I ride back downtown, coming aboveground at Union Square. The city's biggest spontaneous memorial sprang up here mere hours after the attacks. By now, the place where crowds gathered to stand in silence has devolved over the weeks into a skeleton crew of die-hard youngsters engaged in drumming circles, Ultimate Frisbee games, and the free exchange of genital warts. I pass by a small group of them, playing guitar and still sitting on the grass even though it's promising to be a cold night. Littered around them are the wax plugs of candle ends, empty votive cups scattered here and there on the ground, and stray leaflets of the missing, sodden with rain, baked by the sun, now illegible and curling like dying leaves. Surrounded by all these multicolored bits and pieces, these kids could be the last stragglers at a fantastic party. Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.
BEACH BUMMER
T
he scene is by now part of our collective unconscious: the earth being churned from underneath, a snaking runnel suddenly rupturing forth like a keloid scar. The burrowing stops abruptly and up from the ground pops Bugs Bunny, jubilant, his holiday props of pail and shovel at the ready. “Miami Beach!” he declaims. “Yippee! Hooray! Yahoo-y!” and off he runs, racing across the burning sand to the water. But Bugs has indeed taken that left turn at Albuquerque and is nowhere near Miami Beach. Hours later, we find him trudging half dead across a desert, searching in vain for an ocean.
Some might interpret this as a parable about the miragelike futility of dreams. Still others might choose to see it as nothing more than the wascally wabbit's chance to indulge in his penchant for drag in order to outsmart that hot-tempered bedouin he will meet later on in the cartoon. Personally, the message I take away is that, in contrasting it favorably with the punishing emptiness of the vast, arid Sahara, what Bugs Bunny and his creators don't know about Miami Beach is a whole lot.
It is not the fault of South Beach that I am a joy-obliterating erotophobe. That it comprises some of my deepest aversions (heat, direct sunlight, and a pervasive sense of fun) while lacking many of my most cherished requirements in a destination (occasional rain, the generally suppressive influence of the superego, and a melancholic populace prone to making monochrome woodcuts of hollow-eyed women sitting disconsolate in shabby rooms with their meager suppers on tin plates before them) is nobody's problem but my own. And it's a problem that I will have to keep to myself this weekend as I work the pool at one of Miami's hiply refurbished art deco hotels—the Hiawatha, let's call it.
In the old days of Miami, when there was still a vital demographic that I might have charmed with my smattering of Yiddish, my pool duties would probably have involved setting up deck chairs and opening striped umbrellas, with perhaps the odd slather of cocoa butter across the occasional expanse of freckled dowager's back. But those are the klezmer strains of a largely disappeared world. The old widows have either died off or sit wheelchair-bound in nursing homes. The fever dream that is the new South Beach is all sleek, adamantine hedonism. I will be at the beck and call of a clientele glossy with privilege: glamorous people of low degree with tight clothing and loose morals.
I can already see myself approaching a poolside cabana, a large cream-colored canvas tent providing a conspicuous privacy. Pushing aside the flap, I deliver drinks to a music impresario and his two friends. On a chaise nearby, the mogul's girlfriend lies, a living Helmut Newton photograph in nothing but Manolos and panties, her eyes rolled up into the back of her head, the glossed lips of her somnolent mouth parted. Beside her a small black-lacquered table frosted with a conical pile of cocaine, wispy traces of it wicking off in the slight breeze.
“Here, get rid of this,” says one of the minions, a still-warm Glock clattering onto my tray.
“Certainly, sir,” I reply as I back out, my heart beating against the three crisp hundred-dollar bills he has folded and slipped into my shirt pocket.
I'd turn down an invitation to Nero's orgy as a guest, but the judgmental voyeur in me would jump at the chance to man the coat check at same.
THE NIGHT BEFORE
I start work, I take a walk along the beach to get the lay of the land. The deco palaces of Collins Avenue are welcoming young revelers to their respective pool and bar scenes, their outdoor sound systems starting their nightly battle. The music and laughter signal the official shift from late afternoon to early evening. The sky is a bruise of mauve and pink. A huge silver moon hangs out over the water which, even at dusk, is still a startling blue-green. Washed up everywhere on the sand are crescent-shaped jellyfish; transparent gyoza edged in bright blue and crimson. Turning away from the ocean I face the hotels once more, a floodlit chorus line of wedding cakes packed so close together that one could scarcely slip a knife blade between them. A future bride opens the gifts at her shower, occasioning a regular chorus of “whoo-hoo” from her drunk friends. In their matching magenta feather boas, they are easy to spot. I can still make them out in the gathering darkness.
