Miami Mike: My trip to Da Bowl

How many livers were saved by the Bears losing the Super Bowl Sunday, how many credti cards didn’t get maxed out, no one knows for sure.

That came to mind as I sat in Dulles Airport in Washington DC Monday evening with my buddy Butch and a bunch of other Bears fans connecting back to the frozen tundra that is Chicago.

There’s a male model type across from us dressed like every third person we saw on South Beach in black pants and a bluish shirt. There’s a group of 20somethings, a baby faced guy with two reasonably attractive young women at the other end of the facing rows of seats wearing Bear-aphernalia. By them are three approaching middle aged, middle management guys, one black, one white, one Asian.

Sure, their team lost Sunday. But media accounts to the contrary, there weren’t any tears in the beers. In fact, though disappointed, perhaps hungover, and more than likely lighter in the wallet, everyone was positively giddy.

You can’t come back from Miami without a boatload of stories, and these folks had enough water cooler material to keep Hinckley and Schmidt in business for the rest of the decade.

Take the youngsters. They hung out on South Beach most of the time, which for you Chicago types who have never been, is like Rush Street on steroids or pheromones, and with sand and humidity.

South Beach, like Rush or North Michigan Avenue, It is a relief valve for locals, as it keeps the tourists and the celibritocracy away from them as the outsiders look at shiny objects, drink, gawk and do other touristy things like buy t-shirts and pay outrageous parking and cover charges.

The threesome from Chicago met a guy as big as a jockey who bought them drinks a good portion of one night. Initially they were afraid he might be trying to date rape the dude, but he was just loaded in both senses of the word.

They had friends there who just came down without anywhere to stay. One slept not in the Versace mansion, but a Versace jacket on a park bench. Another friend brought a party bus down, parked next to a yacht that the young guy’s dad had docked in Fort Lauderdale.

The only thing they beefed about was returning to the cold. I told them with all the alcohol in them, it could get to 20 below before they would have to worry.

Then there were the black guy and his buddies. Like Butch (who has the perfect Chicago Bears name) they tried to get into the game Sunday.

The trio saw the glimmer of hope that was the first play of game kickoff return by Devin Hester on a tiny black and white TV, sheltered from the deluge by garbage bags, perched on the back of a Humvee, then held high for the replay.

That the game remained close until after half time meant that scalpers asked more than $1,000 for a ticket long into the game. The black guy, perhaps wisened by the experience, thinks there might even be a slim chance the NFL might be alienating its fans by going for the corporate gold, by making their product unaffordable to the masses who love the game.

Which is a navel-gazing way to say the guys headed to a bar.

So did Butch, all soggy, with a wad of cash in his wallet that frankly made me nervous for him, given Miami’s reputation from CSI and other crime dramas. Butch is a good guy for a writer to have as a friend for an adventure like this because: A) he looks like a Bears fan and B) he loves to talk to people and ask questions, which makes it easy for a lazy ass like me and C) thus he gets good stories.

While vainly searching for tickets, Butch befriended a young lawyer (which is always a good friend to have) who came down on a private jet with some guy whose businesses he was soliciting (and no he wasn’t also a hooker - I could tell as he wasn’t wearing fuck me pumps and Daisy Dukes). The rich guy apparently was pulling his chain, getting him close, but no Havana cigar, while he and his corporate clan sat in Dolphin stadium and watched Cirque du Soleil reinterpret football for Europeans and metrosexuals.

The two headed to the Hard Rock Cafe and Indian Gaming Casino, taking a cab ride from an asshole who at first refused service because they were wet. Butch told the driver that everyone was going to be wet, but the driver made him throw out his raincoat, Rather, the driver took Butch’s raincoat and threw it out the car window during the $40 ride.

Me, I wound up at a house party in Hollywood with some transplanted Midwesterners. The hosts assumed the rain would break, so most of the food and all of the drink was set up outside in a yard along a gully as nature tried to rightfully reclaim that yard as a swamp. That made it hard to to quench a thirst.

They had about a dozen TVs set up in the place - and a pool in what looked like it used to be the garage.

I left before the game ended, as did most people, leaving lots of seafood spoiling in the mildew-ripening air, off to pick up Butch at the casino.

Thankfully, some nice folks at the party gave good directions, which is rare to find in South Florida as most people there are from somewhere else and because English is a second or third language for a good many. Case in point: we snacked one night at a pizza placed run by Russian immigrants.

Which brings me to where we wound up staying, a high rise condo, 12 stories up, overlooking the ocean and Biscayne Bay. It’s on Sunny Isles, which sounds like name for a juice product, but is where Donald Trump is building more of his Antichrist Towers - across Collins Avenue from a Denny’s.

The place has the worst valet service ever, poor working stiffs who barely knew English or how to find cars in a less than 100 feet from the front door. And that is my only complaint.

The digs had an elevator that opened directly into the unit. Butch thought there was a mistake when the door opened, and I convinced him by showing him the number on the service door.

How we wound up there: a buddy of mine who lives in Seattle came down with his brother with tickets he got from a Seahawks connection. I found this out about this just two days before we left and as I scrambled to find lodging.

