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Although I barely knew Tracey Flagler, I miss her now that she is gone. I used to give her a goofy smile when we passed in the yard or on the street. I tried to converse with her, but she had little or no time to spare, perhaps because my conversation tends to run into long, off-the-cuff essays, and she had other things to do than to listen to a monologue. No doubt she had heard every line a man could throw out, anyway. She was, I found out, the outstanding beauty who stood in for Charlize Theron in the romantic movie, Sweet November, about a woman who lures a different man every month into her arms to help him out, avoiding long-term commitments all the while because she is terminally ill. Charlize, we might remember, was once rated the “Sexiest Woman Alive” by Esquire.
It is with that in mind that I clipped Charlize’s photograph from the magazine’s cover and pinned it up on my wall. When I gaze at the image of the sexiest woman alive, I imagine that she is really Tracey, my own nice girl next door, so to speak. After all, if it were not for the slings and arrows of fortune and other quirks of fate, Tracey would be a movie star today, and I could very well say to whoever would listen, “I knew Tracey Flagler well. She was my neighbor,” whenever she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She would tell Oprah that she, Tracey Flagler, was just lucky, and Oprah would disagree with her, just as she disagreed with Charlize Theron in their talk published in Oprah Magazine back in November 2005:
“You keep saying you’re lucky,” Oprah told Charlize, “and I can’t take it. You’re not lucky. You are blessed and graced. Even the word blessed doesn’t capture the bigness of it. When you are in alignment with the divine current of your life, that’s when that thing people call luck happens.”
My dear Tracey would reply, “Oprah, you really flatter me, to think that God has personally graced and blessed me because I became aligned with the Divine Current, just as you did before you got your two and a half billion dollars, while those who fail don’t become aligned with it, even though they believe in it, watch your show, read Abraham-Hicks and Seth and Conversations with God, and pray ever so desperately to the source of the divine current! Thank you! It’s so much better to bathe in the divine current and be graced and blessed by divine being than to be graced and blessed by Lady Luck.”
Ah, if only I had slept with the sexiest woman in the world before she became rich and famous, if only I had taken a dozen tawdry photos of the carnal process, I might have exposed all and gotten myself blessed and graced with a hundred grand. ‘O, my, my dear O, thanks to you, my imagination is running away with me! On second thought, I think I am not that sort of person. Alas, if only I could align myself with the Divine Currency of the Central Banker and go with the Cash Flow, I would be swimming in charitable units of exchange. ‘O, Dear O, please send me two million dollars over the next year and I shall split it with Tracey, give half of my cut to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital so more kids can be cured of cancer, and shall support my literary gift with the other half.
We should treat people a lot better when they are here instead of making legends of them after they are gone, but since I missed the opportunity, I am left with a legend. I can see from Tracey’s frantic scrawling in the diaries I recovered from her studio that we had a few things in common, things we might have shared in this limbo called South Beach. Indeed, we might even have been famous friends. It occurs to me that kindred spirits tend to commune in the same places although they might not be formally aware of their communality. It is as if we were attracted to a place by underlying geomagnetic forces. South Beach might one day become a subtropical Findhorn for New Age weirdoes.
Tracey Flagler loved South Beach, but its many alienated residents lack the sunny disposition of their sunny environment, and, on the whole, they prefer to keep their distance with a frown. Only ingratiating beggars dare smile. Everybody go ahead and smile, then. After all, everybody got naked at the Sagamore Art Hotel for Spencer Tunick’s installation on October 8, 2007, so why not get together for one big smile? Do we not all want something for nothing? Don’t we want unconditional love? Some say the father-god had stuff to begin with, but we sons of god prefer to believe that the world was created out of nothing and handed to us on a silver platter. Furthermore, we would supplant our father and treat ourselves as gods in our own right. After all, we are waited on hand and foot as babies, so handouts are naturally expected. Infants are eventually given good reason to fear that more stuff shall not be forthcoming if they are too demanding, but a smile in lieu of outraged cries will often do the trick, or at least belay a smack on the bottom.
