The Horror of the Absurd

It is Halloween in Miami every day of the year, where the monsters find their homes in the luxury condos that line Brickell Avenue, Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami and along South Beach. The poor, the lonely, homeless and hungry are swept under the rug under the overpasses of I-95, the Dolphin Expressway and the 112-airport express. They dress up in costumes pretending that they are someone that they are not while at the same time they look down on the prolls and plebs below them and tell them to “eat cake.” Welcome to the Fritz Lange dystopian “Metropolis” nightmare of Miami that is coupled with George Orwell’s 1984 and a Nazi Stalag 17 straight out of a page of Dante’s Inferno. Someone throws a dollar at a poor person and the next thing you know, a crack pipe is lit, and a liquor store gets held up. Meantime, the prolls and the plebs are working for peanuts and everything costs beyond the reach of the neighborhood trash dumpster that is raided for the only meal that they are going to get.

On one of these dystopian streets is a marauding gang of trick or treaters dressed up for an evening of chaos and mayhem in a neighborhood that is about to get gentrified. A Cuban Dracula (Draculito), a Haitian Frankenstein’s monster otherwise known as the ‘Zonbi’ and a werewolf half breed of pit-bull terrier mixed with a rottweiler; a virtual ‘Kujo’ with rabies infested barracuda drool. A small child is riding his bike with his friends and an elder brother until he falls off and scrapes his knee but then brushes it off as if it were nothing. From out of a house comes a tall half naked black man with dreadlocks, a top hat and a white skull painted on his face. The trick or treaters draw back in horror as they see a mannequin dressed up for Halloween dangling from the gallows set up in his yard with a sign hung around its neck “Trick or Treat.” The kid’s runaway in horror as the tall black man brandishes a machete and chases after them.

In another part of town, white billowing smoke is coming out of a barbecue in a neighborhood relatively free of pets or so the MAGA monsters would have you believe, forgetting for an instance that just over 177 Avenue past the Miccosukee Casino & Resort there is the wide expanse of the Florida Everglades and everything that comes with it; alligators, Burmese pythons, panthers and what some claim is Florida’s version of Big Foot called the Skunk Ape but everyone knows that it is just Cornelius and Zera from the “Planet of the Apes” where they have come from the future and they are raising their son Ceaser so that in the future he can lead an ape rebellion and take over the world.

Meanwhile, the little boy on his bicycle, that scraped his knee is now complaining that the knee hurts. His older teenage brother tells him that they might have to cut it off. A Cuban guy playing dominoes with his buddies on a street corner tells him in Spanish that he can heal the scrape for him. He takes his cigar and blows smoke while spitting a mouthful of rum on it while at the same time his wife dressed up all in white and smoking a cigar herself, wrings the neck of an unsuspecting rooster and waives it over the scraped knee of the little boy on the bike. The spray of alcohol stings; the blood of the sacrificed rooster splatters all over the little boy and the little boy no longer can ride his bike because it’s painful to walk on the leg. His brother drags him along anyways while the little boy says, “I want to get to the Haunted House.”

On the other side of town is a haunted house; a Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights from Hell for those that don’t make enough money to travel to Orlando but to get there you have to drive on a road jam packed full of wannabe Van Diesels in lowrider Honda Civics with Hot wheels sized tires pretending to be BMWs with neon lights flashing in the undercarriage and a rear spoiler that does nothing but make the car look stupid. Bad Bunny is blasting from the speakers making the ground below quake beyond the Richter scale while the drivers ignore the blaring sirens of the Florida Highway Patrol barely catching up with all of the drag racers on the highway as they weave in and out of traffic at over two hundred miles per hour along with the phantom crotch rocket motor bike phantoms from the “Road Warrior.” One of the drag racers hits a Cadilac SUV with a family of super rich New York kids heading to Coral Gables for a fancy Halloween party protected by Coral Gables Cops who couldn’t give an “F” that the golf cart that came from another super rich house just blew a stop sign almost hitting the Uber driver that is just praying to get from point A to point B without getting shot, stabbed, robbed or killed. The SUV rolls over multiple times killing everyone inside. A Phantom bike rider flies off the highway into the alligator infested remnants of the Miami River, which also contains the survivors of an illegal piranha fish farm that someone kept hidden in their house along with their hydroponic pot greenhouse; and the wannabe Van Diesel in his “Fast and Furious” fantasy drives off oblivious of the destruction he has left behind. The real horror is that he makes fifteen bucks an hour in McDonalds an can barely afford the Beamer. “Is anything of this is making sense?” the author asks as they think up what to say next while the little boy is still smarting from the scrape on his knee that is now getting infected and gangrenous.

