Thieves of the Dawn

Maz and I met working on the Video Music Awards for MTV-Latinoamérica.

Out one summer day looking for graphic design work — any paying work, really — on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, I bumped into my old college friend Sash.

She sat by herself at a sidewalk cafe, an empty espresso cup in one hand, Camel Light in the other, breathing her way through a panic attack. She told me later that the moment before we locked eyes, she was praying to God to send someone to help her: starting her first Executive Producer gig for MTV-LA, she was in over her head and drowning.

Then she blinked and there I was on the sidewalk: sweaty, squinting against the sun, searching for enough coin to reset the Rubik's Cube of my life, starting with the dead-bedroom apartment I still lived in with my ex-girlfriend.

My whole heart dedicated to my art hustle, I needed to break orbit before one of us started sleeping with other people. Our loins inflamed by everyone but each other, time was running out fast before things between us got messy.

++++

Sash's immediate problem was a podium. The actual VMA Trophy was already designed and fabricated, but Production needed a podium for the trophy to stand on while talent received it:

SASH: And I'm thinking, like, a Greek temple. You know those... columns?

ME: Classical Greek columns?

SASH [eyes widening]: Yes!

ME: Like at the Parthenon? Or the White House? But smaller...

SASH: YES! With that swirly curly at the top!

ME: Ionic columns. [thinking] I know exactly where to get something like that.

It wasn't a lie. There was a patio furniture warehouse — in true Floridian creativity, called Patio Furniture Warehouse — right next to my father's discount bookstore. I'd passed it a million times on the access road that ran parallel to I-95.

I drove off in a huff of car exhaust and returned two hours later with exactly the item she'd envisioned. After I spray-painted it metallic gold in the alley behind the office and got approved by Sash's bosses, I was booked on the spot for the next three months as her Production Coordinator.

My job: making sure the ballooning complexity of the VMAs never overwhelmed Sash. Soon I learned the show would be hosted by Diego Luna with live performances by Avril Lavigne, Shakira, Carlos Santana, Maná, Paulina Rubio, and System of a Down. Come the week of the show, MTV also added in-house award presentations by The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Johnny Knoxville, and 2/3 of the Backstreet Boys. I really only cared about Iggy Pop.

++++

Working on "the show" for months, I had a staff of "fetchers and schleppers" who I could send out for items I'd sourced, including José, a Colombian dude about my age and one of the producers' cousins. One day, José and I needed to transport a baroque fainting couch for someone's onstage performance. Neither of us drove a truck or van, but José had a buddy with a van, a wiry Libyan cat he called "Maz" who showed up every day on time, high-energy stoned, constantly belly-laughing, never serious but always hard-working.

The three of us clicked and instantly Maz (and the Maz Van) became part of our crew, all the way through to the "show date."

++++

A few weeks before the show, after a long day's work, the three of us went out for pitchers of beer and jalea (a platter of Peruvian-style fried seafood). Too drunk to drive home, our nostrils filled with sweet night-blooming jasmine, I announced I lived close enough to just walk home.

MAZ: Me too, Danny Boy! I can't catch another DUI either or I'm fucked, bro. Which way are you headed?

The street spun as I pointed in the direction of home: north-east-ish. Same as Maz. We walked together, following the canal along Dade Boulevard, sharing a spliff, making all the same turns.

By the time we reached my building, I had to admit:

ME [chuckling]: Maz, I think we're neighbors.

MAZ: Bro! I live around the corner from you. Come on, lemme show you!

Taking me by the hand — he's from Libya, where men hold hands all the time — he led me down to the next block, around the side of a beautiful home I'd walked past for nearly a year. In its backyard was a 1940s Art Deco bungalow hidden in the shade of a mango tree.

MAZ: Yeah bro, I've lived here for about a year, with my girl Fariba. We're kind of broken up right now, but nobody can afford to move out yet, so whatever. [laughs] We still hit it sometimes, too; I can't help myself!

It was too weird, the parallels. I wondered if this whole neighborhood was populated by broken-up couples stuck together by apartment leases.

MAZ: You wanna come in and meet her?

++++

He rapped on his front door and Fariba opened it: she was tiny and slim with long black hair, large eyes just as glazed as Maz’s. We sat on a Persian rug on the floor of their bungalow and drank tiny glasses of black tea. 

FARIBA: So finally I am meeting Dan. I’ve heard quite a lot about you: the illustrator, the MTV man. Thank you for hiring my… big barking dog. I had to quit the yoga studio, and this timing really saved us.

