An asshole burglar (or burglars) had climbed onto a ledge, smashed open a window, and cleaned me out, stealing my laptop and TV. But, worst of all, they jacked a book of CDs, many of which were rare, tough to find electronic music, and to this day I’ve not replaced every one of them. The burgling bastards!
But it wasn’t as bad as what happened to a chick I met at a sushi bar nearby my apartment.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent She, the ex-wife of an NFL player, a linebacker for the Bengals, came home one night to find a robber inside her apartment. The robber, a young kid, attacked her with a screwdriver, slashing her arm, stabbed her in the chest, just above her tit (very, very fortunately not hitting the silicone!) and she was able to fight him off by kicking him hard in the balls and running away.
She showed me the scars to prove it.
(Quite a pretty lady, a bleach blond beauty, maybe ten years my senior. I should have asked her out or gotten her number. We talked for a while at the sushi bar, hit it off, and then I left after finishing my meal. Surprisingly, she seemed disappointed when I departed. As an older, wiser guy, I’d for sure seize the opportunity, because even if she turned me down, so what, but at the time, it didn’t occur to me that this older, beautiful woman might have wanted to jump my bones. The axiom: “youth is wasted on the young” couldn’t be more apt in this instance…)
Aside from getting burgled and the sad plight of the area’s homeless, my time there was one of the best in my life.
I quickly made friends. It was so multi-cultural there, and, with my dark looks, I fit right in, many mistaking me for Latino, speaking Spanish to me, until I’d reply, “Yo soy gringo. Yo no hablo mucho Espanol.”
Sure, there were stuck-up bitches and rich assholes, but I met tons of cool people, and dated a lot.
The first girl I dated in South Beach was a Moroccan girl, who worked at a restaurant nearby and gave me free food. We went out a few times, and I helped teach her how to drive. She was very cool, and we had fun together. She was pretty, with olive skin and her long curly black hair and voluptuous figure. She was easygoing and smart, too, and had a hilarious snorting laugh. She’d worked as a bartender, but it turned out her family back in Morocco was loaded. They were strict, though, too, and soon demanded she return from what I discovered was an extended vacation…
Then there was a Venezuelan chick. This thick little cute thing. She had short green dyed hair that ran just past her ears and she wore tons of eyeliner and mascara. We started off, hooking up online, but after a couple dates, we realized
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent it was more of a friendship type thing, which was cool, because she was cool, and we smoked weed together, hung out, went out clubbing. She liked a lot of the same music I did, at the time, lots of trance and electro stuff. She danced like a Latin girl too. I loved how she’d move and sway to music.
She knew a lot of chill people in South Beach, and through her I made tons of friends. She had this posse of gay dudes who liked to smoke weed and were generally cool as fuck. Hanging out with them really changed the way I thought of gay people.
I’ll admit that growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I was homophobic. My stepbrother, people in school who picked on me or others called me a “fag.” It was the worst thing you could be called, a “fag” or a “faggot.”
Along with my stepbrother, friends in school spewing hate towards gays, there were stand-up comedians like Eddie Murphy and Sam Kinison, whose work I still love, but their bits on gays were ugly and implanted ideas in my young mind that being gay was disgusting.
I had an uncle who was gay, and I’d spent time as a kid with him and his partner.
But I was quite young and didn’t understand it, didn’t know they were gay or what gay people were until later. (That uncle basically abandoned me and my mom after my father died, so, on some level, I may have resented gays because of my resentment towards him.)
But yeah, until the late 1990s I’d thought of gays as gross, had friends in school espousing such axioms as, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
The first thing to make me feel differently, though, about gays, was reading Anton Lavey’s “The Satanic Bible,” out of curiosity, in college.
That book, to me, was an oracle. It was a revelation. Lavey’s philosophy was a rejection of traditional Christian morals. It was a rejection of so many of ideas I’d grown up with. I was floored by the manner in which he drained oceans of ignorance and meticulously dissected and destroyed planets of dogma with his trenchant, brilliant prose. It was simply incredible; beyond anything I could have imagined. Reading that book changed how I thought. It changed who I was. (Now that is the sort of book that should be assigned reading in schools!)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I began to question God. Why would there be a God who’d allow such horrible things to happen, like rapes, the Holocaust, natural disasters, war, poverty, and pandemics. I started questioning everything and became agnostic, believing the only likely God to be Nietzsche’s “absentee landlord” idea of a God.
(Thank you, Marilyn Manson, whose music I was listening to at the time, and who, in his ingenious autobiography, “The Long Hard Road Out of Hell,” turned me on to Lavey.)
In questioning God, the Bible, I also questioned why it was that I should hate gay people.
Why should I care about their personal life? What business is it of mine? Life is short. Do what you want. Be who you are. As long as the people are willing participants, and of legal age, it’s no one’s concern what they do but theirs.
This was around the time when gay marriage became an issue, too. I immediately supported it. I didn’t buy into any of this bullshit about “changing the definition of marriage.”
Meeting the Venezuelan chick’s gay friends further let me know what an ignorant asshole I’d been. They were chill as anything, smoked weed, liked sports, a couple were effeminate, but most weren’t. Most I wouldn’t know were gay if they’d not told me. I realized they were the same as me, just with different preferences in the sack.
(Hearing the stories of the persecution they’d suffered gave me a new empathy for them, too. Nearly all of them were like refugees in South Beach, there because their countries in South America were so intolerant of homosexuals. One of them, this freakishly tall dude, like 6’7, said how his parents in Venezuela divorced after he came out…)
One even told me how he liked women, found them pretty, but that pussy, to him, was disgusting. He thought there was nothing as revolting as a vagina.
Everything about it turned him off. The way it looked. The way it smelled. That he considered it slimy. He winced as he spoke of it.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent To me, I feel the same way about another dude’s dick or ass. To me, man ass, aside from my own, which I like, man ass, to me, is the grossest fucking thing ever.
And guess what, both opinions are okay. And fuck you if you think otherwise. If Jesus, the original hippy, a totally chill Dude, were around today, He’d have the same opinion, I posit.
Hanging out with those dudes, and that girl changed me, opened my mind, and I’m incredibly grateful for having that experience.
We stopped hanging out, me and that thick chick, though. She’d left town for a while, because she’d been terrified of an approaching storm and had returned home to Venezuela.
As the hurricane cut its path through the Caribbean, she was freaking out, never having been in a storm like that before. She called me late at night, in tears, whimpering to me over the phone that she’d rather go back to Venezuela and take her chances with Hugo Chavez. Seeing the storm on the TV, the churning gray mass on the radar that was gunning for us had her in hysterics.
Through choking tears and snorts she screamed how she was “too young and too cute to die.”
She was such a princess, or maybe a queen. Way more so than any of her gay friends.
She came back not long after the storm, which spared South Beach any severe damage, though it walloped the west coast of Florida.
The last time I saw her, I met her on a breezy evening, at a small club, near the American Airlines Arena. She was sloppy drunk, in a skimpy silver miniskirt, with wiggly underbutt bursting out from under the hem. Wild-eyed, she was dancing like an epileptic to electro. Seeing me, she limped over, nearly stumbling in her high go-go dancer heels, and she grabbed me by my t-shirt, thrust me toward her.
Reeking of booze, she French kissed me for a few seconds and shoved me away, before slapping me in the face, stomping off and dry humping her tall gay friend’s leg.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Then she rushed outside, vomited in some bushes in the back-patio area, near the cigarette smokers, and left, being nursed over to a waiting taxi, by her drag queen friend.
Not long after that, she stopped talking to me when I met another girl. A girl I met on the beach, one sunny Sunday.
A girl that would become my wife.