Magic City Mania

By Carlos Miller
She would have been sexy had her body not been ravaged by years of crack, heroin and multiple sex partners.

Jagged ribs jutted through a tattered t-shirt. Needle tracks dotted her bruised, bony arms.

And smeared lipstick created a permanent smile on a face that had been bruised one too many times.

She loomed over my table at Kingdom on Biscayne Boulevard, her body illuminated by the full moon rising over the eastern horizon.

“What are you writing?” she asked.

“A poem. At least trying to,” I responded.

“About what?”

“About this. About life. About Biscayne Boulevard. I don’t even know yet.”

I was on my third Heineken and had been hoping the alcohol would loosen the words that had been trapped in my subconscious mind. Words that would be flowing out of me like an unhinged beer tap had I been standing in the shower, driving down the street or laying in bed trying to get to sleep. Anywhere except in front of a damned computer screen or staring at a blank notebook page.

“Will you read it to me?”

Usually my answer would have been no. I don’t like sharing my unfinished work. And I get annoyed when people look over my shoulder as I write. It’s no different than when people walk into my kitchen and peer into my pan as I cook. Just sit the fuck down and enjoy the final product. You won’t be disappointed.

But on this night, all I had were two lines. Two good lines. Two solid lines. But two lines that were going nowhere.

I looked down at the Moleskine notebook I always carry in my back pocket and cleared my throat. Then I read those lines aloud.

“Under a full moon on Biscayne Boulevard”
“Drinking a beer at an outside bar.”

I recited these lines in my spoken word voice; an urban drawl emphasizing the words “moon” and “beer” and “bar” and the last syllable of “boulevard”.

“Wow, that’s pretty good,” she said, repeating the word “boulevard” with the same drawl. “I like it.”

“I don’t know where I’m going with this,” I admitted.

“You should write about me,” she said, momentarily primping herself.

I was bored. I was lonely. I was curious. So I invited her to sit and offered her a beer. And I asked her to tell me her story.

She looked at me for a second to see if I was kidding. Then she sat down and offered a gap-toothed smile. And for the first time, I realized how young she was.

I had a flashback of an interview I conducted with a street prostitute a couple of years earlier in Phoenix when I worked for The Arizona Republic. That seemed like such a lifetime ago.

**********

It was the spring of 2003 and somebody had been killing prostitutes in Phoenix. After several had turned up dead, it became a hot story. I had been dispatched to Van Buren Street, one of Phoenix’s most crime-ridden streets, to interview prostitutes about their reaction to the ongoing murders.

I drove down Van Buren until a prostitute waved me down. I parked on the corner and as she sauntered towards my car, I stepped outside, prompting a quizzical look from the woman and a raised eyebrow from the pimp across the street. They probably thought I was a cop.

I told her I was a reporter and working on the story about the prostitute killer.

“Oh, you mean the crackhead killer.”

The killer had a moniker. The moniker became my lede. The story made front page headlines the following day.

But at the time, we had no idea the crackhead killer was also a necrophiliac. That was a detail police were keeping to themselves.

**********

She told me she arrived in Miami from Maryland two years earlier and had been working the boulevard ever since.

She told me about an abused childhood. About her nasty drug habit. About her controlling pimp. And about the scary men she “dated”.

“You seem really nice,” she kept saying as I jotted her story down in my notebook.

She told me about her dreams to be a model. A mother. A model citizen who would keep her kids off the streets and out of trouble.

But first she needed to get off the streets herself. And she needed to quit the drugs. And maybe even get back to school.

“I like to write,” she said. “I used to write a lot of poetry in high school.”

When I told her I was a photographer, she perked up and asked for my business card. She said maybe I could help her get famous. She even struck a pose.

I lied and told her I did not have a card on me.

**********

“Here is my business card. Call me if you hear anything,” I said to the prostitute I just interviewed on Van Buren Street.