Maz wrapped his arm around her shoulder, a sheltering provider, but she silently slid out from under it. 

FARIBA [her eyes flashing]: I trust he takes your work more seriously than he does everything else?

Uh oh.

MAZ: Fari, don’t—

She held up a palm at him and he was quiet. She took a hand-rolled cigarette from her pocket, lit it, locked eyes with me.

FARIBA: You know he uses you as his excuse for staying out late at night? [off my surprise] No, I didn’t think you did. [blows smoke at me] Now you do.

At which point I finished my tea. She didn’t pour me more. It was time to return to the wreckage of my own mouldering break-up. 

Tucked into bed, facing the wall, she whined when I came in. Said she had to get up for work soon.

++++

After the VMAs aired, Maz and I were both out of work again. Both our ex-girlfriends had jobs, so we were around all day hustling, now with each other as a support system.

Teaming up professionally with Maz — my designs/illustrations plus his Flash and HTML skills — let us pitch on bigger ticket projects. Instead of dropping flyers and waiting for random clients to contact us by email, we'd crash events, post up at hotel bars and clubs, look "interesting," and make small talk.

Sometimes we'd crash expensive networking events — clearly shady slobs in shorts and flip-flops — eating their hors d'oeuvres, drinking free drinks, schmoozing with color flyers of our design services until someone asked us to leave.

That's how we wound up getting a meeting with Shawn and Delissa, CEOs of PLAYAZ-HAUS.COM: event security grabbed us by our elbows to escort us to the sidewalk while Shawn and Delissa called after us that they'd follow up via email.

++++

The follow-up came on one of those perfect Miami Beach nights: the air humid and perfumed with salt and jasmine and weed, the sea calm and flat as a carpet, the sun bidding us goodnight by lighting everything with slow-motion pink and orange fire.

Maz knocked on my door to fetch me. When I opened it, he stood straddling his BMX bicycle:

MAZ: Bro, it's so nice out. Let's ride bikes down there, meet these fucking douchebags, maybe we'll find some honeys to get into trouble with.

He cackled at the end of that. Maz always laughed hard at the end of every sentence. He was a never-ending gush of laughter always failing to contain itself.

ME: Where are we meeting them...?

MAZ: Nikki Beach, bro!

His fist was out, waiting for my dap. I went around back to fetch my bike, wiped it clean of crab spider webs first with a washcloth. I hadn't ridden the poor thing in months.

++++

Together we rolled down Sheridan Avenue, turned east onto Ocean Drive, and slow-pedalled down the boardwalk, passing the miles of beach-front pastel Art Deco buildings that make Miami famous/infamous in twenty-year cycles. Palm trees shook their fronds in the sea breeze, models rollerbladed past in shoestring bikinis, leathery old folks tanned themselves on folding lawn chairs, oiled muscle daddies leaned against streetposts, cruising.

I pushed my creaky pedals across sandy concrete, through a soup of sky and smoke and skin, this oontz oontz oontz following you might have been coming from a club down the block or from between your own ears.

Maz rolled up next to me, held up an unlit honey blunt, tapping it against his teeth like Groucho Marx:

MAZ: Tell me your dumb ass brought a lighter, otherwise we gotta share this with those CEO motherfuckers.

Of course I forgot to bring a lighter.

++++

We locked up our bikes a few blocks away, near the magenta diner Big Pink, and started walking down to Nikki Beach on the sand.

MAZ [speaking his texting aloud]: Bro... where... U... at... question mark... SENT!

He was still laughing when two pink-skinned Russian men in Speedos walked towards us, holding each other’s hands and cigarettes in their free ones. Maz leapt out at them, hyper-animated, startling them onto their back feet:

MAZ: Beautiful boys! [takes blunt from behind his ear] Can I get a light…?

Sucking their fire into our blunt, Maz offered it to them first. I thought immediately of HSV-1, felt relieved when they passed, having somewhere better to be.

A couple of lusty pulls from the blunt, some light coughing, and we entered the alternate dimension of Nikki Beach: an upscale beachfront club down at the southernmost tip of South Beach. With linen-tented cabanas on the sand and expensive wooden chaise lounges, it was the party spot for the rich, hot, and cheesy.

