Sag Harbor (6 page)
“That's trespassing,” NP said.
Bobby raised the binoculars. “It looks like two fags holding hands,” he said.
It was the heyday of fag. Get a bunch of teenage virgins and future premature ejaculators together, and you were going to
hear fag
a lot. Get a bunch of kids together who felt punked out in various ways, and the collective mind sought ways to punk out others. A touch of homophobia was also good for hiding any nascent predilections and/or yearnings lurking about. Binoculars: a device that facilitates looking down on people.
“They better not try to come up here,” NP said. “I'll bust their ass.”
“Shit, you'd be like, ‘Come up here, sailor, I just dropped the soap.’”
“Dag.”
It was also the heyday of dag. Dag was bitter acknowledgment of the brutish machinery of the world. It was a glimpse into the cruel void, as evidenced by the fact that it was often followed by “That was cold.” In the heyday of dag, we accepted our duty to call attention to such moments, taking turns at this minor masochism. It passed the time.
I took the binoculars from Bobby. The intruders were actually a middle-aged man and woman, soft and shuffling. They clutched their shoes and dug their toes into the damp sand. Every few steps, one of them pointed at some feature of the landscape—the lighthouse squatting on its nest of rocks, the green Mohawk of seaweed on a black stone, the pale carcass of an overturned horseshoe crab—as their companion gaped in wonder. The gender confusion—apart from some wishful thing on NP's part, as he was always trying to start some shit—came from their shapeless clothes, the way they disappeared into the T-shirt–khaki shorts combo that was the official uniform of tourists the world over.
“We should go down there and tell them to get off our beach,” Bobby said. He lived in Ninevah, down the way, hence his interest in keeping the sands undefiled by outsiders, but everybody in the developments, whether they lived on the beach or not, felt that selfish
tug of ownership when they saw strangers—i.e., white people—on our little stretch. Most of the strollers came from the Public Beach, visiting friends for the afternoon and then letting their curiosity draw them toward Azurest. We made noises of outrage, but never did anything. There was an older lady or two of the first generation who were known to fly across the sand and admonish strangers that dogs weren't allowed on the beach, if the people in question happened to be chaperoning some yapping enthusiast off-leash, but mostly we grumbled to remind ourselves we had rights to assert, and that was enough.
Already the couple was turning back. Visitors never made it that far up the beach in those days. Watching them slow down, stop for a conference, and then turn back made you an audience to a familiar pantomime. Something was off. Everyone was brown. The ladies plopped on striped beach chairs and towels, the kids stirring sand with plastic shovels and chipped clamshells. They were every shade in the dessert menu of words beloved by romance novelists to describe African American skin, chocolate and caramel, butterscotch and mocha. Black eyes glared down from the beach houses, the lookouts on the decks of our armada. Yes, something is off, let's head back.
They rarely made it past the Rock. The Rock was a few houses down from ours and a powerful psychological meridian. Kids told each other, “I'll race you to the Rock,” because it was an impossible, panting distance. Parents warned, “Don't go past the Rock,” to keep their offspring in view as they gossiped and sipped Fresca. Parents let their attention lapse, argued, flirted, dozed—as long as the kids didn't stray past the Rock, nothing would happen to them. Perhaps this has happened to you, on beaches: you start drifting off while lying on a beach blanket, close your eyes and shut down your ears only to find yourself revisiting some personal torment still powerful enough after all these years to suck you into its undertow. Don't know what I'm talking about? Never mind. Take my word, friend, the Rock was an anchor to keep you from drifting too far.
It was our almanac, registering all things tidal, every off-season cataclysm. In the autumn and winter, nor'easters came to play in Sag
Harbor Bay, big dumb children that never cleaned up after themselves. The great storms mucked up sand in impressive tonnage, shoving the tide line snug up to the beach grass one year, almost no place to walk, then clawing it back the next year so that low tide became a strictly ankle affair, wearying you to get halfway wet. Wade, wade, wade. You never knew how much beach you were going to see at the start of the summer, what kind of state the Rock was going to be in that year. This season, the Rock was high and proud, next season it had been brought down low, up to its neck in sand. But it was always a real trooper, bird-shitted and buried or no. After eons of being kicked around by glaciers, and then deposited on some random strip of beach, it must be hard to faze you.
