A Miami Loop

on the writer life

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Recently, I made the decision to finally go and revisit a bar in Miami that is something of a monument in my life. I even sat at the exact outdoor chair where, a decade ago, an unsuspecting man sat with his friends before I completely drenched him with the beer that he’d ordered.

I was 22 years old and carrying a grimy black tray full of drinks. The music behind thumped, probably that song “Timber” that to this day I cannot listen to. I don’t recall what caused me to lose balance. I only remember that dazed feeling–the one I had on most nights. Minutes and hours flying by in what felt like seconds as I tried to keep track of orders, who was drunk, and who I needed to get more intoxicated for the sake of my tips.

I remember watching the beer leave my tray in slow motion, then douse this man who was older than me and had traps that could crack you like a nut.

I’m still surprised I didn’t get punched in the face. I expected it. I might have even craved it at the time.

*

I first came to this particular bar in the fall of 2013. A few months before I had graduated college and spent my summer not working a steady job for the first time since I was about 14. I decided to role play this writerly lifestyle I found myself attracted to. And it seemed like all of the writers lighting me on fire back then had all this disposable time during the day to read and ponder.

Why couldn’t I use my meager savings and give it a shot?

You should know that I thought I was hot shit at the time. After falling in love with fiction my first year at my undergraduate program, I discovered I was good at it. I won all the writing awards the university offered, including a campus-wide artist of the year award that hadn’t been won by a writer in many, many years. I had been accepted to a fully funded MFA program in Miami. According to my professors and my friends, I was on a fast track to being a successful novelist.

I found myself striving for what I thought that life was supposed to look like. A young, hip, successful writer, a bartender on the side until my career took off. A Nuyorican S. Thompson. Less hard drugs, more hip-hop and salsa.

I landed in Miami with the idea that I’d cultivate that life for myself. But it didn’t take long to become obvious that things weren’t going to go as I imagined.

*

While my program was fully funded, the $16,000 a year that I was provided was clearly not enough to live on. After paying rent for a tiny efficiency across the train tracks on the “bad” side (read: the Black side), I barely had enough left for groceries, much less to buy booze.

Then there was also the problem of me not knowing how to drive, and realizing that while Miami does technically have a train, it is basically useless.

Days after I first arrived in the city, I found myself in need of a job, and in need of a job that I could easily get to and wouldn’t mess with my classes.

This resulted in me sweating profusely through a dress shirt as I walked down a local strip of restaurants and bars. I hit each one with a resume I stripped away of journalism and writing accomplishments and filled with the service oriented jobs I’d held before that. I dressed up the sporadic bartending I did in a dingy spot in Midtown that was perpetually empty except for my boys who’d come visit me out of pity.

*

I was hired on the spot after dropping off my resume, talking to the doughy manager, and taking a dumb multiple choice test with the most basic questions ever about customer service.

My first shifts coincided with my first classes at the university. I realized pretty quickly, basically just as quickly as I realized that I was broke, that despite all my awards and the nice things people said about my writing back at my undergrad, when it came to finally sitting down and using the time I was afforded to write the great novel, nothing came.

For hours and days I sat in my small efficiency and stared at the blinking cursor. I tried little snippets here and there but my efforts were perpetually tainted by a voice that kept asking me dangerous questions like: “Do you think they would like this?”

No original fiction was produced in the only semester I lasted. For most of my assignments, I turned in polished stories I wrote as an undergrad. Stories that had already been given the seal of approval by my workshop participants or my professors. Safe pieces that had already been validated.

About the only new stuff I could get down were embarrassing journal entries about how depressed I was.

I was scared. The little accomplishments I had up until that point paralyzed me. I was incapable of exploring a character or a scene with any of the playfulness that had marked my previous work. And worst of all, I feared that despite all the promise I allegedly had, I was missing something else in spades: Experience.

At 22, what kind of great novel could I really write? How much did I really know about myself, much less the world?

*

Most nights during this time were taken up by shifts at the bar.

It didn’t take me too long to get the hang of things. When I arrived, I cut lemons and married ketchup, folded napkins, and changed out menus. During the evening hours, I stood around bored, serving the light crowd of guests who’d come and chat with coworkers I became friendly with, like a salad cook who parlayed his skills making salads for inmates during a long bid he’d done into a job outside.

Around 8 or 9 p.m. the bar side would get going, the shitty top 40 music was turned up, and the real money was made hustling until the late night closing hour.

I learned that when people ask for a vodka soda, the appropriate response is, “Ketel One, right?” I learned that flirting goes a long way, as does a smile. I learned which countries have the worst tippers and how to spot them. After spilling the beer on that jacked dude, I also learned that piling too much on your plate can quickly backfire.