To me, Nikki Beach was the cultural void that roared around South Beach after everyone interesting moved away in 1998 and the Eurotrash moved in. All excess, no taste. Not my scene, but... clients. Wandering around the sand, Maz poked his head into tent after tent, interrupting partygoers and lovers, until I heard him bellow:

MAZ: YOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

TWO VOICES: MAAZZZZZ!!

The CEOs invited us in: the shade of the tent was cool, gathering the ocean breeze, littered with empty chaise lounges. Maz and I each took one. Tangled together in a massive papasan chair were Shawn and Delissa, grinning from ear to ear.

DELISSA: I'd hug you but... I'm really comfortable.

MAZ: No worries, bro. You remember my partner, the artist Daniel-san Goldman.

SHAWN: "Daniel-san"... like the—?

ME: Exactly like that.

The CEOs giggled like children, definitely on something fun. Shawn wrapped his arms around Delissa, his fingers circling her belly button, making her coo.

SHAWN: Yeah, so... our thing... PLAYAZ-HAUS.COM is gonna be huge!

DELISSA [arms wide for emphasis]: Huuuuuuuuuge!

SHAWN: We've done all the market research... and the...

Shawn got distracted by her flat tan tummy. Leaning down, he kissed it sloppily, sticking the tip of his tongue fully inside her belly button. She playfully slapped the top of his skull and he looked up, like a dog with a stolen slice of pizza, grinning:

SHAWN: Aww sorry, amigos... We ate some shrooms a while ago and... kinda forgot we were supposed to meet y'all until you texted. Maybe we can have a proper do-over tomorrow...?

My time disrespected, I gritted my teeth at this, but Maz waved it away, chill:

MAZ: All good, all good.

Wiping the saliva off her belly with her wrist, Delissa reached under the papasan cushion and held up a large Ziploc bag full of dried mushrooms like a prize kill, tossing it into Maz's lap:

DELISSA: In the meantime, party with us!

Beats from the DJ booth kicked up on cue, Maz and I shrugged, opened the bag of shrooms, and ate two caps each, washing them down with cold Presidentes from their plastic cooler.

Three minutes passed before Shawn and Delissa began making out again, this time heavier. He was rubbing her over her panties. I looked over at Maz, cocked my head towards the tent exit. We'd come all the way to meet these fools for nothing.

As we left, I waved at the dry-humping CEOs, but Maz yanked my wrist:

MAZ [into my ear]: Come on, bro, let's bounce.

++++

The night sky cooled our hustle, and we walked back up the beach towards where we'd locked up our bikes. I was so, so tired of always clawing for never enough money, month after month, when all I wanted was to be free to make art in peace, shine what I had inside of me into a boring world that needed me.

Maz started to giggle, then erupted into his usual full belly laugh. I looked up from my own whining self-pity: in his hands he held Shawn and Delissa's bag of mushrooms.

ME: Oh shit, you ganked the whole bag...?

He grinned wide, nodding quickly, looking like a crazed chicken. I remembered then that we'd already eaten a few, back in their tent. My eyes flicked from him to the low full moon, a pale eye, a soft yellow spotlight. Things were about to get wild.

++++

The rhythm of the ocean grew louder, roaring, wet. Maz and I sat on the shore in the darkness, our backs to the strip of neon-lit Deco hotels, thirsty palm trees, sidewalk activity. Our dilated pupils stared out at the dark, into the surf, searching.

My normal breathing wasn't enough; I felt constrained, like I was choking. I inhaled deeper, emptying the air from my body loud and hot through my mouth, like in yoga class. Drawing breath again, fresh oxygen in my blood fizzled through my body and brain, like ginger ale, sweet and alive. I opened my mouth to speak and burped.

Maz looked over at me, farted loudly in response, then started laughing again, unable to stop. The giggles caught me too, wracking my body with unstoppable waves of hilarity at I didn't even know what until we lay on our backs, covered in sand, tears forming mud as we panted and begged the mushrooms to release us from this much joy so we could just breathe again.

When the laughter finally passed, wonder took its place. A fork of lightning over the ocean scrawled itself down from dark clouds, illuminating the rippling three-dimensional textures of storm clouds all above us, flattened and hidden by Ocean Drive's light pollution.

MAZ: Did you see that, bro?

ME: Yeah. I saw it.

Called to attention, we sat up on our knees like students, eyes wide, lungs open, breathing in salt air and electricity. The offshore storm responded, speaking back in flashes of lightning. We were rapt, rooted to the spot, two rocks on a beach.

