COLUMN ONE : Miami, So Lovely and Bizarre : Bodies wash ashore. The mayor packs a Beretta. For robbers, it helps to be bilingual. A reporter reflects on 15 years of living amid beauty and covering the macabre.

The memories are mostly of beauty and weirdness, of sunbeams that made the bay waters sparkle like a carpet of gems and of news stories that seemed to warp toward the surreal in this city’s subtropical heat.

At times, the beautiful and the bizarre layered over each other the way they would in a Salvador Dali painting. Always, the sky was the most luminous of blue; often, the world below the most haunting of dreamscapes.

There was the morning when dead Haitian boat people washed ashore onto the talcum-soft beaches behind the luxury high-rises, first five, then 10, then 20, until every shape in the mesmerizing surf seemed a corpse.

There were the evenings, woefully repeated, when racial combustion lit into ghastly towers of smoke. The police fanned out in riot gear, and the streets took on an unsteady pulse, the pinging of gunfire and the smashing of glass.

There was the night when a hurricane wind sent palm fronds rolling across the sand like tumbleweeds through a ghost town. Civil defense teams rushed to evacuate nursing homes near the oceanfront.

Without medication or caretakers, the confused residents were dispersed into the expedient shelter of a convention hall. I roamed among them with a spiral notebook. Four of them asked me the same question: “Are you my son?”

This has been my job, observer of other people’s pleasures and pains, a newspaperman in Miami. Now, after 15 years, leaving for another place, there is an inevitable incompleteness and an urge to write a few final things.

Did I say the city is beautiful and weird?

Miami is an enchantress who comes on to you with hot breath and moist lips. She likes tourists the best and used to coax them onto the dance floor for a fox trot and a hora, though it is now more often a samba and a merengue.

A metropolitan knockout, the city is confident of its good looks and sunny disposition, yet, at important moments, it somehow manages to appear hideous.

Honchos of the National Hockey League recently met here, choosing sites for new franchises. Miami wanted one. Instead of showing off its pretty face, the city broke out in untimely hives, suffering its fifth riot in a decade.

The previous street rebellion had come in January, 1989, a week before Super Bowl XXIII, when 1,500 reporters were in town searching for a pregame angle. They could watch the sporadic fires from their hotel windows.

That same year, the producers of TV’s “Today” show decided to broadcast from balmy Miami only to endure the worst cold snap since “The CBS Morning News” had tried to do the same thing three years before.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II led an outdoor Mass. He almost made it to Holy Communion before an electrical storm chased him indoors. Lightning cut off the TV transmissions that would have shared his prayers for Miami with the world.

There is a tendency to defend this city, to say it is soulful and fun and a lot safer than presumed. There is not as much shooting as you’d think, you tell people: Really, Miami is a great place. Really, no need to pack heat.

But the convincing is hard. Just reading the newspaper is like watching an Indiana Jones movie. The stunning and macabre are frequent and routine.

People are strangled with dead snakes or murdered in their autos for making a left turn too slowly. Body parts get fished from the bay. A decayed finger is discovered at the prison, wedged in a hollowed-out part of an inmate’s Bible.

A buffalo herd is loosed on the turnpike. The school board excuses a first grader so she can partake in the animal sacrifices of a Santeria priestess. Clusters of police officers always seem to be on trial for homicide.

Miami’s elite are alert to such occurrences. When prominent civic leaders David and Dorothy Weaver were burglarized in 1989, an Uzi semiautomatic assault rifle was stolen from their bedroom. David had bought it on impulse.

“It’s like when you go to a dress shop and (they) push a particular item,” explained Dorothy, recent head of the Chamber of Commerce. “That day I guess the salesman was saying this was the best particular gun to buy.”

Miami Beach Mayor Alex Daoud owns four semiautomatic handguns and a night sight. Acting U.S. Atty. Dexter Lehtinen has lost two AR-15 assault-type rifles to robbers.

