Personal Hits #6

Miami Beach

On vacation, we walk. On Miami Beach vacation we walk on a sandy pink brick strip parallel to the beach, called ‘The Beachwalk’.

Beach. Beach. Beach.

It’s an enduring holiday type, a grand tradition for winter-skinned Middle Americans like us.

Crave the cats as we do when we’re gone, we need to be here.

Topless male sexies, possessed of a malamute drive, overtake us, panting on this beach-walk. Wheels with people on them, service workers speed walking to time clocks, all want us to go a little faster.

Palm trees, palm readers unhoused citizens line this route. We can’t help but be a little distracted by it all. Into this sun-dappled dream parade of physical ambition we insert, what must be to them, our loping midwestern pace.

All of this, overseen by police spy bulbs on poles. All of this overseen and at the service of a perky, ominous, life-giving star.

Someday soon it will be a habitat for very tough wading birds pecking for little fish.

This year, first day, we were almost hit by a parade of brightly colored vehicles approaching from 18th street where the road meets The Beachwalk then turns into a path to the ocean.

Boyfriend put an arm out to stop me.

“Careful- it’s the tropic freeze motorcade.”

We’re not sandy beach people. I fear the ocean that will soon swallow this town. Boyfriend has a sun-vulnerable skin type. Sand has replicated in our lives for years after having beached. ‘Feeling the sand between my toes’ would require I actually like my toes. Not sandy beach people, but we walk the edge of this culture because that’s what pale, cat-loving vacationers like us do here and it is, all things considered, a very good time.

Being on a Miami Beach vacation also means walking the sidewalks of another beach-parallel route called Collins Avenue. On this passage, the tradition asks you to engage in a peacocking that displays your current good taste. The colors are muted, peachy, slightly burnt, the fits, flowing and breathe-y on the ladies, breasts occasionally unsheathed and winking. Some gentlemen will display a matching set of flower patterns on top and bottom unless they're wearing a tailored suit or deliberate jogger- casual with intentional latin buzz cut.

Friendless MAGA edgelords, Hasidic girlfriends and working class cruisers before sail. All of them a displaying plumage that identifies their ideals.

Boyfriend notices the culture clash. The method of walking, the side of the walkway chosen, the infant carriages, often a Bugaboo Donkey5 or a twin model, if The Lord has seen it fit to bless you. People walk in tandem like we do or they walk in a loose group, led by an alpha, the weaker troop members trailing, obedient to whatever order they’ve worked out.

Wherever we walk, Past noted personalities like famous TV hotel power-top Anthony Melchiorri, generations of colorful on-trend mommies, through groups of plotting, clucking teens, we're all walking to our own kind of 'hard candy bikini,' a nexus of joy that melts eventually into, one hopes, an ecstasy that will last into the night.

And we all stay in a hotel.

Each year ours has gotten shittier. Since our last stay it's been acquired by the self-proclaimed 'largest hotel franchisor in the world, purveyors of vision and passion’, The Wyndham Group, of Quality Inn fame. Now they’re charging double for less, as is the tradition of passionate American visionaries.

In 2020 when we booked it, pre- covid, it was an affordable, optimistic  place with a cute Japanese hamburger joint in the basement and sexy rooftop swimming bar,  now all closed.

There isn't a wisp of a hint that anyone who works there gives a fuck, but I do love these angels. The lady checking us in wore a t-shirt that said, unapologetically, ‘I Dont Care'.

If only I could have bought such candor to the service jobs I've worked.

The front porch of this place has been drained by Wyndham of the life it once had.  Once furnished with swings and colorful chairs in conversation groups, it now features overcharged families waiting for an Uber to take them to the cruise port.

Blessings upon us all.

It's peripheral yard is now the ostensible smoking lounge for the staff of the super luxury hotel across the way. They feign eye contact and slink as far into the alley as soon as they see a guest coming.

You are seen, you are loved.

Miami Beach. Glorious, sunny, pay-gated Miami Beach gives the working class traveler a kind of sea water thirst only possible by dangling fresh luxury and promises.

It's inaccessible unless you’ve somehow made it into some kind of courtyard  - for a perfect, meal-priced Old Fashioned, or a real croissant made by people who know.

Gated and fastened, this town, so shirtless and exposed, is dependent on perfect interiors, on its zippers being tight.

Even its dumpsters require a pass code.

Our best times happen on bodega patios, drinking Twisted Tea, feeding wads of panettone the chic Miami Beach pigeons.

We also over-tip. No doubt about it, the fact that we can be here is weighted with the knowledge of our own privilege. Look no further than to the nervous, overbearing waiter at the Turkish restaurant, to the bartender at our favorite luxe hotel lobby bar who knows we wait all year for that one perfect drink. We bear the weight of the knowledge that even the bartender at the sumptuous, moody hotel, lives day to day on that gratuity line.

The real courtyard is the courtyard in your mind Miami Beach lets you into, where your hair is on fleek, your muscles shredded and you’re the kind of young person you thought you should have been. The sun that’s trying to kill you still gives a dopamine hug in a place like this, its soft shards massaging you through shade-stingy palm fronds.

You’re nursing a twenty dollar rum drink in a low-slung wicker chair through a biodegradable straw and you’re yelling at your friends about how happy you are over ear crushing salsa.

Babies are handed to brilliant, motherless nannies in three thousand dollar suites, martini glasses are hand washed by PHDs and somewhere else there’s a problem but not here, not now.