Miami Lice
October 24, 2008 @ 4:00 AM
The skate scene in Miami is close knit and strong, centred around Ed and Frankie’s skate shop MIA on 9th st on Miami Beach and the MIA indoor skatepark on an industrial estate behind the airport somewhere. We got lost looking for it. We got lost a lot that week. The two MIAs are the incarnation of the good life these people have: start work at noon, gradually ease the day into an impromptu session of skating or kerbside brews and only lock up once everyone’s ready to go. For the shop, this might mean anywhere between 8-10pm, for the park anytime after 10.
Our first taste of skateboarding and an intro to a weekday in Miami was the white block spot in Overtown. Apart from the blocks, there’s nothing much white about Overtown. Stone’s throw away from the sky scraping downtown area, the bums were kicking on the kerb, hitting hard pipes and t-bird in the shade. In the corner shop a glassy eyed local looked at us and said “Damn, you must be the only white boys in Overtown.” We probably were at the Ghetto banks as well two days later. This banked ledge spot is deep in the slum, wedged in between vacant lots, front porch bbqs and a corner store called The Brotherhood. It has a weird vibe, sort of a hopeless stagnation to it, like if you’re born there, you’ll die there, even if the downtown office blocks and multimillion dollar bank accounts are just a couple of kilometres away. It didn’t feel threatening, just sad. As Colin put it, he felt 10 times safer there than on an Edinburgh council estate. Still, I was happy he hadn’t booked us into the flat that was for rent right opposite the banks instead of the mansion we had on Miami Beach. Later that evening we got busted few blocks away at the Martin Luther King monument by the cops. “What are you doing here? Look at yourselves. And now look around you.” You’re not meant to be here, was the thinly veiled message, you stick out like a sore thumb.
As this was America and there was the common misconception about everything being dirt cheap in America, a few iPhones had to be bought sooner or later. It happened about 3 days into the trip. The rest of the mornings were spent Googling cracks. Colin managed to jailbreak his pretty quickly to make it basically an iPod touch, as he still couldn’t get the phone function to work. That would eventually take a turbo SIM from Taiwan. For the Miami trip though, we now had a wireless Google map riding shotgun in the spot search. It was a big help, but even as the technology advances in leaps, it still doesn’t replace local knowledge. Driving around looking for stuff for the couple of days when none of the locals were around was frustrating. In some weird way there’s comfort in that though. What would become of skate trips if you didn’t need to meet up with any of the local skaters to ask about spots, good days to skate them, security, cheap breakfast, good coffee and so on? What if you could literally just Google it all and the iPhone would take you there? Luckily we’re not there yet and we still need the human contact to get by. When we got sick of Big Pink, we asked Selego where he gets breakfast. The Sandwicherie couple of streets down from his shop became our breakfast spot for most mornings after that.
