Sag Harbor

  “We're on the list,” NP said. “U.T.F.O. put us on their list.”

  Freddie roused a paw and consulted his sheets. Perhaps he'd had an earlier career in civil service. “They don't have anyone down here.”

  “We have to be there,” NP said, a bit frantic now.

  “Even if you were on the list, I can't let these little girls in. You two maybe, but these little girls? They'd shut us down.”

  Another flameout at the gates of Bayside. We'd seen it before all summer, the broken faces and the inevitable stunned drifting-away. I followed. There was no use. We marched off to the grass.

  Erica said, “He called us little girls.”

  “We're not little girls,” her cousin said.

  NP straightened. “Well, I'm going in.”

  “What about us?”

  “You heard him,” NP said. “They'd get shut down. I'm sorry, baby.” A soldier explaining the facts of war.

  “You can't just leave us out here.”

  “What do you expect me to do? Miss the concert?”

  “Bobby,” Devon said, “I want you to take me home.”

  “Me, too!”

  Bobby looked like he'd swallowed a bucket of fishhooks.

  “We're not going to walk, motherfucker,” Devon said.

  • • •

  THE GIRLS AND THEIR DRIVER LEFT. I'd like to say that NP and Erica's bond was strong enough to survive this little contretemps, but it was not to be. Shit was tense. In the following days, Bobby's refusal to honor his debt and NP's constant griping that he “need to get paid,” pitted the cousins against each other as they defended their boys. Throw in the girls' resentment over being ditched, which they probably egged on between themselves when they got bored, and it was all too much for the young lovers, untested as they were in this arena. A week later, Erica kicked NP to the curb, and Devon realized that it wasn't as fun dating by herself, so she broke up with Bobby as well.

  As for my role in the breakup, I can only shrug over my misreading of “The Message.” In reconstructing my sacadiliac theory, I have to go back to when I first heard the song, when I was twelve. Melle Mel was on the mike unfurling his litany of urban disquiet—“Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge … It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under, ah huh huh huh”—and when he got to the part in question, I thought he was saying that getting kicked in the balls was on par with transit strikes and getting his car repoed. He added what sounded to me like “adiliac” to “sac,” in order to round out the rhyme, some nonsense syllables for rhythm, like “ah huh huh huh.” Then over time I forgot how I'd wrassled down that conclusion, and sacadiliac became an official medical term in my mind. On second thought, I take back my shrug. Mishearing song lyrics, making your specific travesty of the words, is the right of every human being. Getting socked in the nuts, the dungeon—these were metaphors that made a lot of sense to me. Blame society.

  Every time the doors opened, the music came out in a great gust. “Super Freak” was the tipping point. What is there to say about “Super Freak”? Figure out a way to harness the essence of “Super Freak” and you'd put Exxon out of business. Flying cars, funky flying cities. That was it. I told NP I was going ahead with my plan. “I paid good money for this ticket,” I told him.

  “Freddie,” NP reasoned, “I think I can talk to Freddie. ‘And this is our game plan.’”

  It was over like that. We got back in line, and when we reached Freddie's stool, he barely glanced at my ticket and waved me through. He waved NP through, too, with a curt, “You better hook me up with some of that shit you sell over there.”

  And so it came to pass that NP and me were the first of our crew to get into Bayside. That was my only excursion that summer, but NP milked his dual hookup until Labor Day. (Marlon got out on bail the next day.) That fall, in the city, I'd smuggle myself into the Peppermint Lounge and Area a few times, in my different costume of plaid New Wave jacket and combat boots, but they raised the drinking age to twenty-one that December and it was a long time before I got into a club again.

  Stepping inside, I saw they'd done a lot of work to the place since its roller-rink days. Instead of bodies drifting in circles, now people's minds performed endless circuits, gliding through need-a-drink wanna-dance like-to-fuck need-a-drink, the club-land loop of desire. People waded in and out of the human surf around the bars, holding drinks above their shoulders to keep them above water. Waitresses in nipple-popping T-shirts, battle-worn from a summer of rough duty, carried trays up to the VIP section on the second floor, the ring of tables circling the dance floor. How nice to look down on those below! Look at her, that one looks like she's into it. The DJ cut it up in his perch, interpreting the crowd through Lennon sunglasses, the twisting bodies like tea leaves. He took counsel from the lady at his side, who stood in the dark as the floodlights zagged around her, hiding her features but casting the eerie shadow of her Afro-puffs against the wall. His muse, the temper of our night. By the stage, techies hunched over the monitors like disco Igors, unwinding the cables coiled around their arms, jabbering into walkie-talkies. Check one, check two. Mix Master Ice's turntables waited at the back of the stage, cross-faders set to zero, black styluses poised like the grim heads of gargoyles.

