Tag Archives: Florida

Beach Justice

All the other beach authorities have a vessel or a crib that distinguishes them from the spring-breakers. You’ve got the guys in helicopters, searching the high seas for man-eating sharks or whatever. You’ve got the guys on ATVs, patrolling the dunes for illicit picnic activity. You’ve got the lifeguards in their stands, keeping an eye out for pretty people who might need resuscitating. But I, Ben Cube, originally from the land of New Jersey, do my law enforcement on foot. When someone is in danger, I don’t need to arrive on a glimmering white jet ski or leap out of a pastel cabana on stilts. I don’t even need the sanction of the South Florida government. I just need my swimming trunks and my impeccable sense of right and wrong. Yes, you’re correct. Mine is the face of vigilante beach justice.

On a typical day I wake up before dawn so I can reach the pier while the local rednecks still think they can fish with impunity. Many of these fishermen know me, having been on the receiving end of my justice in the past, and they pack up their gear and their coolers as soon as they see me coming. It takes all my self-restraint not to frogmarch them back down the boardwalk. But there’s always at least one oblivious tourist, or some doofus kid partaking in his first fishing lesson with Daddy, who needs to be taught the rules. “It’s right there on the sign,” I say as I approach these latter miscreants at the end of the pier. “No fishing. Read it and weep.”

The father stops reeling in whatever endangered sea creature he was reeling in. “Are you a game warden?” he says.

“If you don’t throw those squid back into the ocean by the count of five,” I respond, “I’ll be forced to make a citizen’s arrest. Do you really want your son to see that?” Nine times out of ten, they don’t.

Once the pier is purged of its lawbreakers, I extract my Sharper Image binoculars from their all-weather case and train them on the horizon. If I see too many people in a catamaran, or not enough lifeboats on a cruise ship, I don’t hesitate to call in reinforcements. Though as far as I can tell, the Coast Guard just sits on its collective ass 24 hours a day.

Next order of business is the nude beach. The nude beach attracts your standard law-abiding soul who just wants to sun his or her privates, but unfortunately it also attracts the scum of the earth. If you wonder where all of Florida’s creeps and perverts congregate during daylight hours, it’s here, where boobs and wangs can be tossed about freely in open air. If I see a young female spring-breaker, lounging on a towel, shyly baring her breasts to the sky, you can bet that right behind her will be sitting a fully-clothed troll filming her incognito with a camera hidden in his duffle bag, as if he’s a degenerate James Bond or some shit. This does not fly with me. Babe or no babe, this young woman does not deserve to have her boobs live-streamed to the internet.

So what do I do? I plop myself between woman and pervert, effectively obstructing the camera’s view. Sometimes I leisurely remove my swim trunks in the duffle bag’s line of sight so the pervert will be treated to artsy footage of my jiggling testicles. The pervert usually leaves quickly with his contraband, and after that my only duty is to inform the young woman of the valorous steps I’ve just taken to thwart her career in amateur porn. When I reach for a business card in my pocket so she knows that she can call me anytime if she ever sees anything suspicious, even if it’s in the middle of the night, I often forget that I’m still naked, and my hand skips comically over my thigh and collides with my sweatiest area. But such is life on the nude beach!

Next I break for lunch in the shade beneath the lifeguard stand.

In the afternoon most outlaws tend to be sun-stricken and lethargic, so I try to round up some beach cats for Animal Control. While securing one of these stray varmints in a sand dune last weekend, my hand got scratched up pretty bad, but I’m watching the wound closely. Plus I have faith in the ocean to sterilize 99 percent of infections, even rabies.

After the cat round-up comes my least favorite part of the day, but every hour can’t be a heroic hour when it comes to justice. You would not believe the amount of garbage these Spring Break hooligans generate during their week-long revels on the beach. I’m talking Silo cups, plastic bottles, water-logged underthings, cans of Bud Light, broken sunglasses, abandoned kiddie pools, candy wrappers, and once even a papasan chair. It takes an entire industrial trash bag to clean it up every afternoon, and that’s only for a two-mile stretch of beach. You’d think these kids were raised by animals. Still, I appreciate their youthful spunk. I was also a boy once. Though I don’t recall ever disposing of used condoms in the sand. Speaking of which, what kind of woman gives it up on a family beach? If I ever catch any of these litterbug hedonists in the act, trying to hide their hanky-panky under sun umbrellas or thinking that I can’t see them blatantly humping each other in the surf, I won’t stop until they’re registered as sex offenders. The occasional glass bottle? Fine. A loud radio every now and then? Fine. Sex on the beach? Not on my watch.

