THE UNBEARABLE FABULOUSNESS OF BEING

Miami Herald, The (FL)
April 10, 1988
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

Fabulousness is a grueling enterprise that always begins with a certain look, and tonight Jeanie's look is sort of vampire-in-a-bathrobe. She paints her lips with what might be fresh blood. Her skin is Living Dead white. "Pale is aristocratic," she says. "Laborers have tans." Her chemically red hair is variously tousled and teased and coiled and matted for a just-woke effect that is further enhanced by her dress, which appears to be a bathrobe but is actually an overcoat. Add plenty of fake jewelry and the fabulousness is complete.

Like all vampires, Jeanie is primarily a night achiever. On this night, a Saturday in March, she is rolling across South Beach in her dented black '82 Firebird, bound for the clubs.

"Sometimes my friends call me the Doyenne of Darkness. I can be really black, like really underworld, but then there are other times when I can be a really good person, and that's why people are drawn to me. I wouldn't classify myself as a drug user. And like I know a lot about a lot of things. Or maybe I know a little about a lot of things. I know about opera, I know about Broadway musicals, food -- I know everything about food, like just looking at food I can tell if it's southern or northern Italian. And some people don't even know northern Italian exists! I had one friend who called me mas o menos, which means more or less, because I knew more or less about everything. I guess it's a lot like being well-read, but not having read a lot. Does that make sense?"

If one were to venture far across town, to the University of Miami, and poke through the records in the registrar's office, the name Jeanie Echemendia would appear, improbably, on a list of full-time enrolled students. She has a 2.2 grade point average ("You don't need good grades to achieve in life") and is majoring in broadcast journalism and sociology -- but that is all distant and immaterial on this moist Saturday night, because Jeanie (most people do not know her last name -- they just call her That Girl With the Red Hair, or sometimes Comp Red because she is always comped, let in free, at the clubs) has only 24 hours left to promote a really cool party.

It's at China Club. The club is paying Jeanie to organize a Progressive Dance Rock and Soul night, an alternative to the club's usual straightforward rock 'n' roll. Jeanie has crafted the invitations, lined up a couple of deejays and hired some talent, a singer named Lejuan Love. The owners of China Club figure that Jeanie, with her hip connections, can get people to show up late on a Sunday night and drink and dance and carry on instead of sleep or whatever they would normally do. ("She's very in tune with the progressive crowd," co-owner Nelson Fox says. Sunday nights, he says, clubs have to target people who aren't "work-oriented.")

For her efforts Jeanie will make about $400 after expenses -- but there's a catch. If fewer than 300 people show up, the club won't pay her a dime.

So this is her last chance to cruise the scene and whip up enthusiasm. After picking up a friend, Basil Racuk, who designs her evening gowns, she heads down into the Miami Beach Cool District, roughly 18 blocks long and two blocks wide, guarded by Club Nu on the north and Woody's on the South.

Jeanie parks illegally across from the Cameo Theater on Washington Avenue. Skinheads sulk on the sidewalk. From inside the theater comes the sound of heavy industry, like they're crunching Cadillacs into scrap. It's probably tonight's band, the Dead Milkmen.

Jeanie has no intention of paying admission. She won't have to. The guys at the door register the red hair -- it's like a badge -- and let the Doyenne of Darkness enter.

The punks are dense inside, slumping, sneering, lurking in a barbituated haze, high-schoolers in T-shirts with shaved heads and acne. A few slam-dance out by the band. Tomorrow they'll say of the concert, "It was great, man, we were wasted." Jeanie glides through them, above them, a superior entity, then goes up to the mezzanine for the macro view of the hall, and after hearing the music for a few moments says, "I don't think it's the Dead Milkmen yet."

Covertly, at waist-level, she slips an invite to a blond kid with turf for hair. As she walks out a couple of dudes see the invites (Something's happening! Somewhere!) and beg. She assents. Usually she is careful to invite only "the right people," but she has eased her standards in shooting for the magic 300.

Dinner is next, at Osteria del Teatro.

"It's the new hip place on the beach," she says.

The food is brilliant. Northern Italian, she notices.

After dinner she and Basil bemoan the moribundity of the clubs.

"The club scene down here is really bad," she says.

"The club scene everywhere is really bad," says Basil. "The best club in Miami ended in 1982. Salvation. There are no more good clubs."

Jeanie says she has heard that you have to go to Spain to find any happening clubs. "They have clubs where the roof opens up and lasers shoot into the sky."

For all her uniqueness, Jeanie Echemendia wears the broad, indelible stamp of the '80s. She's covetous of wealth. Opportunistic. Scant of social conscience. Vain.

She's not ashamed of it. Told she sounds like an elitist, she protests, "But I am an elitist."

