In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  NOAH

  Do I think I’m going to go home and automatically be a more conscientious husband? Fuck, I hope so. I want to be. But I know I’m also gonna be the same dickwad I left as. For the most part. Same dickwad, but with stronger calves and less patience for people who aren’t as honed as this made me. Yeah. No magic bullet.

  KENT

  The thousands of little actions that being decent entails. Everyday decisions that have to be made. Steps to be taken—if you want a metaphor, there you go.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  This trip has made it that much clearer to me that virtue and goodness and…fucking…peace of mind—these aren’t things you just happen across on your travels. You have to choose to cultivate these things. Opt in and work toward them.

  GLENN

  Simply just staying the course. Not picking up and moving on in pursuit of something else that I think will make me happier.

  The three men nod without noticing one another nodding.

  KENT

  The end of this does kinda feel like rending the veil a little bit. Like, yeah—now I know how far I am from being a fundamentally decent person.

  GLENN

  Having to be in a completely codependent relationship with people other than my wife for the first time in, like, twelve years—building that from the ground up—has forced me to understand what the mechanics of that are. Again. And what’s required to make the mechanics work.

  NOAH

  Maybe it’ll be like staring at the sun, but in a life sense. Where you can’t blink that shit away, or not for a while you can’t. You see the afterimage of it over everything else.

  NOAH (CONT’D)

  Yeah. Exercise patience. Move on from the grievances.

  KENT

  And, like—put in a small act of generosity where it’s not required.

  GLENN

  Try to be an active agent in communal success. Banal again, but it is true. I’ve thought about it a lot on this trip.

  Again, they stare ahead while nodding.

  GLENN (CONT’D)

  That’s the thing about this place. If you do you, and I do me, then I have to wonder: How are we going to do us? We have to do us! We have no choice!

  KENT

  Florida: People existing for themselves, by themselves.

  GLENN

  Florida: Don’t ask of me, and I will not ask of you.

  KENT

  Florida: You had a choice, and you chose this.

  NOAH

  (pointing at road shoulder)

  There’s another fork sharpened into a shiv. What is that, three today?

  GLENN

  All of this is getting fixed in post…

  FADE OUT

  —

  MILE 994 — MIAMI

  IN THE END, WE ARRIVE AT THE FUTURE

  We emerged from the swamp bare-chested, our shirts spun over our heads like helicopter rotors. Miami! We’d made it! Like the original Marathon Man, we came bearing a message of victory. Or, barring that, a message of our arrival. To passing motorists, we likely appeared to have come bearing news of some imminent calamity.

  A small joy spasmed us. We’d proved that we could, which is the animus behind climbing mountains, having children—all your more popular forms of demonstrative suicide. We’d wrung every last drop of effort from ourselves. We’d done what peripatetic heroes are supposed to do: reminded ourselves we exist.

  “So we’re not going to the Keys, then?” Glenn asked.

  “Only if we’re going by Jet Ski,” Noah said.

  That settled, we left the shoulder of the road for the last time. We ramped onto pink sidewalk as we pierced the high-density sprawlburbs of West Kendall and Sweetwater, where the uniformity of desire was on full display. Though I didn’t want to jinx it, it was looking more and more like we’d made it through the most dangerous pedestrian state without getting pizzaed. We filmed some triumphal scenes of us waving our shirts yet again.

  “Who’s got it better than us?” I asked, practically skipping along toward my birthplace.

  “Nobody,” Glenn said. “Maybe everybody.”

  With the camera rolling, I soliloquized: Proto-Miami was a muddy, malarial nightmare. One soldier garrisoned here during the Spanish-American War wrote to his parents: “If I owned both Miami and Hell, I’d sell Miami and go to live in Hell.” Now, though, it is our dynamo of perpetual motion and ceaseless self-reinvention. It is our bleeding edge.

  KENT

  If Florida is Hothouse America, a microcosm or synecdoche of the larger nation, then Miami is that once more again. Miami is the concentration of the concentrate.

  Perfect, Glenn said, swapping camera batteries.

