The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Page 31

  Weeknight Shindig at Brett's

  DATE: SEPTEMBER 2006

  VENUE! OUR APARTMENT BUILDING

  This year Brett came back from Burning Man with an announcement: he had fallen in love. Kellie, an eighteen-year-old from Truckee, California, arrived shortly thereafter. She immediately found work as a cocktail waitress and started supporting him. I gave her my old driver's license so she could get into bars. We had other news as well: our building was going condo.

  Art Basel Miami Beach

  DATE: DECEMBER 2006

  VENUE! SHORE CLUB

  This year I went out a little more at Art Basel. I went to a Vanity Fair party. We got rubber bracelets, like Lance Armstrong testicular cancer bracelets, but hot pink and stamped VANITY FAIR. My aunt, who lives in southwest Florida and paints pictures of children on beaches flying kites, came to see the art, but what excited her most was watching someone write a $400,000 check in a particleboard boothlet.

  A Celebration of the Jade Collection of Thi-Nga, Vietnamese Princess in Exile

  DATE: FEBRUARY 2007

  VENUE! THE SETAI, COLLINS AVENUE

  The paper assigned me an investigative piece: discover the true identity of Princess Thi-Nga, a Miami Beach philanthropist and supposed member of the exiled imperial family of Vietnam. She was on the board of the Bass Museum of Art, where the parties were always sponsored by Absolut Vodka. Her collection of ancient jade sculpture was on display at the Bass at the time, which some people saw as a conflict of interest. My editor thought she might be a fraud. I failed to uncover much evidence of this. I failed to uncover much evidence at all, actually. It appeared nobody was paying close attention to the lineage of the former royal family of Vietnam. I too didn't really care.

  I met Thi-Nga at the Setai, the hotel where my friend Krishna worked. A room at the Setai cost upward of $1,000 a night. Its bar was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and its couches upholstered with manta ray skins, or something like that. According to Krishna, when a guest of the Setai arrived at Miami International Airport, he or she had the choice of being chauffeured in a Bentley or a Hummer (a question of personal style). In the car was a wide selection of bottled water brands and an iPod.

  Thi-Nga was launching her jade sculpture exhibition with an elaborate party at the hotel. I met her there for breakfast the day before the party. I ate a $12 bowl of muesli. It was the most delicious bowl of muesli I have ever eaten.

  For her party, Thi-Nga had rented an elephant named Judy. Adorned with gemstones, Judy led a parade down Collins Avenue on Miami Beach that also included dancers: Thai ones with pointy golden hats and splayed fingers and a Chinese lion that batted its paper eyelashes to the rhythm of cymbals. The princess rode in a silver Jaguar convertible behind them, seated next to the mayor of Miami Beach, waving to confused pedestrians who tentatively waved back. Then all her guests went to the Setai and ate salmon.

  Brett Moves Out

  DATE: APRIL 2007

  This party is in fact only theoretical. My neighborly relationship with Brett had deteriorated to the point of mere formality, so I'm not sure if he had a good-bye party or not. I hope he had a big party, where the lava lamps oozed and the cigarette butts accumulated and the dollar bills were dusted in cocaine. Our building was depopulated now. The call girl was gone; the dumb stoner who had been my accomplice in the murder of the raccoon was gone. The apartments upstairs had sold for phenomenal amounts of money. My apartment had been purchased by a tennis pro, who informed me that I could consider him a landlord upgrade. I took him at his word and purchased the air-conditioning unit with the highest Consumer Reports rating, paid the alcoholic handyman who hung around the neighborhood to install it, and deducted the whole production from my rent check. Going condo was amazing.

  Unless you were Brett. Things weren't going well for Brett, who was still unemployed and being supported by his teenage girlfriend. He and Kellie had recently been arrested for driving someone else's car that happened to have a felony-size quantity of crystal meth in the glove compartment. I encountered them on our stoop after they had been released on bail. Apparently everything would be all right; they had agreed to rat on some drug dealer. But still, this on top of moving. They were heading up to 8th Street, a part of South Beach that remarkably had retained its seedy character, and whose apartments, though as expensive as everything else in Miami, were terrible to live in. I'd had a friend who lived on Brett's new block; her floor was often inexplicably littered with millipede exoskeletons. She would gamely sweep up the hard brown shells and claim that they were harmless, but I vowed that I would draw the line of shitty-apartment-living at mysterious worm infestations.