At the end of the day there’s always some human flotsam who thinks it’s a good idea to empty her bag of Cheetos into a quiet arrangement of seagulls and warmly invite hell to rain down upon us. This is intolerable beach etiquette. In what world is it okay to feed human snacks to nuisance birds so that everyone within a five-umbrella radius must flee like extras in a horror movie to avoid being pooped on? Or worse? No no no. This old woman has earned herself the full heat of my errant frisbee.

Finally, as night descends, I remain seated on my towel until I’m sure everyone has vacated the beach in a timely manner, before they start thinking about singing songs around an illegal bonfire or drunkenly setting off fireworks as if they’re somewhere in Mexico. When the last of the nudists put on their cover-ups and the final spring-breakers hurl their Silo cups into the ocean, I can finally return to my bungalow knowing that I’ve preserved the sanctity of the beach for another day. If I could afford a white jet ski, this would be my moment to ride it into the sunset.

South Beach selfies

For the next few days, the girls must inundate their Facebook pages with staged bikini shots. They stand in glossy clusters up and down South Beach, documenting their spring break cleavage. You get the sense that the girls selected their vacation companions based purely on how physically complementary they’d look in photos. Every thirty seconds, someone exercises veto power over a group image and the bikini shoot begins again. These young women are modeling spring break, rather than living it. They’re starring in a swimwear catalog available exclusively on their social media accounts. And Poseidon pity the boyfriend who’s conscripted to take photos of his lady as she rolls around suggestively in the surf, thong pointed to the sky like an arrow. In the distance, a dolphin splashes merrily in the Atlantic, but he doesn’t make it into the picture.

The newlyweds wander hand in hand through the historic lagoon gardens of Vizcaya. A selfie stick precedes them like a carrot promising relived experience later on. The cell phone on the stick’s extremity shoots amateur film of the man kissing his new wife on her sunburned cheek, then the man sweeps the camera around to include some unknown future viewer in the tour. Here is the picnic pavilion that resembles a sailing ship. Here is brackish water being pumped into a fountain made from limestone and coral. In the background, other tourists wander obliviously through the honeymoon video. Once they’re in, there’s no way out.

Florida Republicans keep snapping pictures of Miami. To foreign investors they text photos of Bahama-white sand, DJ Paris Hilton dressed as Barbie, and private yachts the size of naval destroyers cruising Biscayne Bay. Then the Brazilians send cash for new luxury condos they’ll never inhabit. No one takes pictures of the seawater flooding the streets at high tide. No one takes pictures of the storm surges that swamp ritzy nightclubs on the barrier island. The recent flood of real estate development is the only way to save the city from the actual flood. “There’s no such thing as climate change,” say Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, as they frantically delete Miami’s selfies from her phone.

Fuck yeah Everglades

Two insignificant things that didn’t really happen

Revenge

Rebecca worked for a small marketing firm that handled accounts from a diversity of clients. Last summer she began volunteering to head the ad campaigns that no one else wanted, e.g., the gastrointestinal disorder remedies, the spray-on hair. She did this because her ex-boyfriend had turned out to be a piece of shit who’d moved into her Soho apartment with no intention of ever getting a job, contributing to rent, or helping out in any way unless he could do it through singer-songwriting. Her ex-boyfriend had also posed for a series of stock photos back in the day so he could buy himself something nice that he didn’t deserve because he liked to stick his slimy crooked penis into everything.

Rebecca happened to discover this cache of stock photos of her ex-boyfriend not long after she’d confronted him about several items gone missing from her jewelry box, then kicked him to the curb. Revenge was sweet. Rebecca threw herself into work at the agency, and soon her ex’s face began appearing in ads aimed at those suffering from jock itch and hemorrhoids, uncontrollable diarrhea, chronic facial fungi. Rebecca had a girlfriend who worked for a popular online news outlet and she got in on the fun as well. The article “How to Identify a Hipster Douchebag” featured a close-up of Rebecca’s ex-boyfriend drinking an iced coffee in a rowboat in Central Park. The article “6 Signs Your Dude Is a Manwhore” was accompanied by a photo of Rebecca’s ex-boyfriend laughing into a slice of cheese pizza.

Rebecca had originally applied to the ad agency so she could earn a regular paycheck just until her online fan fiction landed her a Big Five book deal, but after the breakup she decided that she’d stay in the business at least long enough to see her ex on a billboard warning people about the pedophiles who live among us. Besides, she thought, pictures tell the best stories.

Photographer Emergency

An amateur photographer named David walks along the Florida beach in early morning, taking pictures of the sunrise. He squats on a dune so he can get the right angle on the light colliding with a lifeguard stand. He also takes pictures of a seagull. “Please, God,” he thinks, “let a sailboat pass by.”

