They told me that there would be plenty of models at my hotel. They were so incredibly excited about it. It was almost as I were a model too and we models were made for each other. In the imagination of my hosts in Miami the models and I probably jogged through the early morning mist of Ocean Drive, had some breakfast at Time Café, where we would meet even more models and then end up at the Versace villa, having some sort of model orgy. Neither Christy, nor Naomy nor Linda were at the Betsy Ross with me. There were actually many very hard working Models for Neckermann Versand. These girls had to wear the most hideous looking clothes at 5 am in the morning and then hide from the sun for the rest of the day, go to bed early and be up for another “magical ” shoot early next morning. I was the youngest and most important new Art Director for a record label at that time (I do not think I was, I just thought I was,) yet it was impossible for me to even speak to these girls.
One girl spoke Polish. She did not seem to be a model. She looked quite smart. She was there with her grandmother, who turned out to be her mother when I asked her about grandma. This was the worst possible start to a conversation. She studied in Harvard, her was the publisher of the largest and most influential Polish Newspaper, and it took about 5 minutes to put me into my place. I was not the grandest Art Director of Miami Beach, I was just a boy who happened to be sent into an amusement park which was part of somebody else’s phantasy. I could not even explain what I did. I had some tiny scrap of an Iris print of a cover I designed for some techno compilation. A sad moment, but so very important. Miami brought me back to planet earth. My feet suddenly hit a layer of sand. And the sand was soft and shifting.
I went to have lunch at the Time Café thinking what had planted me into this sunny hell of a cutely molded “town.”