He got dibs on the MTV style crib from a young woman from Northbrook who used to work at a blues bar the brothers run in Pearl Jam land. Her Russian born parents live in Northbrook. That’s all I’m saying, aside from that we each paid less than $60 a night for our stay, making it the best bargain, aside from the free sleeping on the couches Butch and I crashed upon in Fort Lauderdale by the Sea on Friday after drinking at a McSorley’s (named rented from the famous New York pub) where we saw tipsy lesbians make out, which is far more entertaining that catching a glimpse of Justin Timberlake at a place with a $500 cover charge could ever be.

If I ever met that boy band twit, I’d hit him. I brought sexy back, mother fucker, not your skinny white ass.

Sorry, had a South Beach moment. Hey i was mistaken for a cop, once by a nervous but friendly grocery store check out lady (Butch told her he was the cop, FBI in fact, while I was a writer) and later that night/morning by a hooker looking for some Butch action. I flashed my wallet and a Chicago-style “how ya doin” to her, which sent her walking as fast as one can in high heels and hot pants.

Butch was people watching at 4 a.m. while the rest of my posse got slices in a place in line next to a a guy who wanted desperately to be mistaken for Usher, perhaps so he crash a party and get to meet a megastar like Jenny McCarthy or Fergie from Black Eyes Peas or Miami Bengal Chad Johnson whose name was on every third postcard-type handout strewn about the sidewalk.

We rolled in an orange Mustang convertible (and paid $40 to park the ride), not quite as incongruous as the old people I saw the prior night in Lauderdale in a white Escalade with New Hampshire plate or the young punks in a beater cruising Collins with a booming system that sounded like someone put a sander in the trunk.

I should talk. I dressed in a black Cuban wedding style shirt and blue jeans, getting my fashion tips from David Caruso’s moody TV show.

But not much isn’t a silly fantasy during a Super Bowl weekend, and South Beach, at least the patch of it we saw is all about pretending.

It’s oddly democratic that football fans are getting stupid drunk among gangsta wannabes and star fuckers. That guys from the South Side of Chicago can turn up in the day with cameras and get women in Dayglo thongs to pose for their digicams. It’s fun, until somebody gets hurt or until Paris Hilton shows up.

What would you even say to someone like her, if you wound up at one of parties she gets paid to attend? As a Bears fan, would you ask if Brian Urlacher is as good a lay as he is a linebacker? Does she know why ESPN makes its talent wear suits while standing on a beach when it’s 85 degrees and muggy? Does she ever think her life is just like being in high school, but, like Martin Mull pointed out, with lots of money?

Why bother gabbing with the non talent, when, flashing back to my virgin South Beach experience that Friday afternoon, you get better conversation from a Cuban expat who runs a New York style trattoria. Or from connected Chicago guys with Italian ice places with great views of tourists, hot women hawking all sorts of products, and paunchy gay guys in Speedos (that cleanses the pallette, as does the ice).

Or the guys who run the Vienna Beef Hot Dog stand, which curiously clears $5,000 a day. But I joke. Nice guys, not wise guys, I hope, and willing to talk to fellow Chicagoans.

In fact, just wearing a Bears shirt typically led to the following greeting from other faithful followers:

Guy one: “Bearzzz”

Guy two: “Bearzz”

Guy three (playfully tapping guy two on back in non Brokeback way): “Bearzz”

The hot dog stand guy has the froggy voice of someone whose smokes 600,000 cigarettes. He tells us about all the stars he knows, including Prince who will be showing up for a late set with 50 guitars, only 2 of which he will play, at a club the guy part owns. The guy does seem at least to know the names tied to places in Chicago.

But he leaves Pee Wee Herman style, on a bicycle with a metal basket on the handle bars.

I ask the other guy running the stand if his buddy is full of shit. He says know, and this seems like the type of guy you would believe. He has the right gray hair.

He’s friends with a customer in a CBS shirt who is wearing a wrist band he claimed as proof of attending a party at the Versace mansion. I think it might show he was in a hospital, but who knows? Another visitor is supposedly a Chicago alderman married to Christine Hefner. The politician looks like he hasn’t bough new running clothes or changed hairstyles since 1978.

There is a lovely woman with cocoa powder skin working the counter in the hot dog place. We ask her how to get back to our car, as neither Butch nor I will be working for GPS anytime soon (and almost didn’t make it out of Orlando at its confounded toll way system).

She leaves the store and walks us to the corner where we must turn.
Like almost everyone else we’ve met, she’s a transplant, in her case with ties to Minnesota and a mom in Naperville.

I joke to her I don’t belong in South Beach, I am not pretty enough. She tells me I do have pretty blue eyes (offset by my pasty skin which requires SPF Irish to keep from turning cooked lobster red in the tropics, which are my words, not hers).

Yes, you read right. A pretty younger woman blew smoke up my ass for no apparent reason other than her just being nice.

That made the trip. Well, that and the rest of the stuff I just told you.

And gloating by text message to frozen Chicago suburbanites that with the wind chill it was only about 75 on the beach Friday.

Then again, what do I know? I pitched a story about this adventure to my editor at my day job.

His e-mail reaction: “We would be interested in one story of an Elgin guy who was so consumed with the Bears that he went to Miami with no ticket and no chance to see the game. It could run Sunday on the news pages. But would we really need to be there to do that? Not interested in him or anyone else slogging around the bars of Miami. Sorry.”

What could possibly be entertaining about that? I mean I could have done most of this piece by phone - I thought on the ride in the back of the aforementioned convertible, staring up at opulent art deco palaces on the way back to bed, sleeping on a leather sofa with shadows of palm trees dancing on the place next door.