  Rainbow lights strafed our bodies. My head bobbed, with a little extra on the downbeat. Thinking about U.T.F.O. now, it's hard to remember why I was so excited. The beat is immortal, sure, but the lyrics of “Roxanne, Roxanne” are so fucking corny, man. It's a classic because of when it came out, those early days of hip-hop when anything with a bit of novelty was mesmerizing, but it's goofy as hell. Nowadays I read about them doing nostalgia gigs, reunion shows with people like Whodini and Kool Moe Dee and Dana Dane, break dancing on their aching sacroiliacs, busting out their hits for the aging fans. Bringing it all back. For Bobby and NP and Devon and Erica, hearing the song probably calls up memories of their double-dating days, sneaking around after curfew, parking at Haven's Beach in the dark. For me, I'm reminded of a caper that didn't go wrong for once, looking back fondly on a day without injury.

  The DJ dropped “Raspberry Beret,” to seismic effect. Most of them weren't there to see the concert. It's a safe bet the older white people, the middle-aged East End denizens, were not die-hard U.T.F.O. fans. They showed up because they'd heard that Bayside was the place to be that night. Refugees from the known and humdrum, the smothering day-to-day I coulda bought a beer, but I didn't want to push my luck, picturing the music cutting off and Klaxons sounding as the bartender discovered I'd made it past security. Everything coming to a stop as they all looked at me, the utter opposite of what was going on now. No one looked at me. I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we're here together. The bass bounced my shirt on my chest. My elbow mashed the rib cage of this forty-something white lady in a green metallic jumpsuit and when I turned to apologize, she simply smiled and continued swaying to the music. At some point I'd started dancing. I was a pretty crappy dancer, but how could I muster shame with that music rewiring my every system? We can rebuild him. A plane of blue light sifted through the crowd, dead in my eyes for an instant. NP was off somewhere, getting up to something. I didn't know anyone. And it was okay. Something good was about to happen. I just had to wait. Weird trendoids surrounded me, fearsome geezers, drugged-out wackos, but now we were comrades. We were all there for the same thing. The DJ hovered above us, throwing down his thunderbolts. He mixed in a segment of Debbie Harry singing “Rapture” and they screamed. Actually, I decided, I'm not dancing that badly at all. I thought, This is Good. No qualifier, chaotic or otherwise. Simply: Good.

  I knew what Evil looked like.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, after Uncle Nelson bought beer for us, we had to carry out our part of the bargain and take him around the Hills. “I just want to see if some people are out,” he told us from the backseat. “A look-see. I'll be quick.??
?

  “How come you don't come out anymore?” I asked. I had the six-pack between my feet. If my conversation rankled him, he'd have to fight me for it.

  “You know, I want to,” he said, “but I have too much stuff to do, I got a lot of stuff I'm trying to get off the ground. Little this, little that. Can't be drinking beer on the beach all day with all these people.”

  We turned onto Beach Avenue. “Still here,” he said.

  “Left or right?”

  “Right. Up there …” he trailed off. The white house was dark, the lawn bushy and monstrous. One of the shutters tilted down forty-five degrees on its remaining hinge, exposing shattered panes and the darkness within. “Guess they aren't around,” Uncle Nelson said. “That's Lionel's house. That's where we always hung out. Day and night.”

  I'd never seen anyone in there. It was one of our haunted houses, with a drooling man-child chained up in the basement nibbling animal crackers or a batty old lady stirring up a pot of Kid Soup. What would our houses look like thirty years from now? We'd still be here, right? Or would we be out in the world like Uncle Nelson, our homes shadowed, the gutters sprouting flora, the driveways buckled and ripped? Haunted by us. And one of the other houses up the block or around the corner the new hangout spot for the next generation. Those future kids tossing pebbles at our windows and running away screaming, or daring each other to knock on the door. Double-dare you—crazy people used to live there and they'll get you.

  He resumed the tour of his developments, superimposing his houses over the houses we knew, leading us beachward. When he saw the lights outside the Nicholses', he asked us to slow down. My mother always said, “Looks like someone's having a party,” when she saw a line of cars like that, bunched up on the curb. Figures moved in the bay windows and beyond the screen door.

