Some places you exist. You live and die in Miami. In one month, when I was covering the place: a sixth-grader shot a homeless man over a slice of pizza; an Eckerd pharmacist shot and killed another pharmacist in the store; a trash hauler was shot in the spine when he refused to stop for a robber; a homeless man was doused with gasoline and set on fire; assorted tourists perished. I would drive to my stories on a pitch-black interstate, because the homeless and other poor like to strip the power lines for copper. On any given day, a hundred people stood in line for food in Bicentennial Park, in the lee of skyscrapers partially financed with cocaine money. I once rode around the city at night with a state law enforcement agent who stopped every few hours to call his wife and tell her he was alive. He made sure I knew how to use the pump 12-gauge before we pulled away from the curb. “We took a forty-five off a guy the other night. Six in the magazine, one in the chamber,” he said. It was one of those good days in paradise. No one was killed, not even a tourist.
You could whiz by it all, of course, with your windows rolled up tight, and whip into your gated community and pretend to be in Sarasota. Most people did. It was irrelevant that they lived in a city where the corpses in the morgue had bar codes on their toes, to keep up with them. I could have lived in Coral Gables with them, I guess, but that would be like tasting food without taking the Saran wrap off.
That one bad night in Overtown was with me for a long time. It still is, I guess. But I did not let it sour my love of Miami. If you were young, if you had any sense of adventure, then there was no better place in the whole world to live, to do what I did for a living. There were days when I would get my paycheck and laugh out loud, not because there was so much money, merely because they paid me at all.
I lived in Coconut Grove most of my time there, first in a concrete-block duplex where I lost three car stereos in the initial three months, then in a little house, on a less crime-ridden street, surrounded by giant oaks and palms and assorted crawling vines. The trees sang with birds, even parrots—escapees—and I forgot for long weeks to feel guilty about running even farther away from home. My momma worried about me in such a sinful place, but I assured her that, unless I forgot to put on my sunblock, I was just fine. Once, she sent my aunt Edna down to check on me, and I took her to a yard sale in the rich folks’ part of the Grove to throw her off the scent. We found some nice saltshakers.
I called my momma on Sundays and told her I was writing about the models on South Beach—and I actually did, once—and promised not to go anywhere near Cuba. I told her I was getting fat on chicken and yellow rice and croquetas de jamón, which is about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on. I told her I wrote about art shows, and forgot to mention that the only reason I went there was because a rabidly anti-Castro group had condemned the gallery operators as dung-eating communistas and planted a bomb. I told her I was in mad, never-ending love with this place, with the café con leche that was like melted Hershey bars, with the music, with the excitement. But I made sure that I made it sound like it couldn’t hurt me, unless I died of joy.
The truth was that I was elbow-deep in some of the darkest stories of my life. I spent long days under an Interstate overpass with homeless men and women who had created an alternative culture, with laws and punishments. They would gang up and beat a man if the accused was caught taking someone else’s stuff or messing with someone else’s mate. They had no court, just laws and punishment. Daytime existence was a constant merry-go-round of begging, napping and begging some more, for a dollar, a dime, a little attention.
They dreaded the setting sun. I talked to a thin man with a raggedy cat who said he went to sleep every night afraid some crackhead would crawl into a refrigerator box he called “my condominium” and cut his throat for pocket change. After midnight, as people gathered around big fires made from trash and tires, women who looked freshly dead filed into surrounding streets and Interstate exit ramps, selling sex for three dollars, one dollar, less. One woman offered herself in exchange for a ride in a car.
There were roving bands of homeless transvestites—six-foot-tall black men in blond wigs and high heels who slept on the ground—and an old man the other homeless called the Invisible Man because, in mid-conversation, he would just announce, “I am not here,” and pretend he was invisible. You could shout in his ear, but he stared straight ahead. Most people under that overpass were afraid of becoming invisible—many people already treated them as if they were—but he had embraced it.
Walking the shantytown, even in daylight, was like walking through some Baptist Bible Camp’s film show of hell. The dirt, pounded into powder, was dotted with evil-smelling mattresses. A skeletal man stared up at the trembling highway above him, still as marble. On another mattress, two teenage girls in their underwear, both pregnant, motioned to you, beckoned, offering.
A very normal-looking homeless man, Ed Washington, pulled back his blankets to show me a long, thin knife. He had never been hurt and he had never hurt anyone, “but the only reason it ain’t happened is the right fool just ain’t come along. Things happen here. Things you wouldn’t believe. There was this one guy got cut up real bad one time, and this cop comes up. He looks at the guy and says, ‘Look, if you die here it’s my problem.’ So the guy walks on down the road. We never did see that guy again.”
