The Miami Experience

The Science of Bullshit Based on a True Story

The science of writing is beyond me. The art of forming and constructing a sentence is beyond me. I’m not a writer of any kind. I have, on the other hand, been talking for a while, not my entire life but most of it, and therefore in theory it’s possible that I could tell a story. I can vocalize some, not necessarily in any coherent order, words layered and randomly lying in the air not in any particular fashion or in any specific order. But I’m going to try to use the written word to tell a story so you may have to pay attention, listen closely if you care to understand. I’ve had people walk away from me while in mid sentence, they didn’t seem to care about the story, the tale, the myth, sometimes even legend and or what it meant. Some stories actually mean something; some are just entertainment. Some try to be both.     

By putting words on paper I’m merely trying to tell a coherent story that, with your help and imagination we might be able to craft a story together into something that can be understood. The facts of the story took place in 1980, the rest I’m making up as I go. It was forty-two years ago and that in itself invites some intriguing questions. Like, what do seventeen year-old boys and twenty year-old girls talk about? What does a seventeen year-old say to his sister’s 25-year old boyfriend, who seemed really old? What does a seventeen year-old say to a historic Hall Of Fame baseball player? What does one say to the starting shortstop from the previous World Series while you ride in a van together never having met before? These are just a few questions of introduction, the rest take on a deeper if not darker form. They should not be asked in the light of day, when it’s bright and fuzzy and warm and the sky is baby blue and the possibilities are endless, they should be asked late at night in the darkness, in the cold, a type of cold in which you want to pull a blanket around your shoulders, for comfort and protection. All the events are true, well sort-of, all the events are based on truths. The scenes, in my mind, tick by like silent film, no dialogue, only the accompanying music, most likely the common desire of any storyteller since film has been projected onto a screen. I’m no different. At times the scenes took on a three dimensional, sculptural dream feel of walking in and about and around a scene, others yet of pure color and cartoon. In the end the story and characters make simple statements, like any story and simply question the need for positive change and growth in our societies and more specifically the individual, considering today’s state of affairs here and elsewhere, if for nothing else but to live at peace with oneself. 

This account of the series of events that will be told took place in Miami in the spring of 1980. The story at first may appear to be an account of a road trip, however that was not and is not the intent. It’s a story set in a Miami spring about a young man of seventeen, and his friends of eighteen, beginning to understand a world they had not known to prior exist and as a result were completely unfamiliar with, their perception of a Miami reality did not match the underlying truths. A world that looks like a marble is hard to comprehend. A portion of that marble that looks as big as an elephant to a mouse is still hard to understand. But things, like universal stuff like life and growth and good food and wine, and hurt and pain and a thorn, well that we can understand. As well as unjust treatment and cruelty, hate to the bone that you can see on a face, and death, well even from a tiny town, witnesses to life in a big town, we can comprehend.

I’m sitting on a stool, in a bar. It’s a familiar spot. A rumble begins to shake my body like, an anxiety. The building vibrates as an oncoming train approaches the building from the south on the tracks just outside, a common occurrence that goes almost unnoticed but for the rumble. It’s been a neighborhood bar and general store since the early 1930’s, at least. Memories and records get sketchy before that. The bar has been in our family since 1978. The building is really three buildings connected, remodeled, repositioned, added on to broken rebuilt massaged tickled, no no that’s a different story, but it has seen multiple changes and with the changes and a few additions, growth. The bar has been remodeled from the original a few times, the last with efficiency and function and footprints in mind, done in an economically small space. The basic inventory of ten stools, some tables, a booth people like to carve their names into, a pool table, dartboard, some TVs and a jukebox, classify it as a bar. It’s a bar. At a time, the 70’s and 80’s there was carpet on the floor and yellow and brown shag carpet on the side of the bar, now both of wood. The neighborhood was rough and tumble, the streets were dusty at one time. Some houses had old chipping paint or no paint at all. The cops wanted nothing of it, they would not drive through the neighborhood unless it were a dire emergency. The walls inside the bar are now wood and drywall, drywall on the ceiling. Pine for the seats at the booth and pine for the bench seat that’s built to a wall, two tables built of cement and oak, cement with beer bottles placed during pouring for the pedestals sit in front of the bench. No neon beer signs. Nothing on the outside to tell you it’s a bar. Occasionally a salesman will hang a plastic or paper sign; it’s only temporary. The wind and rain and snow and sun join to quickly deteriorate the occasional sign. Trains pass by within feet, winds from the rush of the trains pull on the signs adding pressure to their ultimate demise. It’s just before or just after the railroad tracks, make that turn. It’s the rough looking red and white multi unit place with a tin roof at the tracks. The Pit. It’s a small town, the bar is easy to find. And in this town you don’t expect too many outsiders, foreigners, aliens, or strangers. To describe such a place we prefer the word xenophobic, it’s fun to say and the x sounds like a z.

