Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I experienced different emotions about moving to Austria.
First was elation. I was excited, giddy to visit another continent.
But then I was sad. Depressed to leave South Beach, where I’d loved the beach, the weather, had friends and had experienced many of the best moments of my life. It was the definitive end of my Miami music business dream. The end of my South Beach dream. The opportunities just weren’t there for me. I could have persisted, I guess, but I began to shift to other ideas and dreams. I’d changed. And I’d become excited again and fascinated with the world beyond America’s borders.
Sure, South Beach, Miami, are more like Latin America than America, but it still was America. I’ve always been curious about other countries, people, cultures and languages. America, to me, is like a bubble, in a way. We’re so closed off from the rest of the world.
Our media never talks about other countries unless it’s about an adversary, a war, or a natural disaster. One might think that’s all the rest of the world is, a big festering shithole, replete with war and terrorism and misery. And sure, that is tragically the case, for many, but not for all. In fact, I was shocked to learn of the high quality of life in Europe.
Hearing of how they had free health care, dental care, income assistance, little to no violent crime was startling to learn about. Many of the far right-wing assholes and Fox News Channel people would have you believe Europe is suffering under
“socialism” and how terrible it is there.
In talking with my wife and through my own research into relocating to Austria, I discovered that to not be the truth. I discovered they had cleaner air, cleaner water, safer roads, and far happier people. They all had health insurance. That was free. They had up to two months of vacation. Paid. Not the two weeks most Americans are lucky to get. Most of their citizens weren’t drowning in debt. Quite the contrary, Europeans traveled the world, spoke multiple languages, read more books than us. Book discussion shows were popular on TV, and their news programs actually had news instead of partisan shit-tossing, yelling, and flashy graphics.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent It was saddening to discover how much I’d been lied to, as an American. How our media is so dishonest. How much they’d brainwashed us into thinking we were the greatest country on Earth and how shitty Europe is when nothing could be farther from the truth, in so many ways.
And there are problems in Europe, sure, and advantages in America, especially with starting businesses, investing, but the equality and overall quality of life, the better opportunities for free education, health care, and public transportation and how much less violent crime there was because of the better social services and safety nets, it was astonishing. Simply learning what I did invalidated nearly everything every right-winger Fox News person had said about social welfare and free education…
(I was seeing why it was, too, they didn’t want better education. In that otherwise a better-educated populace wouldn’t vote for most Democrats and Republicans…) ((I came to realize, too that both sides, Left and Right, Red and Blue, are filled with crooked politicians that are simply pawns, puppets for corporate interests, and neither side really cares and they both exploit racism, religion, and greed to keep the masses below them. The same corporate interests spew partisan bullshit on MSNBC and Fox News to divide Americans, pit us against each other, make us easier to control. It’s quite tragic how they manipulate us, dumb us down. And it’s being done, by both parties, I believe, for reasons greater than we know…)) Back to planning the move to Europe, the problem in going over to Austria, as we prepared for our arrival, was that while the immigration procedures were an improvement from Miami’s, they were still stringent.
Annoyingly, if we’d been married a year or two earlier, I could have had an Austrian passport with little hassle. However, I’m not the only foreigner who was impressed by the quality of life in Austria, and there’d been such a surge in sham marriages in Austria, involving immigrants seeking Austrian passports, so many sham marriages, in fact, that the government enacted draconian measures to eradicate the practice.
Laws were established that granted foreign spouses of Austrians only 1-year visas, though these could be used as work permits, and could be renewed. However,
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent before the visa was granted, much paperwork had to be filled out and income, bank statements provided.
There was also a requirement that all new immigrants had to wait up to 7 years before they could apply for citizenship. In order to receive citizenship, too, they’d need to pass a battery of German language tests.
While it was daunting, and disappointing, it was doable, and it didn’t dissuade us from making the move...
The days before we moved were some of the best of my life. I sold my car, providing us enough cash to start up in Austria, buy plane tickets, and spend a couple months relaxing more on the beach. During this time, I studied German, which I’d been enjoying the intellectual challenge of, and my wife and me both worked part-time, her still at the hotel and me working freelance jobs, doing online marketing.
That time, those couple months, over the summer, were magical. Since we weren’t working full-time, we had plenty of time to chill. And smoke weed. And drink. And lie out on the beach, swim in the wonderfully warm Atlantic waters.
When the water is around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s like you’re a lobster in there, moving, floating and swimming around in that thick hot and salty ocean.
Oh, it was so glorious.