  Then one day Brett was gone, and the landlords were happily ripping out the interior of his apartment. One of them, Dave, told me it had been a relief.

  "You should have seen the bathroom. Drug addicts. It's disgusting."

  Very stupidly, I had never thought of Brett as an addict, just as a guy who did drugs. A certain kind of Miami guy who liked to party. But now Brett was gone. All traces of him were replaced, in a matter of weeks, with granite countertops and track lighting.

  I saw him one more time that summer, on 5th Street, when I knew I would be leaving Miami. I was walking home from the gym when I was waylaid by a torrential downpour, the kind where I could see the violent wall of water approaching from across the street. I waited under an overhang, staring at nothing, until it retreated. In the dripping aftermath, the sidewalks gray and clean, the palm trees still quivering, I encountered Brett on a street corner. Brett wasn't a pessimist. Everything was going great, he said, the new apartment was fantastic. Later, when the recession came, I took comfort in knowing that, like me, Brett was probably all right, because Brett owned nothing.

  That was the thing about boom times that later became clear: We now know that boom times don't feel like boom times. They feel like normal times, and then they end. Particularly if one is not a direct beneficiary of the excess wealth and one's salary is measly to nonexistent, boom times are just the spectacle of other people's reckless spending. Their gluttony was my gluttony of course—only a bore would have abstained from the festivities—but their downfall was little more than an abstraction from the vantage point of one with no assets.

  Our downfalls would not involve grand narratives of repossession or foreclosure, just a steadily diminishing ability to keep some fundamental part of the city at bay. In heady days, we conquered Miami, carving out the mangroves, digging up the ocean bottom and slathering it on a sandbar, molding concrete into skyscrapers, pumping refrigerated air through miles of metal windpipes and over glass coffee tables and white couches. But here, now, as those with no assets fled to low-rent holdouts, inland from the beach to paved-over swamps, recession only meant a slow infiltration: worms burrowing through the floor and dying, spores drifting through vents, and terracotta roof tiles uplifted by the autumn winds.

  My Last Day

  DATE: AUGUST 2007

  The Corolla was packed up, and as I was about to leave, one of those terrific summer rainstorms hit. I lay next to my boyfriend on his bed (for by then I had a boyfriend), watching the rain pound against the windows, the palms lean into the wind, and the cat purr between us. Of the whole tableau, the only thing I anticipated missing was the cat. The relationship was ending, my job was ending, and the real estate boom had already ended. I had gotten ornery in the last months in Miami. If another interviewee told me, as we drove in his golf cart through a maze of pink stucco on top of a leveled mangrove grotto, that he "lived in paradise," I thought I might wrestle the wheel from him and plunge us both into the algae blooms of a fertilizer-polluted drainage canal. So I left the place where baby sea turtles mistake the floodlights of condos for the rising sun, where the dogs are small, the breasts are big, and the parties are ornamented with drag queens in bubble baths.

  When the rain stopped I drove past suburbs until I hit the Everglades, then emerged into suburbs again on the other side.

>   Contributors' Notes

  Notable Travel Writing of 2010

  Contributors' Notes

  André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir and the collection of essays False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. His latest collection of essays is Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (2011). Aciman has also co-authored and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit, and has written a novel, Call Me by Your Name. Born in Alexandria, he lived in Italy and France. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University and Bard College and is currently the chair of the Graduate Center's doctoral program in Comparative Literature, CUNY, and the director of the Writers' Institute there. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New Republic.

  Ben Austen is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and writes as well for The Atlantic, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, GQ Popular Science, and Wired. Born in Chicago and raised there, he currently lives in Tennessee.

  David Baez is a freelance writer and a graduate of Columbia Journalism School currently working on a book about his recovery from alcoholism and his relationship with his Nicaraguan father.