The lightning bolts that appeared in the sky remained, each new one joining its sisters, until the sky grew brighter and brighter, filling up with electric white threads like—

ME: ...veins. Like an organism we're inside of.

MAZ: Bro, yes!

A trick of the ocean spray, a message from the mushrooms inside us, lightning bolts continued to arrive, second after second, wires connecting cloud to ocean, while two tiny primates sat on the sand, open-mouthed, tears of wonder rolling down their faces, motes watching a heavenly circulatory system forming the body of a nameless god.

And then in a clap of thunder, they disappeared, leaving only dark sky, mysterious sea. Raindrops started to fall, slightly warm and clean. Eyes closed, the rain soaked my hair, ran into my eyes, my mouth, drenched my clothes.

Shaking my shoulder, Maz snapped me back to the now. He pointed at the jetty of limestone boulders down the beach from us that extended out about a quarter-mile into the sea:

MAZ: Yo, let's climb out there!

++++

The jetty's rocks were wet and slippery, so we left our shoes on the beach since human feet grip better than rubber soles. As we climbed a quarter of the way out, the waves were agitating, slapping our bodies higher and higher with cooler water down deep, splashing across our shins, knees, chests, shoulders.

ME: The tide's coming in, isn't it?

Standing atop a boulder like an adventurer, Maz opened his mouth to speak and was splashed by a wave from beneath him that gushed upwards, filling his mouth with seawater. Shocked, he spit it out, grinning with full teeth and cracking up:

MAZ: Who cares! Let's go!

The tide was rising, and the storm offshore was moving inland, making the sea choppy all around us. Barefoot and soaked, we scampered from boulder to boulder, soldiering forward towards the point of the jetty.

Every few steps, a larger wave would strike, threatening to knock us into the water where who knows what creatures circled, hungry for monkey meat. I knelt down, hooking my fingers and toes into the holes of the limestone, crawling on all fours down the jetty.

Another wave hit us, and Maz was nearly knocked into the sea. He dropped to all fours, too, following my lead. With our faces so close to the limestone, we could see the tiny bugs — not insects but called "sea roaches" anyway — skittering across the surface with us as they had for hundreds of millions of years before my species even existed.

ME: We're all just sea roaches.

Rain began beating down on us harder, the drops from offshore growing colder still. Another 100 yards and we'd reached the last boulder of the jetty. There were several iron rungs drilled into the boulder, heavy and cold and rusty but solid enough to last forever. I looped my elbow around the iron, became unimpeachable.

ME [yelling against the storm]: Who do you think put these here? Was it a mariner or like... the Army Corps of Engineers...?

MAZ: Bro, who cares!

Also holding onto an iron loop for dear life, Maz's other hand dug into his pocket:

MAZ: Danny Boy, let's do some magic!

Waves crashing all around us, he held up the sea-sprayed Ziploc bag. Two handfuls of mushrooms remained. He crammed half of them into his mouth, passing me the bag. I snarfed up the rest.

MAZ [after minutes of slow mastication]: OK bro, here's the plan: the sun is gonna come up but not until we fucking say so. [I laugh. He's serious.] We're gonna extend this night with our spirits until we find us some honeys to get nice with.

My mouth full of even more mushrooms, my teeth grinding them into a woody slurry, tears rolling down my cheeks, I thought about my "home," that rental apartment a few miles up the beach: about the young woman who I slept next to in bed every night without touching for many months after mutually deciding we didn't love or want each other.

The storm was closing in on us. The waves grew angrier, rolled in faster. My heart racing, clear mucous began to dribble from my nose as I panted my way into a heightened trip, the new mushrooms joining the ones already opening my brain/heart/energy/body.

ME [sotto]: I miss being touched.

Lightning exploded right over my head, a crash of white highlighting the crests of waves, knobs of coral rock, revealing the colors of the tiny shadows of massive cargo ships that crossed the horizon horizontally like ants.

The air around us hummed with electricity. Maz threw back his head and howled like a wolf, but the sound carried forever. A pack now, twin sorcerers at the edge of the world, I joined him and we howled together, full-throated, teeth-bared, against harsh nature and loneliness, against the money that never came, releasing internal muscles deep inside our bodies that held in the sorrow and the anger that grew around it. I was crying as I howled but also kind of singing and there was a quality to the music coming out of me: human and wolf and primate and ancient and mushroom and wind and the breath kept coming, pushing against the storming sea, emptying this tiny flesh body of all its internal noise, pushing it out into the world, into the sky, pointed at the moon.

