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR BRETT.
PHARMACEUTICAL SPONSOR: IBID.
FOOD: FROZEN PIZZA.
ATTIRE: SWEATPANTS.
Maybe n.o.body remembers now that Hurricane Katrina hit Miami before New Orleans, but it did, as a baby hurricane. Then it crawled over to the Gulf of Mexico and turned into a monster.
On the afternoon of Katrina I waited too long to wrap my computer in a trash bag and leave work, and the outer bands of the storm were laying into the city by the time I drove across the causeway from downtown to Miami Beach, my car shuddering in the wind. I understood I was to buy nonperishable food items.
The grocery store was chaos, and I was completely soaked from the trip across the parking lot. While I considered the selection of almonds, the power went out. A dramatic hush fell upon us. One minute the store was all beeping scanners and fluorescent lights, the next darkness and total silence but for the wind and rain. I ate some almonds. In the darkness someone broke a wine bottle.
We were told to move to the front of the store. Minutes pa.s.sed. Rain pounded, wind howled. Suddenly a generator turned on, creating just enough electricity to bathe the store in low-key mood lighting, enough for us to grab bottled water and get out but not enough to forget that the hurricane was something to be taken seriously.
Outside, Biscayne Bay, normally tranquil, was a mountainous expanse of gray and white in extreme motion. Plastic bags flew through the air. The high-rises looked exposed and frail, the dozens of cranes in Miami's skyline like toothpick structures that would come cras.h.i.+ng down with the first gust of storm. Once safely home, I put on my pajamas and uncorked a bottle of wine. I opened my door to a blast of wind, rain, and sand that filled my apartment with leaves. I ran across to my neighbor Brett's place, on the other side of the stoop. He opened his door and his apartment filled with leaves.
A friend in Miami once referred to Florida as ”America's funnel,” and that's what I'd thought of when I met Brett. He was in his mid-thirties and had dyed black hair, stained teeth, and a permanent sunburn, and was almost always smoking on our building's stoop and drinking from a bottle of Tequila Sauza. His apartment was draped in fabric of different psychedelic patterns. He had been looking forward to Burning Man. He had played in an early-nineties grunge rock band of some repute-they had toured with the Smas.h.i.+ng Pumpkins-but things hadn't worked out very well. In a moment of idle gossip one afternoon, my landlord Dave told me that Brett had woken up one morning after a night of substance abuse in New York and found his girlfriend dead next to him. So he took their cat and moved to Miami, and now the cat was in its waning days and Brett was selling boats on the Internet, supposedly.
Once I left him my rent check to give to Dave, since I was at the office most days. The next morning Dave, a tan surfer type from Boca Raton who never seemed upset about anything, knocked on my door. ”Um,” he said, embarra.s.sed. ”Don't give your rent check to Brett.”
But Brett was the social nexus of our building, which was a low-rent holdout in a neighborhood at the bottom tip of South Beach that had gotten much, much fancier since Brett moved in. Our building was funny-the walls of most of the apartments had variously themed murals: underwater scenes, jungle scenes, and, my favorite, in the studio behind mine, hot-air balloons and clouds. My guess is that the landlords originally painted the murals as a sort of spell against the crack-addicted undead that were said to have ruled the neighborhood in the early nineties. The building even used to have some kind of tiki setup on the roof, but the door to the roof was padlocked when the rule of law finally arrived, sometime around the turn of the century. My apartment was painted the colors of a beach ball and included sloping wood floors, bamboo shades, and a mosaic tile counter. It was a one-room studio and a total dump, but it had beach style.
Our two-story baby-blue building was surrounded by towering new condominiums of gleaming white stucco, one of which had a helicopter landing pad. I saw a helicopter land exactly once in the two years I lived there. Rent was month-to-month, which meant I was the only person in the building with a salary.
Upstairs lived a call girl with whom Brett was good friends. She would come down sometimes in her evening finery and ask Brett if he would ”do her,” meaning would he please fasten her black lace bustier to maximize the lift of her fake b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Brett would flash his tobacco-stained teeth, hook her into her corset, pat her b.u.m, and rea.s.sure her that he would do her anytime. They were fond of each other.
She didn't like me, with good reason. She lived above me, in a jungle-themed studio. Once, when I was sitting on my couch on a Sat.u.r.day morning, a thin stream of amber-colored liquid began to patter steadily on my windowsill from somewhere upstairs. f.u.c.k this, I thought. I went upstairs and banged on her door, asking why somebody was peeing out the window. It was that kind of building. She said that she had spilled a cup of tea. ”Peeing out the window!” she yelled. ”What kind of trash do you think I am?” I apologized, but the damage was done. Later she moved back home to Michigan, leaving in a sweats.h.i.+rt, with no makeup on. But that was much later, when everyone was leaving.
Brett's friends were always hanging around, none of them model citizens, but I would regularly cross our foyer to chat with them, because being alone at the end of the day sometimes felt unbearable. Two months in, my friend-making campaign was going only so-so.
The night Hurricane Katrina hit Miami, Brett had a pizza defrosting in the oven-the power wasn't yet knocked out-and he dispensed Tombstone, Percocet, and beer. This combo hit me quickly, and I soon staggered home. It was raining so hard that a puddle had seeped under my door. As the streetlights flickered and the eye of the storm pa.s.sed over the city, I slept.
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