Swelter

And isn't it timely for the National Enquirer to be working on an upcoming season-of-the-dog pictorial featuring famous actors united in dissipation with bimbettes? Alas, that sex thing -- famous or otherwise -- didn't come up for me on the club rounds, although the hateful buff boys and girls were all having a grand old time. While I missed the we're-drug-free reopening parties for Twist and Groove Jet, I somehow found time for "Lover Boy" at Les Bains. Steamy as all get-out, the appearance of former New York cop/Playboy Bunny Carol Shaya at Les Bains's "Stag Lounge," apparently vibrating lesbo and hetero gonads alike.

As usual, everyone was talking about the club drug busts, claiming that the operation -- motivated by a television expose -- was accomplished in a highly visual style. Village People cops in masks neglected to arrest any real dealers, but made the local news as the forces of decency. Outside on Washington Avenue, a ray of light arrived with one formerly decadent club kitten gone legitimate. In the old days, when she was living in poorville, I'd buy her a hamburger now and then. Now, bless her worthy heart, she's respectable and living large as a happy housefrau, domestic engineering defined as "fuck, suck, cook, clean."

The next night, the appetite whetted for more food and merriment with an edge of renown, I took an opulent dinner at the celeb-ridden China Grill with a woman of means and pronounced refinement. Splendid platters of East-meets-West cuisine go a long way toward lightening the mood, although I may have miscalculated with a story of youthful erotic triumph: eating too much foie gras at a dinner party and barely managing to complete the sex act without throwing up all over the object of my affection. For some reason my date seemed unamused. Maybe it's a guy thing.

At that point it seemed advisable to steer the conversation around to safer and more inclusive subjects. Now that Miami's the winter White House for the famous, the fashionable, and the good looking, society is one long regret: You're either pissed if uninvited or bewildered when the social scramble does pay off. Only the celebrated needed to apply at Chris Blackwell's gathering at the Marlin Hotel, held in honor of U2's Bono and Adam Clayton, the protocol list encompassing Quincy Jones, Kate Moss, and Johnny Depp. And just for a smattering of sociosexual friction -- the mark of any good party -- Naomi Campbell materialized, maintaining a chilly distance from ex-boyfriend Clayton.

It's a small world after all: Jimmy Buffett (now working on a rock opera called Don't Stop the Carnival) and Bono running into some trouble -- the police mistakenly firing at their plane -- on the way down to Blackwell's Jamaican estate. That must have been an interesting vacation experience. As was, no doubt, Regine inviting Egon von Furstenberg and Diane Sawyer, of all people, to her Caribbean retreat. Up or down the status scale, a comp is a comp.

Unfortunately, my whining about other people's fame and fortune exhausted my date, who left early and missed all the action. In the mood for an after-dinner stroll and some research on a recent civic movement to tighten the noose around porn shops, I crossed Fifth Street and uncovered the Pleasure Emporium. Still vital at this point, it's a virtual Home Depot of pornography A gay, straight, what have you -- with a one-stop shopping approach. The usual dildos and such, along with some interesting fringe material: videos of big-stick wonders actually screwing themselves, plus a series of Virgin Lust movies, the virgins invariably sporting biker tattoos. For private screenings, there's the back room with handy paper towel dispensers. All of us can get behind the masturbation concept, but the little loverboy who subtly suggested that I join him in a booth was sadly mistaken. He wasn't even cute -- or, more important, famous.