  Mischa Berlinski is the author of Fieldwork: A Novel.

  Christopher Buckley is the author of fourteen books, including Thank You for Smoking and Losing Mum and Pup. His awards include the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Washington Irving Prize for Literary Excellence. His novel They Eat Puppies, Don't They? will be published in May 2012.

  Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on the New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for the New York Times Magazine. Ms. Dowd joined the New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983.

  Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He lives, writes, teaches, and edits the literary travel writing journal Nowhere (nowheremag.com) in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction, essays, and nonfiction have been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, Narrative, and The Literary Review, among others. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2008 and 2010 for fiction and nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. Last summer he completed a two-thousand-mile sailing voyage along the Maine coast and he is working on a travel narrative based on the trip. He is also a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Venice Biennale (2009), Mass MoCA (2008), and New York City's Anonymous Gallery (2009).

  Keith Gessen is a founding editor of the magazine N + 1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, a novel. He was born in Moscow and has traveled extensively in the former Eastern Bloc but has never been to Cairo or Mexico City, where, it is said, the traffic is even worse.

  Tom Ireland is an editor with the Office of Archaeological Studies in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His most recent book is The Man Who Gave His Wife Away (2010).

  Verlyn Klinkenborg was born in Colorado in 1952 and raised in Iowa and California. He graduated from Pomona College and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton University. Mr. Klinkenborg joined the editorial board of the New York Times in 1997. He is the author of Making Hay, The Last Fine Time, The Rural Life, and Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Audubon, Martha Stewart Living, and Sports Afield, among others. He has taught literature and creative writing at Fordham University, St. Olaf College, Bennington College, and Harvard University and is a recipient of the 1991 Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in rural New York.

  Ariel Levy is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has profiled the South African runner Caster Semenya, the director Nora Ephron, the lesbian separatist Lamar Van Dyke, and the conservative politician Mike Huckabee, among others. Prior to joining The New Yorker in 2008, Levy wrote for New York Magazine for twelve years. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays and Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex. She is the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.

  Jessica McCaughey is a writer and adjunct professor at George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College, where she teaches writing, literature, and English as a second language. She earned her B.A. in English at Mary Washington College (now the University of Mary Washington) and both an M.A. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in The Colorado Review, Silk Road, Phoebe, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a book examining fear from both a scientific and personal perspective. Jessica lives in Arlington, Virginia, and can be found on-line at jessica@jessicamccaughey.com.

  Justin Nobel covers science and culture for magazines and pens a blog about death for the funeral industry and another where he sits for hours in one New York City spot. He lives in Blissville, a sliver of forgotten New York.

  Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, the New York Times, and the Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her first novel, The Tiger's Wife, was published in 2011. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation's list of 5 Under 35. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

  Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her story "Brokeback Mountain," which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. Her memoir Bird Cloud was published in 2011. She lives in Wyoming.

  Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, as well as a best book of the year by Time, the Washington Post Book World, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. His novel Super Sad True Love Story was published in 2010. He has been selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ and Travel + Leisure, and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City.

  William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. He is also the author of Poor People, an examination of poverty worldwide through the eyes of the impoverished themselves; Riding Toward Everywhere, an investigation of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and Imperial, a panoramic look at Mexican California. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and a Whiting Writers' Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, and Granta.

  Emily Witt is a journalist currently based in New York. She has been a staff reporter at the New York Observer and the Miami New Times and has published essays, articles, and reviews in N + 1, Foreign Policy on-line, the New York Times, an
d The Nation. She was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Mozambique and has also lived in Brazil, Chile, and England.

  Notable Travel Writing of 2010

  Selected by Jason Wilson

  PHYLLIS BARBER

  The Knife Handler. Agni, vol. 71.

  ELIF BATUMAN

  The Memory Kitchen. The New Yorker, April 19.

  Summer in Samarkand, Part II. N + 1, Spring.

  FRANK BURES

  The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa. World Hum, April 19.

  ERIC CALDERWOOD

  The Road to Damascus. New England Review, vol. 31, no. 3.