One man, Rollo Williams, had just become a father. “My woman had a baby here last week, the prettiest thing you ever saw. But I don’t know about keeping it. Not here. If I had a place I would. All I got is a box. But it is a pretty baby.”
There was a young man Alex Wright, a tall, thin guitar picker from California, cool as the other side of your pillow. He said he played for Carlos Santana once in San Francisco, but had to pawn his guitar. When I asked if he was homeless he seemed insulted. “I’m a musician, an artist. I’m not homeless, I’m just here until I get my guitar. I’m not homeless. I’m just camping out.”
They were the first thing the tourists saw when they exited the Interstate in the downtown: Welcome to paradise. Do you want your windshield washed? Sure you do.
But the closest to chaos I had ever been, except for that one bad night in Overtown, was in a little migrant workers’ town on the edge of the Everglades. In the mornings the legals and illegals queued up to beg for work. The crew bosses picked the strongest and the youngest and loaded them, a United Nations of cheap labor from Guatemala, Haiti, El Salvador, on death-trap buses that had a bad habit of running off into the canals. The bosses worked them for twelve hours, then sometimes neglected to pay them at all.
They lived somewhere outside the basic decencies of America. Babies came to the county health department with ant bites that looked like measles. Others came with TB. Then they just disappeared again as their migrant parents moved on, chasing the seasons, leaving doctors to wonder what ever happened to the sick children. Twelve men lived crammed into a trailer meant for two. Prostitution was allowed, out of mercy. There had to be some relief. The people, fresh from the rain forests and death squads and endless slums, did not mind it so much. The town was called Immokalee. It means “home.”
I got there as the season died, as the rains started to fall. The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase for it. The translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: “The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry.” One night I sat in my car and watched a man stagger out of one bar—there was no name on the door, no sign, just a line of drunks inside—and begin cursing the air. He flicked open a pocketknife, waving it insanely through the air like a sodden Zorro, and then sat down in the dirt to weep into his hands.
Another man, a man named Gallo I found staggering dog drunk from a whorehouse, told me a joke. In it, he dies in the field and a crew boss tells his body to go back to work.
“But I am dead,” his spirit shouts down, from somewhere in the clouds.
“You cannot die,” the boss says.
“Why?” the spirit asks.
“Because God is too busy with the living,” the boss answers.
“Not in Immokalee,” the spirit says. “God don’t know where that is.”
But it is easy to write about suffering on that scale, because it is less personal. A story north of Miami, in Fort Lauderdale, tested my objectivity.
It was about a little boy named Dirty Red, who lived with his momma in a treeless, hopeless housing project just outside Lauderdale. His saga began on May 20, 1990, when a police car came and took him away for a dirty little crime he didn’t do. He was six, but the Broward County deputy said he had sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl. They said he had poked her between her legs with a stick. All his momma could see of him as they drove away in the police car was the top of his head.
They fingerprinted him and took his mug shot, and scared him to death. Red just kept shaking his head, NO.
It would turn out to be a lie, the accusation, drummed up by a man who had sexually abused the little girl, but somehow the Broward deputies never bothered to come back and tell people in the housing project that Red was innocent, that it was all a mistake. The people in the project treated him like a pervert. They made him an outcast. Most of the children wouldn’t play with him, and chanted “Dirty Red, Dirty Red, Dirty Red,” whenever he walked by. Grown men slapped him when he came close.
His momma had started calling him “Dirty Red” long before that, but it was a good nickname then. She called him that because his skin had a red tint, and because he was always going out in the yard to play and getting dirty right after she gave him a bath. But after his arrest, the people turned it into something dirty, something mean, and the little boy, the one who roamed the project free as a bird and wrapped his momma’s dish rag around his head for a turban, was lost.
The boy became almost catatonic. He refused to leave his momma’s side. He sat beside her or at her feet and followed her around like a puppy, his fingers entwined in the hem of her dress.
The day I went to talk to them she needed to speak to me a few minutes alone, and had to pry the boy’s fingers away from her dress, and told him to go outside. “Baby, it’s okay to play.”
But Dirty Red couldn’t face the neighborhood that day, any day. To please his mother he walked down the steps, then quickly doubled back and sat on the steps, his thumb in his mouth, just outside the door. I know this because our photographer, Ricardo Ferro, took a heartbreaking picture of it.
