a mini-New York of the South. In the distance, I see a condo development rising, another addition to the growing forest of sexy glass towers against the bay. Sometimes, it seems like there are more cranes than bodies in Miami. The city is a carnival of construction crews.
At the stoplight, a lunky Miami-Dade transit bus screeches to a stop, and I spot my old college friend Ted Williams. Well, it’s not really Ted but his photo splashed on the side of the bus. It’s a Channel 7 ad with Ted showing off his ultra-white grille, holding two thumbs up pointing to the station’s catchphrase, “Just One Station.” Some background notes on Ted. He’s one of my Miami buddies and a famous face in South Florida. Aside from this bus ad and the billboards off Interstate 95, Ted really does have a big head. He’s the region’s star news reporter, with the morning perkiness of Kelly Ripa and the edgy professionalism of Anderson Cooper. If you’ve ever visited Miami, you may have seen Ted. He’s the guy in the yellow raincoat holding on to the swaying coconut tree for dear life as he covers the latest hurricane. He also cohosts Deco Time, our snarky local version of Entertainment Tonight. Sometimes, he has me on the show to talk about the movies opening that weekend.
And thanks to his hosting duties on Deco Time, Ted gets to highlight the new nightlife offerings, gets me and our mutual friend Brian into the clubs for free. Not that Brian needs the freebies, but I’ll soon explain.
As the bus limps lazily along Alton Road like an old man with a cane and crosses Seventeenth Street, I wave goodbye to Ted’s big head. I finally cross the street and unlock the doors of my sea-blue Nissan 300 SX. Mother Nature must be in a bad mood because she has turned up the temperature a few boiling notches. It feels like ninety-something even though the beach breeze blows against my skin. My long-sleeved Gap T-shirt is quickly becoming sticky with sweat.
While watching Miami Vice II was worthwhile, I still have to see the bad movies, another con of my job. At least you, the moviegoer, can get up and walk out of a theater if you don’t like a movie. I can’t. I have to sit through two, sometimes three hours of a bad film, and that’s torture in itself for a lover of cinema who first caught film fever after seeing the first Godfather. But I digress. Oh, and another thing, it’s hard for me to go on a date to the movies because the theater is the last place I want to be after a week’s worth of screenings. Can you blame me?
That’s why I can’t help but look forward to meeting up with my two locas: Ted and Brian. We rendezvous every Friday night at Score on Lincoln Road to shoot the shit about our hectic lives. While we gab, we eyeball the younger hotties who are sprouting in South Beach like palm trees—and those new glassy condo towers. When you’re twenty-nine, you have more of an appreciation for sitting outside with your chicos, drinking a cocktail, and watching the man-flow of guys pour in and out of the bar.
While Ted and I have common journalism ties (we met at the University of Miami’s Communications School as undergrads ten years ago,) that’s where our similarities end. He’s half Irish, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. He has natural dark, tanned skin and matching brown eyes, like his Portuguese forefathers from Cape Cod, and thick short-cropped black hair. The only white thing about him is his Colgate smile, a job requirement for TV. He’s also extremely cheesy with his sound bites, which he does on and off the air in his TV news voice. But he has a heart of gold, and I can always count on him to listen as I vent about my latest frustration with the paper, my brother Racso, or my unsuccessful attempts to quit smoking. (I’ve tried three times to no avail. Damn the nicotine!)
Speaking of Racso, I look just like the dude (we’re identical twins after all!). People also say we look like two different versions of actor Paul Rudd (most famous for playing Alicia Silverstone’s geeky love interest in Clueless.) But our distinct styles make Racso and me stand apart like Miami-Dade and Broward counties, similar from a distance but definitely not the same up close. While Racso and I both have light-blue eyes that reflect the South Florida sky and thick black straight hair, I spike mine up with Aveda products and keep it short while Racso wears his down and parted in the middle, like a mop. Racso has a more sculpted body, thanks to his home gym, and I’m telephone-pole lean from biking to work and around South Beach. In case you’re wondering, Racso’s name is Oscar spelled backwards, after our father. I was named after our grandfather Raymond, but everyone calls me Ray. Racso also calls me Gay Ray, ever since I officially came out to him in college.
