I
t was short plane ride, but the envelope that Slim gave me to give to Sugar was burning a hole in my pocket. It was thin, so I knew it wasn’t cash. I figured it was a check, but it was sealed so I couldn’t open it. When Slim had handed it to me, I’d asked him what was inside.
“Want you to be surprised,” he said. “Want Sugar surprised too. All I can say is that when he opens it, you’ll see a motherfucker smiling.”
“What’s Sugar like?” I asked. “Is he an old-timer like Irv?”
“You’ll see him at the airport.”
“He’s coming to pick me up?”
“He’s coming to pick up the envelope,” said Slim. “You just happen to be the cat carrying it.”
All during the flight, I kept fingering the envelope, holding it to the light, trying to see what I could see. I couldn’t see anything.
When I landed in Miami and walked down to baggage claim, I spotted a Hispanic man in his sixties or seventies wearing a straw hat and looking like he was waiting for an arriving passenger. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth and a bored look on his face. His loud print shirt had flowers and palm trees all over it, and I got the idea he wanted to hurry up and find whoever he was waiting for so he could go outside and light his cigar. His pinky ring held a small diamond that had me believing he was my man.
“Sugar?” I asked him. “Are you Sugar Ruiz?”
He looked at me like I was crazy before saying,
“No habla ingles
.
”
I figured that, like Irv, he probably liked to play it low-key. Just as I was about to approach him again, I felt a tap on my shoulder before hearing the words “I’m Sugar Ruiz.”
I turned around and looked in the face of a man in his twenties with a big broad smile and crazy green eyes—I mean deep green, fluorescent green, green so blazing that it was hard to look right at him. I felt almost blinded by the blaze. He had a big gap between his front teeth and shiny slick black hair carefully combed back. He was of average weight and average height but dressed extra dope: baby-blue Akoo driftwood shorts with cargo pockets running up and down the legs; an orange, blue, and green Akoo polo shirt that gave him a preppy edge; and butter-soft leather Ferragamo penny loafers worn without socks. Where you usually slip in pennies, Sugar had slipped in flashy green stones that looked like emeralds. I wondered if they were real.
“Hey, man, you must be Power,” he said. “You gotta be Slim’s boy.”
“Right.”
“Well,
bienvenido
a
Miami, my brother. Let’s roll.”
“I got luggage.”
“Give me the claim check and I’ll make sure it’s sent to the place.”
“What place?”
“Sugar’s Shack.”
“Is that where I’m staying?”
“Hombre,” he said, “that’s where you be living.”
Five minutes later I was sitting next to him in a black Lamborghini with thin red pinstripes running around the sides and up and down the trunk. The top was down and the night air was sweet. On that evening of my arrival, there wasn’t anything in Miami that didn’t look sweet. Women were waving at us. Women were everywhere. Palm trees were swaying, music bumping, music coming out of the cars on the causeway. The city seemed to be dancing to a beat that couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. Sugar lit a joint, passed it to me. I refused.
“You kidding?” he asked. “This is primo like you never known primo before.”
“Makes me tired,” I explained. “Makes me paranoid.”
“Makes me happy,” he said. “Energy. Creativity. Filters out the bad and makes the good even better. One hit is all you need. This is a special occasion, bro, so let’s mark the occasion. You’re about to see shit you never seen before. Open up your eyes. Open up your taste buds. Open up your heart. Life down here is a whole lot different than conservative old-school Georgia. Get ready, baby. Take a hit.”
I figured,
What the fuck
. I took a hit. A very little hit, and suddenly the night got even brighter. The hum of the Lamborghini was like a sexy song by Sade. The twinkling stars in the sky looked like diamonds I could touch. The moon over Miami was fluorescent white. A week before Thanksgiving, and the weather was like summer. I felt like we were on a jet stream, no turbulence, just smooth sailing ahead, boats and yachts bobbling in the marinas, high-rises hugging the beach, fancy old hotels and hip new hotels lining up Collins Avenue, South Beach a colony of soft-skinned tan women in tiny skirts and too-tight shorts, little halter tops and skimpy blouses blowing in the breeze, women looking like superstar models, actresses, athletic women in perfect shape, women with perfect form, women walking like they owned the world, women giving off fragrances that had my head spinning, women coming up to the car at every stop sign and red light. Looked like Sugar knew every woman in town.
