At the Miami Beach end of the causeway there were two ways to go — north toward Lincoln Road, Bal Harbor, the colossal condominiums, the convention hotels, the tourists, the bellhops, the front desks, the rental cars, the big money, or south to South Beach, a ghetto that has fiercely resisted change for fifty years and is still resisting but now finally is beginning to lose the battle — where almost everything, the streets, the apartments, the stores, the hotels, is old and shabby, where almost everybody used to be old and Jewish but now there are beginning to be large numbers of Cubans, young and old, and the two cultures seem to stand and gaze at each other dubiously.
When people asked Bobby why he lived on South Beach, he said, “When I was a kid I used to go over to South Beach on the bus from Miami to go swimming because I loved the beach there. South Beach had the best beach on Miami Beach then and it still has the best beach on Miami Beach now. When I was a kid I always thought that when I grew up I would like to live in one of the hotels on South Beach that are right on the beach itself, and the one I thought I would most like to live in was the Seabreeze. So when my daughter Sara wanted to go off and live on her own down in the Grove a couple of years ago I sold my house in Miami and moved to South Beach, and now I’m living in the Seabreeze, and I’m happy there. The same hotels are there that were there when I was a kid, the same stores, the same movies, the same streets, even some of the same people. And I like the people. I feel at home with them. They have what’s called a siege mentality. Everything’s closing in on them, the big-time real-estate operators, the city and county politicians, the federal government, the department of this and the department of that, even the Cubans now, and they all wish all these old Jews would drop dead tomorrow so they could come in and bulldoze every building that stands on South Beach right into the bay and start all over again with the condominiums and the high-rises. But these people are tough. They’ll never surrender. They give ground inch by inch, and they know how to vote and how to sue and how to picket and how to nag and how to kvetch and how to obstruct.”
Bobby had trouble finding a place to park the Continental near the Seabreeze and finally had to squeeze it into an alley two blocks away. Walking back toward the hotel he passed a lot of old people who were moving along slowly and carefully, some of them clinging to each other as if they were on ice. All the little hotels that he passed had verandas, and people sat in rows on the verandas talking to each other and to people going by on the sidewalk, or played cards and dominoes. It was possible to look through the windows of the hotels into the ground-floor rooms, and they were bare, with hot plates on the bureaus, no pictures on the walls, ceiling lights burning, bathing suits hung up to dry on coat hangers in the windows.
The veranda at the Seabreeze was like all the others but the lights were brighter. Out there it was like daylight. The card players and the people sitting in the rows of chairs waved to Bobby as he came up the steps and he waved back to them and went on into the lobby, a garish, windswept room where a few chairs were arranged theater-style in front of a color TV. Two small old women sat in the chairs, as far apart from each other as possible, watching a police show. A terrific wind sailed through the lobby from a door at the far end of the main hallway that opened onto the beach. The wind blew ashes out of ashtrays, rolled up the rug, made newspapers fly out the door, fluttered the notices that were tacked up on the bulletin board next to the reception desk.
Bobby went to the desk and leaned over it to get a view of the geezer minding the switchboard, Lester Katz.
“Katz, any calls for me?” Bobby asked.
“No, Mead,” Katz said, not bothering to look up from his Miami News.
“It’s turning goddamn cold,” Bobby said.
“Yeah,” Katz said, still not looking up. “Next year I’m going south for the winter.”
Bobby lived on the second floor, in one of the rooms that faced the sea. When he stepped out of the elevator the first thing he saw was a big black rat. The rat saw him too but didn’t pay much attention. He was like a cop, going along the hall checking each door to see if it had been left open a crack. He kept right on checking nonchalantly until Bobby threw a shoe at him, and then he ducked into a utility room.
Bobby had to push against the wind when be opened his door and had to hold on to the door firmly to keep it from getting away from him and slamming shut after he got inside. His room was full of the wind, which blew in through a big hole in one of the glass doors that opened on his balcony. His room was much like the rooms he had passed on his way to the Seabreeze, small and bare and decrepit. The difference was that since he was an aristocrat with an oceanfront room he had a balcony where he could hang his bathing suit over the back of an aluminum chair to dry instead of on a coat hanger in a window, and he could lean on his railing and look at the ocean.
The glass doors were caked with salt and everything in the room was sticky with salt, and there was fine sand in all the corners and crevices. Bobby went out on the balcony and picked up his bathing suit from the sandy comer where it had blown after it had dried on the back of a chair. Then he went back into his room and took off his canary-yellow slacks and flowered shirt and hung them up carefully in the closet out of the wind.
He put on his bathing suit and sandals and took a towel and went down the back stairway to the beach. There was no moon and at first he couldn’t see anything ahead of him but the whitecaps out on the black ocean. He slogged through the soft sand toward the water, bent over against the wind and just trying to keep from running into any of the metal wastebaskets and scattered palm trees that he knew were in his way. He beard voices coming toward him and a pack of Cuban kids came out of the night, laughing and yelling, and ran past him, and he only saw them as white blurs for an instant before they were swallowed up in the night again and their voices went with them. Then his eyes got more used to the darkness and he saw the empty lifeguard’s box off to his right and a few old people standing looking at the waves, holding on to their hair or their hats with one hand and with the other holding their coats closed at the throat. The combers rolled in and pounded the beach and rose up in the clouds of foam before falling back. But they were not the great waves of Atlantic City or Cape Fear. For one thing the water at this end of Miami Beach was quite shallow for a long way out, with long sand bars that kept big waves from building up, and besides, far away, past the Gulf Stream, the islands of the Bahamas took the full force of the Atlantic swells and broke them up on their countless reefs.
When Bobby reached the hard wet sand near the water’s edge he stood for a moment looking around. To his left was the line of hotels and condominiums that formed a solid chain of lights along the shore all the way north to Palm Beach and beyond. To his right was South Beach, the ghetto, the old concrete fishing pier, that used to be covered over in the beginning and was the home of Minsky’s Burlesque but now was just the place where mostly old Jews and old Cubans stood all day and maybe half the night trying to catch a fish so they wouldn’t have to buy a fish, then the bright lights of the Miami Beach Kennel Club, and after that a long expanse of empty beach terminating in the jetties with their huge jumbled rocks, between which raced the deep, dark, silent current of the main ship channel.
Bobby threw himself into the waves and when he surfaced at the end of his dive he began swimming straight out to sea. He swam every night when he came home from work in all but the very roughest seas and on all but the coldest days. He knew it was dangerous to swim far out when there were no lifeguards on duty and with the water full of loose timber and orange crates and jellyfish and Portuguese men-of-war as well as raw sewage, but he was a strong swimmer and he was never afraid in the water.