  Miami’s been intractable since it rose out of the sea. Its constant wetness and nursery heat make it so. The Tequesta hunted and gathered around the present-day city but didn’t stay year-round; the mosquitoes were too much. The Spanish dream of a sugar colony was kaputted by the monsoon seasons and heat that blanks the brain. The South acquired it late, but for cotton it was unsuitable.

  Neither Spanish nor Southern, and with trainloads of Yankee Strangers several decades away, Miami for a long time was the center of nothing. It wasn’t a frontier marketplace, it wasn’t a transportation hub. It didn’t attract industrial capital, and it didn’t produce anything anyone wanted to buy.

  Really, the main reason Miami exists is because a widow from Cleveland decided it should. In 1895, Julia Tuttle sent a bouquet of orange blossoms to Henry Flagler to prove to him that this sodden outpost had gone unscathed by an otherwise statewide frost. They worked out a deal: Tuttle would give Flagler free plots for a hotel and a railroad station, and then half of her land on top of that; in return, Flagler would extend his railroad, build a palace of a hotel, but also pave streets and dig sewers. Tuttle wanted a real first-class city, not a southernmore iteration of Flagler’s baroque Franken-island, Palm Beach.

  Miami had only a few hundred inhabitants at the time of its incorporation. Tuttle went into debt waiting for more people to show up and buy in. Flagler—he was able to bide his time. He developed his holdings with what remained of his Standard Oil wealth, though he believed that Tuttle was fundamentally nuts: “[Civilizing Miami] would be silly,” he said. “This place will never be anything more than a fishing village for my hotel guests!”

  To raise cash, Tuttle sold off property, which drove down the prices of her remaining land. Flagler tarried while demand caught up with what he had supplied. When, hounded by creditors shortly before her death, a bankrupt Tuttle appealed to Flagler, he wrote back: “I do not want you to suffer but I cannot accept the responsibility of your suffering.”

  KENT

  This is why Flagler and not Tuttle is remembered. And why Miami’s endowment is his and not hers. Down here, the inevitable would be moneyed.

  Compared to contemporaries like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, Miami’s early social organization and civic leadership was a travesty. Recent arrivals didn’t want to consider bond issues; they’d left home to get away from bond issues. They wanted to enjoy the weird trees, unwholesome sunshine, and liquid land market.

  By 1900, Dade County (then constituting the future Broward, Palm Beach, and Martin counties) could claim 4,955 inhabitants. Land then boomed, but in 1926, a hurricane came along and spoiled the fun, leveling the burgeoning city. It killed hundreds and left more homeless. It was the costliest storm ever, equivalent to two Katrinas. Redevelopment, though, didn’t take long.

  There was no business but the real estate business. Until 1949, any twenty-five property-holding registered voters could establish a municipal corporation around Miami. If they chose to do so, they were then granted the powers of taxation and regulation by the state. Money lured
many to damn the larger community and found their own cities. This is why metropolitan Miami today is a two-thousand-square-mile ganglion of almost thirty municipalities. Miami begat Homestead in 1913 and Florida City in 1914, both of which were stops along the new branch of Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway. After that, rich-as-Croesus real estate families incorporated Miami Beach (1915) and Coral Gables (1925). Opa-Locka (1926) was the Scheherazade fever dream of aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, who hoped his city would become the “Baghdad of America.” (Oh, man, did it ever, except not in the way Curtiss had hoped.) Subsequently came Miami Springs, South Miami, and North Miami. The Great Depression gummed up the gears but could not break them. Five more cities were created during the thirties: Miami Shores, Biscayne Park, El Portal, Indian Creek Village, and Surfside. The last pulse came in the 1940s with the incorporation of Sweetwater, Bal Harbour, Bay Harbor Islands, Virginia Gardens, Hialeah Gardens, and Medley.