We spent a lot of time cooking too. We were living in this super tiny Art Deco building that’d been converted from a hotel into a condo. It was closet-sized, that studio apartment, that room, but it was cozy, and a block from the ocean. And we had a nice little kitchen in the corner of the room, with a stove, a range top, and we made all sorts of delectable dishes, lots of pancakes and fried chicken, lots of Latin food, along with the tasty treats and free food, croissants, and alcohol my wife was bringing home from the hotel.
I was hooking up with bags of decent Mexican weed from a chill Mexican dude who was a friend of a friend. My wife and I would smoke blunts and eat omelets stuffed full of green buds, get blasted and sit out on the beach, lying in the hot sands, watching the waves. The beach, on a hot and clear day or night, when you’re high, is like taking footsteps to God.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent We even rode out a hurricane together, high. Hurricane Katrina, when it hit Miami Beach. That storm was a doozy. It was insane how fast-moving it was, watching it on TV morph from a simple, benign tropical depression into a category one hurricane in only the span of a few hours.
There was a call to evacuate the beach, but seeing that it was only a cat one, and that we were in a tall, strong concrete building that’d withstood a multitude of storms, we settled on riding it out. Miraculously, we didn’t lose power, though the cable went out, once the storm roared in.
I’ll never forget the sound it made, that storm. It was stronger than the edge of the storm I’d experienced in Ft. Myers, with Nasdaq and the German girl.
There was a distinct sound to the storm, like a train, that rumbled in the air, and sheets of rain whapped and smacked at our windows, but fortunately for us, the storm surge didn’t reach past the beach.
During the storm, we smoked weed and drank whiskey, stayed in bed. The only traumatic thing that happened was a neighbor of mine, a sexy young Latina, with a toddler daughter, had set her apartment’s stove on fire. The idiot girl was randomly banging on doors, running like a chicken through the halls, screaming in a mixture of Spanish and English.
Hearing the commotion outside, I swung open my door, peered into the hall, and saw it was filled with grayish black smoke!
Not the best time to have the building catch fire, during a hurricane; curiously, though, I guess it could have been the perfect time for a fire in that the rains of the storm would have doused the flames. But wait, would the winds have accelerated it? And what about smoke inhalation? A shitty situation no matter what.
I ran out into the hallway, and asked the panicked, but still somehow impossibly gorgeous Latina, what was amiss…
She pointed to her apartment, down the hall, and I ran over to it, saw smoke pouring out its doorway, like a wide chimney that’d been flipped sideways.
Covering my mouth, holding my breath, I squinted my eyes and trudged in there to see her stove as the source of the smoke, a steady stream of thick, dark smoke
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent billowing from it. Worse was witnessing the lady’s young daughter, maybe 3 years of age, standing there crying. I picked up the girl, brought her outside.
Then I called 911, from my cell phone, though I worried no one would show because the beach had been under an evacuation order. We weren’t, technically, supposed to be there. Not to mention there was a category one hurricane raging outside.
Another neighbor, an older, chubby Cuban guy with a pencil thin mustache, wearing only a pair of tighty-whiteys, burst out of his apartment, ran down the hallway, brandishing a fire extinguisher, and went kamikaze, into her apartment, sprayed the stove, but ran out coughing and shaking his head, his receding hairline looking farther back as he coughed and heaved and ran back to his apartment without saying anything to anybody.
I ran back to my apartment, thinking the building would catch on fire or be filled with smoke, and my wife and I collected our valuables, started packing our backpacks, ready to rush into the thick of the storm and take our chances with Mother Nature as opposed to Father Fire and Sister Smoke.
Amazingly, though, shortly after I’d called 911, the Miami Beach Fire Dept arrived, did their thing, saved the day and night, month, and year. Are those guys ever true heroes! Rushing out during a hurricane to save us. Words can’t express my gratitude for them. As they were leaving, myself, the Cuban, the Latina, my wife, applauded them.
After that, in the hallways, I must admit to treating the Latina with apprehension, not happy she’d nearly burned down the building, during a damn hurricane.
In the days following, I watched the hurricane churn up the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It was boiling hot then, too, everywhere in Florida, around the Gulf, like 105 with the heat index, every day. Knowing how hot it was and how warm the water was, I was all too aware that wherever the storm would land, it would be terrible, given how quickly it moved and grew.
The storm was spawn of the devil. Fucking evil.
I remember walking by a newspaper vending machine nearby my apartment building in the days before Katrina lashed Louisiana and Mississippi. On the front
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent of the vending machine, the glass case where you can see the front page of the newspaper, someone had carved the word “LIES” into the glass, which always made me chuckle when I’d walked past it.
But that day, as the paper had a headline saying something about how New Orleans was in grave danger, I knew it was no lie.