* * *
Pete cast a long look about the room with drooped eyes and let out a sigh. “This is so depressing.”
Our apartment was a shadow of what it had once been. The charm had been sapped from the empty white rooms. The bad mermaid paintings in vibrant colours had been taken down and sent off, and the crazed patterned fabrics packed up in boxes.Where there were once records and stray beer bottles and bowls there was now only long unbroken stretches of plain carpet. On the walls were faint traces of the scribbles that had once been in orange and red, big beautiful women with raven hair and naked breasts.
Pete and I stood in front of the walls and stared. We were the only ones left to scrub it all away as if it had never existed.
“Don’t think of it that way, Pete.” I dipped the brush and streams of white paint tumbled onto the carpet. Shit. We would get charged for that. “You excited for graduation?”
“Yeah. Especially for our guest speaker. Not a Clinton. Not even a Democrat. Have you heard who we’re getting? John Iraq McCain.”
“That’s the gift we get for having his daughter in our class. Maybe you should pull a Parker and stick it in a vein.”
Pete rolled his tongue around inside his cheek. “So long as I’m acquiring his bad habits, I could start beating women.”
I flicked the brush towards the wall. “Charlie Parker didn’t beat women.”
“He did too. Said it was his way of showing the world that there’s no such thing as black and white.” The red Crayola woman glared from under fresh shards of white paint. “Are we going to turn out just like our parents?”
“Never. But we'll probably turn out like our grandparents,” I admitted. “Swings and roundabouts, you know. Then our kids will rebel and do what we always meant to.”
Pete shook his head. “No one will remember anything we do.”
“I won't forget. I’ll remember for you. And don’t forget, we still have the summer too.”
“But the fall,” Pete mourned. “What about the fall?”
“Who knows?” I smiled. “And isn't it wonderful?”
"I wonder what I'm going to do.”
"Anything you want to.”
“I think I want to teach.” Pete hesitated. “My parents are going to hate me."
"Let them.”
While our fresh white creation melted away, the question then remained of what to do with our day.
In between tousles of fallen hair, Pete's eyes drifted upwards and he breezily mentioned Coney Island, and I had nothing to do save something in the Village, but that was evening, hours away. The beach was now not a question, but a necessity. So we disappeared into the subway and began the long trek to Coney Island.
Under the wash of the water the Q train hissed like it was tunneling under a thousand seas. Despite the clanking metal and worn facade, there was a solemn beauty that came with facing each other in the rusting car as the city smeared past, our cameras held tenderly in our laps.
Like the West, Coney Island had been financed by the railroad kings. Ten miles from Manhattan but still a Bedlam by the sea. Lindbergh said it was better than flying across the Atlantic. Freud said it was the only thing he liked in the country.
Once seventy thousand people gathered to watch the rides burn down and the concert halls still played on. It was built back with each coming decade, glittering and anew after each blaze. That is, until all the people stopped coming.
Now once you got up close it was all creaking hinges and rust chain link fences. The rides were all closed – not that there were many left.
"Es la vida," Pete murmured, his non sequiteur motto to life.
We wanted to ride the Cyclone, but didn’t really mind. As long as the beach was open, and deserted, we were fine.
Pete and I stretched out on silk and sat in the sun, with rose champagne rising to our lips, and pink streams coursing and running down our mouths like hungry tears.
I stared out at the black water and wondered where I belonged next. Whereas the city before had represented college, the piles of books on my desks and various friends and acquaintances that scattered through my life, it now seemed to hold a different pulse, now so close to graduation, no longer merely a place to hang my hat for a few years, now tied up in that inescapable question of where I was living, what I chose to do with my life after. The word dripped out thick and slow. After. A question so simple before, and now so entangled. Where I choose to live.
While beautiful, in its own decaying way, with the rotting boardwalk fitting your buoyant step, Coney Island still felt far from home. I knew I was not going back to the Midwest, for that was never home, but rather just where the foundation of my house sat, but nothing comforting, rather just familiarity set in stone. California sounded weird enough for me – the Pacific Ocean was on distant shores waving, but I couldn't commit myself to anything. I could fly off and move to Amsterdam or London or Barcelona, but I didn't know if any of those could satisfy the swelling within me either.
Nor was I quite sure if I was quite ready to leave, even though the city felt as if I was walking through my past, or through some kind of dream.
I wanted to roll forwards, to chase something onwards, beyond these iron gated walls and through the highways that lay stretched before me. I had to strike out. It was time for a new era. After all, we can't keep ourselves stuck in the past forever.
But then why did the island still call my name? Why did I still want to be on a little green hill with flocks of sheep, writing for hours in the shade?
I’m not going to save the world, and I’m not running for president so that I can ruin it. All I needed was a piece of paper somewhere I could occupy myself with little other than the waves crashing on the shore and paddling my board out to the horizon. Why not on its southern tip, playing guitar with the dolphins? Napping among the swaying grass, drifting on the breeze. Where all my thoughts could float above the clouds over the sea?
Tell me, great sea, I thought as I dreamed back to that blue, who needs Aphrodite? Who needs a muse? When one has the treacherous folly of youth! For I still had dreams at night of the island, and that city and her single spire. And if I were a billionaire, I’d fill that island full of spires, so all the kids could come and climb until they reach the pretty lights. And when there dawns that sweet sunrise and pink fills up the city skies they will not it’s not all lies passing by behind their eyes. Maybe I couldn’t just leave the island behind.
In the meanwhile, there was the metal beach, with bottles and white garbage scattered through the sand like snow, the soft lapping water against the peals of a beaten sun. Pete and I flopped down on the sand.
As the sun began to set the buildings started up their soft glow – but something was different. Instead of the pretty white late night fantasy lights the city had always been there were a thousand new glowing colors instead. There buildings were lit low with amber, and daffodil underneath. Beneath the purple clouds and surrealist smear of sienna the buildings twinkled in the distance like a thousand Christmas ornaments. And for the first time, though I had spent so many nights inside the city, I could see it from a distance. The city was changing.
“What’s happening?” I breathed.
“I’m not sure,” Pete said. “I think it has something to do with the energy crisis.”
“Did you know that the meaning behind Manhattan is ‘land of a thousand hills’?” Pete said, his gaze far off in the distance. “That’s what this used to be. And there were lakes, and rivers” – he swept a hand over the buildings – “and all this was rolling green.” Pete shook his head. “And people think New York is ugly.”
“At present I am cursed,” Rimbaud said, and for the moment I agree. “I abhor my fatherland. Let the towns sparkle in the evening… the best of all is a very drunken sleep, on the beach.”
Pete pulled out the antennae of the radio he had brought along with, turned the volume all the way up… and suddenly there was music, picked
up all at once at Coney Island on the beach, and by the Park Avenue drivers of limousines, and lonely writers and brokers on Wall Street.
As the sun pulled slow across the sky we fell into a drunken sleep, bellies sinking in the sand, snug and snoring under the yawning chain jaws of the city.
Pete and I were there for each other, but we were mostly there for ourselves, bellies sinking in the sand, making an hour-long subway trip away from Manhattan to remind ourselves of the worlds that lay beyond its gated waterfronts. Imploring not to let it kill your soul, begging you to stay alive, to remember that when the world gets you low, all you need is a beach – and the Q line will take you there.
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