Looking out for THEM

I have been to Miami Beach. I have seen the malls, I have seen the beach, I have seen the pool and I have seen the Bal Harbour Regency Spa. I never saw the mineral baths, though I saw a lot of wet raisins exiting from a steamy room next to the pool. All day I sat by the pool and slept, intermittently woken up by my grandmother who told me to put on suntan lotion or to turn on my stomach or to say something to prove that I was visiting her and not just there to get a tan...

She would ask, "Are you having a wonderful time?" and before I could answer, she would say, "You are having a wonderful time, there's not a blemish on your face."

And then I would say, "Yes, Nanny, visiting you is really clearing up my complexion."

There were leagues and leagues of old people. They were everywhere. Three days into my two-week visit with Nanny, I realized they were the enemy. THEY grilled me about my grade-point average and social life. This is a question they asked me 100 times a day: "Is he Jewish?"

One day when the sun was setting I decided to get away from them and walk down the beach, alongside the endless row of carbon copies of the Bal Harbour Regency Spa. As I looked down the shimmering beach, I saw what appeared to be young people engaged in calisthenics They were bending over and standing up and bending over and standing up and as I got closer I realized that it was more of THEM. They were gathering shells. Fascinated, I just had to watch them for a while.

After they held them for a few minutes, they'd absently drop the shells as they walked back toward their hotels to take advantage of the free afternoon orange juice and salt-free cookies.

Just when I began to believe that they were everywhere, my young married cousin invited me over for tea with her husband the doctor. As soon as I walked in the door she muttered something about my complexion. When I asked for a Coke, she brought me a glass of milk. She offered to drive me to the beach so I could gather shells. During the car ride back to the spa, my cousin asked me about my grade-point average and if he is Jewish.

She was one of THEM.

The worst part of the day was after dinner when the Spa provided a nightclub act which THEY were convinced was chosen specifically to irritate the hell out of them. Something was wrong with every show and they would start talking loudly while the act was on stage, only to be countered by noisy, wet "sssh"ing. Before long the comedian ("He's talking down to us." "Ssshhh") or the duo ("Her voice is too loud" "Sssshh") couldn't be heard at all. And that's when they started walking out. ("You can't hear these people at all.") By the end of the show, only four or five good souls remained in an audience. The rest were watching TV in the lobby or playing cards. And the next night they'd all be there in the night-club hall again, at least a half an hour early so they could get good seats--close to the door just in case they had to walk out of the show.

But they loved Bobby Barbash, the hotel emcee, who before the show each night sang, "After the Loving" and "I Did it My Way." He belted out those songs, imitating Dean Martin, every single night to rousing applause and a few wet eyes. Bobby could do not wrong--spill steaming coffee down Bertha's back, or worse, call the same bingo number twice in a row--the man in the wallpaper tuxedo was the perfect son who never left mother and sang to her every single night of her life.

"Now you hear about men going to Harvard right?" he asked the crowd in his booming voice on Bingo Night. "But you don't often hear of a young lady going there, right? But we happen to have one with us in the audience tonight." Gasps. "Yes, yes we do." Applause. "Why don't you come on up here on the stage, little lady." He handed me the microphone and said, "Why don't you tell the audience what those Harvard men are really like?"

Many old people told me afterwards they had sons for me. One woman rushed up to me after having finished being forced into calling bingo numbers for two hours and said, "My son (he's at Medical School) will love you. You could date him (he's in Boston). He just broke up with this girl (she wasn't Jewish)." She forced a piece of paper into my hand. Needless to say, I was very flattered. Months later, doing my laundry, I found a piece of paper with a phone number and mystifying Hebrew characters.

When the sun goes down what is this part of Florida good for? The pool closes, the mall closes, the dining hall shuts down, and the old people go to sleep or else they just shut their eyes and visions of salt-free crackers and shells dance in their heads.

Florida--Bronx in the sun, the wasteland of America's senior set, where the former best and brightest go to live out their golden years sans the benefit of existential torment.

Florida--haven for "old fogies," as they call each other behind closed elevator doors. You can just hear them over the muzak. "He's just an old fogie. His hands shake. He has liver spots. He is almost dead." Oh sunny sandy southern peninsula, home of The Fountainbleu, The Princess, The Bal Harbour Regency Spa.

Florida--where are you hiding your young people? Are they all visiting their grandparents for the break? Are they calling out the bingo numbers at night while their grandparents sit blushing in the audience? Or are they experiencing other forms of humiliation for the price of a tan?