Perhaps I myself am at bottom a bum, for I unwittingly smile broadly from time to time, seemingly for no reason at all, as if I were a baby if not the village idiot. I should know better, but I cannot help smiling and kidding around. If looks could kill, I would be dead: I smiled at the world while sitting on the patio of Starbucks just last Sunday. A man got up, walked over to me, said nothing, and stared into my eyes with unutterable hatred. I don’t know, maybe he mistook me for a war criminal who had caused his family and friends to be tortured and murdered; but I figured he was a murderer on vacation, perhaps looking for a celebrity to kill, so I walked away with my smile even though I felt a self-defensive urge to hit him over the head with a heavy patio chair several times until he went on a permanent vacation. But he had confronted the wrong man this time, the Nobody who apparently looks like somebody, a man who had better things to do than to engage in a so-called Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest at Starbucks.
South Beach Hispanics and Jews seem more secure and somewhat happier than the alienated lots. Hispanics prize their families and are more familiar with their familiars than the run-of-the-mill atomized individual. Since Spain was first to seize Florida from its aborigines, Hispanics feel they have a right to South Florida at the very least. Many Hispanics work for a pittance on South Beach and live on the mainland, but a few poor Latinos cling to South Beach for what it’s worth; and a number of rich Latinos like South Beach well enough to maintain fabulous quarters here and there. Jews cleave to their families and familiars as well. By the way, investors, Jews still own a goodly portion of South Beach, mostly for sale at bargain prices, in case you are interested. But the large Jewish population has fled, making way for gentile gentrification.
The gentiles, contrary to their namesake, are not clannish. We might call them pagans or villains or heathen, but they are not country comrades or tight-knit villagers and they do not adhere to sacred hearths. They are, in truth, neo-barbarian individualists. Gringos and goyim bring the suspiciousness of their parochial towns and the angry isolation of their respective cities to South Beach with them. They seek refuge from the barbarous, unwholesome war of all against all most prevalent on the East Coast, where Mars rules, or rather Thor-Zeus. They want relief from the insanity or unwholesomeness they cannot help but to bring with them as unwanted baggage – no matter where you go, there you are. Mind you that South Beach is famous for the craziness of its residents, call it eccentricity if you wish to be politically correct, particularly among those abject vagrants who flock to South Beach to live publicly and panhandle under the protective wing of its permissive authorities – a city commissioner who opposed an anti-panhandling ordinance referred to the crazed characters as a favorite tourist attraction..
People flock to South Beach to relax and have fun, to take a break from the rat race and puritan work ethic and inhibiting moral codes, to do what they want to do to please their own selves one way or another. Bacchanalia it is not, but perversion is appreciated and tolerated. We all want to have fun. Many of us will never grow up. Our gurus preach infantilism or childishness, a return to the inner child, the kid within; we are to return to our origin, the aboriginal fountain of youth within, and live in the eternal moment, free of guilt about the past and anxiety for the future. Let us return to our true nature; let us be innocent babies: the negative old farts always die off, and the positive-attitude babies always win. Yes, indeed, we would like to return to the security of the source, to the womb, where nothing has to be done, where we can relax. At the same time we associate fun with absolute freedom from restrictions, with the feeling of power we had as omnipotent infants once relieved of the birth trauma. We believe life should be an eternal vacation, that the whole point and final cause of living is, in fine, to have fun.
Oh, joy, joy, and more joy! If only the point of life as advertised could be had, if only the instant Now were not spurious, there would be no end to the fun! The advertisements for tourist meccas like South Beach reinforce high expectations for relaxing and having fun. Even Islamists find South Florida irresistible: they cover up the breast of Madonna suckling baby Jesus in the picture in their motel room with a towel, and gravitate to strip clubs where their appetite for metaphysical virgins is whetted. Alas, the service class must work hard for fun, and they do not always work for the fun of it.
