Chapter 29: Venezuelans

An asshole burglar (or burglars) had climbed onto a ledge, smashed open a window, and cleaned me out, stealing my laptop and TV. But, worst of all, they jacked a book of CDs, many of which were rare, tough to find electronic music, and to this day I’ve not replaced every one of them. The burgling bastards!

But it wasn’t as bad as what happened to a chick I met at a sushi bar nearby my apartment.

She, the ex-wife of an NFL player, a linebacker for the Bengals, came home one night to find a robber inside her apartment. The robber, a young kid, attacked her with a screwdriver, slashing her arm, stabbed her in the chest, just above her tit (very, very fortunately not hitting the silicone!) and she was able to fight him off by kicking him hard in the balls and running away.

She showed me the scars to prove it.

(Quite a pretty lady, a bleach blond beauty, maybe ten years my senior. I should have asked her out or gotten her number. We talked for a while at the sushi bar, hit it off, and then I left after finishing my meal. Surprisingly, she seemed disappointed when I departed. As an older, wiser guy, I’d for sure seize the opportunity, because even if she turned me down, so what, but at the time, it didn’t occur to me that this older, beautiful woman might have wanted to jump my bones. The axiom: “youth is wasted on the young” couldn’t be more apt in this instance... )

Aside from getting burgled and the sad plight of the area’s homeless, my time there was one of the best in my life.

I quickly made friends. It was so multi-cultural there, and, with my dark looks, I fit right in, many mistaking me for Latino, speaking Spanish to me, until I’d reply, “Yo soy gringo. Yo no hablo mucho Espanol.”

Sure, there were stuck-up bitches and rich assholes, but I met tons of cool people, and dated a lot.

The first girl I dated in South Beach was a Moroccan girl, who worked at a restaurant nearby and gave me free food. We went out a few times, and I helped teach her how to drive. She was very cool, and we had fun together. She was pretty, with olive skin and her long curly black hair and voluptuous figure. She was easygoing and smart, too, and had a hilarious snorting laugh. She’d worked as a bartender, but it turned out her family back in Morocco was loaded. They were strict, though, too, and soon demanded she return from what I discovered was an extended vacation...

Then there was a Venezuelan chick. This thick little cute thing. She had short green dyed hair that ran just past her ears and she wore tons of eyeliner and mascara. We started off, hooking up online, but after a couple dates, we realized it was more of a friendship type thing, which was cool, because she was cool, and we smoked weed together, hung out, went out clubbing. She liked a lot of the same music I did, at the time, lots of trance and electro stuff. She danced like a Latin girl too. I loved how she’d move and sway to music.

She knew a lot of chill people in South Beach, and through her I made tons of friends. She had this posse of gay dudes who liked to smoke weed and were generally cool as fuck. Hanging out with them really changed the way I thought of gay people.

I’ll admit that growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I was homophobic. My stepbrother, people in school who picked on me or others called me a “fag.” It was the worst thing you could be called, a “fag” or a “faggot.”

Along with my stepbrother, friends in school spewing hate towards gays, there were stand-up comedians like Eddie Murphy and Sam Kinison, whose work I still love, but their bits on gays were ugly and implanted ideas in my young mind that being gay was disgusting.

I had an uncle who was gay, and I’d spent time as a kid with him and his partner. But I was quite young and didn’t understand it, didn’t know they were gay or what gay people were until later. (That uncle basically abandoned me and my mom after my father died, so, on some level, I may have resented gays because of my resentment towards him.)

But yeah, until the late 1990s I’d thought of gays as gross, had friends in school espousing such axioms as, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

The first thing to make me feel differently, though, about gays, was reading Anton Lavey’s “The Satanic Bible,” out of curiosity, in college.

That book, to me, was an oracle. It was a revelation. Lavey’s philosophy was a rejection of traditional Christian morals. It was a rejection of so many of ideas I’d grown up with. I was floored by the manner in which he drained oceans of ignorance and meticulously dissected and destroyed planets of dogma with his trenchant, brilliant prose. It was simply incredible; beyond anything I could have imagined. Reading that book changed how I thought. It changed who I was. (Now that is the sort of book that should be assigned reading in schools!)