You have, huh? Which one?
What do I mean? Well, I imagine you didn’t notice, but there are two Miami Beaches. Couldn’t you tell when you were there? What did you go there for anyway?
A convention? Some headshrinker society you belong to, I suppose.
Well, that explains why you didn’t see the other Miami Beach. You know, you’re just like the volunteers in the nonprofit I managed. People like you and them, you fly into Miami—or San Francisco, or Chicago, or wherever your national convention is being held, upgraded to first class, no doubt—and you experience a city very different from the one people actually live in. From the limousine pickup at the airport to the chocolate-covered strawberries waiting in your hotel suite to the top shelf liquor served at the opening night reception on the hotel’s private portion of Miami’s famous beach—or, I suppose, at Museum of Modern Art if it’s San Francisco or the Signature Room at the top of the John Hancock Building if it’s Chicago—you never get to see what’s really going on in the cities you visit, do you? Even though what’s really going on is often going on right there on the street in front of your four-star hotel, just a couple of stories below the crystal chandeliers hanging in the ballrooms where you hold your fundraising dinners and your professional education sessions.
Think I’m kidding? Look, I may not know much about being a father, but I do know about this. I was on the inside, remember? I’m the one who cut the deals with the man behind the curtain to make all the magic happen, who kept people like you in the dark about that other Miami Beach. It’s not all restaurants with dueling movie star chefs and all-night dance clubs filled with beautiful Cuban women and glowing high-rises and celebrity mansions along the Intracoastal Waterway. That’s just the image they put in your mind. That’s what they spend their millions on, making your brain conjure up those illusions whenever you think about Miami Beach, and convincing you it might be fun to go down there and add some of your money to their pot. But it isn’t real. Like every other city on earth there’s a real Miami on which that fantasy is built, where kids go to school and garbage gets picked up on Thursdays and people struggle to get ahead and some percentage of the population inevitably falls through the cracks.
On this trip to Miami, the juxtaposition of it all hit me really hard. Probably because of all the crap I was dealing with at home and at work. It’s never a good idea to travel when you don’t have a stable anchor to ground you.
The plane ride down was uneventful, giving me plenty of time to think about all the things that could go wrong in the week ahead. On a plane full of people I felt more or less alone, because no one from the office was flying with me. I was coming in a day earlier than I usually did, invited to make a special appearance at the board meeting because of my new role in the organization. I stopped in Memphis to change planes and checked my voicemail about a dozen times during the layover, certain that all kinds of hell was already breaking loose and that my mailbox would be filled with frantic messages from staff members and volunteers alike.
Alan, I missed my connection in Detroit. What do I do?
Alan, all the conference materials got shipped to Miami, Arizona, not Miami, Florida. What do we do?
Alan, I just checked in at the hotel and my room is completely unacceptable. What are you going to do?
But every time I checked there weren’t any messages, just the dry and unfriendly computer voice asking me if I would like to leave any. I didn’t trust it. I was positive the voicemail system was malfunctioning—that the messages were, in fact, piling up on the server but that some computer gremlin was keeping them from getting delivered to my mailbox. I even called back to the office to check on the server status, and got a gruff and somewhat insulted Jurgis telling me to keep an eye on my own business and let him keep an eye on his.
It left me feeling disconnected. Things had been so busy for so long, and now here I was in the Memphis airport with nothing to do and no demands on me other than getting on the next flight. It was liberating and frightening at the same time. Part of me wondered what would happen if I never got on that second plane, if I just left the airport and drifted into the rhythm of that great Southern metropolis. I saw myself working by day as a tour guide at Graceland and spending my nights in the blues clubs down on Beale Street. Would anyone from my current life ever find me? Would any of them even try?
I wasn’t serious, just entertaining another dark fantasy, and when the time came I dutifully boarded the flight to Miami, squeezing myself into my coach seat and checking my voicemail one more time before they closed the boarding door.
The cab ride in from the airport is one of the best times to catch glimpses of that other city, the one the people in the mayor’s office and the convention and visitors bureau don’t necessarily want you to see. It’s hard enough for them to create a protective cocoon around their convention district. Blinding you from their blight for that entire trip is next to impossible. I always investigate the neighborhoods I’m likely to be taken through, wanting to know more about the real lives of the cities I visit. And, as expected, to get to my oceanfront hotel, the cab driver took me on freeways overlooking land-locked communities like Allapattah—a name derived from the Seminole Indian word for alligator, now the home for mostly Dominican and Haitian immigrants—and Liberty City—named for one of the first low-income housing projects in the nation, where riots had once broken out over accusations of police brutality. These were places people are moved to and forgotten when expressways are being built and the dreams of developers are being realized.
This time I was by myself, but I’ve made such journeys with my colleagues and volunteers dozens of times before. For them, the twenty minutes in the taxi cab is always catch-up time—talking on the cell phone with people who had left them messages or punching away on their Blackberry keyboards, trying to stay ahead of a never-ending string of email conversations. But for me these trips were a priceless reality check, an opportunity to stare out at the gritty circus that defined most people’s lives and try to put my own privileged existence into perspective.
Whether it was the strip clubs that lined every airport access road, the rusted and broken industrial buildings that surrounded every crumbling interchange, the graffiti-laden billboards for radio stations and beer that flanked every highway, or the boarded-up storefronts that seemed to wall off blocks of dilapidated houses—the trip in from the airport was one giant reminder that the world is filled with haves and havenots. Some people ignore that fact, spending their cab time just watching the meter count up the dollars it will take to reach their destination. Others see the injustice but feel powerless to do anything about it, and fatalistically forget the divide by the time the bellman brings their bags up to their suite on the twenty-third floor.
