Miami Revelations

“Hey, Dad, I’m going to be hooker,” is not something every father dreams of hearing. But in my case, it came as a blessing, because Dad knew I had to do what it took to get the job done right. Even so, the uniform was a bitch.

It’s 1985 and the center of Miami is a cesspool of a swamp and not the kind of gators, mosquitoes, snakes and the garden-variety wildlife. This is the Miami that Scarface shit out after all the prisoners and miscreants from Castro’s boatlift became wards of Florida, giving new meaning to the words naturally terrifying. It’s the era of Miami Vice, but the pastels and fast cars were only for those who had connections, the rest were just desperate drug addicts, thugs, arsonists and prostitutes…

I could see my co-worker, Mercedes, on the corner a few blocks ahead. The neon and florescent lights reflected in her sweaty skin – she was showing a lot of skin. Mercedes was not happy being a lady of the night and I could tell she was pissed that I was running late. It wasn’t my fault; I knew full well how dangerous this part of town was, Carlos was my ride and he had to borrow a friend’s car just to drop me off. There was no way he was going to drive his white shiny Z28 Camaro with orange flames flashing over the hood into this part of town, he’d be lucky to get out with the air from his tires.  His buddy’s loaner was a clunky Honda hatchback held together by primer paint. 

“Stop here,” I said.

“She’s three blocks away, you’ll be flat on your face before you get to the corner,” he argued.

“I can walk three blocks.”

“Baby, it’s not you I doubt, it’s those pimp stilts… I don’t want you to mess them up.” He couldn’t help but laugh at the idea that I may wear this ridiculous get up for him; even though we were no longer dating, he was one protective Cuban.

I smacked him and announced myself to the hood with an ear-splitting screech of the rusty door as it opened. I tottered across four lanes of asphalt; the heel of my right stiletto got stuck with every step.  Miami is so hot; I don’t think the asphalt ever fully hardens.  I’m pigeon-toed so my right leg comes down harder when I walk and, in this butt, hugging get up, the left side of my skirt rode up every time my left leg, stepped. Thunk went the right, click went the left, and then I’d yank down the skirt. Thunk, click, yank, thunk, click, yank…

I knew Carlos was watching every step because I didn’t hear the Honda chug away. Imagining him laughing his ass off watching me, made me laugh so hard I made it across despite my handicap. While making my way down the sidewalk toward Mercedes, I heard the hatchback sputter by.

“Hey, Lady, how much for a ride?” Carlos shouted out the window.

“Come back when you can afford a real car,” I shouted and didn’t even look at him. Thunk, click, yank. I passed burnt out shops and burnt out hobos. 

Gang bangers ogled me; a shopkeeper pulled down his iron gate for the night. “Your kind is not welcome here,” he hissed. 

I kept my sights on Mercedes but realized it was a mistake to wear the bleached blonde wig against my Wonder Bread white skin; my hair was naturally blonde, but I figured, none of these gals paraded around in their real hair. I was like a beacon of misguided light on the dark side of the tracks. I just reminded myself that it came with the job and marched on… Thunk, click, yank. 

“You’re late, Vick. I know it’s cool to be hot, but I’m melting my falsies off,” Mercedes said.

I was used to Mercedes’s pointed dramatics, so I knew it was just her way of saying, ‘good to see you.’ I sort of felt bad for her, because she was darker, she sort of fit in this part of town. Mercedes had skin that bronzed in the Miami broiler and I had skin that blistered. If it weren’t for her genuinely bubbly personality this could have been her permanent corner.

I picked at my right heel tip where the rubber met the road and decided it could stay. I had to survive on a nail as a heel tip or go barefoot. A goon whistled at me through his gold tipped teeth and for a second, I felt like smashing them out with my nail heel but that would have ruined the work I desperately needed to do.

“It’s not the heat, Mer. It’s the humanity. “

“Ain’t that the truth.”

As I wedged my swollen right foot back into the impossible shoe, I lost balance yanking my skirt down. Mercedes caught me and I started cracking up. It was the sort of laugh that comes out through your eyes and runs down your cheeks.

“I guess if I really want to score tonight, I need to stop yanking my skirt down,” I managed to get out during my thirty-seconds of lucidity between laughs.

“You’re all class,” Mercedes said.

As I wiped my eyes, I caught a whiff of something burning. It was the smell of heat. If you’ve ever seen a movie where they show a lone figure on the desert horizon and the air seems to warble because of the heat; mix that visual with the blast of opening an oven door that’s baking wood, metal and cement, and that’s the scent that I was picking up.

“I’m guessing it’s a different kind of joint on fire,” Mercedes said as she caught a glimpse of my nose in the air. 

           Her answer came as sirens tore through just like bullet trains speeding along uneven tracks. I sprang to attention and waited for the first fire engine to pass. As it neared, the reprobates of the hood didn’t flinch, but they did make themselves scarce. To say they were like cockroaches under the sudden flick of a light is probably unfair, but then again, the night was young.