On many nights, I walked out into the dark Miami sky with a clean 200 cash in my pockets, which feels amazing when you’re broke. Although I was often exhausted, I found some joy in how fast the nights sped. Outside of the bar everything else seemed so slow.

*

When I wasn’t serving drinks I felt like a fraud. Like I was cosplaying a writer. I deduced that smoking a lot of cigarettes might be an effective method to cure my depression.

It helped that being a smoker allowed me to get frequent little breaks from my desk and classrooms, as well as from the rush of the bar at night. Every hour or so I could ask the woman who managed the night shift, for example, a grizzly lady who’d worked at this bar for most of her adult life, for permission to step out.

She’d see me coming and say, “You want a smoke break?” in a high pitched whine, mocking me as if I was a child asking her for more ice cream.

Our parking lot was right next to a local strip joint. I made friends with some of the valet guys, the bouncers, and even a couple of the strippers. But mostly, I was out there alone, sucking down Marlboros on the pavement and wondering why the hell nothing was working out like it was supposed to.

I saw therapists. I spiraled further down. I smoked so many cigarettes that I had to stop buying Marlboros and switch to a brand called 305’s. A brand so cheap that it is embarrassing to admit you ever smoked them.

The funk got so bad that I decided, in council with some key loved ones, that I had to get the fuck out of Miami.

With my tail between my legs, I dropped out of my MFA. I went back to New York. I turned away from fiction, figuring I might not be cut out for it after all, and dove back into my journalism experience.

I wondered if maybe the swashbuckling novelist lifestyle I built up in my head really wasn’t for me–and more so, if it actually existed.

I wasn’t sure what fiction I'd write, or if I’d ever write, but I was sure of one thing, which I told anyone back in New York who would listen to me, I would never, ever return to Miami.

*

But of course I was 22, so what the fuck did I know?

Not much, clearly.

Because within a few years, I was back in Miami, this time with a nice remote job, a driver’s license, my girlfriend who grew up in the city, and some years of experience under my belt in the real world.

I’d kept up with the fiction, trying my hand at some novel drafts in the mornings before work that hadn’t really panned out. I gained an awareness of all the time I had previously at the MFA program, and I started to miss that time. Started to find myself thinking: If I had it, I’d know what to do with it now.

I was already moving out of the territory of youth I so desperately wanted to be published in, and I was coming to the realization, slowly, that it would be perfectly fine–and perhaps even ideal–if I didn’t publish a book in my twenties.

It was basically fate when I returned to the city and my spot was offered back to me at the program.

While there, I experimented. I tried out different voices and plots. I wrote in big furies. I went to conferences and workshops, and ate up a vast selection of books and work that deeply informed my own.

A few years after graduation, in 2022, as a dad in his thirties with a day job and a mortgage–decidedly not a Nuyorican Hunter S. Thompson–I finally sold my debut novel. Almost ten years to the date that I had first come to Miami with my grand intentions of riding off into the sunset.

*

When I first moved to South Florida around 2016 it was easy to avoid going to the bar I used to work at back then. It was far from my first spot over the county line in Broward. And when I moved to the city, I had no reason to ever go back. Nor did I really want to.

It didn’t end well for me. After the owner of the bar silently watched a group of people skip out on the bill while I was busy attending to five other tables, he tried to punish me by asking me to clean the whole place for a few nights in a row. I told him to go fuck himself. And so it went.

The place was a site of shame for me. A marker of the time that I’d failed. A time period I desperately wanted to forget and erase from my memory banks. Why go there and stir shit up?

But as chance would have it, the new home we recently moved to in Miami is close by. Close enough that I often pass it just driving around during normal daily activities.

Still, for months, I avoided going there. Until recently, when I decided, basically on a whim, that I needed to go back and see what exactly it would stir in me.

I walked in a completely different person than the 22-year-old who walked out in a fury. A husband, a father, a published novelist. I was embodying many of the things I desperately wanted at the time, just in a form that looked far different than I would have ever imagined that life to look and feel like.

But in some ways I wasn’t all that different.

A new manuscript I was working on was stalling out. It was becoming clear that I would have to start over again. And again, I was feeling a bit of fear. A bit of the weight of expectations, following up a novel that was well-received, and that would come with more expectations than my first, which mostly came out of nowhere.

What would it look like? How would it be received? Will the path be as easy as I hope it will be?

I still have these questions.

But sitting at the bar, I know from experience that it is a waste of time trying to answer them. The path to whatever comes next is likely one I’ll never be able to predict. It’ll have its own bumps and turns and they probably won’t make sense at the moment. But later on they might.