What I'm not
It's 12:22 a.m. on a Monday morphing into a Tuesday. The Wife and I are cruising Ocean Drive on South Beach. Cruising, of course, as much as an Oldsmobile will allow.

It's 12:22 a.m. on a Monday morphing into a Tuesday, and everything is open. The Versace store ... open. The Gucci store ... open. Who buys clothes at this hour?

Can't hardly drive for all the pedestrians around, so we decide to pull over and park. The Atlantic is on our right, a hopping, pulsating, thoroughly enticing life is on our left. Buy a drink, have a dance, be pretty.

All the doors are open. Everybody's half outside, half inside. Clubs, pizza joints, the aforementioned clothing stores. See, be seen. No other discernible purpose. So many people, out on a Monday night. The smells of beach life fill the air: sea salt, expensive perfume, cigarettes, a spilled pina colada, piss, expensive cigars, vomit, sweat.

We're sightseers, and there are sights to be seen in all 360 degrees from where we stand.

"Hey," she says, "hookers." Yep, there they are, three of them, talking to a cop. The cop isn't chatting them up because they're great conversationalists. He's ruining their nights.

The two taller women have blank looks on their faces, the look you would expect to see on the face of a prostitute in the process of getting busted. But the white girl looked different. She looked a lot less sure of herself. I looked in her eyes for the .39 second it took to walk past them. Her face betrayed her. Her face, obviously soft before it became so hard, showed defiance, fright, anger, despair, all at once.

We knew we were out of place, The Wife and I. But we walked on. Cigar stores, hotels, restaurants, velvet ropes. Big houses, fast cars, pastels illuminated by neon.

"Lots of drugs here, I'll bet," The Wife mused. Yep. Probably so. Impossibly pretty women over there, talking loud, dancing at full speed. Wonder what's in her purse. Two young men, dressed casually to the nines. They're clearly in love. You can see that on their faces. Good for them.

We're walking back toward our car, headed back toward Suburbia. We've seen, we've been seen, although we were invisible. As we walk back, the ocean on our right, a life we never lived and never will on our left, we see him, asleep under a light in front of an apartment building in the process of being rehabbed. We walk past him at the same steady clip at which we walked past the hookers. His face was covered by a scraggly beard, his skin hung loosely on his bones, his legs were covered in purple sores. So many people come to Miami Beach to dance, to drink, to show off, to live. He's come to Miami Beach to die.

We walked back to the Oldsmobile, silently. Soon, the ocean was behind us, I-95 was in front of us. We saw what we needed to see.

It must be a hell of a life there on Miami Beach. But it's not us. And we're very comfortable with that.