And vain?

"I am vain. But if you looked like me, you'd be vain, too. Is that really sh--ty?"

Jeanie admits that she's a controversialist: She likes to say outrageous things. Better to be despicable than dull, she figures. And if some of her values are loathsome to mainstream society? "It's my opinion. I don't care what anyone says."

She adores the accoutrements of wealth, but hates greed. She claims to have recently given 10 hefty bags of her old clothing to Goodwill and the Salvation Army. She likes Reagan, admires Nancy Reagan's taste in clothes, hates Castro.

"I like old values. I'm going to be married in white."

Jeanie is a product of her times and her environment: divorced, wealthy parents; private Catholic schools; New York City; and most of all, nightclubs.

She began going to nightclubs at the age of "13 or 14," she says. She went to the Mudd Club, Limelight, The World, Milk Bar, Danceteria, Xenon and Save the Robots. She learned the delicate science of late-night partying. And she became cool.

"Sometimes I think I'm really cool and sometimes I don't. Like one time at Limelight in New York the doorman said he'd let me in free, but then he didn't let me in free, so we went around to the employees' entrance and picked the lock and got in. I think that's cool."

She clarifies her terminology: "I don't like to call it cool. I prefer to call it 'in' or 'hot.' "

Jeanie claims she dropped out of school in New York and ran away from home. She attributes her current status as a student at an expensive private university to financial aid, after-hours jobs and, for admissions purposes, a high school equivalency degree. She won't discuss her parents other than to say that they came to the United States from Cuba in 1963 and divorced when she was 2 years old.

By her estimate she studies about one hour a week. She has a work-study job (10 hours a week, $4.50 an hour) but seldom works or studies, prefering to talk on the phone, promoting parties. She says she has a high IQ that is not reflected in her grade point average. (Though occasionally she will seek help in spelling a word: "How do you spell immature? IN-mature or IM- mature?")

Journalism professor Alice Klement says Jeanie is one of her most memorable students. "She's a delight," Klement says. "As a journalism student, the hardest thing she has to fight is to keep her own personality out of her story."

Where Jeanie thrives is South Beach. In the early 1980s there were hopes that the Art Deco district would turn into a Soho-style enclave for artists, intellectuals, performers, Bohemians of all stripe. But for some reason it has turned into something more closely resembling the Upper East Side. First, Club Z opened on Washington Avenue, and it later became Club 1235. Then Club Ovo opened a few blocks away, later replaced by China Club. Club Nu opened last year, then Woody's, bringing to four the number of glitzy warehouse-sized nightspots. Simultaneously, elegant cafe/restaurants have erupted along Ocean Drive, such as the Carlyle, the Waldorf, Cafe des Arts, Tropics and recently the Cardozo. It's a monied atmosphere. No mo' Soho.

And so Jeanie, weaned on Limelight and the Mudd Club, is in her element. She's also $5,000 in debt. Whenever possible she eats on someone else's nickel, even if it means escorting older men around town. She refuses to sleep with them, she says; she's just decorative. "To them I'm just an arm doily."

Comp Red may be one of the most familiar characters on South Beach, but she isn't the most popular. Black clouds trail her like a jet stream. In the fall of 1986 she got a waitressing job at the Strand, a South Beach restaurant popular with all manner of fabulous people, but though she proved more skillful than any other waiter or waitress at selling drinks (she knew that jacked up the tips) she was fired after six months for various alleged incidences of insubordination and opportunism. Jeanie claims the grievances were petty.

Last summer she got her big break: She convinced the Brandt brothers, owners of Club 1235, a spacious converted movie theater, to open a private club for the supercool crowd in what had been the theater's projection booth. The new after-hours club was named Jagged Edge.

Jagged Edge started gloriously. Jeanie decorated the interior with broken mirrors and drew raves for her avant-garde instincts. Initially the club was packed, and the revelry continued until 6 in the morning. Jeanie turned away anyone who didn't look appropriate, such as all those women who struck her as too "JAPpy."

The next week, fewer people came. And the week after that, fewer still. The owners wanted to start advertising. Jeanie wanted to keep it exclusive, a secret.

"It seemed that more of her friends were coming than patrons," co-owner John Brandt recalls. "On numerous occasions I found her giving out drinks to her friends, and it ultimately became a place where she and her friends were drinking at my expense."

Jeanie denies this. But the Brandts closed Jagged Edge after only six weeks.

"Everyone always said that it was really New York," Jeanie says. "The Brandts didn't realize they had something really good. Sure, it didn't make thousands. If I had sold coke up there, it would've made thousands."