Miami is the city that has raised the horror of the absurd to an artform. The highways and the byways of Miami are the clogged cholesterol clogged arteries of a spoiled rotten baby hooked on Ecstasy, booze, clubbing and appearances with a meaningless existence as a culture and an addiction to death and indifference borderline on contempt. The signs over the judges’ bench at the Miami Dade County Courthouse reads, “we here seek only the truth,” but what they should really read is “we here seek only money,” because in a court of law there are no winners or losers. Money just changes hands so that a bridge that looks like the McDonalds corporate logo, which has no function whatsoever can get built in the life span of a ten-year-old child and a soccer stadium gets built next to a major airport in a place that has no business to be built. Murder, fraud, negligent homicide, theft, mayhem, rape and God knows what else is the norm in a city where law enforcement is absent except in cases of extreme emergency. There are no rules; only guidelines until someone gets hurt and the scream of a siren announces another statistic and yet the little boy on the bike continues to forge on. His goal is simple, to fill that bag of candy to the brim and yet the leg is dead, there is no circulation going through those legs.

Across town, a gringo tourist is looking for a place to eat in Miami Beach and they heard about the great Cuban food that Miami has to offer. They walk up and down Washington and Collins looking for a place to eat while dodging the barrage of restaurant hostesses in tiny miniskirts with their boobs bursting out of their bikini tops like bowling balls barely fitting in marble sacks. One of them shoves the tourist in the restaurant and before they know a menu gets shoved in their face and a mojito they never ordered plopped down on their table. They get greeted by a waiter who doesn’t speak any English and is not even Cuban. He is some fat oversized Russian mafia guy that just works there taking orders and selling cocaine. They order their food. A guy, pretending to be the chef in the back, puts a bag of microwavable rice in the microwave and opens a can of Ebro black beans that he heats on top of an electric stove that he piles on the plate with a fake Cuban sandwich with fake ham and fake pork. More mojitos are poured and by the end of the evening they get a bill for a $1,000 for a meal they could have gotten in the supermarket for less than $10. During dinner, a guy in a beard with red lipstick lips pretending to be a drag queen, belts out Celia Cruz tunes. The tourist forks over the money like nothing and then later that night has a nightmare about being locked up in a Caja China with the charcoal lit at full blast and he is the pig splayed out that gets presented to the cheering throngs of more tourists who have absolutely no idea what a Caja China is because to them gourmet means the cheap can of Viennese sausages they got on Miami Beach for twenty bucks that they could have gotten across the MacArthur Causeway for less than a dollar. Someone came up with the idea a long time ago that they could ferment Welches frozen concentrate grape juice and pass it off as fine French wine and somehow Oreo cookies became crack cocaine with their rich deliciousness of cream filled chocolate cookies. The big spirit in the sky is laughing all the way to the bank because Indian Joe gave the white man cocaine as the monkey on his back and cancer inducing toxic tobacco while the white man brought his fire water and fed it to the alligators. In the conquest of America, no one is innocent and everyone is guilty.

It’s Halloween in Miami in 2025. The government has shut down and there is no money for health insurance. The little boy earlier in the day, who had gone out trick or treating with his older brother has developed a fever and is unable to go to the hospital to get treatment because he can’t afford it. His dad goes out to the local liquor store to get a bottle of rum. His mom heats a saw and an iron frying pain to the point of being white hot. The father makes his son drink a whole bottle of rum until the world around him is spinning. The father takes the saw and starts cutting the leg off above the infection. The little kid clutched his bag of candy while he screamed in agonizing pain. As soon as the leg falls off, the white-hot iron frying pan gets slapped onto the wound to stop the bleeding and disinfect the wound. The older brother in the background is laughing because he finds all this funny but there is nothing funny about it. Flipper left the party a long time ago and now all that is left is the empty shell of an aquarium and the hungry eyes of greedy real estate investors with dollar signs for eyes. They smell the blood of the little boy’s fresh wounds like sharks circling the waters surrounding Miami. They come in and offer the father money for the house and before you know it the building is boarded up and ready to be torn down and a man from New York comes in and puts down money for a condo he will see rise from the ashes of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods for an incredibly obscene amount of money.