“
THE AMBASSADOR CAN
own the pool. You can really set the tone of the place,” says Vivienne, the Hiawatha's front-office manager, during my training session. Pool Ambassador is a little-known diplomatic posting whose primary task is making sure that the people coming down the steps from the hotel or up from the beach are actual paying guests. I am to check their names against a list. I am a doorman without a door. And that is all, it seems. The Hiawatha pool is staffed by a veritable pantheon of minor non-deities, each of us with an individual and specialized role. There are two young women who keep the chaises covered with fresh towels and clear away the wet ones, two bartenders, one waiter, and two Ambassadors: myself and Sammy, a recent Miami transplant from New York also starting his stint poolside that very day.
Sammy and I are sitting at a long walnut table in the Hiawatha's conference room, a glass-walled cube off the lobby, rendered private with curtains of sheer white fabric. Our joint training session is a high-powered affair. The top three members of the hotel's staff, including the general manager and head of housekeeping, have gathered to instruct just the two of us.
“You'll have your eye out for things,” Vivienne continues, putting the best face on the situation. “Say you overhear that it's a guest's birthday. You could tell one of the front-office staff, and we could arrange for a cake to be delivered to their room. We'd like to be that kind of hotel.”
We are reminded to smile. We must never let a problem show in front of a guest. Establish eye contact and use a guest's name if possible. Above all, we are told, we are to learn the subtle distinction between being friendly but not friends. “I would draw the line at applying the sunscreen,” says Vivienne.
I feel underutilized and I haven't even begun, but if it's benevolent omniscience they want, then I will be the self-effacing, eagle-eyed mole of their dreams, pervasive and invisible as a gas leak. Nothing will escape my purview. Unsolicited birthday cakes arriving at hotel room doors? Kid stuff. I will save marriages by discreetly whispering into a husband's ear that perhaps he might like to wish his wife a happy anniversary while I slip a thoughtfully purchased necklace of black freshwater pearls into his hand, before rushing up to the helipad on the hotel roof (note to self: verify existence of helipad) to meet the human liver packed on ice that I have surreptitiously arranged for the little girl languishing on her poolside gurney, waiting in vain for a donor.
What ever would we do without you, Pool Ambassador?
The training continues. We should greet any guest within three feet, but need only acknowledge one within ten with a nod or a smile. I'm on it, already planning how to measure the distance using the ancient art of triangulation, my body and the shadow it casts a primitive sundial. We are to be the first to begin the conversation, and should have the last word, as well. Say no more. But why content myself with the suggested “Have a nice afternoon,” when I can make a guest's day by uttering the far more meaningful—and in the moment that I say it, absolutely true—“I love you” to their departing form? I am vibrating with excitement to get out there and prove just how mewlingly subservient I can be. The more tortuous the etiquette instruction in the training session, the more hopped up I get. Maybe it was all the years I spent answering other people's phones and doing their bidding, or maybe it's just low self-esteem, but it turns out that I'm very good at the hyper-polite, obsequious bow and scrape. In the right situation, highly formalized, high-suction ass-kissing not only comes all too naturally to me, it makes me breathless with a feeling of penitential power.
THE POOL IS
a hidden-edge rectangle surrounded by brushed-aluminum deck chairs. It sits at the end of the Hiawatha's long green lawn, framed by palms. I introduce myself to my co-workers and take up my position by the gate leading out to the beach. Even though we were told not to talk to one another for extended periods of time—it makes the guests uncomfortable if they feel like they're interrupting a conversation—Sammy immediately comes over to my side of the pool and stands chatting for half an hour. He has worked at the Hiawatha in other jobs. Sotto voce, he tells me to be careful, cocking an eyebrow over to Luiz, one of the bartenders. “He's a snake.”
Our shift is from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. By 10:15, the pool area is filling up with the guests who don't seem remotely connected with the criminal element, alas. A gorgeous young couple arrive with their baby and nanny, a group of middle-aged ladies from Los Angeles in town shooting a commercial, and a trio made up of two women and a straight man with a gay body. Limbs are greased, magazines are thumbed through, someone tempts the collapse of the space-time continuum by reading
The South Beach Diet
in South Beach. Sleepy conversation is droned back and forth as they tan.
