Aaaaarrrrrgh!

Apparently, no one wants to attend my development’s Pirates of the Caribbean party.

Along with a number of retirees and families with small children, I live in a townhouse community. Rather than a neighborhood, this part of Miami comprises a series of strip malls and condominium complexes. The occasional mangrove pond and canal punctuate the cement landscape. Traffic is heavy.

Living here means surrendering to suburban alienation, and the heat heightens the sense of anonymity; who wants to stop and chat when it’s 100 degrees out and humid? I read before that air conditioning may have contributed to the decline of Southern hospitality. There might be something to this theory.

Genuine community tries to sprout up here and there, like a microscopic plant on a hostile planet. Not surprisingly, cool water is often involved. One development closer to the university, for example, has a pool shaped like a penis; my MFA-seeking friend showed it to me. Some current inhabitants congregate around it on the weekends, but she doesn’t. “I hate that shit,” she says.

My local clubhouse definitely exudes its own 70s porn aesthetic. It’s brown, beige, and geometric. The pool (not penis-shaped) is behind the building. Its lights are white and globular. The hot tub’s tiles are aqua and cracked.

Inside, the clubhouse offers function rooms, a ping pong table, soda machines, and the requisite Floridian fake palms as well as paintings offering “realistic” ocean views (two examples).

Occasionally, the steering committee plans a clubhouse event, like a Mexican fiesta or a Halloween party. To kick off the summer, it has proposed a pirate party (click to enlarge):


Why do I feel like this gathering has the potential to resemble a decoupage of deleted scenes from Boogie Nights and Cocoon?

This flyer radiates zeal. It intimidates me, and it raises more questions than it answers. Will I be ostracized if I don’t dress up? What if some unsuspecting, hard-living resident reads it and reflects sadly, “I left all my pirate stuff in the Caribbean. In Aruba, actually, along with a disposable camera, some whipped cream, and my dignity.” (Flights from here to the islands are cheap, baby. What happens at the Holiday Inn SunSpree stays at the SunSpree.)

The price point also piques me. How can I possibly enjoy the bounty of a carving station, a pasta bar, AND a drink—with alcohol in it, no less—for a mere 18 dollars? Have these libations fallen off a truck instead of arriving plundered from the high seas? I can’t even get a Southwest Salad, an Awesome Blossom, and a Calypso Cooler for under twenty bucks.

The pasta is from Italy. Fair enough. The fajitas are from Spain. Fajitas are Tex-Mex, but okay. The cargo of beef, on the other hand, seems to have no origin whatsoever. Ominous.

Why is four the cut-off age for paid admission? Who determined that five year-old Becky is likely to eat 12 dollars’ more her weight in mystery meat than four year-old Carlos is?

Do you hear something sizzling? It’s the slow charring of misdirected passion and the gradual crisping of misbegotten enthusiasm.

By contrast, the follow-up flyer is rather stern:


Avast ye, lads, I spot a foundering promotion on the horizon.

Maybe we need carrot instead of stick. Could each resident be promised a souvenir laminated gold doubloon for his/her trouble? We must have something worthwhile to coax us out of our central air mausoleums and away from our home theatres and message boards.

Perhaps the leadership should manufacture a scarcity—the party vessel has all the mateys that will fit onboard already; everyone else must stow away.

Money will be refunded?? That’s not piratey. I suggest that they put the profits instead towards some new floating noodles for the pool. All seafaring community scoundrels, when they do venture out, enjoy those.

~Bat Totem~

I didn’t understand lushness until I moved to Miami; the colors are richer and the touches deeper. Ocean Drive is fanciful. Coconut Grove is spirited. But it’s difficult to experience a genuine sense of place here—nothing simply is what it is, and it hasn’t been around long, anyway.

I lived in Boston for nine years. Miami is temporary; Boston is permanent. Miami is ingenuous; Boston is august. I had collected a number of “totem” places in the northern city. One of the walls in the Davis Square subway station sported porcelain tiles painted by a third-grade class. I would linger over the tiles, especially the one of the daisies and the one of the farting cow. I thought the patches of green grass running through the middle of Commonwealth Avenue were refreshingly un-manicured for such a fastidious urban environment. And a special part of my consciousness still dwells near the 1369 Coffee House in Central Square, where the ancient, toothless Reverend Larry Love used to sit out front and study passersby, with his ragged blue Sergeant Pepper coat buttoned and his golden soldier’s helmet affixed.


A totem place belongs to you—even though you leave it and even though other people might use it, too. These spots can serve as Rubicons for romances: if he loves me enough, you think, he will appreciate my special place. If she loves me enough, you imagine, she’ll understand why it’s so great. When s/he inexplicably does not, a little piece of the relationship dies.

After four years, I can happily report that the Perky Bat Tower on Sugarloaf Key (MM #17, i.e., 17 miles from Key West) has finally ended my totemless Florida existence. While it’s true that I don’t actually live in the Florida Keys, it’s also true that I live closer to them than I did before.

Joy Williams writes the following about the tower:

The bat tower, shingled, brown, and elegant, is about 35 feet tall and to be found down a dirt road just past the Sugarloaf Lodge…People bounce down the road to view it, circle it warily in their cars, then look a little embarrassed because they’ve“ gone out of their way to see it.” (The Florida Keys: A History and Guide. Random House, 2003. p.119)

During the 1920s, R.C. Perky planned to erect a glamorous resort on Sugarloaf Key; he envisioned a casino and a fancy restaurant (almost all of South Florida has fallen prey to developers’ fantasies and failures at some point). Mosquitoes were a serious problem in the Keys then, and conventional wisdom suggested that bats were the solution. Bats eat mosquitoes. To attract the special nocturnal Brownies, Perky built the bat tower based on the design of a Texas scientist, and he also ordered a box of special bat bait. Williams is convinced that the bait was snake oil.

The bats never came.

Perky went broke. He died, the fledgling resort vanished, and the tower alone remains. And I do mean alone. The road Williams mentions is paved now, but it’s still awfully obscure. The road provides no sign to guide visitors. You drive down the little road, and you begin to get the inkling that all you will see at the end is something industrial, like a generator.

The tower itself has no label of any kind. It is silently, maddeningly nondescript. It was raining and overcast the day I saw it—its slickened wood gleamed. The long chute down the front made the structure look ancient and magisterial; it almost suggested a Mayan ruin or a fortress in Myst.

One can stand under the Tower and gaze up into its intricate, symmetrical wooden slats. The slats create hundreds of crevices—perfect for a hanging bat in need of daytime retreat.

I suppose it’s foolish to expect any random third party to come along and take an interest in the tower, a deus ex machina to swoop in and declare it a special landmark. Besides, what would it be a landmark to? Capitalism? Quixote? The ungracious bats who never put in an appearance?

I live a little too far from the tower to appreciate its underwhelming glory on a regular basis; Miami is about two hundred miles from Sugarloaf. I think of it often, though. And later, I indulge in whimsical, cavernous, bloodsucking dreams.

The Florida Keys