Miami Lice
October 24, 2008 @ 4:00 AM
Text and photos: Deeli
MIAMI LICE
Nike squad in search of sunshine, silicon and Scarface in the city of, well, Scarface.
There’s a French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who thinks America doesn’t exist. Or maybe it does, but at least you can’t go there. In fact the man is dead now, but his ideas live on. In any case Colin Kennedy, Tom Harrison, Snowy, Jerome Campbell, Neil Smith and Danijel Todorovic of the Nike SB team boarded a flight from London to Miami late November last year and if it didn’t take the team to America then I don’t know where the hell we were. The inconvenient truth of the matter—for Baudrillard and his ideas—is that America not only exists, it is a very convenient place. For some of us, this was the first visit to the new world and for some it had been years and years since the last visit, so everyone was pretty hyped to get out there and have a nosy. Did they really have free refills? Would a pair of Dickies really only cost £5? Would they really have no concept of geography? Were the streets really paved with bits of the Berlin Wall after they won the Cold War? Wait, that was in Budapest, the Turkish capital. I think.
Our chase after the American Dream started the first night at a diner called Big Pink, recommended by Josh Stewart and according to the Miami locals “such a Josh place to go.” It’s a burgers and fries type of thing with fruit salads and smoothies added to the menu to give it local flavour. They do buckets of chips. Actual buckets. When Danijel asked what the portion sizes were to know whether he should order starters, the waitress proudly exclaimed that most people can only eat half of what they order. Danijel had just come back from LA, so he was a bit more in tune with the American way then the rest of us. He had a real, actual chip on his shoulder-bucket about all the choices you have to make as soon as you sit down to eat. “You order something and they have five different options for it. When you pick one, there are another three options again.” The waitress never stopped smiling. Danijel never stopped choosing. The waitress kept asking if everything was OK, and whenever we said thanks, she replied with a cheerful “You’re welcome!” That’s exactly how we felt.
The house that Colin had rented for us on the internet was big. It was comfortable. It had air conditioning apparatus that filled a closet about the size of my bedroom at home. Magee’s bed had lice. They bit his forearms to death. The house was around the corner from John Newport, a ten-minute walk from the beach. The lady who owned the house had left a mix CD in the boombox and that became the soundtrack of our lives for the week, until some schmuck threw it out of the car. And even that didn’t help, because the most annoying ringtone tracks on the CD were constantly playing on the radio wherever we went. John, along with Ed Selego, became our key to the art deco kingdom of Miami for the 9 days of our stay.
