I'll Mature When I'm Dead (8 page)

No. 1: Are You
Insane
?

S
ome years ago I proposed a new tourism-promotion slogan for Miami. I even had a bumper sticker made. It said:

For some reason this slogan never caught on with Miami’s tourism industry. Which is a shame, because we need to improve our image. According to a poll by the Zogby organization, 67 percent of Americans agree either “somewhat” or “strongly” with the statement that “Miami is plagued by crime.” This is very upsetting to those of us who live here and love our city. It makes us want to visit every single one of those 67 percent of Americans personally, so we can tell them what Miami is
really
like, and then kill them with machetes.

But seriously, we are sick and tired of being saddled with the hackneyed, outdated
Miami Vice
and
Scarface
image of Miami—a city crawling with homicidal maniac drug dealers like Al Pacino, casually committing horrendous acts of violence and, worse, speaking with ludicrously fake Cuban accents. The truth is that only a small percentage of Miami’s population consists of violent criminals, and the bulk of those are elected officials. The rest of us Miamians are regular people, just like the people in your town: We work hard, try to raise our kids right, and are always ready to help out our neighbors by laying down covering fire when they go outside to get their newspapers.

I’ll grant you that in the past Miami has had some problems with “putting out the welcome mat” for tourists. I’d say the low point came in 1994, when a group of Norwegians, headed for a vacation in the Bahamas, made a common rookie-visitor mistake: They landed at Miami International Third World Airport

(Motto: “You Can Have Your Luggage When You Pry It From Our Cold, Dead Fingers”). Most travel experts recommend that even if your final destination is Miami, it’s better to fly to an airport in some other city—if necessary, Seattle—and take a cab from there. Or, as
Savvy Air Traveler
magazine suggests, “simply jump out of the plane while it’s still over the Atlantic.”

Nonetheless these Norwegian tourists landed at MIA, where they boarded a free courtesy shuttle van that was supposed to take them to a hotel. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the van was then boarded by two men who diverted it and robbed the Norwegians at gunpoint. That is correct:
Their hotel courtesy van was hijacked
. This story got BIG play in Norway, which does not have a lot of violent crime. If there were a TV crime show called
CSI: Norway
, most of the cases would involve improperly labeled herring.

So the van hijacking was definitely a “black eye” for Miami tourism. It did not help that in the same year, there was another unfortunate, highly publicized incident involving a European tourist. This was a German who spent the night at a hotel near the Miami airport. When he checked out the next morning, he complained about a bad smell in his room. So a maid went to check it out. She looked under the bed, and, to her horror, she found: an Amway representative.

No, seriously, what the maid found under the bed was even worse: a human corpse. This was not a recently deceased corpse; the police concluded it had been there for quite a while.

As you might imagine, this was another story that became a big media deal back in the tourist’s home country. The Germans are known for being finicky about cleanliness. They might let it slide if a hotel housekeeping staff failed to notice a dust bunny or two under the bed, but they draw the line at decayed corpses. If you find a corpse under the bed at a German hotel, you can be sure it’s a
fresh
corpse. Once again, Miami looked bad.

But my point is, these stories
took place during a different era
, specifically: the past. Miami today is a completely different city. What would you say if I told you that, since the year 2000, the city’s overall rate of violent crime is down 17.3 percent, and crime against tourists is down by 36.8 percent? If you would say, “You are totally making those numbers up,” you would be correct. But I’m pretty sure things are better.

I’m not saying Miami is Disney World. As in any other large urban area, you have to use your common sense to avoid potentially dangerous situations. To give you an idea what I mean by “potentially dangerous situations,” here’s the beginning of a
Miami Herald
story from November 2006: “A manhunt is on for fifteen men who crashed a baby shower in a rented hall, killed a partygoer, and wounded four other guests with AK-47 assault r ifles.”

That is correct: There was a shootout, featuring assault rifles,
at a baby shower
. It is not uncommon for tempers to flare at ceremonial gatherings in Miami; there was once a shootout in a funeral home here
during a wake
. Other events that can be “iffy” from a safety standpoint in Miami include birthday parties, football games, proms, nightclubs, Halloween, July Fourth, Christmas, and of course New Year’s Eve, which in Miami involves more gunfire than the Battle of the Bulge, although to be fair most of it is
happy
gunfire.

But as long as you avoid these dangerous situations, you’ll be perfectly safe in Miami, provided that you watch out for traffic. This is not as easy as it sounds. In Miami, traffic can appear anywhere—on the streets, of course, but also on sidewalks, as well as in parks, front yards, restaurants, hotel lobbies, and swimming pools. You may think I’m exaggerating, but that’s only because you don’t watch the local TV news in Miami, which routinely features images of cars that have been driven into what we usually think of as non-automotive environments such as buildings. At risk of reinforcing an unfortunate stereotype, I have to point out that many of these cars, at the time of impact, were being piloted by senior citizens possessing the same level of awareness of their surroundings as a salami sandwich.

