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The Post-Drunkalogue: part 2

THIS PICKS UP RIGHT FROM PART 1

August 1st arrived and I arrived at Penn Station.  It smelled like retired piss.  God I’d missed this place.  It was noisy and there was so much to look at you couldn’t focus on any one thing.  Luckily I’d stayed in touch with my friend Beau and he let me stay with him in the South Slope for a few days, until after the wedding, where I’d then get to housesit for my brother and his fiancé (Luis and Kathleen, or L & K) while they were in Bora Bora for their honeymoon.  They were balls-busy with plans but made time for me a few times before the 6th, their appointed day.

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The Post-Drunkalogue: part 1

I’ve come to believe (mostly through observation) that just about everyone comes to a place in their lives where they do what’s called “taking stock.”  That time for me was in May of 1994, where, like a postwar resident of Berlin, I emerged from my (virtual) bunker and said, “what….the….fuck?!”  But unlike the urban German of another May in 1945, I knew that in my case all the damage was literally self-inflicted.  You could say I’d bombed myself back to the “Stoned Age.”

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Streets

Some people are born and grow up in one place, sometimes even one house.  Then there are others who move a couple of times, maybe even to different cities.  Then there’s my family.  We moved around like neurotic nomads from place to place within cities; and then from coast to coast, ricocheting back and forth in ever widening caroms.

Probably the only thing that kept us in the same country is that we never had passports or much money.

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Dalia’s Gym

South Beach used to really suck.  Especially for a kid having to live there after several great years in Hollywood, CA.  And having to arrive there in the hot summer of 1982 just made it worse.

Tony revenging on Ocean Drive

1982.

We’re not talking modeling agencies and clubs and bars and celebrity sightings.  This was before all that.  Instead, picture Tony Montana getting chased out of a squalid apartment by a crazy guy with a chainsaw and onto a nearly deserted Ocean Drive. Read more

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Passing Through

The mid 90’s found my friend James and I with very different living situations.  We’d both dropped out of college a few years earlier and took divergent paths that had finally led us again to the same place, the same situation.  He’d served a couple of hitches in the Marine Corps and ended up at a hostel on Miami Beach called The Tropics.  I was back in Miami too, drying out at my Mom’s place in a strangely resurgent South Beach.

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