Jeanie remained undaunted. She held down four part-time jobs at once: Selling drinks at the Cameo, delivering copies of the hip tabloid New Times, maintaining her work-study job and, most importantly, throwing renegade parties. They were more than parties: They were like one-night-only clubs. She held them in galleries, restaurants, private homes and, once, during Art Deco weekend, in an abandoned mansion on the bay near Brickell Avenue. She didn't have a permit. She paid no rent. She simply told her friends and acquaintances to show up. When they did they found a darkened, gutted husk littered with debris. Jeanie was at the front steps, taking $3 from every person who entered. Upstairs a radio blasted music through the gloom. Coronas in a cooler cost $1 each. After expenses (invitations, a bartender, etc.) Jeanie only cleared about $100 on that one and regretted not charging more for the Coronas.

A few weeks ago she became persona non grata at Club 1235, her old stomping ground. Twice she was caught red-handed in 1235 passing out invitations to China Club. Club owners have the gravest of attitudes toward such trespasses. Jeanie protested that she only handed out a couple of invites, and only to employees, but the Brandts banned her permanently. Even Gary Brandt, her biggest defender among the brotherhood, was annoyed.

"She has an uncanny ability to try to circumvent rules and regulations," he said. "Do I like her? Yes. Has she broken too many rules at our club? Yes."

A couple of weeks later, Jeanie sauntered up to 1235 just to see what would happen. The bouncers shook their heads coldly. She went into the manager's office. The manager, a woman, stopped dead in her tracks. "What are you doing here, Jeanie? You can't come in. Never come in. Never again! Go to China Club!"

Jeanie walked off bemused. "That was a real dissing," she said.

As in disrespect.

Despite all the commotion, even her severest critics respect her ability to muster a party. Moreover, they acknowledge she has the singularly redeeming characteristic of being not boring.

Jeanie is a rarity in the night world, where so many people just loiter as though they came from nowhere and have nowhere to go: She has, astonishingly, turned club-hopping into a goal- oriented vocation. She works hard. She's ambitious. And maybe just ruthless enough to be a great success.

In five years, she says, "I'd like to be wearing Chanel with a Chanel handbag, vacationing in Palm Beach, with my own place in New York. I wouldn't have to have a car, but if I did have one, I'd like a Corniche. I guess right now I think of myself as jet set, but what I'd like to be in five years is filthy richly jet set."

As soon as dinner at Osteria comes to its blessed northern Italian climax, Jeanie drops Basil off at home and then heads to the Hotel Cardozo to see if a female friend wants to party. She parks illegally in a tow-away zone. "They'll never get the tow truck here fast enough," she says.

The friend can't play. Off to China Club.

Cops have closed the street outside the club. Jeanie, undeterred, starts driving down the street.

"Hey!" shouts a cop.

She ignores him.

"Pull over!" the officer commands.

"Pleeeeease, mister," Jeanie says, and whizzes past. She parks around the corner next to a hydrant.

Inside China Club she sees her boyfriend, who works behind the bar. She asks him for a glass of ice water -- she likes to keep a clear head when she's working. ("I don't like drugs. I think they suck. I think really good music and a good crowd and good company, that's the best drug. You know the one drug I would use is speed. I could easily be a speed freak. I love to feel wired. I used to get three hours of sleep at night just so I could feel wired in the morning.")

Jeanie and her boyfriend have been dating about a month, and she says she'll marry him if he asks. She's 22 now and has been in love eight times.

As the lovers nuzzle, two lemon sharks endlessly circumnavigate the bubbling waters of a large tank behind the bar. They want out.

Jeanie distributes a few more invites. Then, back to the car. An older man walks up. She used to date him, or at least escort him. He says he wants to get together sometime. She is noncommittal. They chit-chat. She smiles pleasantly but insists she has to run. She drives off, and when out of earshot says, "Bastard! But I'll be nice to him because he's loaded."

Club Nu: Momentarily the door workers hesitate to let Comp Red enter. Then the owner wanders up, and Jeanie gives him a kiss on the cheek in the fabulous style. He lets her in. The theme inside Nu used to be Egyptian, heavy on the Nubian slaves, but now the theme appears to be generic Decadence, although Jeanie says it's Versailles. Greco-Roman busts line the walls. There are gold mannequins with flapping wings suspended from the ceiling.

The crowd seems more Latin, more elegantly dressed, than at China Club. Fine fabrics are everywhere: leather, lace, silk. Certain tables of women are surrounded and protected by force fields of perfume. The music -- generously amplified -- has been extruded from synthesizers and so tortured by technology that one fails to recognize a single instrument. Communication within the club is essentially pheromonal. In the center is a slightly raised platform where people are eating dinner and occasionally attempting to shout words at each other. This is the classic Miami activity known as Dining at a Disco.

