A Music Seminar in Miami, Where the Drugs Don’t Work and the Boobs Don’t Move

South Beach is exactly the
pastel dream-state it’s made out to be; a towering city of cubist wedding-cakes
stacked by the ocean, blushed with neon turquoise and pink, klieg lights on
the gaudy spires of the hotels tracing the clouds like quartets of synchronized
swimmers. Every once in a while the wall of art-deco structures erodes into
a construction area, brooded over by towering cranes, where the stucco has been
stripped off a hotel in the process of renovation, revealing flimsy gray walls
that stick out like rotted spots in a gleaming jaw. The crowd pushes between
rows of cafe tables that almost run the entire course of Ocean Blvd. They’re
about a third young and gorgeous, a third aging and augmented–by surgeon
or gym membership–to resemble youth and gorgeousness, and the remainder
ungorgeous, unyoung and ill-advisedly unclothed. In fact, Miami hosts a sizable
population of real monsters: impossibly asymmetrical faces, noses smooshed in
one direction, enormous chins, mouths missing teeth but attached to supersculpted,
bulging bodies or big plastic brandy-snifter tits.

The Winter Music Conference,
a gathering of everybody who makes or sells dance music, is held here yearly.
It’s quite a funny contrast with the old New Music Seminar. For one thing,
being dour and defensively intellectual was stylish then; the people here are
a little dumber and much, much happier, the way it goes for let-it-all-hang-out
disco versus self-conscious smart-guy rock. For another, actual conference attendance
is a joke. Sure, the Radisson Deauville, where the seminars are held and the
exhibition hall is, is sold out, but nobody who actually has anything of a professional
career is up there. They’re all around the pool at the Delano, where the
staff seems to have been personally trained by Ian Schrager to treat paying
guests like dirty freeloaders, and anybody wearing the official WMC laminate
should be wearing a Hi! I’m Not a Baller t-shirt. It seems like
everybody I know is here for the same two reasons: because the record company
paid for it, and because they’re in their early 30s and they don’t
do a whole lot of ecstasy anymore, and this rather stilted bacchanal is the
perfect excuse for one’s yearly roll.

That’s my story. Except
I can’t find anything for the first two nights.

The first night I wander
down to the beach, where an all-day techno-fest is going down–I’m
drawn there by the distant house beat, oomph oomph oomph oomph, which
I can hear from my balcony over the sounds of the waves. The party is near-concluding,
and I find myself walking against a tide of burnt-looking teenage ravers, their
glowsticks limp in their hands. I watch a convulsing raver lass being carried
over the barricades and shoved into the back of an SUV, which edges slowly through
the disoriented mass of folks. I move out of its way and the polo-shirted EMT
at the wheel goes, "Thanks, dude." The next night, I go to the Uberzone
show at Level, and then the Tony Humphries gig at Bar Room, and then back to
Level for the Norman Cook set, all the while bumping into people I know from
New York and L.A. They heard that my band broke up last week, and they’re
all treating me like my great-uncle died. Which is lovely, but if I met you,
honorable reader, on the street and your band broke up, or your great-uncle
died, I’d definitely give you a bunch of pills as a gesture of compassion.
Up and down Washington and Lincoln, where the big clubs are, the air is an Ivesian
mess of 300 separate strains of oomph oomph oomph oomph, excepting where
the high-hat has been introduced, and the beat goes oomph tsik! oomph tsik!
oomph tsik! oomph tsik!

So I go back to the hotel
and sit on the balcony, and listen to the wafting waves of oomph oomph oomph
oomph emanate from a dozen sources in the darkness. I figure out how to
program the channel-titles on the hotel tv. There’s a four-letter maximum,
so I change them all from ESPN and VH1 and so forth to SEEP, CLAD, TREE, PENS,
SHOE, FEAR, THEE, THAT, PEER, FEEL, BARE, every single channel. I have good
luck with this kind of prank. Once I turned the abstract prints on the walls
of an L.A. hotel upside down, and six months later I got the same room and they
hadn’t been corrected.

The third night I get lucky.
A friend of Carlos hooks me up with a blue pill stamped with the face of Papa
Smurf and assurances of superfine quality. I head out with a gaggle of like-minded
people to the Cream vs. Spundae party at Shadow Lounge. BT is playing, and everyone
else has decided to wait until he’s done to take their pills. Not me. I
wander out to the middle of the floor and gulp it down and wait.

Nothing happens. The crowd
I’m hanging out with is getting a lot friendlier. Hell, the crowd in general
is getting a lot friendlier. Everybody’s loved up but me. I’m dancing
a little unusually fast, but not insanely so. Carlos’ friend who gave me
the pill, on the other hand, is putting his arms around me every five minutes
and asking me if I’m okay. Yeah, I’m okay, fucker. "Isn’t
this the best?" he asks, his voice cracking with joy. Yeah, sure, the best.
Grrrrr.

Finally I figure it out.
"You’re not on antidepressants, are you?" Carlos asks. Yes, as
a matter of fact, I’m on a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. "Oh,
man," says Carlos. "An SSRI will counteract the MDMA." I feel
like a cartoon character cast into the pits of hell: Nooooooooooo! Everybody
else around me is giving or getting a backrub.

"So what do you do?"
asks Carlos’ friend, eyes fluttering in his head.

I’m a singer. Sort
of a singer and rapper.

"Oh man, that’s
so rad. What kind of stuff do you sing about?"

Uh, sort of everything and
nothing at the same time.

"Oh wow!" shrieks
Carlos’ friend. "That’s amazing! That’s my favorite
thing to sing about!"

Oh, uh, great.

"Dude!" he rhapsodizes.
"Dude, I’m doing this record, and I’m getting a whole bunch of
people to guest on it, you would be so perfect, I mean, I’ve never
heard what you do but I can tell! I can totally tell! It is so
great to meet you, you’re awesome! Carlos! I love this guy!"
He pauses. He sniffles. His eyes get teary. "I promised myself I wasn’t
going to cry," he says, his voice all trembly.

After the gig we lope down
Washington Ave., past all the clubs jammed at the doors with blaggarts clamoring
for the guest lists, the oomph oomph oomph oomph and the oomph tsik!
oomph tsik! oomph tsik! oomph tsik! oozing out the portals, all over the
street. After an hour of effort, we find a cab and end up at an afterparty at
a house on the Miami side of the bay. People are jumping off the dock into the
water; a couple in matching Adidas shorts are discreetly finger-fucking in the
hot tub, as the blue night lightens and begins to get pink-streaked. Somebody
finally locates a couple of pills and we crack them into halves. This bald-headed
English guy named Graeme who’s been bugging us as to whether or not we’ve
got any coke ends up in the circle of fuckups trying to divide the pills among
themselves. "Wait a minute," my friend Brian says. "Didn’t
I just give you half? I think we’re missing one?"

"Maybe you dropped
it on the floor," says Graeme, trying not to look like he just swallowed
it.

After the sun comes up we’re
back at the Delano. I’m feeling something, even though I’m
not exactly getting off, and I keep standing up and doing the running man at
hyperspeed, singing "Maniac" from Flashdance. After I sit down,
I feel a measly trickle of the chemical running through my limbs. The rooms
at the Delano are pure white, and the sun is golden, slipping through the blinds.
Brian avails upon me to get the fuck out of his room, offering a selection of
natural, herbal sleeping pills as an incentive.

"Where did you get
all this stuff?" I ask him.

"They don’t call
me the homeopathic Elvis for nothing, homey," he replies.