Thieves stole Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez’s car in 1987, making off with the .380-caliber Beretta in his briefcase. He got a new pistol. A few months ago, he flashed it at the intruders who held his wife at gunpoint in the family room.

Eccentricities have come to be a hallmark of Miami officialdom. “Animal House” has nothing on City Hall; nor does “The Price is Right.”

In the Hot Suit Case, a Who’s Who of spiffy Miami residents--among them a city commissioner, the statewide prosecutor and a police sergeant--were found to have shopped at a duplex with huge racks of clothes in every room.

Designer garments carried expensive retail tags from department stores such as Bloomingdale’s, but the new prices had been marked down by a very reasonable 90%. The formalities of sales tax were overlooked.

“I had no knowledge whatsoever the merchandise could have been stolen,” said one of the best customers, Sergio Pereira, then the county manager. “I don’t think anyone who went there could have imagined it.”

Two years ago, shame even befell the usually heroic Miami Fire Department. Herman Skinner complained after he was handcuffed by several of his fellow firefighters; one of them had rubbed his genitals on the bound man’s scalp.

At first, this was thought to be an isolated incident of harassment. But city investigators later learned it was a fairly common way to pass time at the station house. The firefighters had a name for it: Scrotum on the Head.

One hot afternoon, a crowd of nearly 500 people, some sipping lemonade and others bouncing children on their shoulders, waited six hours in a shopping plaza for detectives to remove two bodies from the trunk of a gold Lincoln.

The deceased had already begun to smell. Police attempted to wall off the gruesome scene with vans, but onlookers crawled under the vehicles or climbed atop their own cars after hurrying home for binoculars.

“Only in Miami,” was the reaction of many to the event, not because of the double murder--common enough in other cities--but because of the casual manner of the onlookers. It was as if Miami residents felt entitled to such diversion.

There is a civic pride in the city’s wildness, in living in a place of mysteries and intrigues and extremes. People wonder aloud: What is the weirdest thing to happen here, and the choice is most often “the head.”

A naked man cut off his girl friend’s head and carried it by the hair through a quiet neighborhood. He finally stopped along one of the city’s busiest streets. He hurled the memento at a passing cop.

“Arrest her . . . she’s the devil,” he shouted as the stunned policeman moved closer. The head landed on the ground and rolled a few feet. The man rushed to retrieve it. He threw it again.

Of course, bizarre things most often happen to other people, not to you. The rest of the city watches from a safe distance on the evening news. Only rarely do the innocent bear witness. One who did was Jorge Luis Gonzalez.

On a Saturday night, he was taken to police headquarters to tell what he saw of a barroom shooting. He was happy to help, and, after being questioned, he was offered a ride home by Detective Tony Rodriguez.

Just wait here, the detective said. But then there was a mix-up. Rodriguez went off duty, and the witness sat patiently in the unlocked fifth-floor interrogation room for the rest of the day.

He also waited Sunday, then Monday, then Tuesday too. There was nothing for him to eat or drink. He urinated in a plastic foam cup.

“What are you doing here?” curious police officers occasionally asked.

“I’m waiting for Detective Rodriguez,” the dutiful witness replied.

Reporters earn adequate salaries, but nothing that would have permitted me to live in Los Angeles in the style I enjoyed in Miami.

My apartment’s balcony hovered over the bay. The water view held a backdrop of the colorfully lit downtown skyline and the nation’s busiest cruise ship port. Dolphins swam in the front yard, and pelicans sunned on the dock.

Management was obliging, and the upkeep of the pool, sauna and hot tub was superb. It startled me to find a photograph of the building in the newspaper. The government alleged it was part of a cocaine cartel’s sizable holdings.

This city holds such occasional surprises, the suburban home that turns out to be a drug lab, the office space used as a base for counterrevolutionaries, the hotel that offers discounts for vacationing Contra “freedom fighters.”

In 1988, county commissioners declared “Leonel Martinez Day” and renamed a street for the socially prominent, politically connected developer.

The honors barely preceded the indictments by a year. Martinez, it turns out, is a drug smuggler. He is also an alleged murderer.