In the Florida Everglades there is a couple looking out towards the east and there is toxic radioactive yellow and orange glow of city lights over the horizon. They look at their pet alligator and wonder what lies beyond the river of asphalt as they get eaten alive by mosquitoes. A guy picks up a gangrenous leg he found at the city dump off the turnpike and 57th Avenue on the border of Miami Dade and Broward. As the alligator chomps on the leg, the little boy in his feverish state of delusion can feel the teeth sink into the leg he used to have before his father threw it away into the oblivion of non-existence. Every day it is Halloween here in Miami. Nothing escapes the monstrous appetite of a black hole of a mouth needy toddler ready to devour everyone that gets stuck in the delusion that they are somebody when in reality they are nobody. What will a trophy for a sport played on ice get you in a place where there is no ice?

The irony is that one day the sea will swallow us all up in one fell swoop and the multi-million dollar mansions that lie in the lowest levels of Coconut Grove will be the Atlantis that will be spoken off thousands of years from now if our species manages to survive all of the madness of our present times because a few miles to the south is a nuclear power plant aptly called Turkey Point which lies within the cross hairs of the shooting sights of Fidel Castro’s descendants when the Revolution will ultimately fail and burn. (Wait, it already has because it never worked to begin with.) Peace? What’s that? That is a joke in a city that has made anti-communism a business model for selling left overs to a population that says it hates communism but still supports Castro by sending food and money to dying and starving relatives who rise from the sea like the Creature from the Black Lagoon which is actually a spring in the Panhandle of Florida where there are no Cubans; just rednecks pretending that Florida was actually part of the Confederacy. If the end of laughter is silence because you don’t believe a word I say, just think that all of this is hyperbole in the face of feeling that the absurd is completely real and there is nothing that makes sense in this city anymore.

Somewhere, imagine you have reached your breaking point. There is nowhere else to go, nowhere else to hide. You pray but everything seems to be hopeless because the god you are praying to does not talk back. No number of voodoo candles that you light is going to fix the situation now. You are sitting in your office, and you are watching your stock brokerage account get decimated into nothing. The buildings that you built with shady construction materials and questionable labor you hired that fell off the back of a truck, are the sandcastles you used to make as a kid when the waves kept coming and reducing those castles into nothing. On top of your desk is a bottle of valium you got from your friend, the pretend doctor with the fake Harvard School of Medicine diploma he got from a mail order catalogue that happened to get delivered to him from a scam farm in Southeast Asia. Next to the bottle of valium is a bottle of vodka and a manila envelope with the divorce decree giving everything you have to your wife. She is off at Club Space and Club Eleven with her “Sex and the City” girlfriends celebrating another divorce victory over $40 martinis and snorting coke through hundred-dollar bills and smoking joints rolled in a hundred-dollar bills. You take a valium and chug the vodka. The room turns dark except there is a little kid on a scooter with a stump for a leg. You kicked his dad out of his house to build the luxury condo that now belongs to your ex-wife located in the heart of Wynwood that used to be part of Liberty City and Overtown. As the kid is laughing his ass off at you, the tall black half naked man with the painted skull on his face, the dread locks and the stove pipe top hat shows up in a black hearse and pulls out a Caja China from the back. He strips you naked, sprays you wide open from top to bottom and sandwiches you in between two grills that he wires shut with wire hangers. He puts you in the box, piles a big bag of Kingsford charcoal on top and lights a match. This is the Hell you created out of your greed, your need for fancy clothes, a fancy car and a fancy house; your insatiable appetite for cocaine and the fast and furious lifestyle that goes with it. This is Halloween in Miami, every day.

The gates of Woodlawn Park Cemetery on Southwest Eighth Street between 32 and 36th Avenue have opened their spectral gates to welcome you in. The spirits of Miami’s past file out of their tombs and gawk at the absurdity of a Miami that they no longer recognize. They wander the streets looking for the offerings they think that have been left for them; a cafecito or a piece of chicharrón but nothing has been left for them. The spirits of old Miami have been forgotten. They fade back into their tombs and mortuaries and over the city hang the bitter silent tears of a forgotten history. Henry Flagler’s train has finally vanished into thin air and there is nothing left but the long road out of the train wreck of a city that is left in the dust bowl of history. It’s Halloween every day of the year here in Miami you need only see as far as a little kid with a stump for a leg and a real estate developer dead from a Marylyn Monroe cocktail.