Ilya Fleet Prayer cuffs, Coco de Mer
THOU SHALT ENTER NAKED.

The sign’s virgin white plastic winks at me in the bar’s low lighting, as it catches the gleam bouncing off a line of bottles scribble-labeled “Mary’s,” “This is Joseph’s,” and “The Joneses.” I stare at the sign, it’s like we’re sharing a joke, like the two couples congregating across from me, at the other leg of the L-shaped bar.

I can barely hear their laughter over the porn playing on the flat rectangle of TV above me, flashing a man and woman doing what god designed them to do, in the pure sunshine of their own ghetto garden of Eden.

Only I’m not sure the president of the universe imagined they’d manage to twist so many limbs at so many right angles like that.

The camera zooms on a heaving rib cage, trailing down… I look away when another alcoholic apple juice appears in front of me. A woman yells across the bar, “We call this a ‘Holy Roller’ down in Florida.”

I cross myself with the cup, and the couples raise their plastic glasses.

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Azendi “Forbidden Fruit” necklace, $490

“You can smell their desperation like perfume.”

I meet the cabbie’s glance in the review mirror: the cracks in the glass echo the red spidering through the whites of his eyes.

“That is how tourists are to the men and the women here,” he says, smiling. “You are going through rough time? They smell it, and they are ready to comfort you. You’re like a ripe apple dangling from a tree.”

I cackle with him. I’d just been telling him how suspicious I was of Miami’s mindless friendliness, and he had voiced my guess: “Oh, but you can be sure their niceness wants something from you.”

He had picked me up in downtown Miami, where I was looking at a high-rise condo. The rest of the country’s white-picket-fence dream was melting down from the heat of its greed, and its southern most tip was having a fire sale: luxury buildings growing out of Miami’s decrepit business district were priced too temptingly. So I’d gone to see what seemed like a ridiculous deal: what I’d pay for a humble apartment in Los Angeles would buy a thirtieth-story flat here. Part of a glass and steel sculpture stretching to the sky, the condo had offered a bay view that made me feel like god looking down on ant people, along with a 24-hour doorman, and a rooftop sauna.

It’d seemed fitting that Miami would place a hellish heat as close as possible to heaven.

And the apartment had been beautiful, its public places sensually groomed, but I’m not sure yet how Miami wouldn’t be hell compared to LA, which is already a dull purgatory compared to New York. I’m still building my career, and it makes me nervous that Miami’s carpe diem command is more explicit than in the desert beach town I already live in: forget any effort outside of instant pleasure, just chill out.

I relax into the black seat of the taxi, as we bump over the bridge back into touristy South Beach. Out my window are vacation villas, the plaster castles distanced from the cab by a lawn of ocean. My mind gets lost in that ideal island, its palm trees swaying like beckoning hands, its yachts bobbing like heads nodding “Yes.” I watch a couple writhing together on a pier.

“What’s the craziest thing that’s happened to you in a cab?” I ask. “When’s the last time you were in this car and thought, ‘I can’t wait to tell someone about this’?”

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