Never Let Them See You Cry (11 page)

Being born in Paterson, New Jersey, had obviously been a mistake, because I was a Miamian on sight.

Seeing the city for the first time was like coming home, and the love affair endures. The hot-blooded heartbeat of this passionate and mercurial city touches my soul. Palm trees silhouetted against swiftly changing sky and water, towering clouds under full sail, lightning that pirouettes across a limitless horizon and the sheer violence of sudden storms—they all leave me breathless.

Perhaps Hollywood is to blame. As a little girl, the film
Sinbad the Sailor
, starring swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., captured my subconscious and changed my future forever. I realized that recently, when I saw it again on TV. Sinbad sails turbulent Technicolor waters beneath brilliant azure skies, single-mindedly seeking the home of his long-lost father, an island called Deryabar. No one else believes it to be more than a myth, but Sinbad searches the seven seas, his quest peopled by monsters and villains, adventurers and beautiful women, until, at last, he finds Deryabar and happiness.

When I saw Miami, its turbulent Technicolor waters, and its brilliant azure skies, I had found my Deryabar. The color and sweep are identical, the monsters and villains certainly as evil, the heroes as courageous.

Perhaps because Sinbad survived the raging storm at sea, I had little respect for ominous weather when I first moved to Miami. I actually looked forward to a hurricane, fantasizing about wearing new boots and huddling with warm bodies at a hurricane party, where we would gaily lift our glasses, daring Mother Nature to do her worst.

Then I met a real hurricane.

Until then, I had always believed that Mother Nature was on my side. I had no fear of earthquake, typhoon, tidal wave or shark. I had never seen any of them.

As my first hurricane threatened, backtracking across the Caribbean, skirting Florida's coast, sweeping by, wheeling around, then steaming our way, I observed the natives: They took the oncoming storm seriously, boarding, taping and shuttering windows, moving boats and cars to high ground, emptying supermarket shelves of canned goods, bottled water and batteries.

Eager to join the preparations, I stocked up on soup and bought a candy bar. At age eight I read how the Bobbsey Twins survived a blizzard by building a fire, melting a chocolate bar and some snow, and drinking the hot chocolate.

My landlord was more realistic. He urged me to evacuate at once. My apartment, poshly labeled the “Penthouse,” was actually a freestanding one-room efficiency on the roof of a Miami Beach apartment building. It more resembled a tool shed than a penthouse. When I called to have a telephone installed, the Southern Bell representative asked my apartment number. When I said penthouse, she tried to sell me half a dozen extensions.

Home was the perfect hideaway. Climb three flights, crunch across a flat gravel roof, and there was my penthouse shed, with its jaunty porthole window. I loved it.

The landlord, my mother and my friends pleaded with me to leave it as Hurricane Betsy swirled her billowing skirts along the Florida coast. I steadfastly refused until the wind began to whistle strangely through the powerlines strung around the penthouse. I fled, forgetting my new boots in my haste. I took my cat, Niña, with me to the lobby of a sturdy beach hotel for some hurricane partying. My mother and some friends were there. So was Billy, a distant and disturbed relative by unhappy marriage. The authorities—school, law enforcement and psychiatric—were constantly on his case. I had never spent much time with him, but he had never seemed all that disturbed. In fact, he seemed fascinated by my cat. I was flattered, until late in the evening, when Billy mumbled, his eyes a glassy stare, “She's so pretty, all pink and white. I'd … I'd like to squeeze her.” At that moment the lights went out.

Clutching my cat and my raincoat, I decided to take our chances at the penthouse. We drove back on empty streets, through heavy rain. No problem—the hurricane had been scheduled to slam ashore by ten
P.M
., and it was nearly midnight. Obviously Betsy was not coming. We all had overreacted.

Niña and I quietly climbed the stairs, glad to be safely home. The power was out everywhere, so I lit candles, and we went to sleep. I awoke to what sounded like a chorus of women wailing in my room. The penthouse rocked. Water gushed in. Niña clawed her way frantically to the top of the bookcase, dislodging half a dozen volumes that splashed to the floor—into three inches of water. My battery-operated radio was still dry. Two radio reporters driving a mobile unit into the teeth of the storm shouted that a roof had just landed in the middle of Seventy-ninth Street, a few blocks away. Large objects were crashing onto the roof around the penthouse. Through my porthole I could see the fireworks of fallen wires cascading in the wind.

