Miami Odyssey

This morning, and a beautiful one it is, crisp clean clear air and lots of sunshine, I am thinking of my first adult travels. I am reading the "The Red Leather Diary" by Lily Koppel and thinking on Florence, the writer of the diary, and her travels to Europe as a young woman where she was often on the sexual menu. Last night on PBS I watched a special about Chuck Close, Philip Glass and other artists in lower Manhattan during the 60s. I wish that I had gone to NYC or to Europe, but instead, in an effort to shed my small town Mid Western naiveté, I flew by myself to Miami, Fla. (in a jet, not with my psychic abilities. Ha!). I chose Miami because it was big and in a warm clime, and I thought it sounded glamorous. Three high school friends were planning on making the trip with me, but they all found other things to do. My dear friend, Sue, went to Denver. I wrote about her in an earlier post. I had a sort of friend in Miami. We were not close but hung with the same crowd in school. She was a stewardess and ready for a new room mate.

I got off the plane and took a cab to the apartment she shared with other stewardesses. A motley bunch, a bit shallow and unfriendly, but, Hey, it was a place to start. I had $350 to my name. They hooked me up with some old creepy rich guy who hung with notables. He chaperoned mini-skirted-sexy-sweet me to a party my second night there. All the flying females were in the air, and I was the only girl available. We drove for a long time through alien, scary city streets to a penthouse on Biscayne Blvd. in down town Miami. There were high society sorts in flashy mod clothes, mini skirts, jewels and Lulu, the actress from "To Sir With Love" was there, a lavish split level living room, with full length windows facing the bay. Culture shocked, I managed to compose myself as I meandered about on very shaky legs, one sleazy guy after another, and some real hotties of both sexes approaching me and flirting, for I was obviously on the sexual menu. The night wore on and I wondered how I would ever get back to the apartment. There was a huge over-decorated condo down the hall shown to me, and offered, but only if I wanted my very own sugar daddy along with it. I was given three choices for that most inauspicious position. I didn't take the offers, wondered about the attached parking garage freaked and lost as the party broke up, until one 40ish garish slime ball took pity on my obvious state of disorientation and rejection (I had not panned-out appropriately), deposited me in his car, and drove me back to fly girl bizarre world in the early morning light, not without trying to feel up my thigh as he drove, in one last attempt to unfreeze the ice burg. I was shedding my little girl naiveté fast.

The fun didn't stop there. I found myself on a huge white yacht within the next week, being wined and dined with other pretty young things, all of us in bikinis, by a dozen or so 80 to 90 year old Mafioso types. Then onto Miami beach clubbing it with my new roommate, where I continued to be on the menu. There were gatherings in our apartment of professional mafia card sharks (my roommate's man was a dear, sweet card shark from Chicago), just back from big games throwing thousands of dollars in cash about on the floor just for fun, heartless parties at our single's club apartment in South Miami...and many more bizarre experiences too numerous and tedious to mention happening along the way. I had an affair with a sports-car-driving, sexy, college bound Cuban, who returned to Miami to try and win me back only after I was pregnant with my first child from my high school beau (who had returned from Viet Nam to make bi-monthly trips to visit me) and ready to exit Miami and it's charms for a stint as an army wife in North Carolina. I might have had higher quality experiences if I hadn't chosen such a ultra-grotesque city, where everyone goes to let their hair down and misbehave. New York or Europe with other artists would have been kinder and possibly more productive. The life choices we make. Throughout all of this my work as a lowly sales girl, then a fashion coordinator at Burdine's kept me in limited funds. What a kick. I had set myself apart, and no longer had easy bonds with the girls in my home town, not that I had ever had many.