  In 1959, Havana’s upper and middle classes fled Fidel Castro’s revolution, and the process of contemporary Miami becoming what it is was begun. Miami for the Cuban bourgeoisie had been a vacation destination, a day trip. As such, it was the only place that made sense to muster themselves in exile. The lower strata of their social pyramid arrived periodically thereafter. Hot on their heels came all the major refugee streams of the Western Hemisphere: Nicaraguan, Haitian, Panamanian, Colombian, Honduran.

  KENT

  Right as the peninsula’s tourism industry was being swallowed whole by Orlando, Miami received this newly impoverished if also highly trained and motivated labor force. The cheesy old hotels and restaurants gave way to international finance, insurance. Real estate, of course. Suddenly, Miami was a real place, with resources unique to the country. “Capital of the Caribbean,” “Capital of Latin America”—

  Kent steps lively around a car rolling through a red light into a right-hand turn. Salsa shines through its cracked window like a line of light under a door.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  I have never had such a palpable sense of everyone being on their phone.

  KENT

  Eyes on the prize here. Take two. Ahem.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  Miami grew unplanned, as if not needing to be sown. Like the land couldn’t help it.

  Planes banked low overhead on their final approach to Miami International. Noah noticed that a shopping cart had been parked at every covered bus stop we passed.

  “Where’s the, uh, opulence?” he asked. “I was expecting, y’know, zeppelin titties. And for there to be, like, oligarch yachts sliding through intersections like this was Speed 2: Cruise Control.” He gestured at the surrounding metropolis stretching on low and vast like a used-car lot.

  I tried to explain the special Miami combination of arriviste decadence and abject poverty. Promise v. reality. That we’re perennially ranked worst or second-worst in terms of inequality, gun violence—yet one out of every ten of us is a millionaire, if you account for homes, stocks, and cars. “The grit keeps us from being a bigger, shittier Palm Beach,” I said, “and the glitz hides the fact that we’re not too too different from most Sunbelt cities on the make.”

  But Noah and Glenn weren’t listening. They were debating as to which restaurant should serve us our first post-PowerBar meal.

  So we weighed our options at a three-tiered strip mall before settling on El Palacio de los Jugos. Glenn and Noah were rebuffed by the Spanish-only mamis awork behind the sneeze guard. It was glorious to watch—though my kitchen Spanish has left me, and I could not help them. Nor could I any longer summon the Miami accent—that rubbery locution honed here by the children of immigrants. (The shibboleth is the word “like,” which when enunciated in the Miami accent is very tongue-forward, sounding almost candied, lllllllllaike the curved gloss on a bauble.) The Miami accent shoehorns English into Spanish cadences and pronunciation rules. Words are molded on the lips and given much forward thrust, ticking higher in pitch and tempo as they’re spoken. The Miami accent is often mistaken for a Latin accent by Americans, but the Miami accent affects Spanish, too. Monolingual Spanish speakers consider the inflection of Miami Spanish to be a variation of the gringo accent. What a strange way to be apprehended. A few degrees from foreign in either direction.

  While a rouged grandma holding a ladle full of black beans shook her head no at Glenn, he surmised: “No concession to whites. It’s great. There’s a little bit of this in L.A., but not at this level.”

  And he’s right. When the first Cuban exiles began to arrive, the original Miami power brokers (tourist-oriented fellers who referred to the place as “My-ammuh” like Captain Dale) were concerned largely with preserving their own good-ol’-boy prestige and way of life. They were doomed, of course. The Cuban exiles had the power of the federal government behind them. A most important ally in the struggle against Communism and its spread in the Americas had literally washed up on our nation’s shore. For geopolitical reasons, Uncle Sam could never allow the Cubans to be just another ethnic group. They had to become the “most successful immigrant story of all time.”