The Rock, the Creek, the Point: the increments of our existence. Earth, solar system, galaxy. The shallow waves of the Creek put an end to the line of beach houses, and on the opposite bank the wetland outskirts of East Hampton whispered in their eternal huddle. Watching over a scrabble of inhospitable beach, the wetlands curved up to Barcelona Neck, aka the Point, and beyond that maps failed. Even the animals changed, so extreme the border between Sag Harbor and East Hampton. Crescent rinds of dried-out sand sharks littered the shore and this new breed of horseflies, the juvenile delinquents of their set, taunted and nipped the whole way to the Point, trying to suck the moisture on your legs. The Horsefly Shuffle was the one dance I could do, no hassle: bat at thighs and calves, skitter a few feet in a serpentine style, repeat. Also: shout “Dag!” whenever a horsefly raised a welt. Who knew what kind of fauna lurked around the bend of Barcelona Neck? Pterodactyls wearing ascots and sipping gin and tonics, trust-fund duck-billed platypuses complaining about “the help.” It was all hoity-toity over there.
When we were small, we were impatient for the day when we'd be able to undertake an expedition out to the Point. Sandwiches in baggies, orange soda, baleful glances backward after the soothing sight of our homes. By 1985, we knew it wasn't worth it, and had decided the same was true of the entire beach. This grousing about beach rights and intruders was beside the point because we never
hung out down there anymore. The beach was for little kids and old people. We preferred the ocean, on the other side of the island. Especially now that we had access to a car. The ocean, in fact, was our destination that afternoon, once the guys finally showed up.
So forget the beach and the rest of it, the quality of the sunrises and sunsets … although it must be said that those two things were top-notch. Waking up early in that house was science-fiction stuff. The sky over the wetlands was a fine, simmering blue, slowly boiling up morning. Before you lay the dead, misty surface of the bay, an imperturbable line of dark gray, a slab of ancient stone come out from under the earth. A reversal there: the sky was liquid, the water a solid screen. There were fewer boats then to zit the surface of the bay. No one to be seen at that hour, emboldening that cherished dread of early risers, that you were the only being alive and awake in the world. Occasionally some drowsily dipping seagull shot into the water after low-tide crab, seized its quarry in its beak, and swooped back up to the sky, dropping the bits of shell after it nuzzled out the meat so that the dead pieces briefly rippled the water before all was silent again. A mute, primordial theater.
Sunsets unfolded above the big houses in North Haven. The sunset made it appear that the sun and the sky were not separate things but different states of the same magnificent substance—as if the sky were a weakened diluted form of the sun, the blue and the white merely drained-away elements of the swirling red-and-orange disk sitting on the horizon. I'll wager on this: the sunsets closed the deal for that first generation, the ones who came here originally, my grandparents and their crew. After walking down through the woods off Hempstead Street, the meek trails that would one day be roads, it must have been wondrous to emerge on that unspoiled beach and see that sunset. No houses, no footprints even, just beach grass whispering to itself. Saying—what? You'd have to spend some time to learn its language. That first generation asked, Can we make it work? Will they allow us to have this? It doesn't matter what the world says, they answered each other. This place is ours. Over the
years I have learned that the sunrises and sunsets of that beach are rare and astonishing but I did not know this then. Sunset meant that the damned gnats were coming out, that was it.
NP SAID
, “Benji, can I get a Coke?” His head was in the refrigerator.
Cokes were no problem. My parents kept a healthy store of mixers and such. With their friends coming up from the beach for drinks, and now me and Reggie's gang spending so much time hanging out on our couch all day, they had adjusted their mixers supply. Food was something else, however, with Reggie and me on rations.