About 40% of the people who live here are foreign-born. It is useful to speak Spanish as well as English, and those who have not schooled themselves in at least two cultures can be seriously disadvantaged.

Three masked men barged into the Tequendama Restaurant, one sticking a gun into a kitchen worker’s chest. “Where’s the money?” the robber demanded.

The man was stymied to answer. “I don’t speak English,” he apologized. So the gunman turned toward two waiters, who also failed to understand. All around, people were shrugging. Finally, the exasperated thieves left.

Moises Faroy, a recently freed political prisoner from Cuba, settled his family into a modest Miami home, and most of them were watching TV when detectives came to the front door.

The investigators merely wanted to ask a few questions about a kidnaping, but to the Faroys, the sight of armed men meant only one possibility: Castro’s agents were there to kill them. Faroy’s brother opened fire with a pistol.

In the ensuing gun battle, Moises hid his young son in a bedroom closet and then hurriedly made a phone call. Finally, he too joined in the fierce shootout until a high-powered slug ripped through his chest and killed him.

The number he had dialed was 911, pleading for the police to help.

The most important man in this city’s history has not been here in 35 years. He resides in Havana. On weekends, dozens of Cuban exiles still gather in the Everglades, wearing Army surplus fatigues and practicing to kill him.

Fidel Castro’s communist revolution inadvertently transformed Miami from a dowdy resort into the prosperous capital of Latin America. In 1960, only 5% of the city was Latino; now the percentage is nine times that.

The immigrants are primarily Cubans. They hate the bearded Red brute who uprooted them. It is as if Judas himself were alive, operating the business he began with his 30 pieces of silver.

In 1986, a rumor skipped lip to lip that Castro had died. Radio stations broadcast the hopeful news. There was dancing in the streets, and people broke open the good whiskey.

As things turned out, Fidel had only given up smoking cigars, a possible sign of ill health but nothing decidedly fatal. Still, it got officials to thinking. What will Miami do when the Cuban dictator falls?

Since then, there has been planning. The celebration will be tremendous. It is expected to take place in the Orange Bowl.

Miami is notorious for race riots; there is one about every two years. This owes to the horrid poverty and powerlessness of the city’s blacks--and also to the periodic killing of unarmed black men by white police officers.

In 1980, four cops were acquitted after they were accused of beating to death insurance man Arthur McDuffie. The all-white jury agreed that something very wrong had happened, but the details were so hard to sort out it simply let everyone go.

Eighteen people--black and white--died in the cruel, spontaneous violence that followed. I recall running toward a crowd of people who were battering automobiles, overturning them and setting them ablaze.

My aim was to gather quotes to explain their fury. The verdict had outraged me too, but in my ardor I overlooked the obvious, that I was easier to pound on than a car. Only the coincident arrival of 50 police officers rescued me.

Two years later, I again found myself in the midst of inflamed resentments and burning vehicles. Three black teen-agers walked toward me. As a white man trying to calibrate the racial heat, I sensed danger. But I kept still.

This motionlessness was rooted--I hope--in humanism. Who knew for sure what these teens wanted? I thought it wrong to make a hasty judgment.

As they got closer, the one in the center became the spokesman. He pulled a brick from behind his back and said: “We want what’s in your pockets.”

I had once been a competitive sprinter, and my guess was that I could race away. This presumption turned out to be correct, though there was an obvious flaw to such a hastily devised escape. I did not outrun the brick.

Why did I stay in Miami so long? This is a fascinating place, a good news town, so beautiful and weird. But 15 years? Why?

Sometimes, I think I chose to stay because of that inexplicable wisdom known as intuition. Good things seemed about to happen. And indeed, in my last years here, I married. We have a child. The Earth spins reliably on its axis.

But other times I think the strong glue that held me was nothing more than inertia. I don’t lead my life so much as follow it. Life does the leading.

So who knows? Maybe I was only waiting for the sheer sake of waiting--obediently waiting, as people do, for the return of Detective Rodriguez.