  The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act ensured that these exiles would qualify for permanent residency and then citizenship only one year after arriving in-country. They would be exempt from immigration quotas as well as requirements that their family members enter the United States through a legal port of entry. (Contrast this with the treatment of Haitian refugees, who were shown exactly zero sympathy.) And if after receiving their leg up these exiles threatened to displace “Anglo” (i.e., white American) hegemony in Miami? Así es la vida…

  That’s a vital distinction to keep in mind: The first wave of Cubans, the doctors and lawyers and landowners, did not immigrate to Miami. They exiled themselves following a revolution. They came here with no intention of assimilating. Instead, they brought with them the heirloom seeds of bourgeois Havana and cultivated them in an amenable clime. Oh, they underwent the trials of the immigrant, same as everyone else. But as they strived and prospered, the Cubans opted not to enlist in prevailing American organizations. Rather than join the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, they participated in the Cámara de Comercio Latino. Instead of petitioning for entry into the Builders Association of South Florida, they created the Latin Builders Association. In lieu of the American Cancer Society, they supported La Liga Contra el Cancer. As they waited daily for Fidel to topple, they nourished a community separate from provincial Anglo Miami. More and more exiles (plus marielitos) arrived, and distractedly they built a metropolis.

  Meanwhile, the dwindling Anglo elite preached the old standard to the newcomers: learn English, soften your strange ways, get in back of the ethnic queue like the Germans, Irish, and Italians before you. This inspired little enthusiasm. The Cubans—at least the pre–Mariel Boatlift Cubans—were not tired, nor weak, nor huddling. They were professionals who’d been forced out of their home. They did not fawn; they ran for local office. They gained seats, and standing. They consolidated power.

  Before the Anglos could know what had hit them, the Cubans became the ones enforcing cultural standards and effecting others’ assimilation. Anglos now had to bargain in a sociopolitical arena in which white men no longer occupied the center of gravity (as is still the case in New York, L.A., et al.). Their city had ceased to be just a vacation destination like those other Flagler whistle-stops along the coast. Miami became a less relaxed, more complex place thanks to the exiles and subsequent immigrant groups. In jockeying with one another and bringing down the old order, Miami’s various communities produced a unique urban experiment long before, say, Houston began undergoing something similar.

  De facto pluralism was—is—the norm in Miami. It’s the only city in the world where more than half of the citizenry is made up of immigrants who arrived within the past fifty years. Sixty percent of Miamians are of Cuban extraction, 18 percent are black, 12 percent are white, and 10 percent a
re Venezuelan-, Nicaraguan-, Mexican-, Puerto Rican–, Colombian-, Brazilian-, Haitian-, Russian-, Israeli-, et cetera–American. This overlap of languages, customs, institutions, and social systems gives rise to acculturation in reverse. That is, newcomers don’t conform themselves to Miami; Miami morphs to fit them. Crucially, this means that Miamians have no common frame of reference. Everybody lives in a different Miami—their own Miami. Everyday events get filtered through interpretive frameworks that are different to the point of near unintelligibility.

  KENT

  (through mouthful of ropa vieja)

  This is tomorrow’s America, today!

  * * *

  —

  “I can’t believe this place made you,” Glenn said to me as we passed more stucco apartment houses crumbling next to luxe new high-rises, with riotous vegetable growth grouting the space in between. “That is the mystery,” he added.

  While we walked, the Tamiami Trail became regular old Eight Street. Calle Ocho. My smile could not stop widening. We were into Little Havana now—98 percent Latino, though the original Cuban exiles moved to the ’burbs long ago. Around us: actual street life. We watched as a “Safari Tours” bus pulled up to bustling Domino Park. Alabaster Germans disembarked, thrust cameras into the faces of ancient jugadores. They tried to look stoic, these jugadores, but their flaring nostrils betrayed just how tired of this shit they were. We joined the Germans and filmed B-roll of their clinking ivory tiles.

  The jugadores drove their words with gestures, practically shooed them away in cycles of bickering and flirtation. They made for far more compelling footage than the adjacent body shops, tire marts, muffler stores, and car dealerships. I tried to calculate the car dealership per square mile ratio for Little Havana, West Flagler, Flagami, Westchester—basically, for the length of Calle Ocho between Biscayne Bay and the Everglades—but I couldn’t do it. I’m certain there are more car dealerships here, proportionally, than anywhere in the United States. Someone smarter than me should be writing a thesis on the historical impact of car dealing on South Florida.