Motambo Tiempo

Somewhere in Overtown, Miami Florida
Motambo Tiempo lie drunk and bleeding beneath the overpass that gave this rough-sled section of Miami its name.  Two cop cars passed by in clear sight, one after the other, heading toward I-95 and a possible rendezvous at an all-night eating joint.  If the cops noticed Tiempo, maybe caught a glimpse of him in a peripheral field, or made him the subject of passing conversation, no one knew, except Tiempo.  He knew damn well because he'd managed to bug almost every cop car that made the Overtown rounds and could activate the proper listening channel that corresponded to a particular vehicle.

The first car was quiet, except for the constant buzz and blather of the police radio.  The second car carried a fat pig that Tiempo hated, along with his partner, Rosalita Rodriguez, who was taking none of Fat Pig's swag on this sweltering night.

"Shut the bleep up, Ronnie, you fat piece of ca-ca," was the most memorable line Tiempo heard as the partners drove by.

Another slow night in Overtown for hip-hop DJ, part-time body guard and full-time detective, Motambo Tiempo.  He rose slowly to his feet, wiped the fake blood from his chin and sprayed himself with half a bottle of Realm cologne to mask the stench of the cheap port wine he'd spilled all over himself.

"Time to take a dump," Motambo Tiempo (nee Ralph Smith) said to himself.

Felipe Carrabas
A bad case of the flu felled Felipe for three or four weeks, but when he came to his senses he was mildly aware that some of his belongings had been disturbed.  Not a dramatic recognition for the lethargic 24-year old, whose latest illness hit him only about as hard as an exaggerated weekend bender.  Not a penny creased his pockets.  And industry was anathema to the laser-thin Colombian.  But nowhere could he find the Rolex Presidential watch he'd worked the middle-aged congressman so hard to acquire.  The phone call from Motambo Tiempo was the last thing Felipe needed or would remember.

The explosion rocked the South Florida front pages and the chuckle-huckster TV news shows for months, but to Felipe Carrabas it was a fitting end to what he'd thought was just the beginning of the really big things to come.

Neither bad juju, Haitian voodoo or any untoward thing he'd ever done or thought about prepared Tiempo for the percussion of the violence that put an end to Felipe and 340 other unfortunate folks who happened to be spending time at the Sunlit Chimera, South Beach's edgiest new Art Deco hotel.

The Haves and the Haves Not
In Miami the folks who exist in a gauzy niche between the haves and the haves not, dwell in places like the southern parts of North Miami Beach, where Don does his mom's laundry every Saturday morning.  Picking at his laptop while the barrel-bellied custodian mops the floor in front of him, he smiles as the smell of Sandy mingles with the whiff of soaps.  The machines gently whir away, offset by the sounds on a ceiling mount CRT television of a smiling hostess on QVC selling discount China.

A welcome refuge from the wake of the South Beach bomb; at this hour only two black girls folding clothes and the custodian join him in the calm after the storm.  Indeed, the 21st Century's early years had been marked by relentless disaster, beginning with the coup d'tat that prevented the Gore Administration from taking its lawful office.  While millions of the righteous marveled at the cool precision with which the right wing wrested power from their grasps, the Christians and opportunists raved at the courage and stubbornness of the simian puppet who would reign supreme for the first eight years of the new millennium.  Once the puppet's strings were cut from forces unseen, the specter of its fitful collapse left the world anxious and willing for the Phoenix to rise again from the ashes that the Bush administration had left behind, but it would be a harrowing task that would doubtless take generations.

Suddenly Donnie saw it unfolding before him and he knew what Sandy and he ought to do.  The bloodless coup, September 11th, the criminal incursion into a sovereign third-world country were but the shock waves caused by the collapse of the American Empire.  He well remembered when he became aware of it while watching a silly program where a wealthy man picked his bride among several exquisitely shallow women whose physical charms could give the Pope an erection.