In South Beach: Me, Myself and Everyone

I’m coming atchu live from South Beach, easily one of my five favorite places in these here United States of Amurca.

When people think South Beach, they most likely think Ocean Drive or Collins or Washington. And that’s perfectly fine. Those streets are marquee and rather enjoyable. In fact, I’d like to make them my wife. But, if you’ve never been to South Beach, there’s also this street, or area I guess, called Lincoln Blvd. It’s a street that acts like a mall (if malls were hip and not huge testaments to western commerce where white kids go to max out Daddy’s Amex and black kids go to loot disturbingly long white T-shirts that tend to get caught under their news Js when they walk). Picture Georgetown’s M Street or Buckhead’s Peachtree or Hollywood’s Sunset…but then picture those streets without a road separating both sides of the street, instead, there’s a huge court yard the runs down the middle and the very center of the courtyard are strings of tables and chairs and couches, so it looks like one long café in the middle of these restaurants and shops and stores and galleries. I feel real strongly about Lincoln Blvd. I feel like, if I were a street, I’d wanna be Lincoln Blvd. I sincerely feel this way.

There are many things that make me a unique, substantial and magnificent human being – things that mask the fact that I’m actually vile. Of these, memorizing Keith Jarrett piano solos, sculpting sculptures for the Modern Museum of Art and French-kissing are mighty high on that list. Nestled between amazing abilities like being able to do 13 consecutive squat thrusts in 7 seconds and spitball quantum physics with nerdballs at MIT, is my profound ability to entertain myself in the midst of people entertaining each other. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, I discarded any inkling of discomfort when it comes to eating at a restaurant alone, going to the movies alone, sippin a good single malt at a bar alone, catching live music and doing just about everything entertainment has to offer…alone.

It’s puzzling. I grew up with five siblings and spent 10 years in an 8x8 room with two little brothers (Chrish smelled like spit because he used to suck his fingers until he was teen. A smelled like sour crotch because he didn’t like showers and used incessantly scratch his itchy sack and then randomly touch every inch of every inanimate object in our closet of a room). I also grew up with too many friends to even bother counting. One might the think such a fella would have trouble hangin with himself. I am no such fella. We’ll dig deeper into this some other time. That ramble was to preface the utter enjoyment of hangin with myself on Lincoln Blvd Friday night.

After sweatin out my polo in the Miami mug I settled on Nexxt Café. I asked to be seated in this little nook in the corner and sat outside for the next two hours, drinking, eating and chilling by myself, but doing a whole lot of observing and Patriot Act-level eavesdropping. It’s in these setting that a black man came to some random realizations and rejuvenated some dormant thoughts.

Miami is the US Capitol for androgynous men. I couldn’t help but notice this. I know male models run rampant around this city, but why is it cool for them to wear jeans that were really made for Shakira? I feel a certain way about the new dress code and…I gotta say, the feelings not too good. There’s an obvious euro-influence on the new dress code. In fact, there’s no doubt that men in Paris and Milan and Barcelona have been dressing this way for a few years now and it’s finally coming stateside. That’s the way fashion trends trickle. But shouldn’t there be a firm belief throughout humankind that it is not appropriate for men to wear hip-hugging jeans and baby-doll, midriff T-shirts?

These men aren’t gay, although I’m sure some of them are. But the startling thing about this frightening spiral toward rampant aesthetic androgyny is the fact that many of these men are attracted to women and – this’ll make you bite your bottom lip – women are attracted to them. Some of these men were canoodling with flyest of airborn honeys.

True story: Last night my server approached and asked me what I wanted to drink. Because I was relaxing and it was South Beach and I tire of always being cutting-edge and radical and kinda awesome, I was gonna be a sheep and order some $12 martini that no man would buy other than a cornball or a gay. Then, in walked a man wearing the same jeans Fergie wore in that video where this black boy in leather comes pn the screen, out out of nowhere, and asks her what she’s gonna do with all that breast inside her shirt. I mean, these were the exact same jeans. And he was a T-shirt that came ‘this close’ to exposing his navel. He looked as close to women as possible, without going over board and dressing in drag and getting all Felicty Huffman on niggas. There was no way he’s not a gay, I thought. So instead of ordering the sheeptini, I ordered a Makers Mark, my staple. The order was less out of desire as it was out of some deviant, misguided defense mechanism. I’m thinking, “I’m here alone, gazing aimlessly at any and everyone and instead of having a mustache to provide my masculine scamp, I can’t seem to get past this Puerto Rican-whisker stage…I better order some thing brown, in a short glass.”

In a priceless twist his dinner companion arrived around the same time as my Makers. She looked portugese and she rooked marvelous. She looked so downright good that my innards reacted and I got the bubble-guts for a few secs. I kinda stared at this exotic beauty for a moment, just long enough to replay her image in some daydream next week. Obviously this guy was a gay and she was a fag-hag, I wouldn’t be disrespecting him if he happened to catch me ogling this damsel. Then he grabbed her hands, started staring at her, she changed seats so they were kitty-corner to each other and then, this androgynous creature started france-kissing this like there was no tomorrow…I mean, like, literally the world was set to end today and france-kissing helped them cope with the cloud of this impending doom.

That’s when it hit me that there are women, very good looking, feminine women that don’t mind these new androgynies. After that I started noticing all these men, wearing booty jeans and body shirts, sporting women on their arms. “There’s nothing good about this,” I said to myself.