The high-pitched howl was deafening. Niña ran crazily around the room, slipping and splashing to escape the forces of wind and water all around us. We finally huddled together under a blanket on the bed. My record albums floated by. The candles flickered out. The phone was dead.

We were next.

Suddenly, there was an ominous silence. I knew what that was: half-time. The eye of the hurricane was passing over us. Time to get out of there before the second half of the storm hit. Holding on to Niña, I darted out the door, across the roof—avoiding fizzling wires strewn about like spaghetti—and yanked on the door to the stairwell. It would not open. It was locked, tied shut in fact, from the inside.

My murderous landlord was trying to kill me. What had happened, of course, was that the landlord had seen me evacuate earlier. He did not see me come back and, sometime after I did, he had secured the door so it would not bang in the wind.

I was trapped on a roof in Miami Beach in the eye of a hurricane.

Strangely enough, I felt almost calm, like a captain resigned to sinking with his ship. If my cat and all my worldly possessions were to be blown away, I might as well go with them—quietly. We were so emotionally drained and exhausted that during the fierce and howling second half of the storm, Niña and I actually fell asleep.

At three
A.M
., I was awakened by my landlord's astonished shout to his wife. “The penthouse is still there!”

He trained his flashlight on my door. I opened it, and he turned pale. “You couldn't have been up here during the storm!” He shone the light on our faces and knew we had been.

The week that followed, without phones or electricity, was anticlimactic. That hurricane, when I was new to Miami, instilled a new respect in me for Mother Nature. As each year's storm season ends, I breathe a sigh of relief. Don't want to see any more hurricanes around here.

New Miamians and people who visit have a notorious disregard for Mother Nature—as they do for almost everything else. Maybe it is the merciless sun, the depleted ozone layer or a grim determination to have a good time, no matter what.

Treacherous rip currents spawned by heavy winds drowned three tourists and left a fourth in critical condition one day. They all had ignored warnings. One was told personally by lifeguards that it was too dangerous to venture into the water. He insisted that he had gone swimming every morning for ten days and had no intention of disrupting his routine.

His body washed up a short time later, disrupting his routine permanently.

You would think that that would scare the rest of the swimmers out of the water. Not in Miami. Determined to have fun or die, they ran like lemmings into the sea, many within sight of the blanket-draped corpses on the beach.

Weary lifeguards rescued nineteen.

Miami's ever-present heat and humidity and the big thunder moon of summer seem to affect human behavior profoundly.

How else can you explain the wealthy young tourist from Brazil? An excellent swimmer and skindiver, he liked to hold his breath under water and would enlist friends to clock the minutes as he sat on the bottom of his condominium pool trying to break his own record. A friend was timing him one August afternoon when the manager strolled by and casually asked how long the man had been under water this time. Told six minutes, the manager leaped into the pool to try to save him. The man from Brazil had apparently removed the grate and placed his body over the drain to hold himself down.

“He couldn't have realized how strong the suction is in these pools,” said assistant medical examiner Dr. Garry Brown. “It's like putting your hand over the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.”

The desperate manager tied a hose around the man and tried to drag him out of the pool. But “the entire weight of the water, eight feet above him, was pushing him onto the drain,” said chief deputy medical examiner Dr. Ronald Wright They finally freed him by shutting down the pool pump to break the suction.

By then it was too late.

What could explain the bus driver arrested after fracturing an elderly passenger's skull during a dispute over whether he should pay the twenty-five-cent senior fare or the full fifty-cent fare? The reduced rate for senior citizens went into effect at 6:30
P.M
. The passenger insisted the time was 6:32. The driver said it was 6:29. The call for the ambulance was logged at 6:44.

During that same sweltering stretch of summer a naked body lay ignored on the front lawn of a well-kept home for two weeks.

“I don't know how they couldn't have noticed,” complained assistant medical examiner Dr. Stanton Kessler, inspecting the now skeletal remains. “The houses are only twenty to thirty feet apart.”

