#n gerard

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me, isolated during quarantine, scrolling through /r/RoleReversal 

[thecenteratmdc]

The Big Read: Miami Stories Blog

These Miami Stories are being collected by The Center for Literature and Theatre as part of The Big Read 2014. To learn more, and to submit your own story, visit our Big Read site.

Photo caption: N Gérard and her son Leaving Miami: A Love Letter By N Gérard Jesus, I’m ranking murders now? “At least he didn’t kill his kid”? Miamians have a perverse, reverse pride; I get that. We think our newscast is more ‘interesting’ than other places. We’re the world’s rudest city, the worst drivers, the epicenter of Medicare fraud. When some study reported that, combining all the social indices – housing, crime, attitude, whatever – Miami is the number-one lousiest place to live in the U.S., many of us thought, “We won!” But did I really just now think that this murder isn’t as bad as the one two days ago, because this time no machete was involved, because this time he killed the mother but spared the child? I must leave Miami before my son is much older. Yet noticing how randomly delightful this place is can mess up an exit strategy. The crooked line of ibis wobbling across the sky above traffic. The marlin that explodes, twisting, off in the Atlantic. The screech owls, six inches of knock-kneed indignation, that hiss as you pass in the night. Even these crazy-ass people might reel you in: the person who pays a skywriter to convince rush-hour heathens that “God loves U” + smiley face, causing us all to squint and crane out our windshields – then swerve to miss other bad drivers, thinking ungodly thoughts. The man walking down Flagler with his head on fire – the incendiary effect of one of our ridiculous, gaudy sunsets bouncing off the cigar smoke swirling around his head. The mighty woman in the parking lot of a peeling strip mall who can lop the top off a coconut with one machete stroke. It’s hard to leave a city where the local Publix stocks Santería candles. Where the owner of a shop in Little Haiti keeps a huge glass bottle on a metal pivot in which herbs resembling lawn clippings float in grain alcohol; he’ll swing it to pour you a shot just for stepping in. Where life-size statues of rearing stallions are wedged in a tiny garden off Douglas Road. That giant plaster manatee mailbox in front of the million-dollar home? Somebody put it there. Don’t be captured by the charm. Daily signs are so yin-yang that they could go either way. The man on the motorcycle who blows past the 75-mph herd, pops a wheelie and blasts down the highway, dreads streaming behind: Is he here to knock someone off St. Peter’s waiting list, or to make us all tense up and behave? Hard to tell. The guy in the pick-up who pointedly roars over the median where my son and I stand, almost hitting my head with his side mirror; but he’s chased by the Cuban fellow, mouth wide, bellowing, “Casi la mató, carajo!” in our defense. Or the time I picked Félix Morisseau-Leroy as Miami’s best poet in a local newspaper and was blindsided with hostile telephone calls – couldn’t I have called him Miami’s best Haitian poet and then picked a ‘real’ one? – but then a colleague taught me the infallible way of hanging up on an asshole without it coming back to you. In Miami, the wound and Band-Aid aren’t separated by much. Unless they are a chasm apart. We stop traffic along the I-95 for two cops gunned down so wastefully, and post silently flashing police cruisers mile after empty mile. The tribute is moving. They deserved to live. But I’m too mean not to notice that we didn’t stop traffic the last time a cop gunned down some unarmed black guy and later said ‘oops.’ Prosecute the Liberty City Seven because they might eventually make a bomb? Isn’t that sort of Liberty City returning the favor? I mustn’t lose sight of that; I must get my son out. Yet it’s easy to put off planned departures at dusk, in May, when the humidity isn’t yet cruel, and the tabebuia blossoms catch a breeze off the 16th Street cemetery and waltz like little wayward ghosts. The wind feels almost otherworldly, like a storyteller drawing breath before she begins. It’s hard not to see that there is something deeper here, or maybe just darker. I think it’s something brave. Miami is so brash that, sometimes, I forget the stories of sea-crossings and chancing everything, of people who won’t see their families for years – maybe not ever again. Of people who, maybe, no one will ever watch over again. On a sweltering afternoon when the air feels furry like growth in a Petri dish, I try not to be so peeved by the sweat pooling behind my sunglasses that I forget those stories. I’m not made of that stuff, but it’s all around: in the mariachi singer in silver-studded regalia, chest no longer puffed out, trudging home in the heat. In a trash-filled lot, in the circle of plastic chairs and a blown-out sofa arranged under a Poinciana tree: old heads in straw hats, a certain attention to dress. In the worn T-shirt folded over the face of the dead dog lying by the curb of a neighborhood where no city crew is coming to pick it up. Missing home, I’ve recognized it in the upheld tradition of a cricket match and stopped to watch. And that’s when a stranger with an island voice may fashion a rose from a palm leaf and pass it to you, saying “Smile, darling,” and walk on. He knows what it’s like. I wake at night afraid for my son – not now, but soon. So what, who doesn’t? It seems arrogant to leave. It feels disloyal to the city, to the people here who’ve never had their fuck-you money lined up and don’t have that kind of luxury. Maybe Miami lends itself to stereotypes of cheap flash and ugly tempers but, here, resilience is everywhere, like the banyan tree that needs just a tiny break to grow in concrete. Miami is a city of sly grace. It’s a seductive tar-pit that can trap a mammoth. I must tell it good-bye.