MIAMI BEACH CLUBGOERS CREATING NEW, UNWANTED IMAGE

MIAMI BEACH, Feb. 26 -- It is just past 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning
and the Kit Kat lounge in South Beach has closed. A boy and a girl
stand motionless on the sidewalk, clinging like mortared bricks. Three
shirtless boys in black pants mill around them, and a girl in a white
T-shirt gyrates and claps, lost to a beat that still hammers her head.
She is a "roller," high on the drug Ecstasy.

Mari, in a red tube top and a clinging black miniskirt, is 20 but has
a fake driver's license that gets her into the clubs here every
weekend night and has for years, she said. "When I leave South Beach
and see the sun coming out," she said, "I know it's been a good
night." She does not use drugs, she said, but she says many kids she
knows do.

Vaulting into celebrity as the backdrop of "Miami Vice," the hit
television series in the 1980's, this oceanside gem of Art Deco whimsy
and former resort of retirees has joined the company of the nation's
most impudent and indulgent trend-setting societies, like Greenwich
Village or Berkeley or Venice, Calif.

But South Beach has also inspired precarious excesses, especially
among the young who frequent night clubs and the after-hours clubs,
which first appeared three or four years ago and open at 4 a.m.
"Eighty percent of the people going to the after-hours clubs use
drugs," said Chief Richard Barreto of the Miami Beach Police.

So cautiously, the authorities have begun to crack down. So far this
year, the police have corralled nearly 400 teenagers for curfew
violations in the proximity of the clubs, compared with about 30 a
month in the last half of last year.

In December, Mayor Neisen O. Kasdin of Miami Beach and the city
commission moved the after-hours clubs' closing hour to 9 a.m. from as
late as noon, and prohibited admission to people under 21. Last month,
the commissioners voted to ask the state legislature to raise the
admission age to 21 for all night clubs. Now they can admit
18-year-olds but not serve them liquor.

But the city has rebuffed Chief Barreto's appeals to shut down the
after-hours clubs. The commissioners reached a "balanced decision," he
said. They took account of the views that the clubs buttress the
economy and burnish the community's image as a cauldron of creative
vigor and its adult culture, as Mr. Kasdin put it, "of beautiful people."

South Beach stretches along the 17 southernmost blocks of Miami Beach,
and the beach itself faces the Atlantic. With the nation's prosperity
helping to fuel the nonstop creation of new businesses in modeling,
new media, broadcasting and electronic commerce, Mr. Kasdin said,
"South Beach is roaring."

The momentum is such, said Kevin Crowder, the city's development
specialist, that business will need 700,000 square feet of new office
space within three years (about several city blocks) -- 110,000 more
than it already occupies.

The new business and the relentless growth of tourism have set off
something close to anarchy on weekends along Collins Avenue and Ocean
Drive -- a "controlled reverie," as City Commissioner Luis R. Garcia
Jr. put it. "The chaos you see," Mr. Garcia said, "is because of
different perceived values."

The cultural mix brings together races, diverse sexual orientations,
languages and incomes. The average age of all Miami Beach plunged to
43 from 65 in the 1980's, with little change in the total number of
people, just under 100,000. Mr. Crowder said the average age probably
dropped another three or four years in the 1990's.

Fashions whip through South Beach. Against backdrops of ear-splitting
music, shops display clothes on the mannequins that ignore any
practical use. But people do wear them, in the clubs.

A trend among young men is a close-cropped, yellow-bronze mat of hair
that glows in the strobe lights of the clubs. This look is hardest for
men with black hair to achieve.

"Mine used to be green," said Michael Escamilla, 16, newly blond and
with black fingernails, who was lingering with friends on South
Beach's open Lincoln Road Mall. He tackled his dark hair first with a
bleach.

Then he applied yellow Manic Panic, a brand of hair dye. "The trouble
is," he said, "it washes away after about 20 washes."

Tattooing is flourishing, with a parlor on nearly every block, and has
evolved far beyond the World War II sailor's rite of passage.
Brazilian-born Luiz Segatto said the popular variations are geometric
or Chinese-character bands around the upper arm, all in black. He
charges from $60 for a little tattoo, up to $10,000 for a "full body
suit."

Carlos Ruiz, 20, a Cuban-American, stops in. A large red and yellow
sunbust on his upper left arm is inscribed "Sunshine of my life.
Betty." Betty is his mother. Tattooing hurts, he said. "It hurts
enough so you say you won't get another," he said. "But I'm here to
get another."

In the pyrotechnic scene inside the clubs, fashion turns lunatic. At
the Bar Room and the Living Room, two prominent night clubs, and Kit
Kat, one of the after-hours clubs, young women arrive in feather boas,
stretch black miniskirts and bulky black platform shoes.

At Level, one of the newest clubs, with 45,000-square-feet of
laser-illuminated dance floors, Fridays is gay men's night. On a
recent Friday, most men had doffed their shirts, and some, in boxer
shorts and boxing gloves, pumped their fists to hip-hop music. Waiters
circulated selling bubble-gum filled lollipops. Dancing patrons waved
neon-green glow sticks.

The glow sticks and lollipops, said Police Chief Barreto, suggest that
the patrons are buying Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer also known as
Special K, gamma hydroxybutyrate, or G.H.B., a muscle relaxer, and
mesmerizing Ecstasy.

Ecstasy is dehydrating and causes users to grind their teeth, so
lollipops and pacifiers offset the effects, Chief Barreto said, and
glow sticks stimulate the senses. Another device, menthol inhalers,
enhance the effect of some drugs.

"It is not unusual," Chief Barreto said, "to walk into a club and see
some individual zonked out in a trancelike state with one or two
inhalers hanging out of their nose." The fire department, he said, has
been rescuing overdosed patrons at a rate of about three a month.

Such scenes have been jarring for both South Beach's image and its
economy. In the early 1990's, Mr. Kasdin said, "beautiful people came
to town, and people wanted to be around them."

"A whole night life grew up around this culture of beautiful people,"
he said. They were affluent people who stoked the economy with their
spending in the shops, hotels and restaurants.

"But then the night life began to evolve," Mr. Kasdin said, "with more
and more low-rent clubs catering to people who came from across the
bay. A handful of clubs would let them in even if they were under age."

Merchants complain that the young club patrons simply come for the
clubs, especially the after-hours clubs, ignore the stores and are
tarnishing South Beach's glamorous image.

So the mayor and the commission have begun to crack down on the clubs.
In addition to restricting their hours, officials have limited their
operation to weekend and holiday nights and have barred any new
after-hour clubs from opening.

That is an unfair assault on the clubgoers, said Leo Mena, the owner
of Kit Kat. "There has not been one overdose or death in any of the
after-hours clubs," he said. "It's not entirely true," he said, that
some patrons use drugs. He said he throws out any one with drug
paraphernalia. His patrons, he said, "just want to sweat and dance."