Sugar’s Shack was a nightclub/hotel/condo high-rise situated at the southern tip of South Beach on Ocean Drive. I later learned that Sugar had hired a guy named Ortega Bouza, a world-famous Barcelona architect well-known for his super-funky style. The Shack was a thin building some twenty-five stories high designed out of pieces of rock and colored stones and sheet metal. The windows were all uneven and various shapes—circles and triangles and crazy oblongs. In between the rocks, stones, and metals were tubes of neon in candy colors like red, orange, and lime green. Maybe it was because I was blasted on grass, but the building looked like something a schoolkid might have drawn in his art class—but a cool kid.
“This is it,” said Sugar. “This is the Shack.”
“No sign in front?” I asked.
“No need. It’s invitation-only.”
On the ground floor the doors were wide open but a line of security guards protected them. The security guards were gorgeous women well over six feet, the kind who win volleyball championships. They were wearing khaki army shorts that showed off their long muscular legs. The minute they spotted Sugar, they stood at attention and gave him a smart salute. I watched as he went up and kissed each luscious chick on both cheeks.
I followed him through the first-floor club that had the same look as the outside of the building—cut-off pieces of blazing neon; walls made of metal, rocks, and brightly colored stones; tables of rough granite and chunks of slate; chairs of orange-Popsicle plastic; a dance floor made of burnt cork; and so many dazzling women with flashing smiles that I got dizzy and had to sit down when we reached Sugar’s office in the back.
I had never seen an office with black leather walls before. The carpet was some kind of black suede. Sugar’s desk was a shiny black Steinway grand piano. The keyboard had been ripped out and replaced by a flat plane where Sugar put his phone and computer. He said the massive chandelier hanging over the piano had been taken from the Hotel Nacional in Cuba just after Castro came to power. I later learned that Sugar’s people came from Cuba.
We were alone in his office when he leaned back in the red leather judge’s chair behind his desk and said, “Want another hit?”
“No, man,” I said. “I’m already wasted.”
“Did I say primo or did I say primo?”
“You said primo.”
“Slim said he gave you an envelope.”
“I got it.”
“Before you give it to me, let’s mark the occasion with a special treat.”
“We already marked the occasion with a special treat.”
“This is a better treat,” said Sugar, opening a drawer and pulling out a small jewel box. He dumped the contents of the jewel box on a small mirror that sat atop his piano-desk.
“It’s among the world’s finest,” he said, referring to the small quantity of cocaine spread over the mirror. “You need very little. The truth, man, is that I do very little of this stuff. I keep my distance. I know how to handle it. I’m an expert at this product. I should be. I’ve been selling it since I was a kid. There’s nothing about this product I don’t know. I know that you can’t fuck with it much. The first hit is always heaven, but you gotta be smart enough to know you’ll never get back to heaven. You land in heaven, you look the fuck around, you get out. That’s it. One hit. Not one night or one week or one month or one year or one lifetime looking to get back to heaven. That’s why cokeheads end up broke or dead. They think they can live in heaven. You can’t. All you can do, hombre, is make a quick visit. So tonight, to celebrate meeting my new brother-man Power and his special delivery from Mr. Slim Simmons, we gonna take a quick trip to heaven. You ready?”
I wasn’t sure how the blow, on top of the grass, would work on me. But given my already fogged-over state, I didn’t have the energy to argue.
We went down on the coke and came up smiling. I came up clear. My dizziness was gone and, at least in my mind, I felt like I understood absolutely everything in the world. Everything was in order. All the dust was blown out of my brain. My brain was working overtime. I suddenly saw that this guy, Sugar Ruiz, was absolutely brilliant. He knew how to use drugs. One hit and you stop.
“Nice, huh?” he asked me as he snorted up a few flakes.
I had to agree. “Very nice.”
“Clean and pure. The product is here. The product is high-octane super-quality grade A-plus. The product has put me in the mood, bro. The product has put me on the cloud. The cloud is where I wanna be sitting when you give me that envelope. Sitting on the cloud and looking down on the sweet earth below. Am I reaching you, Power?”
