The Dragons of Miami

By Garden Urthark

After an argument with Tommy, her 21-year-old hearing boyfriend, the deaf, Korean, and immaculately beautiful Cathy, also 21, runs away to Miami and a new life as an exotic dancer (stage name: Gloria Kim) in a topless bar, the Starlight Club, on Southwest Eighth Street (Calle Ocho) in that Cuban enclave within Miami known as “Little Havana.”

With Tommy on the way, hitchhiking down to Florida to bring her home, is it possible that Cathy, however beautiful, can preserve her precious virginity, so important in her culture, and yet still manage to thrive within the seedy, shameless underworld of early 1970s topless dancing?

Or will she agree to go home with Tommy when, or if, he finds her, when Norrie Parker, the fabulously wealthy owner of the Starlight Club, has other plans for Gloria?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Garden Urthark
• Release date: Jan 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9780978516291

Garden Urthark

Bishuasi, la mia amore,nella mia vita, che meravglia.Mi trovo fra la perduta gente,voglio mangiare la tua melauna pezza alla volta, mentre,era tu, beh, che me l'ha offerta.Tu faccia me matto! Mia testavole con uccelli belle belle,mio cuore con luce dei stelle,brucciando secoli e secoli.Galessie brute e bellegridano contro nostri nemici!Vieni ai miei abbraccio muoro, da vero, senza bacci.Translation into English / Traduzione in ingleseSalvation, my love,in my life, what a wonder.I find myself among the lost people,I want to eat your appleone piece at a time, while,it was you, well, who offered it to me.You make me crazy! My headflies with beautiful beautiful birds,my heart with starlight,burning centuries and centuries.Brute and beautiful galaxiesthey shout against our enemies!Come to my hugsor I die, truly, without kisses.Garden Urthark is an enterprise that contains, as in an ark, the revolutionary process of transforming reality into a vision of human love and freedom.

Book preview

The Dragons of Miami

by Garden Urthark

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Albert J. Miele, Jr.

All parts of this book are fiction, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for your support.

To my mother and father,

my wife, Sung,

and our son, A.J.

So we beat on, boats against the current,

borne back ceaselessly into the past.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Dragons of Miami

Chapter 2: The Spectacle of a Woman’s Flesh

Chapter 3: The Opening and Closing of a Door

Chapter 4: A Mentally Ill Man

Chapter 5: Hard-boiled Detectives

Chapter 6: The Starlight Club

Chapter 7: The Slaying of the Dragons

Chapter 8: Ascent toward a Higher World

Chapter 1: The Dragons of Miami

The coils of a great dragon rose up to swallow me along with almost a quarter of my known universe of billions upon billions of stars. At the last, my younger brother had sought to pull me back.

Don’t go, he said.

I have to, I replied.

It had been after midnight, the second day after Christmas day, a cold night in haughty Bethesda, Maryland, one of the most affluent suburbs in the United States.

I shouldered the lightweight orange backpack with its silver aluminum frame, in it a down sleeping bag, a change of clothes, and some water in a plastic bottle.

Even as I answered my brother, saying I must go, I could just as easily have crawled back into the cowardly embrace of sleep.

But then my elaborate dream might vanish in a paralysis from which I might not ever wake. I could not confide this dream even to my brother, being aware of the indecipherability of most dreams, even to myself.

In my wallet, I carried the magical photo of a woman. Who was this woman? The night whispered her name: Gloria (Gloria in excelsis Deo, I remembered from that strange enchanted language that had come down to me from the Medieval church.)

The dragon road writhed in contractions that engulfed me, and I looked up, thinking I saw heaven, not yet realizing I saw only that part of the sky being carried down to hell along with me, but I knew the guilt of the condemned even then.

I had wasted myself over the bathroom sink while gazing at the glossy picture, now in my wallet, of a beauty so supernal and profound, so above the plane of my ordinary existence as a university student, then in my third year, that the imagery set the filament of my being aglow in instant recognition of the holiest of holy relics.

Upheld by my one trembling vassal of a hand, that picture of immortal woman’s flesh then blazed before my innocent, inquiring, and virginal eyes as that mystical object of all honor and purity and goodness in the world--the Grail--must have blazed before Galahad’s so many lost and tumultuous centuries ago, while in response to the feigned female attentions of my other vassal of a hand, my genital organ morphed into a lance that miraculously bled its precious