To cite just one example: In 2008, police in Miami stopped a seventy-three-year-old man who was driving a Chevrolet Cobalt. This in itself is not unusual; police often, for one reason or another, stop older drivers. What was unusual was where they stopped this man:

Really. The man had somehow, without noticing it, burst through an airport-perimeter gate, and when the police caught up with him, he was driving on the runway, apparently unaware that he was doing anything wrong. (“Is there a problem, Officer?”) This incident really makes me wonder about the priorities of our airport-security people. I mean, when
I
go to an airport, they won’t let me near an airplane with
shampoo
. And this guy was out there with a
Cobalt
.
¹⁴

My point is, when you’re in Miami, you should be very alert if you’re in a place where a car might hit you, which is pretty much anywhere below the fourth floor. And you definitely shouldn’t attempt to drive yourself in Miami, because odds are you’d make some foolish tourist mistake such as stop for a red light, which means you’d be rear-ended by a vehicle going upwards of eighty miles per hour driven by a motorist with no insurance but a minimum of two firearms.

That leaves public transportation. Here there is good news and bad news. The good news is, Miami does have public transportation. The bad news is, if you ride on it, there is a chance that you will encounter dangerous marine life. I say this because of an incident that occurred in 2009 on Miami’s Metromover, which is a free automated “people mover” that makes a loop around downtown Miami. One evening at rush hour, two men boarded the Metromover
with a live, six-foot-long nurse shark
. The men had apparently caught the shark in Biscayne Bay and were using public transportation to take it downtown to sell it.

One of the people who saw the shark, according to the story in the
Miami Herald
, was a twenty-four-year-old musician named Mae Singerman, who was getting ready to do a show on the Metromover platform. The
Herald
quoted Singerman as saying:
“The door opened and the shark was sitting by the front of the door. I didn’t see a reason to call police. It’s Miami. Stranger things have happened.”

True. Still, not everybody was blasé about the shark. One of the commuters who boarded the Metromover, Sandy Goodrich, sent me an e-mail stating that, as a native Miamian, she thought she had seen everything, until she saw the shark.

“Unbelievable,” she wrote. “Only in Miami!” Attached to her e-mail was a photo she’d taken with her cell phone, “so that my son would believe that there was actually a shark on the train.”

She said the shark was definitely alive, although it was not doing well. Sharks are hardy creatures, but they do not thrive on public transportation. The men got off the Metromover a few stops later and took the shark to a fish wholesaler, offering to sell it for $10. The wholesaler declined, and the men left the shark—which at this point had kicked the bucket—on a downtown Miami street, where it lay for hours before the authorities removed it. It attracted some attention, but not as much as if it had been lying on a street in, say, Des Moines. The
Herald
quoted a local resident as saying: “It was a relief that it was a shark. When I first saw it, I thought it was a body because of all the shootings that have been going on. I was surprised and happy because of my concern for human life.”

So this was actually a feel-good story, Miami-style: Against all odds, it wasn’t a human body! Still, the fact remains that—this bears repeating—there was a live shark on the Metromover. And had it been a little
more
alive, there is a very real possibility that it could actually have bitten somebody. We could have had a shark attack on a commuter train! Wouldn’t that have been
great
?

No, wait, I mean: Wouldn’t that have been tragic? Yes it would, which is why I’m recommending that you exercise caution when boarding public transportation, and by “exercise caution” I mean “carry a speargun.”

You should also watch out when you
leave
public transportation, because then you will be in one of the most dangerous areas in all of South Florida, namely: outdoors. We have a lot of extreme wildlife here. Over the years I have personally encountered, just in my neighborhood, several alligators, hundreds of poison toads, mutant, heavily armored five-inch grasshoppers that cannot be killed with a hammer, irate, hissing, needle-toothed lizards the size of Chihuahuas, and huge spiders that appear to be wearing the pelts of raccoons. I have also had numerous sphincter-disrupting encounters with snakes, including one that, when I noticed it, was coiled up approximately six inches away from me
on my office desk
, which is how my office chair came to have a stain.

We also have a growing population of unwelcome out-of-town wildlife species that have come here and clearly intend to stay. Two invasive species in particular have caused serious concern: Burmese pythons, and New Yorkers.

The New Yorkers have been coming for years, which is weird because pretty much all they do once they get to Florida is bitch about how everything here sucks compared to the earthly paradise that is New York. They continue to root, loudly, for the Jets, the Knicks, the Mets, and the Yankees; they never stop declaring, loudly, that in New York the restaurants are better, the stores are nicer, the people are smarter, the public transportation is free of sharks, etc.

The Burmese pythons are less obnoxious, but just as alarming in their own way. These are snakes that started out as pets of Miami residents, until one day these residents stopped smoking crack and said, “Jesus H. Christ! We’re living with a giant snake!” So they let the pythons go, and a lot of them ended up out in the Everglades, which is basically Las Vegas for pythons. They’ve been engaging in wild python reproductive sex out there for years; wildlife biologists estimate that there are now more than one hundred thousand of them. They can grow to be longer than twenty feet, and they don’t have any natural enemies, so they’re eating all the other Everglades animals. The wildlife authorities are desperately trying to figure out what to do about this. My preference would be to use tactical nuclear weapons, but this would never fly with the wildlife community, which regards the Everglades as a precious ecosystem, even though to the naked civilian eye it is a giant festering stinkhole of rotting muck.