When you live in a small town, in a small bar you hear many stories over and over until they become time itself, not funny anymore some never were, ever, and some weren’t even meant to be. Often the meaning gets completely lost. Sometimes a meaning was never intended. Storytelling can be more a form of exercise and not so much communication. Listening is the extreme in exercise; it can be exhausting if done properly and not cheated. Talking has a way of releasing things that shouldn’t be released, at least not from the mouth, things people don’t want to hear released, personal information, secret angers, things of that nature. These are things that just don’t seem to change. People come and go but the stories are always similar and the regulars hear them and tell them, it’s the same story, things just don’t seem to change and no matter the seeming dislike, that’s how people like it. Sex somehow, in any setting is always, at some point part of any conversation, it comes up, period. It is one I’m not fond of, however guilty of infrequent, irregular participation. However my story does possess the suggestion of sex. My excuse? I was a child, a young adult, a young man, a child and now I want to talk about it. I just made that up, it’s not really true. But it is true. I do want to tell you about it. I sit here at the end of the bar humped over a beer or some other drink, listening to people talk, the jukebox playing off and on and the sound of TVs fade in and out with the music of the jukebox fading out and in. Sometimes the people talk politics mostly during the day. The younger generation, well they don’t care. During the day there is a nice mix of conservative and liberal thought, around 95 to 5% just how a small town likes it. Once in a while food, and what it costs makes for good discourse, normally about the time to go home for dinner. We talk about sports. Some talk about being athletes 45-years ago and how sports were much harder back then, and so on. Long past, the memories continue to blur with time. Sometimes memories of stories become so blurred that they take a natural path that forks like a road and leads into the morphing of other stories, two stories into one or more, mixed and matched in the name of a good story whether it’s been told before or not, in one form or another. We talk about how we deserve more at work, how we are not respected, what our wives really think of us and what we really think of our crummy bosses. We talk about retirement almost like we want time to travel and travel so fast that our job, this life, end as quickly as summer turns to fall. We don’t talk much about religion, but fishing, hunting, gas prices, and The old lady, we talk about those. And politics? Let me tell you.

We live in a factory town. The factories are all but gone now. People are here but the jobs are not. Short in height and time and the distance across the fertile valley is short too. Our skyline still reveals our past. Factories, their towers and stacks and churches and their steeples and spires dominate the skyline. Pizza, and hoagie shops, and the bars that have lasted are nestled underneath. We live here, not on the east or shiny west coast or in any major city. Our dreams of becoming rich have materialized here in this part of the country and living in houses that have been afforded us. This is our wealth, this is truth. Sitting on the same stools for years, talking grand talks about topics that folks find great interest in and have belief in their understanding of life. Some topics, sexuality and minorities, politics I mentioned, the borders and immigration and drugs, a murder now and then can get a bartender through an eight-hour shift. Almost to the person, women included, the overwhelming opinion, one would have to agree, everyone likes a nice lesbian, right? It’s not the same for guys. I can see the hair standing up on the back of customer’s necks, arms, legs, who knows maybe other spots as well when the subject arises. You can see where I’m going, some just can’t get past sex that is not of their concern no matter who is having it. I wonder why there is such interest?