The hotel I was staying in was nice. Real nice. I wasn’t in a suite and I wasn’t on the twenty-third floor, but it was the kind of hotel that had those kind of accommodations, and I knew several had been offered to our VIP volunteers. It was the headquarters hotel for our national convention, the one where we had reserved rooms at a discounted rate and where many of the conference sessions would be taking place. But it wasn’t good enough for Eleanor Rumford. As I dumped my luggage in my room and placed the do not disturb sign on the door before heading over to the board meeting, I remembered how Eleanor had asked us to reserve a special block of rooms for her and the board of directors at an even nicer hotel up the street. The service is so much better there, she had said, and we’ll have much more productive meetings with their conference concierge seeing to our needs.
“Yes, certainly,” I remember Mary saying when Eleanor had made the request at the end of one of our weekly conference calls. No equivocation at all, no caution that we would have to investigate the cost, that the budget may not support such an indulgence, that no incoming board chair had ever asked for such an extravagance before. Just “Yes, certainly,” and then a nod in my direction indicating that she wanted it taken care of, no questions asked. Of course it was me that had to convey the order to Angie who, in the midst of planning six other meetings, would have to find time to negotiate a new contract with a new hotel, Eleanor breathing down her neck the entire time to make sure we got just the amenities she was looking for.
“The woman is insane,” Angie told me at one point. “She keeps going on and on about how this is the hotel she always stays in when she goes to Miami Beach, about how she gave her first presentation there, and about how it will always hold a special place in her heart. She wants me to get a certain board room for their meetings and a certain suite overlooking the ocean for her.”
“So?” I had said, not needing her testimony to convince me that Eleanor was crazy. All I knew was that Eleanor wanted it and Mary wanted her to have it. “Get it for her.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Alan.” Given the tone of her voice, she might as well have called me numb nuts. “We’re not doing any other business at that hotel, and they have another group in-house during our dates. They’re not interested in keeping us happy, they’ve already landed their big fish. I can give Eleanor anything she wants at our headquarters hotel. We’re going to fill all their sleeping rooms and do about a quarter million in catering there. For Christ's sake, if she wants the whole fucking spa to herself for the weekend, I can make that happen. But I’ve got no pull at that other hotel.”
“Do the best you can,” I had said, knowing there wasn’t much more I could say.
And Angie, using the almighty dollar and Mary’s blessing, got the hotel to release both the conference room and the suite Eleanor had wanted. As I walked the few blocks to the better hotel I could see the balconies coming off its tower—the largest ones facing the ocean on the top few floors—and I shook my head knowing how many thousands of dollars we were paying for the suite Eleanor was staying in, and hoping she was enjoying the view.
The main drag between the two hotels was another study in contrasts—a reminder that the two Miamis existed even here. The east side of the street—the ocean side—was reserved for the over-leveraged high rises and hotels, million-dollar real estate gobbled up for their expansive infinity pools and beachside restaurants. Each complex squatted on an entire city block, lifting its luxury towers into the air so its windows could reflect the dazzling light of both the rising and setting sun. Between these giants sat squalid little swimwear and souvenir shops—places where the paint was always peeling—the kind of places the tourists who were staying in the fleabag hotels on the west side of the street would frequent when they ran out of suntan lotion or wanted to pick up a six-pack of beer, or a trinket or two for the kids to remember their Florida vacation by. Later in my trip, I knew, I would spend a few minutes in one of those dismal shops, looking for something to bring home to Jacob, and fully expecting to give up after finding nothing more meaningful than lucite snow globes filled with dolphins and glitter stars, and giant ballpoint pens with MIAMI BEACH stenciled in plastic appliqué down the side.
When I turned down the street where Eleanor’s hotel had hidden its entrance—the truly best hotels always did that, tucking their main entrances down side streets and adorning them only with simple signs, like corporate law firms that don’t need to call attention to themselves—a salty fresh sea breeze hit me in the face and I caught a glimpse of the sand of Miami Beach itself, a blue ribbon of ocean beckoning beyond. The great expanse of dreams and danger had always been a block away, but now I saw how the buildings—and the hotels, always the hotels—tried to keep it prisoner, as if such a thing could be corralled, and in their attempt only succeeded in keeping certain people from it. Eleanor’s hotel and the building opposite—some kind of art deco condo monolith—formed the walls of a white canyon, with a palm tree-lined street snaking its way between the cliffs and ending in a traffic turnabout and several concrete pylons. This configuration kept all but the most determined pedestrians from wandering out onto the finger-thin patch of public beach access that existed between the privacy fences, terraced decks, full service beach cabanas, and manicured sand that the Goliaths of this world used to parcel out the majesty of the unsounded sea, treating it like any other commodity to be hoarded and sold to the highest bidder.
Except these Goliaths weren’t feared and reviled like that ancient Philistine from the Bible story. Instead, they were where everyone wanted to be. The whole cavalcade of humanity was there—from the American princesses with their silk beach wraps and their rhinestone-studded flip flops to the homeless men with soiled swim trunks and toenail fungus—you could see them both by the dozens on the streets of Miami Beach, sometimes passing each other as if members of the same community, as if they had something more in common than just the desire for what only one of them could afford.
People are the same everywhere you go. Bums asking for spare change, hotel doormen working double shifts to put their kids through college, trophy wives laying out on pool decks with their fake breasts and fashion magazines, and volunteer leaders gathering together in oak-paneled board rooms to make decisions on how to spend other people’s money. Whoever they are, if they go to Miami Beach they want the same thing. They want to be where it was happening, where they can lose themselves in the intoxication of knowing that they are a step ahead of someone else, that they have something someone else doesn’t and never will.
That, in fact, is why there are two Miami Beaches. As sad as it is to say, you can’t have one without the other.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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