Jeanie slices through the crowd, gets bored quickly. Her philosophy is, "If a place sucks, you leave." She ducks through the service exit, finds a hallway and suddenly arrives in the kitchen, reciprocal in its bleakness to the glamour of the public areas. "Hi!" she says to the cooks. They say hi back.

Moments later she's racing away in the Firebird, heading toward the mainland and the club called Fire & Ice. She goes through a toll booth without paying and announces, "I don't have a driver's license, by the way."

At Fire & Ice she gives the owner a dirty look: She doesn't get comped here, and in fact has been thrown out several times for such things as complaining that the music sucks. Inside, the club is dark and foggy. If Nu was elegant, then this is flamboyant: women in black micro-minis, Surf Nazis in T-shirts, biker-types in leather jackets, gays in herringbone suits with black-and-white spats and polka-dot socks.

Jeanie sees a woman she knows. "She does nothing. She doesn't even go to school. I think that's really bad, because I go to school, and I also have four jobs, which is what makes me a good person, in addition to the fact that I'm nice."

She hangs out for a while. She tells everyone about her party tomorrow night. And about Lejuan Love. Hardly anyone has heard of him, or them, or it, or whatever Lejuan Love is. Jeanie tells them that Lejuan Love does that song Everybody Say Yeah, which provokes a knowing nod and then a brief flash of uncertainty.

It's about 2:30 in the morning. Jeanie is a little weary. Someday, she promises, she'll leave this club scene behind.

"It's not my whole life. It's just under 25. After that, I'm a zillionaire."

Her attitude is that she's not really hanging out: "I'm working right now. I'm promoting myself. I'm being seen by people, so they'll remember who I am."

She eventually leaves Fire & Ice and drives to Woody's. There is rock music here -- that Rolling Stones stuff sounds hopelessly square and uncool compared to what you hear at Fire & Ice -- and there is hardly anyone around. But then again, it is past 3 in the morning.

She goes back to the China Club. The ranks have thinned.

At 4:10 she considers going to Beirut. That's another club, very dark. But her back hurts and so she gives up and goes home.

"It was a bad night," she says.

There's always tomorrow.

Midnight. China Club. Jeanie, wearing an inky black silk nightgown, is beaming. A first-rate Sunday night, progressive- rock, nonwork-oriented crowd has showed up. She checks the count at the door.

"I need 300; I got 290 right now," she announces breathlessly. "What if I don't get 10 more?"

Ten minutes pass. Then her boyfriend, the bartender, runs up and says, "304!"

"Oooooh! I'm getting paid!" Jeanie says. "I hope four hundred people show up."

He says, "You need five hundred to be cool."

They embrace.

Then Jeanie decides to go check on the talent, the famous Lejuan Love. She rushes up the stairs to the VIP room of China Club. It is very dark. Two silhouettes stand at the railing overlooking the dance floor. They have abnormally tiny heads. Jeanie approaches the table. The two creatures are not clearly male or female; their voices are high, their bodies strangely small. They are like some new breed of hipster, a mutant strain so far out it hasn't yet been discovered by mainstream civilization.

And then it suddenly becomes obvious: They're children.

"That's Lejuan, and that's his deejay. They're the band," Jeanie says proudly.

Lejuan and his deejay are in the eighth grade at Allapattah Junior High. Lejuan has two local hits, My Hardcore Rhymes and the Stevie Wonder remake, Everybody Say Yeah. They have a 1 a.m. curfew this Sunday night because they have school in the morning.

Fifteen minutes later they take the stage, and Lejuan, in what looks like a karate outfit, suddenly turns into an adult, strutting around, saying, "What's happening? I see y'all out rocking tonight! We're gonna rock out tonight, that's right! I came out tonight to cool-rock this place!"

And he raps out a tune about why no one should use crack or drop out of school. The crowd applauds politely. Then comes the big hit, the fabled Everybody Say Yeah. More polite applause.

"Aren't they great?" Jeanie says.

The children pack up and leave. The club owners are not too thrilled that Jeanie paid $700 for a band that does two songs, but the night is still a great success. Everyone likes the tunes that Basil Racuk has been spinning in the deejay booth, the only hitch coming when some creep puts on a Genesis song that is so bad that Jeanie momentarily considers suicide.

As the party winds down Jeanie is already thinking ahead: She's throwing a bash at California Cafe in less than two weeks, with the theme "Let's Git Nasty."

And beyond that? Well, she's still got more than a year in school. Then she has to make a serious career decision. Right now she has only one particular thing in mind. To some people it might seem dumb, but to her it's quite practical in terms of long-term career opportunity, and might even prove to be cool and fabulous:

Graduate school.

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 12
Copyright (c) 1988 The Miami Herald