My cheeks already ache from the Mona Lisa smile I have on my face, ready to ratchet it up into a full-fledged toothy grin for anyone who so much as glances in my general direction. A man in a black Speedo says something to me. I walk over eagerly, his wish my command, but as I get closer I see his eyes lack focus, like a sleepwalker, and I only spot his cell phone headset once I am within three feet of him, at which distance I am required by the protocols of my Ambassadorship to greet him, which I do, heartily.
“Uh, hi,” he responds, interrupted.
“Need anything?” I ask.
He's okay for the moment. I resume my position on the travertine walkway, feet together, arms crossed over my clipboard. My posture is ramrod straight. I look like one of the Coldstream guards in front of Buckingham Palace but all I am really trying to do is stay in the very narrow band of shade cast by a palm tree. The fronds clatter in the breeze overhead like venetian blinds.
The morning crawls by, my dreams of indispensability deferred and I the whitest raisin in the sun. Radu, the pool's waiter, a large pink-and-white wall of a man who resembles an affable overgrown baby, takes orders and delivers drinks, having lots of conversations. I hate Radu.
We are allowed a thirty-minute break for lunch. My co-Ambassador, Sammy, takes an hour and returns without a word of apology. I run to the Burger King on the corner. I wonder what it is about my uniform—an outfit consisting of a white T-shirt with navy banding at the cuffs, a blue-and-white grosgrain belt, white shorts, and white sneakers—that immediately marks me as wearing one. In college, I briefly favored pajama tops as shirts, until one of my professors leaned over one day and confidentially told me, “You know, no one would know if it wasn't for the buttons.” She was right. They were the size of Mentos. With my Hiawatha uniform, I think it's a combination of the fact that if you're all in white on Collins Avenue, that means you're in service, coupled with my clothes' fastidious cleanliness but rather casual approximation of proper fit. I'd hoped to be wearing something a little tighter and sexier. My present loose attire only accentuates my unmistakable forty years of wear and tear, the love handles, and male pattern baldness. I project the wide-assed sexlessness of a dad. In other words, I am invisible in South Beach. Exactly what a uniform is designed to do.
It is blessedly air-conditioned in the Burger King and lovely chamber music plays. I wolf down my chicken sandwich and head back to the hotel. I pass by some Hiawatha guests I had greeted at the pool not minutes before. More decently attired in street clothes, they look straight at me without recognition.
By late afternoon the pool is—oh sweet, merciful God!—cast in shade. I won't die of heat stroke but the inertia might kill me. Ambassador duties be damned, I make the unilateral decision to help take the foam cushions from the chaises and stack them in a storeroom for the night. Just moving around fulfilling this simplest of tasks brightens my mood immeasurably. It makes the last half hour of my shift pass in a way it hasn't all day long.
My first day is almost over. The morning crowd has left the pool. Three blond Southern women come down and take seats at the bar. They are boisterous, cracking jokes with the staff. One of the women is on a cell phone and motions me over and makes a writing gesture. I proffer my pen and clipboard, and she scribbles down a phone number and finishes up her call. I tear off the slip of paper and hand it to her. “Thank you, darlin', I've been drinking since noon,” she says, letting me in on her not terribly well-kept secret. She holds up the phone number for her cronies. “Lookit what I did to this handsome man's paper!” She grabs both of my hands in both of hers and spins me around with a high-pitched laughing “Wheeeew!” A brief Virginia reel to end my day. Her friends watch her with mild amusement. This is clearly not her first dance of the day with a strange man.
“That is some L.P.,” one of them says to me. “Loud pussy.”
AT NO TIME
is the strangeness of this charade starker than in the mornings. I am staying two hotels over from the Hiawatha. My room is the most gorgeously appointed surgery on earth: white floor, white walls, white bed, white desk, white phalaenopsis orchid. As I wait for my breakfast in my white terrycloth robe, I think,
I hope room service arrives on time so I'm not late for my fake job.
The twenty-second commute leaves me with some time to kill so I take a walk farther along Collins Avenue. The main strip of beautifully refurbished hotels gradually gives way to smaller, two-story guesthouses, seedy with disrepair, their pastel-colored plaster bubbling, all sweet green icing flowing down into the tiny front yards with their scrubby, dusty palms. It's a small pocket of the seventies here, before the district was landmarked, when it was still just a boneyard for abandoned grandmothers. Loose windowpanes rattle in rusty casements, a rainbow flag hangs tattered and proud over an iron balcony, lending the place the battle-scarred dignity of a gay Alamo.