That summer we switched from a Kid with the Pool–based hanging out economy to a Kid with the Empty House–based hanging out economy. Before his family moved to California and he stopped coming out, Kevin had been our Kid with the Pool, and the fact that we never saw his mother made it a prelude to the days of Empty Houses. I think I saw her once, when I was little. I think. We knew someone was in there—the afternoon soaps blared kissing music or about-to-kiss music through the windows and once in a while a hand clawed back the curtains overlooking the pool area. Safe to say we were unsupervised. As we horsed around in the pool, we pretended that we lived in a world without parents, but actually it didn't take that much pretending.
We'd been moving toward Empty House status for a while. For years, we'd skulked in basement rec rooms, on screened porches, played tag on cracked patios. We heard footsteps above, inside, over there, but never saw who they belonged to. In every house there were secret rooms with locked doors and if you asked who was in there watching TV, the kid always said, “My grandma,” in the same dead tone. The moms ran through their summer itinerary, off to the beach with a folding chair under one arm and an overflowing wicker bag in the other, off to “a luncheon,” a cocktail party in the Hills, or an art opening in the backyard of someone who had a cousin with a bunch of friends who were said to be talented and known in Harlem
galleries. The dads were in the city, making money, making something happen, reappearing on the Friday evening 7:25 train in East Hampton, staggering off the club car with big smiles: Showtime.
That summer we just made it official. Reggie and I were the Kids with the Empty House, and the gang changed their schedules and routes accordingly. Our parents only came out on weekends, which meant that now me and Reggie had the place to ourselves most of the week. Our sister, Elena, used to be the one in charge, bossing us around with such relish that history's great lesson, “Power corrupts,” played out in intimate scale in our living room. How we cringed as she kept us in line with her powerful club, “I'll tell Daddy on you.” But she was gone now. Once you were old enough to go to college, you stopped coming out to Sag. It was kids' stuff, it was too bourgie, the city summoned, etc. Graduate from high school, and you graduated from Sag as well. Until you were called back.
“You're men now,” my father told me when I asked who was going to look after us. “You can take care of yourselves.” Men? A compliment and a curse: no more excuses, no one to blame. At first I thought he was joking. But there we were—me and Reggie alone during the week, and my parents only coming out on weekends. If then.
Now that we had a free house, what did we do with it? Sit around and talk shit. That day it was me, NP, and Bobby. Reggie was working at Burger King. The smell of Reggie's grease-infused clothes crept from our bedroom, from the corner where he tossed his work duds, making us hungry whenever a breeze swept through.
“You want sprinkles with that Coke?” Bobby asked. NP had a job at Jonni Waffle, the new ice-cream joint in town, and when we went to visit him for freebies we taunted him over the stupid shit he had to say all day. Whip on top, waffle cone, slob your knob? NP had also been ribbing Bobby about his “Scarsdale mansion” lately, causing Bobby to push back a little.
“Shut up, you pleather Members Only–wearin' motherfucker,” NP said. Which might appear to be a non sequitur, as Bobby was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, but there was history there, context. It
was a reference to some intel from Clive, who had informed us that he'd run into Bobby during the school year, and described how Bobby was wearing a Windbreaker that looked suspiciously like a knockoff Members Only jacket. No small misdemeanor, that, and Clive's alpha-dog status only magnified the dis.
The trend that summer, insult-wise, was toward grammatical acrobatics, the unlikely collage. One smashed a colorful and evocative noun or proper noun into a pejorative, gluing them together with an-in' verb. I'm not sure of the syntactical parentage of the-in' verbs, so I'll just call them the-in' verbs. Verbal noun, gerundlike creature, cog in the adjectival machine, who knew—as was the case with some of the people in my living room, there was a little uncertainty in the bloodlines. “Lookin'” was a common-in' verb. Like so:
