11 June 2020

Officials have allowed the public to again enjoy Lummus Park, the public park that runs along Ocean Drive in South Miami Beach, and they are letting us do so without masking our faces, providing we maintain an anti-social distance from one another. They have finally allowed us to use our beach again too, under the same conditions, and have permitted hotels and restaurants to reopen, at least long enough to file for bankruptcy pending an expected second wave of Kafkaesquean emergency orders to save us from the novel coronavirus by destroying livelihoods. We are exceedingly grateful for their generous commands for we would otherwise know not what to do with ourselves except to carry on with business until our herd became immune.

Tourists, who were treated like pathogens by officials, are drifting back to South Beach, which resembled a ghost town for two months. Business is relatively slow, but nowhere as slow as I remember it during the summer off-seasons 50 years ago, that is, during my good old days when we had sand sharks and a racetrack; I lived at the flea-bag Colony Hotel and had to scrape banana peels off boats downtown and sell my blood to pay the room rent. An alcoholic who liked to sit on the base of the Colony Hotel sign with his bottle of rotgut pointed the ocean out to me one day and said it was the end of the world, that all you had to do was walk out there and drown if you did not like it. I got lucky, hooked up with a foxy Jewish American Princess who arrived wearing tattered jeans under a mink coat and headed back to New York to hang out at her loft in Midtown. But I still loved South Beach and returned ever so often instead of taking those cheap mid-winter vacations in Iceland.

I have been back living on the beach since 2004. I live in the old crackhood four blocks from Ocean Drive and the beach, but I stopped going to the beach because it got too crowded and rowdy after Hillary Clinton''s pal, Philip Levine, was elected mayor. This coronavirus lull, however, brought me back. I sat down on the only shaded bench in the park yesterday, and felt an unusual twinge of loneliness, a feeling I have become an expert at avoiding after crying in my beer at a Mexican restaurant in Kona over love lost, and suffering from food poisoning the next day.

Miami is a refuge from socialism, I thought, a good place for loners, hence the rise of the Antisocial Socialist Party and its frustrated little dictators and fuehrers who resemble what they or their ancestors fled from. I myself am a little dictator, I confessed, the smallest one of all since I have few followers. Was there a time in the lives of great dictators when they were terribly alone in hovels, I asked myself, without many followers, and were wont to write wordy tracts?

Well, I have never been interested in soliciting followers, as is evident from my social media accounts. In fact, social distancing is easy for me as I have distanced myself most of my life. I do like to go to a party now and then and stay for a half an hour or so. I am ambivalent about marriage. Women advised me to never marry, but I did. I am still in love with my last wife, whom I have not heard from for decades although I always thought we would get back together in this life. I am sure I would panic if I heard from her now, or if another woman were interested in me for that matter. My type, according to Karen Horney, moves away from people. She thinks I am neurotic, anxious from some sort of basic conflict, which for her is not sexual in nature, something inherent and unavoidable, but is rather something elusive that might be resolved with the interminable help of an analyst like her.

I do not believe anything is wrong with me. What truly neurotic person does? My circumstances were such that.... But never mind, I think the problem for reflecting human beings is death, the subject of basic anxiety, something we would deny the best we can and conceal with reasons for living, especially with romance. One way out would be to find immunity from mortality by hugging the herd, or at least to lose oneself in another, say, The Beloved. 

Perhaps, I considered, my isolation is a kind of selfishness, the result of a self-destructive death instinct, for without others one is vulnerable and helpless, so being with another would relieve this brief moment of loneliness I am feeling on this park bench, of having to face death alone and unloved.... Maybe I should, during this reopening of the city from cowardly retreat, reopen myself, perchance even to romance, and fly from death with a sexy woman, such as the one I encountered here long ago....

Ah, be careful of what you ask for lest you have to just say no and regret it! Supernatural as this might seem to the reader, SHE suddenly appeared before me, a beautiful, smiling woman of about 20 years, in a bathing suit, no less, with hair, face, and body all wet from showering, carrying nothing, not even a towel, and she sat right down next to me and looked right at me with big blue eyes.

I was terrified, and stood up with an "excuse me."

"Oh, you don''t have to leave," she said in the sweetest voice.

"No problem, social distancing is six feet, it''s the law," I said and walked away.

Yes, I think something is wrong with me. Perhaps I am neurotic, after all, but I would hate to admit it. True, she might have been trolling for a grandfather, a custom in the area, but then again, maybe not, and so what, anyway? I missed a chance to meet the opposite of Almost Dead Already