“All I want is fun and excitement,” Tracey Flagler scrawled in her diary after a hard night’s work as a food server. “I want to sense that my life is amazing. It is all for fun, that’s what the purpose life is, to have fun. I can have anything imaginable. I can create anything I want. I am in this body because I chose it, and I can leave it any time I want and have another body if I so choose, for I am really everlasting life. All I have to do is to relax and accept joy, joy, and more joy, the joy that is mine because the universe adores me for being one of its bright stars. If I can’t have fun doing something, then I shouldn’t do it. This planet will be gone tomorrow so I shall have fun on it today. I will just relax and enjoy my vacation here, and then I shall vacation on another planet. May this happy vacation last forever, and it will do so because I wish it would. Wow, what a great idea, of being on vacation eternally, of taking a permanent vacation from all the troubles stupid people occupy themselves with. Life then would be so much more fun and exciting and amazing! Inner Being, please steer me to what is easy and fun and helps me to connect to you where I enjoy the forces that make life fun. Please steer me to fun friends, and to fun relationships that are easy and long and passionate and fun.”
Tracey thought she might be befriended by rich and famous celebrities at the fabulous party hotels where she worked. Perhaps her foot would fit the proverbial glass slipper. After that, she supposed, life would be a ball. By virtue of her association with celebrities, she would enjoy celebrity status herself, and then others would hang on her every word. Celebrities had the power she craved, and they obviously could relax and have a great deal of fun. Powerful people as well as dominant apes must at least appear to be relaxed in order to maintain their superior status before an adulating or cringing audience. And of course democracies are supposed to be more fun for everyone concerned.
Many celebrities are talented indeed, and they have worked hard for what they have, but most notably the notables or Names have won the great popularity contest. The Name is the claim to fame, and fame is sufficient authority in itself. Essentially, celebrities are members of the power elite who are celebrated simply because of the positions they occupy. As a matter of fact, they may be far from wise and may even be flagrant fools or perverse clowns if not drunks, dope addicts, and wife beaters. Whatever prestige they might have on a small scale is inflated by the national spotlight. Prestige is a dominating power; it paralyzes the critical faculty and fills the adulator of idols with astonishment and respect if not awe. Wealth is not the only form of power – a penniless saint may influence the world – but the prestige of celebrities more often than not is boosted by the perception of wealth, by the power to obtain whatever money can buy; and that includes, first and foremost, fun.
Status is a psychological place where the power elite meet. Conventiclers do not conspire in that virtual space, but there is an abiding interest in maintaining power over the populace. Conservative snobs and mobsters have their private clubs and secluded resorts; they do not want publicity, for it might call into question their prestige. “The moment prestige is called into question it ceases to be prestige,” observed Gustave LeBon in his groundbreaking study of crowds. “The gods and men who have kept their prestige for long have never tolerated discussion. For the crowd to admire it, it must have been kept at a distance.” But celebrities must be seen to be celebrated in this great democratic republic of ours. South Beach seemed to be a great backdrop for the public display of the sweet life beautiful celebrities are supposed to live every day. But then a man celebrated for making celebrities look good was slain on the doorstep of his posh Ocean Drive mansion by a madman. It dawned on celebrities that some of the crazy people who flock to South Beach to enjoy the permissive atmosphere are exceedingly dangerous to the welfare of the elite. So celebrities withdrew from South Beach. The ones who do appear on occasion usually keep their distance – a famous hip-hopping athlete might get drunk, pull out his pecker and urinate on Washington Avenue.
The fear of celebrity-killers greatly reduced the chance of persons like me and Tracey Flagler of meeting celebrities on South Beach and being recognized by them as the great people we really are, people whom it would be fun for them to know and to adopt into their fun-loving circles. If we knew them better, we might have discovered that we were already having more fun than they did, but just didn’t know it. But that wouldn’t have kept us from having more fun than a barrel of monkeys with them. Mind you that a monkey’s grin does not necessarily mean he’s frightened and angry.