A quarter mile down the beach, David passes a large crew of people staging shots of fashionable accessories in the white sand, probably for a Land’s End catalogue. A man with a camera barks orders at the handful of assistants holding white discs who are trying to reflect the morning light onto an array of vibrant products. Then David watches as the professional photographer suddenly drops to his knees, clutching his chest. The panicked crew surrounds him, but the professional photographer has collapsed face-down in the sand and is giving off every impression of being dead.

“Oh my God!” yells a woman with a clipboard, scanning the beach in every direction. “Is anyone here a photographer? Are there any photographers on the beach?”

One of the assistants scrambles up the steps of a lifeguard stand and grabs a bullhorn. “We have an emergency!” he says. “Someone please help us! Can anyone here shoot a purse?”

From a distance David takes in the undocumented fashion accessories, then looks down at his camera. This is his moment. “I can,” he says quietly. Then more loudly, toward the crew, as he speeds across the sand. “I can!” he says. “I can shoot a purse!”

Scenes from a Florida horse track

The minimum bet is one dollar. I bet five. When my horses come around the bend and stampede toward the finish line, I scream so loudly that a nearby baby starts crying in his mother’s arms.

I’m surprised that I’ve never been to a horse track before today. I’d always assumed that I had, because it seems so characteristic of me, but in retrospect I think all my familiarity with the racing world came from reading Seabiscuit.

People here are deadly serious. Most of them operate alone. They sit at picnic tables in the shade of the tiki bars, poring over stats in their official daily programs. One man’s future seems to depend on the performance of Bingo Kitten.

What is a horseman? Is it a jockey? Is it a centaur? Is it someone who enjoys the company of horses? And why am I not allowed to park in the spots designated “Horseman”? Is it because I’m a woman? I enjoy horses just as much as anybody.

I send my mom a text about being at the race track. She responds, “Slippery slope, that racing. When I lived in Florida I used to bet on the dogs.”

M and I win $15 and do an end zone dance. Everyone glares at us.

No one here seems to be rich, even the gamblers who bet with $100 bills. The only individual who appears to have done well for himself at the track is a man exiting the compound in a Ferrari. But his smugness seems less about winnings and more about taking money from poor people, so I assume he’s a manager.

According to the program, Bingo Kitten’s parents are Kitten’s Joy and Bingo Queen.

A statue of a horse towers above the palm trees at the entrance to the parking lot. The horse is ten stories tall. He is fighting a dragon. I rack my brain for a similar scene in mythology, but come up with nothing. Maybe the artist based his work on a cartoon. In any case, it takes my breath away.

For all of those gamblers who are down to less than a dollar, there are slot machines.

Post-time is at 12pm next Sunday. I will wear a sunhat and bring lots of quarters. My mom will be in town, but I’ll hold her to a budget so we can still afford tacos after the races. And I’m not leaving the track until my horsewomanhood is acknowledged, at least by the babies.

 

 

Miami shut-in

She hasn’t set foot outside her seaside condo in eight years. She cannot think of a compelling enough reason to leave. The delivery guy drops the food outside the door. She’s had pretty good luck with the hurricanes, and has enjoyed a long spell of adequate health. The ocean is there whether or not she puts her feet in it. Plus she has a flatscreen TV and two floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the beach and approximately seven places to sit, including the bed and the toilet, though she dislikes the yellow armchair that can never seem to swivel the right way when she’s reading old magazines.

Eight years ago, when she first moved to South Florida to finish her book, she had every intention of exploring the local terrain. But in order to get in and out she had to ride the elevator with various combinations of strangers who lived inside her building. Riding the elevator with other people was an intolerable situation. When she pushed her own button and stared straight ahead she felt ashamed of her misanthropic tendencies. But when she made small talk, it always petered out before her floor (the 80th), and then she and her neighbors were just standing there watching the floors tick by in awkward silence. It was enough to rip your guts out. And she wouldn’t dream of taking the stairs because when she tallied up the number of times she might get assaulted in the dark stairwell over the course of 80 stories, she didn’t like her odds.

The plan was to be in South Florida for three months before returning to the Land of Winter. But after a few weeks went by she realized that climates and landscapes mattered much less to her than the quality of her apartment, and the television set in her Miami condo was a full third bigger than her flatscreen in the Land of Winter, so she settled in.

