Miami Herald - December 22, 2003
Margaria Fichtner, mfichtner@herald.com

Off and on from 1993 and 1995, Rodriguez had flickered through the Miami Beach Botanical Garden like a shadow. Depressed by his mother's death and, though he did not yet know it, terribly ill with hepatitis and HIV, he had ended up here after he lost will, then hope, then everything else. Born in Miami into a family of 18 children, he had not finished high school, and his life had not been easy. But he says he always could find a job: dog groomer, restaurant manager, house-sitter, even the guy in the Zorro costume who springs from the cake at women's parties.

But now "I couldn't think about work, so I lost my job. I was being evicted. All my furniture was outside in front of the building, and things got worse." Grazing in dumpsters, too proud to beg, sleeping in the leaves or some nights just walking, walking, "roaming like a predator because I didn't feel secure." Beaten up once because someone wanted his sneakers -- sneakers more desired than he was, a lesson even more bitter once the fence went up here, and he lost this place, too: ' 'Oh, my camp! It's gone.' So I had to find somewhere else." One place he found was the airport where he was arrested for stealing a briefcase, a desperate stupidity for which he eventually served 60 days. "I thought I could use the items inside it to sell." Finally, down to 85 pounds, he hobbled up Biscayne Boulevard to a vacant lot where he collapsed onto an abandoned mattress and, he says, waited to die.

In fact, when Rodriguez first turned up here, this 4 -acre plot behind the Miami Beach Convention Center was a brambly mess, a squat for the anonymous and forgotten and a heartache to those who still recalled its sun-kissed past as a seat for the city's four most prestigious garden clubs. Opened in 1962 under the thumb of the city parks department, the garden had been home to a famous orchid collection and the setting for an annual flower show that radiated tradition and earned pride, but with time there were gloomy budget cuts, and the clubs' membership rolls aged and dwindled. The neglected orchids died; weeds prickled. Visitors, when they came at all, went away muttering "Our backyard looks better than this."

The garden scratched along, of course, as gardens do, as people do, but "it looked like hell," says Steve Grundstein, a retired New York criminal defense lawyer who now serves as secretary of the Miami Beach Garden Conservancy, which manages the property under contract with the city. "I went on a bike ride on Sunday morning and came upon this place. It looked haunted. It smelled. There were feral cats. The conservatory, which has since been removed, . . . had broken glass shards falling. . . . I had no idea what I had come upon. Now it's changed so much, as has Peter's life."

No other landscapes play so deeply into our weakness for metaphor as do gardens, with their ripe implications for uprooting and severing, for imposed order, for covetousness and luxury but mostly for their miracles of beauty and second chances. Peter Rodriguez could have died on that mattress, but he did not. A Camillus House outreach specialist found him, nudged him.

"I remember the sun," he says, 'and I kept hearing a voice. 'Are you OK? Are you OK?' I opened my eyes and said, 'Oh, my God. Is this heaven?' And she said, 'No. You're in a vacant lot, and I want to help you.' I said, 'You mean I'm not dead? You're not an angel?' And she said, 'No.' And the first word out of my mouth was 'Damn.' I thought this was my escape. . . ." Funneled through homeless-assistance and health-care pipelines, Rodriguez eventually landed in the Salvation Army's Allapattah residence for people with or affected by AIDS. "Initially, he was not so gracious, because he was very sick, and he was angry," says Gussie Flynn, the Community Partnership for Homeless grants manager who was then the Army's director of social services. "But he just had the gift of gab, and we saw his strengths." Rodriguez volunteered to organize the agency's give-away clothing shop. "He loves clothes, . . . He took it over," says Flynn, laughing. "Then he started leading tours." A 1998 issue of The Camillus House Clarion featured Rodriguez's "personal story of how one client changes his life and is sticking with it." Finally, as his health improved, Rodriguez came back to South Beach and moved into a half-way house.

And then: Three years ago when the restaurant in which he had been waiting tables was about to close, Peter Rodriguez walked back into this garden to apply for part-time work running the old gift shop. "We felt like he was friendly and appropriate," says Claire Tomlin, the veteran Miami Beach activist who was then executive director. Tomlin and Rodriguez had known each other casually for years -- she used to eat at a restaurant where he worked -- and "when you need somebody, you need somebody," she says. "We thought he would be reliable and willing to get involved."

Now, on this late fall afternoon exactly three years later, the garden looks glorious, manicured blade by blade, its new orchids bowing welcome near the front gate. The place has 400 members now, twice as many as three years ago, and Laura Jamieson, the new executive director, has marching orders to recruit more. "We said the other day at a meeting that we would give free memberships if people would volunteer their time," says conservancy president Donna O'Higgins. "We need hands." And, they all insist: We need Peter. Rodriguez works full-time now as facilities director, a sort of catch-all shorthand for if-you-needsomething-done-quickly-go-get-YouKnowWho. Job description: handyman, special-events guy, janitor, flower arranger, tour guide, good-will ambassador, cat caretaker, conjurer, sprite.

Joyce Yaffe, who was the garden's executive director until she left a few months ago for a similar position at Casa Casuarina, met Rodriguez when she was thinking about coming to work here and dropped by for a quiet little look-see. "And he popped out of the bushes and started telling me all about the garden and the plans for it, and he didn't know me from Adam," Yaffe says. 'I was blown away. . . . He makes friends with people almost instantly, no matter who they are. I remember he came into my office one day and said, 'I have somebody here . . . who wants to meet you,' and it was the vice president of GM, who was here for the boat show."

At 50, Rodriguez cuts a natty, graceful figure as he whirls among the palms. He has a big, toothy grin, an endearing gift for fractured syntax ("I was trying to pacify the time") and an invested eye, plucking an offensive bit of litter from a path, nodding to the squirrel he calls Possum. "We never knew he would take on such an important role," O'Higgins says. "The more he's given, the more he seems able to assume. I think we saved his life." "Peter, I put three candles on it," conservancy member Victoria DiNardo-Montifiore says, inching forward the flower-trimmed chocolate decadence she has baked to celebrate Rodriguez's anniversary. "But I didn't bring any. . . ." "They're here!" Rodriguez chortles, fishing in his pocket for matches. "If it wasn't for him. . . ," muses interior designer Viviana LaBoy, who threw a Halloween party for 250 old school pals at the garden. "He loaned us tables. I had rented tables, but I didn't think about bar tables. He helped me out with the decorations. He's got great ideas. . . . He makes everybody feel welcome. The building was supposed to close at 12, and my party lasted until 2 in the morning. He wasn't uptight. He was having a great time, too."

'People sometimes ask me, 'Do you live here?' " Rodriguez says, 'and you know what I think? I think, 'If you only knew.' "

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