“They told me my boy fell through the cracks,” said his momma, a woman with those defeated eyes you usually only find in the terminally ill. “I wanted somebody to write a letter, maybe, to the people who live here. I wanted somebody to tell them my boy is all right. But nobody has done, maybe because they just don’t care about him. If this had been a rich white family, do you think this would have happened. Do you think they wouldn’t have fallen all over themselves, saying they were sorry.”
She tried to spread the word that her son did nothing, that it was all a mistake, but the people believed only what they saw that night, the night they came for the child.
For months after that, he screamed when his momma turned loose of him even for a second. “Finally we got him to go outside by himself, but that’s when the people get him.”
I wrote the story of Dirty Red in the Miami bureau of the St. Pete Times, a peaceful place on Coral Way shaded by banyan trees. At the very worst, I promised his momma, I wouldn’t do her son any harm. They ran it on the front page, with a big, heartbreaking photo. The next week, I sent his momma a bundle of them.
She took them door to door in the neighborhood, as I knew she would, and shoved the story in the faces of the people who had abused her son, and said, “See. I told you.”
Seeing it written down, they began to believe. The story drew the aid of ministers and other do-gooders who helped spread the word, who made sure the word got out. Counselors called and offered to help free of charge. People sent money. People sent toys. He became a sort of mascot for the Miami Heat basketball team. He got better.
I didn’t get into this business to change the world; I just wanted to tell stories. But now and then, you can make people care, make people notice that something ain’t quite right, and nudge them gently, with the words, to get off their ass and fix it.
The fact is, I did very few happy stories in Miami, and the vast majority did not change a damn thing. I wrote about Castro selling relatives to Cuban Americans in Miami, and the hopeless story of a man who had been choked into a coma by Miami police. Friends have told me I did too much of it, that I dwelled on it, that I should be careful not to let it build up inside of me. One reporter, a friend, christened me “the misery writer.” But I have always been able to distance myself, to dance between the raindrops. Miami is a great place for distance. On a good day, you can stand on South Beach and see forever. I lived my life as full and rich as I could on a reporter’s salary, and every month I put money away in savings, to keep my promise.
One day I just had too much of the bad news piled up in my head, and I guess I snapped a little. I wanted to do a happy story, anything that did not involve killing or meanness, and I flipped through the local papers, searching for something, anything. There was one, just one. A rare plant, the “deltoid spurge,” grew only in a few places in Florida, and one of those places was to be developed. Environmentalists were trying to save it. Never mind that they couldn’t save the panther or the manatee.
I called Bill Cooke, our free-lance photographer and my friend, but an ornery man even on his best days. I told him to join me in the bureau, that we were going to help save the deltoid spurge.
“What in the hell are you talking about?” he said.
“We are off to save the spurge,” I said.
“Are you drunk?” he said.
“No. Come. The spurge awaits. It needs us.”
He showed up a few minutes later, looking at me suspiciously. Bill had been in Vietnam. He had seen people drift quietly away from the piers of life.
Thirty minutes later we were standing in a grove of pines and scrub just off U.S. 1 in South Miami, standing over a little green plant that looked like a cross between a mushroom and a pineapple.
“Looks like it,” he said.
“Well?” I said.
“Well, what?” he said.
“Take its damn picture.”
“They’ll never run it,” he said.
“Take it anyway.”
He took a few shots and we went home. That night, I wrote the prettiest story I could on the plight of the deltoid spurge. Faulkner couldn’t have done it better. My newspaper ran it across the top of the Tampa Bay and State page, and Bill Cooke had to buy me dinner.
“You may be the only man I know who could get twenty inches out of the deltoid spurge,” he said. “You are a poet.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The spurge lives, to this day.
For more than two years the newspaper left me alone and let me find good stories, except for one week when they sent me to cover Operation Desert-whatever-it-was, the part before they actually did any serious shooting and renamed it Desert Storm. I didn’t even have a passport, when they told me I could go, but I was thrilled. “I will kiss a camel, if you will let me go,” I told the editors. I wrote one good story—Jewish soldiers in Saudi Arabia were forced to pray in closets and had the Star of David removed from their dog tags—and about four truly bad ones. It was the first time I had ever gone outside the country to write a newspaper story. The next time would rearrange my soul.
I had come to believe that I was good at one thing, writing about people in trouble, about misery. As it turned out, I was a rank amateur. I didn’t know what misery was, but I would learn.