           Mercedes and I stood our ground inside the cone of reverberating angst that fire engines emit as they race by with sirens blaring and lights glaring. There wasn’t much concern for windows breaking, most already were and the smart shops had their windows caged and were closed for the night.  My concern was with the fire trucks; more specifically what station they were from. My swollen ankles nearly gave in as I got my answer.

           “Fourteen, shit!” I kicked off those nasty ass heels and sprinted to keep up with the trucks. Suddenly my skirt hiking up was an advantage, my legs pumped like a nubile 20-year-old, trying out for track. I know this because the lowlifes who lined the streets could care less about the fire trucks; they were more interested in the lily-white flesh bouncing by them.

           The trucks turned the corner and I got a chance to close the distance, but in the batting off of the multi-ethnic ass grabs coming at me, my gain was short-lived. I turned the corner gasping, pulling breath from my throbbing toes. As if my lungs weren’t already on fire, they now surely were as I faced a wall of fire. A ten-story apartment building to be precise, but the way it was situated on the block, it consumed the entire width like the gates of Hell.

           To face an inferno is one of the most surreal feelings a person can, and very well may, experience. Being consumed by lava or quicksand hold terrifying perceptions but those phenomena are so far removed and rare to a girl from Miami or anywhere USA, that we go through life never thinking the ground we stand on can actually engulf us, even Florida’s frequent hurricanes come from the sky with fair warning. A fire this big feeds off of everything within reach; the air, the buildings, the ground, the people. Everything becomes like that warbled vision then flashover.

           Police cars soon blared their way in-between to create a barrier to prevent me and other onlookers from going any closer to the wall of fire.

           My eyes burned from the smoke, but I didn’t dare look away, I had to make sure he was not doing anything foolish. I already knew he was a hero, why, why, did he have to prove it on a daily basis? I searched everywhere and the only person I connected with was… Mario? Are you shitting me? Mario Morales? He was no-good when he was twelve and fresh off the boat from Cuba, there was no way seeing him was good news tonight. I stepped toward him when Mercedes caught up and handed me my shoes.

           “When did Miami become a place where you need shoes?” I muttered. My brain was melting. I stomped barefoot toward the “first in engine”. An officer just getting out of his car tried to stop me, but I was undeterred.  I smiled and choked as four firemen burst out from the doors of the crumbling building. “Come on, where are you?”

           The lead fireman lifted his headgear and shouted, “Get the airbag, Captain’s got a little girl!”

           ‘Captain,’ my boiling mind thought, ‘he’s still in there.’ I could feel the fire sucking the water and air from my body. I was that lone figure on the deserted desert highway warbling from the inside out, in an all-consuming heat. The next minute or two happened all at once in Hell’s melting pot.

           The crew inflated a giant blue air bag, like a jet’s emergency slide.

           A window popped and crashed out from above.

“Daddy!” I screamed.

From the window, the Captain of station fourteen tossed a young girl. Her body wafted toward the blue air bag, but I couldn’t watch, my only interest was the Captain, my dad. My body was so sapped of fluid that I couldn’t even keep my eyes wet enough to focus. As I stared through my molten-dry eyes to the smashed window, the roof of the blazing building collapsed. The Captain raised his arms and made a shadow puppet like he always did for my sister Sherri and I– his hands the wings of a poetic wave. For a split second, there were no sirens, no deafening flames, no suffocating smoke, it was just the shadow puppet and I – saying goodbye.

In the next second, my mournful screams overtook all of the sirens in Miami. It was 1985, and me, 34 year-old Vicki Hamilton, just witnessed her hero burning to death and all I could think of was that, if he did see me, if he was sending me that poetic wave goodbye, his last vision of me was that of a prostitute. That’s not an image any daughter wants her father to die with. 

In my case, I felt like the guilt that came with the possibility of him going to his grave seeing his daughter as a hooker, was nothing compared to the guilt that came with the fire that killed him being my fault. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t start it, but if I had done what it took to get the job done, really done it properly, as he bet me that I could, the person who did start that fire would have been caught long before now. As part of the Miami Arson Investigation task force, I worked on the streets with the male arson investigators, as homeless bums with Mercedes and I as street hookers. We had the arsonists on our radar with a bird’s eye view of their strike zones, merchants who hired them to destroy their property to collect insurance or to hide evidence of criminal acts. Miami was under siege in the 80’s with drug manufacturing shops inside old factories, deserted commercial properties as well as condemned residential occupancies.

I wondered when a parent’s level of support becomes blinded by love, giving the child a false sense of indestructibility emanating in a detriment to society? The answer is, it’s when a child’s level of adoration for their parent is equal, despite being mature enough to see that mutual admiration does away with the conflict needed to stop the madness and save or nurture a life other than your own.