Beach Bum

Backpacking around the US I met Mike. We were staying at the same hostel in South Beach, Miami. He was fresh from interviews hoping for work on Sovereign of the Sea, a Carnival Cruise Liner. I was simply on holiday. Enjoying a break from real life and catching up with a friend.

Mike was from Canada and he liked a drink. So did I. So we spent the fair part of a week at the beach or in the South Beach bars. It was great.

In an area with a lot of homeless people, particularly because of the warmer weather, the hostel would lock the front doors after a certain time and you would simply buzz the buzzer, look through the glass doors and either wave if you knew the person on the desk, announce your room number or hold up your key.

I’d worked in hostels on a previous trip to the US so I knew how important it was to feel safe as the desk clerk but I also wanted to feel safe inside as a guest. The system worked for all.

More often than not, we left at a reasonable hour and after the 'triple D': dinner, drinking and dancing, we would come back at a very unreasonable hour. It was not unusual to break off from our bigger group of traveller's socializing, made up of Brits, Aussies, the Canadian and an Israeli, into smaller groups. Not everyone wanted to get messy and all the guys were always trying to get laid so we would often walk home without them.

Mike was a happy-go-lucky guy with a gap between his teeth that made him remind me of the kid on the Mad Magazine. He was obviously more handsome than that kid. One night we went out with a couple of hostel newcomers and Mike gravitated to the German girl Elke. She was nice and she had a smokin’ body.

When the rest of the group headed back to the hostel they came back with us. So it was strange in the morning when the desk clerk from the night before was telling everyone that Mike and Elke had come back to the hostel at 5am, and had to buzz for entry. The desk clerk said she was wearing only her top and underwear and he was in her jeans.

Word to the wise and doe-eyed traveler, nothing is sacred in a hostel. Everyone knows everyone’s business.

After we’d gotten back to the hostel Mike and Elke decided to take a walk along the beach. The stars were out, the waves were rolling into shore, so they sat down and were kissing on the sand. One thing led to another and they decided that with no one around they’d have sex. Mike removed his clothes and put them in a pile beside them and he lay down on top of her.

They were getting their groove on when from the darkness a homeless guy ran up and grabbed Mike’s clothes and ran off down the beach. Mike gave chase but it was fruitless. The guy was too fast and Mike had left a half naked woman alone on the beach where they’d just been robbed.

So naked and without clothes, he had to wear Elke’s tiny jeans back to the hostel and she wore only her top and undies.

If it wasn’t for the loose lips of the desk clerk, forty other strangers might not know of Mike’s embarrassingly funny night on a Miami beach!