“The cloud’s soft,” I said.
“And the envelope’s thin, ain’t it?”
“Real thin.”
“That’s ’cause it’s only holding one slip of paper. You wanna slip it to me, bro?”
I reached in my pocket and handed Sugar the envelope. His green eyes were beaming.
“Let me just look at it first before I open it,” he said. “It’s kinda like when shorty is up in your bed flashing you that sweet pussy. You wanna take a minute and just look at it. You wanna cherish that motherfucking moment before you go in and actually taste it. So I’m fingering this here envelope. I’m getting it wet, baby. Then I’m going in.”
Sugar held the envelope up to the broken shafts of light coming off the fancy chandeliers. He just looked at it.
“I know what you’re thinking, Power. You’re thinking if just a little bit of blow made us feel that good, a little bit more will make us feel better.”
Sugar was right. That’s exactly what I was thinking.
“But you gotta outthink the blow. See, the blow’s designed to get you thinking that way. But this is the time to say no to the blow or else the blow will blow off the top of our heads. We don’t want that. We wanna be cool. This is the perfect time to stop the blow and instead get a hit off this envelope. Compared to what’s in this envelope, the blow ain’t no stronger than Sweet’N Low.”
Slowly, slowly, Sugar tore open the envelope. I was fixated by how much time he took to do it. It was all happening in slow motion. When the last eighth of an inch of the flap was torn and he reached inside, all I could see was a thin piece of paper with lots of typing on it and some kind of seal.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Key to the future. Key to expanding the empire.”
“Are they ownership papers?”
“You got that right. Ownership papers to
the
business that I’ve been looking to buy for two years. This fool woman thought she had it tied up forever, but Slim outslicked her. When it comes to slick moves, Slim’s king. I did Slim a serious solid some years back. He was grateful and said he’d take care of me when it mattered. Well, bro, this mattered big-time. With this,” said Sugar, holding up the paper, “my man has come through like a motherfucker.”
“What’s the business?”
“The Holly Windsor Agency. Biggest modeling agency in Miami. Biggest in the South. She got a roster of the hottest models going. Models from all over the world come to Miami to get signed by Holly. But with this beautiful little piece of paper, we can wave Holly Windsor good-bye. She’s out. I’m in.”
“How’d you do it?”
“She got overextended in real estate. This building of mine was designed, constructed, and leased out before the market fell. But Holly, she bought a fancy hotel and high-rise up on Collins at exactly the wrong time. Ate up her cash and left her near bankrupt. She needed cash to keep the modeling agency open. Slim got her the cash, but with the proviso that if she needed more, she’d have to give him, at least on paper, ownership. She agreed. Two months later, the well was dry and she had to go back to Slim. She never thought he’d make her stick to the agreement and take over her business—or let someone like me take over. Well, I am taking over and the first order of business, my friend, is to kick her flat white ass out of town. What do you think of that?”
“Cool” was all I could think to say.
“You don’t sound very excited,” said Sugar. “You came to town with a piece of paper that’s gonna change my life. You better get excited about it.”
“I’m excited—excited to be here.”
“You thinking that with a little more blow, you’d be even more excited, but that ain’t happening. What’s happening is this new agency. What’s happening is that I finally got my chance to put up a slate of models like this world ain’t ever seen before. I was born for this job. No one knows beautiful women like me. You can’t argue with that. You can’t argue with the truth, hombre. It’s something you gonna see with your own eyes. So we ain’t getting any more fucked up than we already are. We ain’t turning into no freakin’ cokeheads. Slim would have my scalp. Couldn’t do that to my man Slim. Couldn’t do that to his boy. He sent you down with a piece of paper that I’m holding high in my hand. Beautiful piece of paper, ain’t it, bro? He sent you down here ’cause he knows you’re interested in beauty. If you with Slim, you already seen beautiful women. Slim likes to talk about his beautiful women, but listen here, partner, this is Miami Beach, where beauty takes on a whole ’nother dimension. We going into that dimension on a personal and professional basis. You ready to follow me into that dimension?”