About midway through my evening at Nexxt, after I had sampled some double-stuffed potatoes rolls, some chicken madeira and was waiting on my apple tart, a really fat woman walked by. She was basically shaped just like me. Same height, same morbidly obese body parts…although, she didn’t have my six-pack abs, but her midsection was round, sloppy and disgusting like my identical-twin, Benson. Keeping in line with being the female version Vince, she was very pretty like I’m really handsome. What struck me about this young lady was that she was struttin SO hard up-n-down Lincoln Blvd. I mean, homegirl was on the catwalk. And I’m thinking, “You mean even really fat broads have model-walks in Miami?”

At a table about 10 feet away, there was a nice eclectic group enjoying dinner. At the end closes to me there were four girls. A lovely black number, two gorgeous Latinas and a sloppy Irish-broad resting her breasts on the table like she was a church-going Big Momma. Soon they get up. The Irish-broad lifts her breast off the table, but doesn’t bother to lift her gut from over her belt and also doesn’t bother pulling down her shirt. I shake my head. After I finish judging the Irish-broad I notice that the three women that got up with her were all, like, 5-11. It was kind of unsettling. One moment they appeared to be your average really good looking women enjoying a couple bottles of white wine with their friends. Then they get up for the meeting in the ladies room and it’s 8th & Ocean. Then it seemed like for the next 36 minutes, 5 out of every 8 women that passed by were the same height as Allen Iverson.

A little earlier in the evening I saw a group of black women -- dressed in the best ghetto fashion Miami had to offer – walk by Nexxt. It was a pack of maybe four or five. It jolted me, you know, seeing a group of black girls. Miami is one of those great cities where you have representatives from every country. I bet there’s even some from China that lives in Miami, not to mention Kazhikstan. The two men sitting at the table in front of me were talking in some eastern-European language. When I was talking to Vino on my cell for a bit, I was talking in broken English. There was a table on the other side of the café with a party made up of people that were clearly from some northern African country. It’s just a beautiful thing and something I immediately started to miss, reflecting on the lack of diversity most parts of Florida.

But seeing that group of black women shocked me and its because I just didn’t see many of them. South Beach overwhelms you with Latinos, not so much blacks. It’s bittersweet. You’d like to see more black women, but Latinas are unique in that they blend, amazingly, the hallmark body-parts of white and black women into what is often one seamlessly divine shape. One after another they walked by looking blessed and they knew it.

I started thinking: all these lovely Latinas aware of their beauty, fat women walking like Naomi Campbell, all these tall 8th & Ocean chicks – Miami is stuck on beauty. As much as I love South Beach, I wondered if I’d tire of frivolous atmosphere.

I’ve never really stopped to think how my family appears when we go out to eat. Never bothered to spend to much time analyzing how things usually proceed, either, other than acknowledging the fact that we typically have a jolly-grand time.

After midnight, a group of four sat down at the table vacated by the Portuguese chick and her androgynous boyfriend. It appeared to be a mother, a father, a daughter and another woman. But I couldn’t get the relationships nailed down for the life of me. Because, judging by seating arrangements and interaction, the fourth women could have been an aunt or maybe she was the teenage girl’s mother and sister to the husband or wife. I spent a good deal of time doing knowledge on this and out of exasperation, and a bit of irritation, I decided the mother-father-daughter family was taking the fourth woman out to eat as a Thank You for getting the daughter in Florida International University. You see, the fourth wheel was the girl’s guidance counselor. That’s when the daughter tapped the fourth wheel on the shoulder and said, “Mom, move your plate, you’re not giving Uncle Carlos any room.” The family tree had taken root.

As I observed them interact I noticed that they didn’t talk a lot. I mean, there were 5 minute stretches where the whole table was silent and they’d all be individually doing what I was doing or twirling their glasses of water. When they were taking their first couple bites of food, they didn’t even offer each to taste their dish or ask how the others’ dishes tasted. It was kinda sad, to tell you the truth. There are few themes that run throughout the majority of the world’s culture. But in most countries, I always thought that family meals were joyous occasions. I mean, weren’t those scenes in dramas where the families sit around the dining room table and force three or four monotone words out there mouths to break the silence…weren’t those dramatizations? You mean, most households are like that? And this scene, it was even more odd. At first, I was so delighted to see this family out on Lincoln close to midnight, about to snatch some grub. They must be a really close group that enjoys each others’ company, I thought. Then they hit me with the dinner scene from a Lifetime movie and threw my whole equilibrium off. Now why you wanna go and do that now, huh?

As sobering as that was, nothing was more sobering than the before-and-after reality reinforced by the three females. They looked to be Dominican. The daughter was a pretty girl. Very nice shape. Could pass for 21, but she drank water while the others drank alcohol. I figure she was somewhere between 17-19 years old. Just about to hit her prime. The world is hers. But that world stops spinning and for Latinas, it doesn’t stop spinning and stay still for a while. It automatically reverses. Whereas they are, perhaps, the most beautiful ethnicity during that 18-35 stage; it’s like they hit 40 and suddenly they look like they stole my shape and Che Guevara’s mustache. As the pretty Dominican girl looked on as her mom and aunt pounded Coronas, she seemed to be remarkably unsuicidal. Teenage girls aren’t always the most optimistic creatures, this girls half-full mentality was character-victory.

Remember those remarkable skills I have that I was telling you about? Well, I’m sure you already knew that I can read minds. And if you don’t know, now you know. That pretty young Dominican thang was planning to beat the odds, buck genetics. She was thinking “Maybe if I lay-off the ales I won’t look like a Spanish Jerry Stiller when I’m 38.”

That’s when I put my credit card and receipt in my pocket and stepped off.