The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (40 page)

DATE: SEPTEMBER
2006
VENUE! OUR APARTMENT BUILDING

This year Brett came back from Burning Man with an announcement: he had fallen in love. Kellie, an eighteen-year-old from Truckee, California, arrived shortly thereafter. She immediately found work as a cocktail waitress and started supporting him. I gave her my old driver's license so she could get into bars. We had other news as well: our building was going condo.

DATE: DECEMBER
2006
VENUE! SHORE CLUB

This year I went out a little more at Art Basel. I went to a
Vanity Fair
party. We got rubber bracelets, like Lance Armstrong testicular cancer bracelets, but hot pink and stamped
VANITY FAIR.
My aunt, who lives in southwest Florida and paints pictures of children on beaches flying kites, came to see the art, but what excited her most was watching someone write a $400,000 check in a particleboard boothlet.

DATE: FEBRUARY
2007
VENUE! THE SETAI, COLLINS AVENUE

The paper assigned me an investigative piece: discover the true identity of Princess Thi-Nga, a Miami Beach philanthropist and supposed member of the exiled imperial family of Vietnam. She was on the board of the Bass Museum of Art, where the parties were always sponsored by Absolut Vodka. Her collection of ancient jade sculpture was on display at the Bass at the time, which some people saw as a conflict of interest. My editor thought she might be a fraud. I failed to uncover much evidence of this. I failed to uncover much evidence at all, actually. It appeared nobody was paying close attention to the lineage of the former royal family of Vietnam. I too didn't really care.

I met Thi-Nga at the Setai, the hotel where my friend Krishna worked. A room at the Setai cost upward of $1,000 a night. Its bar was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and its couches upholstered with manta ray skins, or something like that. According to Krishna, when a guest of the Setai arrived at Miami International Airport, he or she had the choice of being chauffeured in a Bentley or a Hummer (a question of personal style). In the car was a wide selection of bottled water brands and an iPod.

Thi-Nga was launching her jade sculpture exhibition with an elaborate party at the hotel. I met her there for breakfast the day before the party. I ate a $12 bowl of muesli. It was the most delicious bowl of muesli I have ever eaten.

For her party, Thi-Nga had rented an elephant named Judy. Adorned with gemstones, Judy led a parade down Collins Avenue on Miami Beach that also included dancers: Thai ones with pointy golden hats and splayed fingers and a Chinese lion that batted its paper eyelashes to the rhythm of cymbals. The princess rode in a silver Jaguar convertible behind them, seated next to the mayor of Miami Beach, waving to confused pedestrians who tentatively waved back. Then all her guests went to the Setai and ate salmon.

DATE: APRIL
2007

This party is in fact only theoretical. My neighborly relationship with Brett had deteriorated to the point of mere formality, so I'm not sure if he had a good-bye party or not. I hope he had a big party, where the lava lamps oozed and the cigarette butts accumulated and the dollar bills were dusted in cocaine. Our building was depopulated now. The call girl was gone; the dumb stoner who had been my accomplice in the murder of the raccoon was gone. The apartments upstairs had sold for phenomenal amounts of money. My apartment had been purchased by a tennis pro, who informed me that I could consider him a landlord upgrade. I took him at his word and purchased the air-conditioning unit with the highest
Consumer Reports
rating, paid the alcoholic handyman who hung around the neighborhood to install it, and deducted the whole production from my rent check. Going condo was amazing.

Unless you were Brett. Things weren't going well for Brett, who was still unemployed and being supported by his teenage girlfriend. He and Kellie had recently been arrested for driving someone else's car that happened to have a felony-size quantity of crystal meth in the glove compartment. I encountered them on our stoop after they had been released on bail. Apparently everything would be all right; they had agreed to rat on some drug dealer. But still, this on top of moving. They were heading up to 8th Street, a part of South Beach that remarkably had retained its seedy character, and whose apartments, though as expensive as everything else in Miami, were terrible to live in. I'd had a friend who lived on Brett's new block; her floor was often inexplicably littered with millipede exoskeletons. She would gamely sweep up the hard brown shells and claim that they were harmless, but I vowed that I would draw the line of shitty-apartment-living at mysterious worm infestations.

Then one day Brett was gone, and the landlords were happily ripping out the interior of his apartment. One of them, Dave, told me it had been a relief.

"You should have seen the bathroom. Drug addicts. It's disgusting."

Very stupidly, I had never thought of Brett as an
addict
, just as a guy who did drugs. A certain kind of Miami guy who liked to party. But now Brett was gone. All traces of him were replaced, in a matter of weeks, with granite countertops and track lighting.

I saw him one more time that summer, on 5th Street, when I knew I would be leaving Miami. I was walking home from the gym when I was waylaid by a torrential downpour, the kind where I could see the violent wall of water approaching from across the street. I waited under an overhang, staring at nothing, until it retreated. In the dripping aftermath, the sidewalks gray and clean, the palm trees still quivering, I encountered Brett on a street corner. Brett wasn't a pessimist. Everything was going great, he said, the new apartment was fantastic. Later, when the recession came, I took comfort in knowing that, like me, Brett was probably all right, because Brett owned nothing.