I drove back to the office with a notebook filled with lurid details about a woman’s struggle on the streets. About how the twisted arm of fate can send one’s life spiraling down an empty abyss. About how innocence is never lost, only robbed.

But my editors were not interested in any of that. All they cared about was the quote about the “crackhead killer”, which they injected at the top of a story written by another reporter on the serial killer.

“Nobody cares about the personal life of a prostitute,” an editor told me.

**********

I continued asking her questions about her life, her goals, her dreams, about the men she “dated” on the boulevard.

She said she feared the streets but the drugs helped her get through it. The crack enabled her to walk the streets at night. The smack enabled her to sleep all day.

She said she carried a knife and was not afraid to use it. She said she had sold her body to lonely men, violent men and crazy men. And even a few evil men.

Her cell phone rang and she answered, her face getting serious and scared, the barking words of her pimp emitting loud and clear through the ear piece, ordering her back on the boulevard.

She hung up and forced a smile. And asked the question she had been dying to ask.

“Do you wanna date?”

“No thanks.”

“I didn’t think so.”

She finished her beer and stood up, primping her hair again, flashing that gap-tooth smile again.

“I’m in room 217 at the Vagabond if you ever want to see me.”

She strutted down the Boulevard, disappearing into a car with pitch black tints. I finished my beer and thought of the five women who had been killed in Phoenix during that spring of 2003.

I ordered another Heineken and opened a fresh page in my notebook and started writing my poem, the words flowing out of me as fluidly as the beer going down my throat.

**********

Under a full moon on Biscayne Boulevard
Drinking a beer at an outside bar

The girl on the corner is selling her body
She walks up to me, do you want to party?

I ask her how much, she says fifty bucks
I shake my head, that’s too much

She said make me an offer, you got a nice smile
It’s been a while since I had a fine guy

I say girl stop lying, stop talking that jive
I know you say that to all the guys

Then she busts out laughing and covers her mouth
She gets a look in her eyes like a scared little mouse

Under a full moon on Biscayne Boulevard

She said she was twenty, she looked thirty-nine
When she told me her story, I understood why

She was a biracial baby from Baltimore
A teenage runaway turned crack whore

Her father had raped her
Her mother had blamed her
The brother who raised her
Killed himself with a razor

So she packed up her bags and hit the streets
Looking for solace from this misery

And she was lured down south by a fast-talking man
A crotch-grabbing con who would make her a star

With tales of modeling and posing in Vogue
He told her this is where you get your start

Under a full moon on Biscayne Boulevard

But she kept her head high, believing the lie
Thinking of the day she would make Ocean Drive

And she developed a habit and it made her rabid
Rapidly killing that spirit inside

Now the girl wasn’t stupid, maybe naive
As she recited to me her philosophy

This is the boulevard of the broken dreams
Where James Dean been replaced by methamphetamine
Where every fiend is a friend
And every trick may leave you dead
But this is the price I pay to get ahead

She disappeared from the streets one day
Her body was found the following day
Gagged and tied with four sliced veins
In a urine-soaked alleyway

The man who killed her was an impostor cop
A necrophiliac who had served in Iraq
He returned to the scene of the crime that day
Wearing her panties with her DNA

But what gave him away was the blood on his boots
The ones that matched the bruise on her face
He was one of these guys that would get a rise
About seeing fear in a woman’s eyes

He blamed the war, he blamed the press
He said he did it because he was depressed
But his history showed he was always a whack
A psychopath who had slipped through the cracks

But he was able to get away with his crime so long
Because he kept his lust to the underclass
Preying on women who had lost all hope
Walking like zombies on a dead end road

Under a full moon on Biscayne Boulevard

The girl was buried in a pauper’s grave
The story was buried in a forgotten page
And the man who killed her pleaded insane
To the seventeen girls he killed the same

So next time you’re driving down the boulevard
With your windows rolled up and your AC on
With your stereo blasting and your blinders on
Just remember, she’s not the only one

Under a full moon on Biscayne Boulevard

© 2005 Carlos Miller

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