Our small town in a shallow valley sits along a silt filled river, commercial rail lines running alongside. A blue-collar town that has always had more minorities than any other town in the valley that runs to the State Capital. It is something that unless it is brought to our attention no serious thought is paid. On some occasions the attention is focused on race. You hear what people say and disregard it more than not. Mostly you understand the source of the attention and that is the justification to disregard it. Maybe that’s a mistake. Even as white as I am I can hear what people are saying though trying to mask it, it’s very apparent. I do not have the capacity to feel it completely and that’s the problem. Though it’s not just a personal problem, it is a universal problem. Do we not respect ourselves enough to address that problem personally? It is possibly the number one hypocritical issue in society. Is growth and change even sought? Does the education, language, and history being taught in our schools address the disconnect? Or will everything just remain the same, now and in the foreseeable future. Are we the silt filled river in need of a dredging? How do we create change? Consider the change that has occurred, the positive change in society, said with great sarcasm, the old white guy gray with age is today the target of the wrath. The easy target, the problem fixed with a band-aid, talk back you silly old man and you will be canceled. Who needs more old white guys anyway? The problem, like the flu has not been cured, it will return. The plague is with us, as a society directed mindlessly to refocus, the problem remains, the directors assuring the focus does not reflect back on those few giving the directive.

That said, a story will be told. We are leaving our small dusty town to visit my sister. Leaving behind the dust carried by trains that run through town leaving fine dust of coal and strange dusts picked up through the traveled valley, randomly deposited on windowsills and the sides of my house. Leaving for the south, taking dust that has accumulated in us, in our minds through our childhood depositing bits of the particles along stops in fields and next to rivers and around small towns and gas stations as the gray north turns to the warm spring of the south. Along with three friends and the others we encountered on our trip south we found drugs and alcohol of course but we also peered into a world of homelessness and immigration, questioned past war, and talked with professional athletes. We did not witness murder but it was present and we stood in misty fogs in front of what would become classic rock and roll; we witnessed things like that. And days were filled with chance experiences, the foreplay of a thoughtful beautiful mind and the courage to question and open avenues to mental and spiritual challenges, and of course the ever-present presences of racism was itself, like a troll peering and protruding from random corners, and we witnessed things like that. This story has roads and Avenues, streets and Interstates even a Way but this trip was not about that, it is not a road trip story. It’s not a tale about the people from 1980, though they grease the story’s wheels. It is about the issues encountered that have been universal issues since the beginning of human time and they sit with us on the barstools here today. Go outside, look around it’s here. It’s here when the sun climbs and burns off the early dark morning, and it is here long after the sun has gone down and is rising on other beautiful lands. Time has not changed the individual human experience. It repeats itself in many forms but never strays far from the overall essence of the human experience that encompasses us all. It’s only when each of us individually experiences that unchanging essence of the experience that we each can realize the truths and begin to grow through them, learning to adapt to them or break them, get past them. The questions these experiences raised to us then and how things have changed little in forty years allows for these same questions to be raised again today. All the elements of the story are relevant today and possibly still affecting our growth or lack there-of, as men in our late fifties. It’s getting late in the night but one more story can be told. I hope it has not been told before. I tend to repeat myself. That’s what storytellers do and never seem to realize it. They enjoy hearing themselves tell that certain story. Alcohol may have something to do with that as well. So falling on the sword I will sacrifice myself and tell the story in turn. Sitting at the bar, Rich and Kenny will start, assumingly as an initial temporary audience, Kenny one of our story telling friends. He’s good. The bar is somewhat full of people who have shirts and shoes and pants on, some with more, some with sneakers and none that care, they are maintaining their own tales. It’s hard enough to keep Rich and Kenny’s attention. There is no time in story telling to worry about anyone but your audience. Some of these old stories have lessons, opportunities