October 07, 2009 at 12:49am by Matt Meltzer
This is the first in a series of occasional stories of the crazy, surreal things that have happened at my favorite South Beach watering hole, Ted’s Hideaway. Some of you have heard these stories, some have not. Some have lived them with me. But all of them are things I haven’t even come close to experiencing outside the wacky walls of Ted’s.
My friend and I had just finished watching the 1-2 a.m. reruns of Golden Girls and had decided to head down the back alley to Ted’s Hideaway. A nightcap at Ted’s could range anywhere from a pitcher of beer to a 2-day coke binge depending on who was there. Tonight the crowd looked a little sparse. No middle-aged men looking to relive their youth vicariously by buying us drinks and telling us stories. No pool hustlers. And, most importantly, no Franco.
BEWARE OF EGG-LAYING BUGS IN SOUTH BEACH
Franco was our favorite purveyor of illicit substances to hang around the Ted’s bar. He looked a little like a cross between Steven Wright and F. Murray Abraham, if that offspring had decided to live in Colombia and use massive amounts of hair gel. Sadly, he was not in the office this Wednesday evening.
As my friend and I sat at the bar nursing our happy hour ($8!) pitcher of Bud Light, we see Franco’s unmistakable greasy silhouette bursting past us through the windows. He stammered in holding his eye, screaming at us.
“You have car?!” he demanded of me.
“I have what?” I asked him. Franco’s grasp on English was only slightly better than your average Sunoco clerk in Little Havana.
“You have car?! I need o-spee-tal! O-SPEE-TAL!” After about five minutes of wild gesturing, Franco made it clear he needed to go to the hospital. I figured he’d gotten a little too high off his own supply. But it was better.
“Yeah, Franco, We can take you,” I told him.
“What happened to you?” my friend asked.
“It FLY in my eye!” he yelled as we walked up 2nd Street to my car. “I on scooter, it fly in my eye and lay eggs!” So, basically, Franco had been putting around South Beach on his Vespa and a gnat somehow got in his eye. Happens to the best of us. But Franco, he was convinced it was some sort of parasitic cousin of Mothra that looks for unsuspecting coke dealers on mopeds in which to lay its eggs. In their eye sockets.
“I feel it laying egg! I can feel it!” Franco was becoming dangerously close to clawing out his right eye. And I was just not in the mood to have Franco’s eyeball and bloody socket messing up the back seat of my Saturn. I also knew that a one-eyed man attracts attention to himself, and that would be bad for both Franco’s business and our weekends.
THEY DON’T GIVE THEM MDS FOR BEING STUPID
We took Franco to the emergency room, and the line was typically interminable. But Franco somehow convinced the triage nurse that if the bug was not immediately removed from his eye, whatever was breeding in there would eventually take over the entire world one drug-dealing eyeball at a time. So he’d better get to go first.
The ER doc met us within five minutes.
“What is your name sir?”
“Fran-coooo!” he sang out. Perhaps this was the proper pronunciation and we just didn’t know.
“How much drugs you had tonight, Mr. Franco?” the doctor asked him.
“None! I no use none,” he told the doctor through fully dilated pupils and sweat that would make a NBA floor mopper uncomfortable.
“No, really Mr. Franco, what have you been using?”
“Ahhh, maybe I use some coke.”
“Ok. Thank you. You guys his family?” he asked me and my friend.
“No, we’re just his regular customers who are trying to help out our dealer,” is what we should have told him. I’m sure an ER doc at South Shore has heard that one more than a few times.
“Nah, we’re just friends,” my friend told him.
“Ok, I’m gonna need you two to wait outside,” he told us as he escorted Franco to a back room. We were pretty sure there were police waiting.
“You no leave!” Franco yelled at us over his shoulder as the doctor pushed him out. “You no leave! You wait, I meet you at car! I meet you at car!”
“Ok, Franco. Meet us at the car,” I told him. Then turned to my friend “This guy has half an hour and I’m going back to Ted’s.” I liked Franco, but I wasn’t bailing him out.
DRUG KARMA IS SOOOOO MUCH COOLER THAN REAL KARMA
Well, not 20 minutes went by, and Franco came out of the ER entrance, looking dry and carrying some bottle of pills.
“They give me medicine to kill the eggs,” he told us. By this, I’m sure he meant some sort of antipsychotic to counteract his drug hallucinations. But I was happy to let Franco believe whatever he wanted. A happy coke dealer is a good coke dealer, I always say.
“Good, Franco. Back to Ted’s?” my friend asked.
“No, no, I go home. First and Ocean. Take me First and Ocean.”
This, of course, was back in the day when First and Ocean had the sorts of hotels that sweaty, balding, low-level Colombian drug dealers would call home. And so we took him there. He invited us upstairs, but the desk staff would not let us in past the lobby. We looked a little too much like cops, I think.
“You wait here,” Franco told us. “I come back with something for you.” We both looked at each other a little confused as to what to do next. This could have been anything from a bottle of Colombian wine to a date with a hooker to a knife across our windpipes. But feeling that the good options here probably outweighed the bad, we waited.
Franco was upstairs for about half an hour. Just as we were ready to walk home, he emerged from the staircase.
“Come outside,” he said. This would be the only proper English sentence I would ever hear come out of Franco’s mouth. We followed.
“Here. You take care of me, this for you,” he said as he shook both of our hands. We opened our hands to find a nice little uncrushed rock of Colombian soft.
“How much is this?” I asked him.
“Eh, is eight with both,” which I took to mean he’d split an 8-Ball between the 2 of us. “Is from me. No worry.” And with that, he bounded back up the stairs to his little slice of paradise at the Ocean Motel.
We looked at each other a little flabbergasted. An hour’s work had netted us about $100 worth of pretty-good cocaine. Who says people in South Beach aren’t virtuous? So let this be a lesson to all you kids out there: You take care of your coke dealer, and he’ll definitely take care of you.
 | Matt Meltzer is a featured columnist at Miami Beach 411. Matt’s column appears Tuesdays. See more articles by Matt Meltzer > |