And now she sits. Sometimes at the kitchen table. Sometimes in the abominable yellow chair. Sometimes she wishes she could go to a pet store and buy a turtle terrarium, but then she thinks of putting on sandals and riding the elevator, and she stays where she is. Her book used to be about life, but now it is about dog food ads and funny things she finds on the internet. Anyone who thinks shut-ins don’t have a sense of humor is dead wrong. She finds it hilarious, just goddamn hilarious, to stand at her window and wave and wave at the ocean, like it’s a boat that is sailing away.

A word on public toilets

I once stood in a bathroom line for 25 minutes at a Starbucks near Central Park, only to have a European woman barge in front of me holding her child’s hand when I was next to go. “My little girl she has to tinkle,” the woman said. “She will wet her pants. Please can we go first?” I gave them my coveted spot, and I’m pretty sure they both used the toilet while they were in there. Or perhaps just the woman used the toilet because the kid had no bladder urgency whatsoever and had only been classically trained in the peepee dance.

Imagine giving a $5 bill to a homeless woman on the street because she’s holding a baby in her lap and the baby’s face is all grubby and sad, and you assume that your $5 will buy the baby some medicine for her drippy nose, then you find out later that the homeless woman actually lives in a penthouse apartment in Tribeca and earlier that day she’d smudged expensive chocolate into her baby’s cheeks right before bundling them both into rags for the sole purpose of extorting $5 of sympathy money out of you. Well, I would think better of that woman than someone who cuts in front of me in the bathroom line of a Manhattan Starbucks falsely using her child’s bladder as an excuse. She might as well flush all my good will down the toilet with her five lunchtime martinis.

That is a lengthy preamble to my point: anyone familiar with New York City knows how precious a commodity a commode can be when you’re walking around, which is most of the time. I have bought unnecessary cups of coffee, bottles of water, and once even a cheeseburger to earn the exalted privilege of using a Manhattan business’s restroom. There are no public johns anywhere. It really sucks. And if you do manage to find one, it’s probably disgusting because Lavatory Grinches steal the toilet paper, soap, and toilet seats. If they could steal the water out of the bowl, they’d probably do that, too. The real reason that native New Yorkers don’t watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve in Time’s Square isn’t because it’s cold outside and the whole thing is kind of dumb, but because they know that if they have to pee at any point during the evening, they will never be able to thanks to Manhattan’s egregious restroom deficit.

Which brings me to Miami. [OMG a white sailboat is passing by right now OMG] I took a jog along a beach trail this morning and counted no less than seven public restrooms. And I don’t tend to jog very far. In Miami, toilets are everywhere for the taking. They’re so prolific that not once in my first week here have I ever felt the need to urinate. It’s as if the bathrooms come to ME, saying, “In five minutes you might have to pee, so why don’t you take a load off now as a preemptive measure?” and I’m like, “Thanks, I think I’ll take you up on that,” and then it turns out I DID have to pee, but it just wasn’t urgent yet because the nerve pathways between my bladder and my brain are so retarded (until they’re not), but that’s okay because the bathrooms here totally bypass those nerve pathways and sense my body’s yearnings before cognition. And they’re really nice bathrooms! Only once have I gotten the sense that I was interrupting gay beach sex when I arrived to do my business. The hand dryers are modern, the TP is fully stocked, you look tan and beautiful in the mirror, and after you pee you kind of want to hang out until you have to pee again. But you don’t because you know that the next sunlit bathroom will be even better. I’ve never seen so many doors marked WOMEN in my entire life.

I can’t get over how different this is from New York. The palm trees and the blue-green ocean and the short pants are all wonderful, of course, but I could also see them on a Jumbotron in Times Square. If I looked hard enough, I might find an authentic Cuban sandwich in Manhattan. But the wealth of public restrooms is what distinguishes this city from its northern rivals. That and Gloria Estefan. But she has no need for brick and mortar facilities. She just uses the ocean, like a starfish.

I’m sorry I’m not sorry I now live in Miami

I’ve temporarily relocated to Miami, and I want to write about all the ways in which this place is paradise, but meanwhile my friends and family members are actively catching hypothermia in climates north of here, so I can’t describe paradise without sounding like I’m gloating, but on the other hand I kind of want to gloat because I can see green ocean and palm trees from the balcony of my condo, and because it’s 80 degrees and at any moment I could go swimming with the local dolphins, and I don’t think you should resent me for my change in fortune because it’s entirely possible that I froze to death a few weeks ago in Brooklyn and am now enjoying a sunny afterlife in a place masquerading as Miami, and most people would rather be cold and alive than warm and dead, so if it makes you feel any better we can all operate under the assumption that I’m deceased, or that these palm trees are fake, or that soon this entire metropolis will be underwater, and then everyone in South Florida will have to relocate to the island of Kokomo, which I found out recently doesn’t exist.

