Part 2: The Miami Years (12-29)
At 12 years old, my parents got divorced. It wasn’t necessarily a shock. In fact, it was inevitable. My father hadn’t been part of our lives since I was four or five years old. But the finality of this step made me incredibly sad. That deep sense of abandonment would dog me the rest of my life.
David Donati showed up one day in a Cadillac wearing his requisite loafers (white this time - I thought that was very weird) and a sweatshirt to pick up some family furniture. I remember thinking that “sweatshirt” was the right name for a piece of apparel to work in, because it seemed to literally make you sweat. He loaded up his stuff, made some sweet promises that even a 12-year-old was beginning to find suspect, and disappeared out of our world. Turns out I would never see him again.
Shortly after that we moved to Washington DC – a short stint, but a fun one. My mother got her first real job ever, working for a firm that had her couriering documents around the city. We were in awe of the various embassies and other official places she visited. A lot more glamorous than what you could expect in North Carolina. I loved our school, Janney Elementary, and had one of the first big romantic crushes of my young life on a boy from Japan – Johnny Jann. But DC, a place we came to adore, wasn’t going to be our final stop. Things didn’t work out financially, and for a variety of other reasons, Mom made the decision to move us back to her hometown – Miami, Florida.
My grandparents were from the Northeast, a little town north of New York City and Wilkes Barrie, Pennsylvania. In the 1940’s the family (my great grandparents on my mother’s side) migrated to Miami, chasing the sun and opportunity. They bought a lot of land (Walt Disney bought some orange groves off us for his new theme park!) and even “developed” a small neighborhood in North Miami. Immigrants from Slovakia and Italy (upstairs maid and footman to the Oppenheimer family in New York City) they were New Yorkers through and through, but they soon made Miami a cherished home.
Sunshine, palm trees, tropical birds, and plants; it was a bit of a paradise after the harsh northern winters.
When we moved down ourselves, taking up residence in my great grandmother’s small bungalow with its abundant fruit trees, dusty furniture, and ancient oriental rugs, it was a letdown from the fast-paced, city life we’d been living in DC. I was starting middle school and rather than take the bus the two miles to our campus, I decided to walk. I found Miami ugly after the lushness of North Carolina and the stateliness of DC. Lawns where we lived just ran into the street with no curbs, houses were small, square, and boring. Everything felt bleached hot and sleepy. I was on a mission to find beauty in this place, so I grabbed a wicker basket and walked to school gathering subtropical flowers on my way, trying to find hidden glamour in the simple architecture. I’d bring my new friends flowers when I arrived at school, and myself memories of little details I captured that helped me see the subtle beauty of this place.
Around that time, I decided I wanted to become a writer. I loved art: dance, painting, film. To me it was the very best way to transcend everything that was mean and ordinary in life.
I chose writing because it was the cheapest thing I could do. We’d had ballet classes with an ancient ballerina and her creaky Chopin-playing recordings. We’d studied art with my mother, trying to recreate the sublime symmetry of orange segments. And I’d submerged myself in 1930s films in the stuffy, venetian blind gloom of our South Florida living room, drawing inspiration from Carol Lombard and other actors, dreaming of a bygone era. Books. They were the best option for me, and how I loved them! Open the page and a new world emerged.
I would become a writer.
I wrote three 200-page books in no time flat. Even having one professionally transcribed and sent off to a publishing house. When I was 12. Yes, it was roundly rejected, but at least I tried! And I didn’t give up for most of my early teens.
But life crept in. The teenage years, rife with all you could imagine in a place like Miami. Wild? Yep! The 1970s blended into the 1980s. MTV, British one-hit wonders, nightclubs, Parachute clothing, Japanese boots, fast boats, and fast cars – all the stereotypes rolled into one. Miami, a once sleepy town, came into its own thanks to Miami Vice (my girlfriend was dating Don Johnson). I moved to South Beach, into the apartment building Gianni Versace later bought and renovated - when it was truly cool (based on Christopher Columbus son’s home in Santa Domingo). Artists, restauranteurs, and club promoters moved down from the East Village to create a festive tropical enclave. Never mind the ex-pat Cuban contingent, with their yearning for paradise lost, and their culture. Please don’t take my brevity for stereotyping (not enough room in a blog!). I’ll just share that I love some of the things that are quintessentially Cuban - to me: the fragrant, strong coffee, Cuba Libre (coke and lime), salsa music (Celia Cruz!) and the dancing. Oh, I wish I could dance like that.
My friend and I started a “thing” – the Miami Arts Asylum. The Director was obsessed with (and trained in) modernist art movements and wanted to create a space for artists to express themselves. We requisitioned an old, barely functioning art deco theater (used mainly for punk rock concerts) and put on a weekly show. I had the job of curating the visual art and handling the performance art production – which, at the time, was a dream. I remember sitting in the back of my friend’s flatbed truck on a warm summer night after picking up some oversized paintings, heading to the venue and thinking, “This is one of the best times of my life.”
I loved sharing our friend’s hard-won work with others, hoping to inspire them. I loved bringing performance art to life – we had some awesome poetry slams. Not unlike a million other artists out there, we felt like we had an important story to tell, and we were going to tell it. Fun fact: I helped curate one of the first “events” at Art Basel in Miami (early ‘90s), having our artists share their source of inspiration in their voices.
This was a highlight of my life up until this point. But something felt missing. While I was becoming a well-known fixture on the beach and Miami through a new job in media and some high-profile friends, I was starting to grow scratchy at the edges. “Have black dress will travel” was not my moniker, but it was starting to feel like it could be. My father, who I last saw at the age of 12, had died when I turned 18. I was in Israel on a high school course to study 4000 years of Jewish history in eight weeks. When I landed, he had been dead a day. No goodbyes, no way of reconciling the past, none of those much-needed daughter/daddy chats.
I was going to have to figure this stuff out on my own.
That deep well of longing was only growing deeper and it caused me (thankfully!) to go in search of healing. So, many years later, when the life I was living felt like it was running its course, a good friend offered me a place to stay in San Francisco and I took her up and headed out. San Francisco open your golden gates – I’m on my way!