That was the thing about boom times that later became clear: We now know that boom times don't feel like boom times. They feel like normal times, and then they end. Particularly if one is not a direct beneficiary of the excess wealth and one's salary is measly to nonexistent, boom times are just the spectacle of other people's reckless spending. Their gluttony was my gluttony of course—only a bore would have abstained from the festivities—but their downfall was little more than an abstraction from the vantage point of one with no assets.

Our downfalls would not involve grand narratives of repossession or foreclosure, just a steadily diminishing ability to keep some fundamental part of the city at bay. In heady days, we conquered Miami, carving out the mangroves, digging up the ocean bottom and slathering it on a sandbar, molding concrete into skyscrapers, pumping refrigerated air through miles of metal windpipes and over glass coffee tables and white couches. But here, now, as those with no assets fled to low-rent holdouts, inland from the beach to paved-over swamps, recession only meant a slow infiltration: worms burrowing through the floor and dying, spores drifting through vents, and terracotta roof tiles uplifted by the autumn winds.

DATE: AUGUST
2007

The Corolla was packed up, and as I was about to leave, one of those terrific summer rainstorms hit. I lay next to my boyfriend on his bed (for by then I had a boyfriend), watching the rain pound against the windows, the palms lean into the wind, and the cat purr between us. Of the whole tableau, the only thing I anticipated missing was the cat. The relationship was ending, my job was ending, and the real estate boom had already ended. I had gotten ornery in the last months in Miami. If another interviewee told me, as we drove in his golf cart through a maze of pink stucco on top of a leveled mangrove grotto, that he "lived in paradise," I thought I might wrestle the wheel from him and plunge us both into the algae blooms of a fertilizer-polluted drainage canal. So I left the place where baby sea turtles mistake the floodlights of condos for the rising sun, where the dogs are small, the breasts are big, and the parties are ornamented with drag queens in bubble baths.

When the rain stopped I drove past suburbs until I hit the Everglades, then emerged into suburbs again on the other side.

Contributors' Notes

Notable Travel Writing of 2010

André Aciman
is the author of
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
and the collection of essays
False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory.
His latest collection of essays is
Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
(2011). Aciman has also co-authored and edited
The Proust Project
and
Letters of Transit
, and has written a novel,
Call Me by Your Name.
Born in Alexandria, he lived in Italy and France. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University and Bard College and is currently the chair of the Graduate Center's doctoral program in Comparative Literature, CUNY, and the director of the Writers' Institute there. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for the
New York Times, The New Yorker
, the
New York Review of Books, The Paris Review
, and
The New Republic.

 

Ben Austen
is a contributing editor of
Harper's Magazine
and writes as well for
The Atlantic, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, GQ Popular Science
, and
Wired.
Born in Chicago and raised there, he currently lives in Tennessee.

 

David Baez
is a freelance writer and a graduate of Columbia Journalism School currently working on a book about his recovery from alcoholism and his relationship with his Nicaraguan father.

 

Mischa Berlinski
is the author of
Fieldwork: A Novel.

 

Christopher Buckley
is the author of fourteen books, including
Thank You for Smoking
and
Losing Mum and Pup.
His awards include the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Washington Irving Prize for Literary Excellence. His novel
They Eat Puppies, Don't They?
will be published in May 2012.

 

Maureen Dowd
, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on the
New York Times
Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for the
New York Times Magazine.
Ms. Dowd joined the
New York Times
as a metropolitan reporter in 1983.

 

Porter Fox
was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He lives, writes, teaches, and edits the literary travel writing journal
Nowhere
(nowheremag.com) in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction, essays, and nonfiction have been published in the
New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, Narrative
, and
The Literary Review
, among others. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2008 and 2010 for fiction and nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. Last summer he completed a two-thousand-mile sailing voyage along the Maine coast and he is working on a travel narrative based on the trip. He is also a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Venice Biennale (2009), Mass MoCA (2008), and New York City's Anonymous Gallery (2009).

 

Keith Gessen
is a founding editor of the magazine
N
+
1
and the author of
All the Sad Young Literary Men
, a novel. He was born in Moscow and has traveled extensively in the former Eastern Bloc but has never been to Cairo or Mexico City, where, it is said, the traffic is even worse.

 

Tom Ireland
is an editor with the Office of Archaeological Studies in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His most recent book is
The Man Who Gave His Wife Away
(2010).

 

Verlyn Klinkenborg
was born in Colorado in 1952 and raised in Iowa and California. He graduated from Pomona College and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton University. Mr. Klinkenborg joined the editorial board of the
New York Times
in 1997. He is the author of
Making Hay, The Last Fine Time, The Rural Life
, and
Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile.
His work has appeared in many magazines, including
The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Audubon, Martha Stewart Living
, and
Sports Afield
, among others. He has taught literature and creative writing at Fordham University, St. Olaf College, Bennington College, and Harvard University and is a recipient of the 1991 Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in rural New York.

 

Ariel Levy
is a staff writer at
The New Yorker
, where she has profiled the South African runner Caster Semenya, the director Nora Ephron, the lesbian separatist Lamar Van Dyke, and the conservative politician Mike Huckabee, among others. Prior to joining
The New Yorker
in 2008, Levy wrote for
New York Magazine
for twelve years. Her work has been anthologized in
The Best American Essays
and
Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex.
She is the author of
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.