Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
—CONFUCIUS
The world is full of real-life heroes, and I love to tell their stories and chronicle their feats, their adventures and their noble deeds.
I am still hooked on stories, and this singular city, with its rednecks and Rastafarians, Contras and cocaine cowboys, Yahwehs and yahoos, villains and victims. My love affair with Miami, the longest-lasting in my life, endures, as the city and I both grow and change.
Miami is still hot. Sleepy South Beach, once famous for its senior citizens, now throbs through the soft nights with a healthy and youthful energy, more lusty and alive than it has ever been. Hot bodies and the city’s sizzling beauty dazzle the world in movies, commercials, fashion photography and stunning photos that capture Miami’s true colors, breathtaking blues and shades of gold. Across the Bay, the city seethes with tension, battered by trauma and transition. Sometimes the city heat seems too hot not to burn. Not again. I hold my breath. The world is watching. Miami has been discovered.
To a far lesser degree, I too have been discovered and burn with ideas and stories to tell.
Life is a series of trade-offs; everything exacts a price. The cost of the city’s new fame is traffic snarls and parking problems, haze, pollution and destruction of our precious environment and wildlife. The carpetbaggers and profiteers will always be with us.
The struggle never ends—progress at a price. On leave from the Herald, I yearn for the fray, the daily battles, the exhilaration of stalking the wild story, the stimulation of the streets, the interaction with sources, strangers and talented newsroom colleagues. I miss the intensity of deadline, focusing in tight on a story and tuning out all the meaningless and mundane irritants of life that make you crazy if you surrender to them.
Working at home, alone, is solitary confinement, but childhood dreams grew out of this self-imposed isolation into reality. Before I could even read, I said that when I grew up I would write books. Fiction was what I had planned before I was swept into that whirlwind called journalism.
In 1990 my first novel was published. I am blessed. How many of us get to do what we dreamed of as children?
I had never written fiction before—though I had been accused of it a few times in the past—and found it to be a source of unexpected satisfaction. We all yearn to be tidy, to wrap up the loose ends and resolve all the perplexing mysteries, but in real life, in journalism, that does not happen. Murders go unsolved; corpses remain unidentified; missing people stay lost forever. They dwell in your dreams.
Write fiction, and you can tell the whole story, solve all the mysteries, tie up the loose ends and see to it that the good guys win.
So unlike real life and so much more satisfying.
Nothing is easy, of course, especially writing fiction in a city where truth is stranger. But once begun, it was a joy to let imagination soar, to see characters spring to life, step forward and clamor to tell their stories.
Afterward, I returned to real people and real life with this book, intending, when finished, to plunge back into journalism and the police beat. But something happened: Certain faces and voices began to haunt my consciousness, imaginary characters with stories to be told. The time came to report once more for work in that big Herald newsroom in the sky overlooking Biscayne Bay. I hesitated and picked up my mail only on weekends to avoid the editors and their questions about when I was coming back to the beat. Like someone addicted to secret pleasures, I thought, Not yet, just one more, just one more book first, another novel.
So the isolation continues—for one more novel, maybe more. The dual lifestyles are a study in contrasts: Reporters battle deadlines, miss regular meals and survive on coffee, action and adrenaline. Authors set their own schedules and work at home, close to the refrigerator, unfortunately.
Police reporters are generally as welcome among strangers as Freddy Krueger in the girls’ dorm. It is not unusual for people to slam doors, curse or even run when approached by a reporter.
Authors, however, are invited to literary luncheons and library teas, often by people who would never dream of talking to a police reporter.
In this case, reporter and author are one and the same, not entirely at ease at literary luncheons and teas. I am more comfortable knocking on a stranger’s door to inquire if he murdered his wife than making small talk with the literati at a cocktail party.
The life of a reporter is unlike any other. There is something noble and exciting about venturing out into the world in search of the truth. No day is ever the same. Each is an adventure, another crusade. That is how I spent the best years of my life so far, and I want to do it again, but now there is something else that I love as much.
So I try to shut out the sounds of sirens in the night, try to block the news flashes on the latest car bombing, steer clear of the newsroom to avoid being captured, and steel myself against intriguing phone calls from sources. My longtime companion, a portable police scanner, has fallen silent, the batteries long dead. Instead I listen to bird songs and wind chimes, I watch a daredevil mockingbird dive-bomb intruders and the slow-paced mating dance of two love-struck chameleons outside my window. I ponder mountainous clouds, a glowing turquoise sea and sudden summer thunderstorms. No beepers, no emergencies, no three-alarm fires, a news junkie on the wagon.
I work alone, surrounded by heavy-laden fruit trees and brilliant bougainvillea, bright green water, my favorite cat, and a flowing stream of stories, stories, stories, springing up from some inner source.
No news bulletins from downtown. For a writer this is life at its most free.
My days seem like a dream, so far from the familiar din and chaos of the newsroom. The Herald lands on my lawn with a plop each morning, minus my byline. I live without the daily link to readers, the lifeblood of communication. But I persist. The news goes on without me as I create my own world in a growing manuscript. It is a long time between deadlines. Sometimes, drowning in the silence, I yearn to surface, emerge from my isolation and travel door to door, delivering my story to total strangers and watching them read it—at gunpoint if necessary.