And at the center of the fugue, a quiet voice, speaking plainly:

A QUIET VOICE: May the dawn never come.

The wind spent, inside and out, the sea began to quiet. The tide still rose, but the waves softened. We had done our spell, and it was time to head back.

Releasing our arms from the iron bars, Maz and I stood slowly, the sea spinning around us like drunks on the deck of a ship. Slowly, we regained our sea legs and grew lighter, hopping from boulder to boulder back the way we came until our feet landed on the sand again. We flopped onto the beach like string-cut puppets, the surf lapping up around our ankles and retreating once, twice, three times.

Maz and I faced each other, three feet of air between us, eyes shining like flames in moonlight.

MAZ: Danny Boy, this is the best. [he swallows] I... bro, I never met anybody like you before.

And I know what he's saying, what he's not saying. It's not in his vocabulary, doesn't have to be. My eyes meet his.

ME: You can't make magic with just anybody. Most people are—

MAZ [laughing]: Bro, who cares! Who cares about most people! It doesn't matter!

He leaped up, knees dug into the sand, his thoughts rushing to form as words on the way out:

MAZ: This is all there is! This one tiny moment, forever! So fuck it bro, who cares! The thought you're having while I'm talking right now — or right now or now or the next one — none of that shit matters! We're all here, alive, breathing this breath, dancing our fat little asses across the earth and that's it, bro! [exhausting himself] It's like—

I sit up too, but on my ass. Slowly. Lazily.

ME: You're a little guru... You know that, right?

Emotions hit him; his eyes teared up. He'd told me before that he'd been through a lot of shit, the worst of which I'd probably never know about, but Maz followed his own spiritual calling: he studied teachings, went to watch weekly live satellite feeds of his favorite guru Osho. For all his fucking around, he was always putting in the work, always present.

MAZ: It doesn't matter either. [laughs at himself] Who cares?

++++

Back on our feet eventually, we walked west, out of elemental darkness, towards the oontz-oontz and the neon, the traffic and smoke.

The mushrooms inside us were driving. We panted, we sweated, every vibration of everything rippling our psychic spider's webs that extended dozens of yards beyond our bodies in every direction.

Signs melted together, writing became a slurry of symbols that wouldn't sit still. Blocks rushed by as our legs propelled us westward until we stood outside a cocktail lounge called:

MAZ [reading the sign]: The Room.

ME: I... this is a good place. [smiling] I like this place.

MAZ: Bro, maybe the Universe sent us some honeys, waiting for us in there!

We looked at each other for a long beat — salty and wet, covered in sand, eyes puffy from crying tears of joy, throats raw from primal-screaming our pain into the storm — and dapped up before opening the door.

++++

Stepping inside The Room, the bar was all dark wood, red velvet, pink neon. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust, and we realized that everyone we'd worked with at MTV was there: Sash, her assistant Cris, the hot crusty Chilean girl with septum piercing and tattoo sleeves was there with both her long-haired rocker boyfriends, José and Oscar and Cristina and Mara and everyone's bosses.

Everyone turned, called our names, but it was Sash who stepped forward, looking us up and down:

SASH: What are you guys doing here? This is kind of a... private event.

Maz started laughing, uncontrollably. I looked at my sandy legs and feet. We both instinctively took steps backward towards the front door.

There were actually many honeys in The Room, but none for us. We were too wild, two savage wolves who didn't belong indoors. As a boiling being of conscious superfluid intelligence, it took everything I had to maintain my physical form, remember the tune that calls itself Dan Goldman.

So we stepped back out onto the sidewalk, and our spell — the theft of the dawn — broke outside The Room and morning arrived, pink and orange bleeding back into the sky.

ME [narrating]: In the end, they couldn't hold it back.

MAZ: Hold what back?

ME: The dawn, bro.

MAZ: Who cares?

++++

More than human but still neighbors, Maz and I walked back up Collins Avenue to Sheridan, back towards our homes, our ex-girlfriends, our ongoing separate-and-joint hustles.

Stopping outside of my place first, I hugged Maz tight when a data point resurfaced:

ME: Fuck. We forgot the bicycles.

And we laughed, because really, who cares? We laughed the entire walk back down to Nikki Beach, two slow-cooking bozos in the already-brutal sun.

By the time we unlocked them and started riding back home, we were sober and hungry and went to a diner for breakfast instead.

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