It’s an odd feeling, trying to stay sane. You know you’re not completely there when you discover a passion for the toothless man dragging a vacuum in a little red wagon, his confidence being the thing you envy. The moment that look of awe and wanting comes across the face is when you run into a wall with a helmet or vest full of C4. But as a great writer once said, “… C4 is hard to come by. That being what it is, I move on… to what moves me…” And what is moving me is the man’s brown and yellow stained wife-beater. I can’t decide whether or not the fiery feeling in my face is from embarrassment, repulsion, or an awkward sense of admiration. His wife was the equal state of living in the “South Country” for a lifetime, but they were both smiling, despite all of the weird glances shooting their way. My mind made humor and fun at first, but at a second glance, I wasn’t sure if this Florida man with no teeth and a vacuum cleaner should really be at the end of all my ranting jokes. It wasn’t only him. It was the thin old man in a metal studded Obama shirt and a man in a wheelchair with a suitcase at his front and parrot at his back. In all my accusing and berating, I still felt something unidentifiable in my gut. There was the woman with the hair curlers and the man wandering the market in a Speedo, Italian tan deepening in the Southern sun.

Ft. Lauderdale, beneath it’s sea of riches, lavish beachfront condominiums, and carbon copy suburbs, was a different story. And not the kind of story sharpened with a Rolls Royce or Bentley, but a tale of a separate set of money and wealth. Outside of downtown and disconnected from the coast, gaggles of brightly colored houses crowd in small neighborhoods of palm trees and power lines. I can already hear myself humming to Destination Anywhere. Pink houses, green houses, tan houses, all of the houses some fantastically bright color. All of it is so bright. Small adult shops pop up from every corner and independent businesses are islands in hordes of flooded parking lots, the water warmed from boiling in the midday heat. This is the other façade of Ft. Lauderdale, the other face of most urban metropolises.

Cities are the mark for all that is wrong and all that is right in this world. There is the corruption: hard drugs, hard liquor, hard sex, hard politics, and hard living. Depending on what side of the tracks you hail from, this could be a good or a bad thing. But on the other hand, there is the beauty: there is Chicago’s Lake Michigan, apple green at the climax of a summer. There is New York’s night skyline, speckled with pepper of apartment and business lights. There is Seattle, a West Coast kingdom of sweet smelling rain and mountains. In Ft. Lauderdale, the beauty is within the ocean; how it smells in the early hours of the mornings, how it is harsh and severe before a storm yet so hypnotic and friendly simultaneously. How in the early hours of the evening the sand and water and Oceanside buildings are tinted blue. Even the drunkards falling over at the end of one of those hard drugs, hard liquor, and hard sex nights seem so strangely welcoming. Watching surfers wade into the water as a squall of bruised clouds make shore, strong bullets of rain pelting the skin, it seems as though the days could never end, even though they must. Cities are horrific and evil in their tenderness. But this revelation about cities, the Southern city, all horrible and all terribly lovely, presented itself to me suddenly in the time before dawn was to hit. It took a week of pondering, though, to fully develop itself into words. And it all came on from a football fan.

“A hotel in the middle of the night,” Benjamin Button said, “can be a magical place. A mouse running and stopping. A radiator hissing. A curtain blowing. There’s something peaceful, even comforting, knowing that the people you love are asleep in their beds where nothing can harm them.”  The lobby at Ocean Manor was a collection of not-so-stylish velvet chairs meant to look like they came straight from Victorian England, a broken grand piano that screamed in pain with every punch, a Starbucks chasing café, a reception desk, and a bar behind glass doors. It was the marble (or so they say) floors and gaping window that gave a glimpse to the beach front that got us hooked. At night, after we’d swim or walk or do our other nightly “chores”, my brother and I would sit on the frumpy couch facing the ocean watching drunks stumble from the Tiki Bar to the beach. The excitement in it all would be betting on who would be able to get the most drinks down. The surprise in it all would be if one would show up on the morning news, washed ashore in Fort Pierce having appeared to have “drowned in a semi-comatose state” (intoxicated individuals thinking they can swim when they can’t even stand). In the middle of the night at this hotel, only the exotic roamed. The magic was in what you made of it...