A timid sixty-five-year-old woman experienced a problem with her Chevrolet Nova for an entire week in August. Something was dangling under the car. A white cord trailed from the undercarriage. Her sixty-seven-year-old gentleman friend tugged and yanked at the cord in a crowded supermarket parking lot. When he could not pull it loose, they drove to a service station.

“A bomb,” the gum-chewing mechanic announced. Attached to the rear axle. He was matter-of-fact and all business. “Do you want me to take it off?”

The couple decided against it. They drove the car seven blocks to the Coral Gables Fire Department.

The man, gray-haired, slightly built and wearing a little hat, went inside to tell the dispatcher there was a bomb taped to a car. The dispatcher referred them to the police department. “They handle the bombs,” he said.

The couple went to police headquarters. “We've got something under our car,” the man complained.

Officer Randy Jaques took a look. “It looks like a bomb!” he screamed.

The county bomb squad was summoned, rush-hour traffic diverted, and the street around headquarters evacuated. Bomb experts gingerly removed the device, carried it to the middle of the empty street and detonated it with a water cannon as a hushed crowd watched. There was quite an explosion. Had the mechanic tried to remove it, he could have lost the entire gas station, the experts said.

The couple had no idea who would do such a thing. Detectives suspected a case of mistaken identity.

Police officials were shaken. “There is a lesson to be learned here,” police spokesman Dennis Koronkiewicz said grimly. “There are bombs out there. And people do place them on cars. This is far more than a prank.”

He sternly advised people with bombs on their cars not to drive them “anywhere—let alone to our police station.”

The Miami Chamber of Commerce was even less amused when a knife-wielding robber hijacked a busload of foreign visitors bound for Disney World. Their abductor took the distinguished group on a wild ninety-minute ride.

The passengers, including ten members of a tour from Spain, spoke no English. The hijacker spoke no Spanish.

“It's hard times, hard times, man,” the robber mumbled. He said he needed money. The crime became a jurisdictional nightmare for police because the hijacker robbed the passengers one by one, as the commandeered bus cruised north, then south, at his direction, across the boundaries of several different police departments.

At one point the driver grappled with the hijacker over the knife as passengers hurriedly stuffed their money into their socks and shoes and the runaway bus picked up speed.

Police asked the rescued tourists if they would return to testify if the hijacker was caught. Only if the United States paid for the trip, they chorused.

More frustrated were Coral Gables police in their hunt for a one-legged man who escaped on foot—literally. His artificial leg was left at the scene of the crime, ripped off by his estranged wife as he attacked her savagely with a tire iron. When neighbors intervened, he hopped off the front porch and made his getaway. “He had to hop fifty to a hundred feet to his car,” Lieutenant James Butler said. “If his car hadn't been there we could have caught him.”

Some people do not love Miami. A homesick Mariel refugee tried to swim back to Cuba, starting in the Miami River. Police tried to coax him aboard their boat. When gentle persuasion failed they turned to shrimp nets, then grappling poles. Crowds lined the river cheering on the sweaty officers, who finally hauled him from the water with a boat hook. Struggling with his rescuers, he demanded to go home.

He gave as his local address: “wherever I am at the time.”

Miami is stranger than fiction, a city where somebody embezzled the tax money intended to fight crime, where thieves armed with axes and cutting torches felled hundreds of three-hundred-pound aluminum light poles to sell for scrap, leaving expressway motorists to careen in the dark; a city where doctors attribute sudden outbreaks of suicide to barometric pressure and where one Halloween became a horror show for police, with thirteen people shot. Officers assigned to the “Pumpkin Patrol” blamed egg throwing that escalated and roving bands of teenagers in Ninja costumes.

Street-smart Miami children, some as young as six, learned how to open parking meters with screwdrivers and looted thousands. A ruthless gang of Mariel refugees bid on old police cars at auction. They shopped for uniforms, guns, holsters, night-sticks, handcuffs, badges and radios at police equipment stores and formed their own “police department.” The “officers” robbed, kidnapped and shot shocked citizens who believed they were the real thing. They killed five and were suspects in four more murders before bewildered real cops caught on to the other force, a dark one, out there.