It wasn’t easy coming out to my straight brother who always enjoyed talking about how much he liked women. I thought I did a good job of cloaking my invisible life from him until one spring night. We were out drinking in the Grove, celebrating the end of our first year in college when he asked me point blank, “Bro, are you gay? It’s okay if you are.”
I spat out my Corona, spraying the bar counter and our fries.
“Qué cosa?” I stuttered. I dated some girls in high school, but I knew deep in my heart that I liked men. Actually, I lusted for men. I just wasn’t ready to tell Papi, Mami and most of all, Racso who always finds a reason to make fun of me. The last thing I wanted to hear was him ragging on me for being un pato.
“Ray, it’s cool. I kinda sensed it. You never really talk about girls, and you’re into your movies and your writing. And let’s face it, your new friend Ted at UM isn’t the most masculine dude. He’s kinda girly, and you guys are always hanging out and giggling like two schoolgirls on the phone.”
And so that night, I came out to Racso. He listened as I told him about my secret crushes at Gables High. Rick on the track team. Dan on the football team. Jake at the school newspaper. Racso was surprised to hear that I had liked so many guys he knew from school. I remember sitting there at the bar, my nervousness replacing the warm buzz from my Coronas as I spilled my guts. But it was a relief too. Hiding took so much energy and effort. I always made sure my eyes didn’t linger too long on a cute guy if I was out with my brother and our parents. It felt good to share all of this with Racso even though he began probing me as if I were a Reese’s-loving alien from E.T.
“So you’re a homo-sex-ual,” he said, elongating the word and teasing me. “Have you gotten it up the butt? Are you a gay virgin?” Racso teased. And from then on, I decided that my twin didn’t need to know everything about me. My sex life remained private. I could share those details with Ted. It’s not that I don’t love Racso, but he didn’t understand why I was attracted to guys while he was drawn to women. (And he was a future educator at the time. Go figure!) I grew tired of explaining it to him. A few months later, he helped me tell Mami and Papi, who didn’t seem so shocked. They said they suspected I was different and they loved me regardless. But Papi had to add, “If this is what you are, we accept you. But we will not have a son dressing up as a woman and performing at La Copacabana on Calle Ocho.” Mami, in her Cuban dramatic fashion, stormed over to me, hugged me, and said, “Mi hijo, mi hijo!” and then gave me a long lecture about safe sex, as if I hadn’t known. It was awkward for those first few months, but then they realized I was still Ray, or as Racso began calling me, Gay Ray, which Mami and Papi never liked him doing.
My bro and I are both fair-skinned, and we both have the same amount of freckles dotting our nose and shoulders. Our propensity for sunspots harkens back to our pre-Cuban roots, back to Madrid, Spain, where our grandparents were born with milky white skin. We always stood out against our olive-skinned, tanned Cuban cousins and friends growing up in Coral Gables.
Fifteen minutes, two large armpit sweat stains and another cigarette later, I pull into the main parking lot of the News’s main offices. That’s Miami for you. A two-block walk in this soupy heat sends your pores into overdrive even if you’re walking under the awnings of local boutiques. I’m about to enter the massive lobby, home to two rising and descending escalators, when I feel my cell phone buzzing in my pocket. I whip it out. It’s a text message from Brian. I bet it’s about tonight.
Hey, we’re meeting at eleven tonight, right? Daniel’s leaving on a business trip, and that means I can find myself a hot Latin papi.
Brian is ready for another Miami manhunt tonight, which only happens when Daniel is in New York on business, where his printing company is based. To Brian, hot dark-skinned Latin guys are human catnip. He can’t wait to roll around with a Latino when his other lover is away.