A few of Miami’s key (get it?!) elements:

1) Donald Trump

Once upon a time Manhattan real estate mogul Donald Trump gazed across a pristine white beach where Floridian children were playing with sea turtles and listening to the hallowed voice of the ocean through an abundance of conch shells. “I would like to erect forty thousand condos here,” Trump pronounced, “and their foundations will be strong with the crushed bones of blissful children. And I will also sell sea turtles in vending machines down by the seashore.” Two decades later Trump’s dreams have been realized. When M and I drive up or down A1A, Vanilla Ice’s beachfront avenue, the view goes like this: Trump condo, ocean, Trump condo, ocean, Trump condo, Trump condo, Trump condo, ocean, Tony Roma’s. Every evening M and I stand on our balcony and watch hundreds of ominous black vultures circle the rooftops of Trump’s extensive skyline. We think Trump commands these birds like a storybook witch. He hovers on his penthouse balcony with arms raised to the sky, calling to his pretties. But I’m sure the lobbies of his condos are quite nice. I know at least one of them has a waterfall.

2) colossal fishing boats

Every weekend a fleet of colossal fishing boats emerges from Biscayne Bay and takes to the Atlantic. These boats are usually stark white and about 20 stories high. Some of them have colorful, curly slides on their decks, which must be the chutes down which the fishermen send their catch at the end of the day. The fish spiral down into the boats’  chlorinated aquariums where they can be kept alive until they go to market. A massive crew of sailors and deep sea anglers—mostly hailing from Chicago, mostly wearing flip flops, mostly drunk and bloated—keep the boats on course in the Caribbean’s prime fishing grounds. These working fleets might strike you as old-fashioned, but many people in Florida still depend on traditional fishing boats for their livelihoods, and to feed their families, so they continue to take to the sea blaring ancient maritime Disney music.

3) nudie beach

To be frank, the primary reason I chose to rent our particular condo is because it’s directly across the street from the biggest public nudie beach in America. This means that if I veer left when walking toward the ocean, I encounter white lifeguard stands and the bathing-suited denizens of Trump’s condos, but if I veer right, I encounter pink lifeguard stands that herald all the pink, untoned flesh to come. I’m not talking about topless sunbathing either, which is a rampant and delightful custom in South Florida. I am talking about naked penises that look as if they were shrunk by evil shamans and I’m talking about jelly rolls that could have been liposuctioned from a herd of manatees. I love it all so much.

4) weird birds

M and I are determined to become ornithologists while we’re here, but only if we can juggle the binoculars and our wine glasses at the same time. This place is full of weird birds that chose to migrate south for the winter just like us. If we’re not being captivated by Trump’s avian minions, we’re watching pelicans fart in trees at the marina, or speculating about what makes the giant flocks of starlings vacate the telephone wires all at once. My favorite bird by far, however, is the one that lives in the parking lot of the shopping center where we ate Cuban sandwiches yesterday. Food was scarce because we weren’t sharing, so the bird snatched up a packet of Splenda and proceeded to jump from one car hood to another pecking wildly at the sugar, playing keep-away with the rest of the birds, and generally enjoying a decadent lunch. I never knew that birds liked artificial sweetener, but now I will be sure to bring some Equal when I go to feed the ducks.

5) tennis

I insisted on bringing our tennis rackets to Florida because I want to improve my hand-eye coordination. My mom gets beamed by every ball I throw at her and I really don’t want to end up like that. This morning M and I went to the condo’s tennis courts for the first time. We were feeling cocky because last spring we played a few matches at the only court in Brooklyn that didn’t shake us down for expensive permits and tennis decrees from the mayor and such. The court belonged to the Marcy Projects and its net was a chain link fence. Much like Jay-Z honed his rapping skills and street smarts at the same housing project, M and I both assumed that we had improved our tennis game by playing in the ‘hood. But we were not prepared for the vigorous competition of Florida retirees. Ten minutes after we arrived at the court this morning, two elderly men challenged us to a doubles match. It was a brutal defeat. I hadn’t known you were supposed to hit the ball hard, or straight across the net, or within the white lines. I’d thought tennis was a game played with gentle lobs and a lot of flirtatious teasing, but suddenly a gray-haired Austrian man was shouting “Forty-love!” and whacking balls toward my floppy sunhat. The Marcy Projects tennis court had not been the elite training ground I’d thought it to be. Those facilities will probably not host the U.S. Open anytime soon. Though if they do the security costs will be minimal because the neighborhood already boasts a strong police presence.

And now, while you manage your long underwear situation up north, I must excuse myself to go perve on the nudists. Adios, amigos.