  “Here?” Bobby asked.

  “I'll catch up with them later,” Uncle Nelson said. “There's one more place I want to see.”

  Bobby scowled and kept driving. We reached the last street in Sag Harbor Hills, the dead end on the water. “Pull up there on the left,” my uncle told us. We parked in front of the Lee's, where Abby, one of my sister's friends, used to stay. Maybe he knew her parents from the old days. I turned around to ask him what he wanted to do. He was staring out the window, across the street at the Yellow House, his parents' place. I'd forgotten that's where it was.

  The Yellow House was a cozy bungalow, perpetually musty and overstuffed with sailing memorabilia. Rudders and shiny brass cleats owned prime decorating real estate, the remains of beloved vessels long gone. Uncle Nelson's father was one of that seafaring generation, like my grandfather and Bobby's grandfather, hitching his motorboat to the station wagon at the start of the season, chugging out into the deep water to fish, tooling around the Caribbean in the winter. Uncle Nelson had inherited some of that. His old Sunfish spent its final, neglected summers lodged in the beach grass in front of our house, its mildewing white-and-yellow sail collecting dirty lakes during rainstorms. When I was little, our parents hauled us to the Yellow House to reunion barbecues or birthday parties for some Southern cousin my age whom I'd never met before and would never see again. The kids running on the grass, the parents on the patio, sipping their drinks. So many years ago.

  “You getting out?” Bobby asked.

  “No.”

  He sat there looking at his old house, not saying anything. I didn't see anyone inside, but all the lights were on. The bug zapper sparked. “Is your father out?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How's he doing?”

  “I don't know.”

  We called his father Uncle Gideon, which was what our mother called him. Look at Uncle Nelson now and you saw him in there. Although he was as skinny as me when he was younger, Nelson had grown into his father's shape, his belly spreading out, his cheeks rounding into apples. Uncle Gideon didn't have much time for kids, which was fine with me, and I didn't remember that much about him beyond what trickled out in my mother's stories about her cousin's misadventures. “Uncle Gideon was mad.” “You should have seen Uncle Gideon's face when he got the bill.” In my mind he was a character standing to the side of one of the bad-boy anecdotes, tsk-tsking at high jinks. One of the founding fathers, with their ideas of how proper black people should act.

  Bobby cleared his throat.

  Uncle Nelson said, “He told me, ‘Don't set foot in my house ever again.’ So I'm not.” I stared straight ahead. “That doesn't mean I can't look, does it?” he asked. The developments were usually hopping this late in the season. It wasn't too late. You could count on a barbecue or two at least, winding down to stragglers, a get-together shrinking to diehards, the people with nowhere else to go. But no one was around. I heard nothing except my uncle's breathing. The previous stops had been window-dressing. This is where he wanted to be. “I can look, right?”

  An insect sizzled in the zapper, converted to smoke. He flipped a switch in himself. He clapped his hands together loudly and said, “Let's go, boys! If you drop me at the Nicholses', I'll be much obliged, and I'll see those fine fine people and relieve them of their fine fine liquor. It's early yet!”

  “Okay,” I said.

  When we dropped him off, Bobby said, “Well, that was a buzz kill.”

  I said, “Yeah.” But mostly I thought, Evil. Nothing else to call it. I could've made up my own lyrics to what passed between the father and the son, something about misunderstandings, the ones that don't matter and the ones that are everything, but I would've gotten the words wrong. Make up lyrics to someone else's song and you put yourself in there, botching it all.

  AS “RAPTURE” TRANSFORMED INTO “BAD GIRLS,” NP tapped my shoulder, materializing in the crowd with two Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers in his hands. He gave me one. He started to speak but it was too loud to hear him. I knew what he was saying anyway. It was going to be a great night.

  One more thing, before the concert starts, and they're going to go on any second, you can feel it. It's not that important, but in case it comes up—Sagaponac is a Native American word meaning “the land of big ground nuts,” not “big brown nuts.” The place mats of the Corner Bar contain a world of knowledge, never to be doubted. Bobby misread. I'd hate for you to repeat that in conversation. It might lead to complications.

  Now you'll have to excuse me. Can you feel it? It's about to start.

  EVERYBODY HATED WLNG. IT WAS SAG HARBOR'S lone radio station, beaming out sentiment at 92.1 megahertz, reverberating through our skins and inner transistors even when the stereo was off. They called themselves a Classic Oldies station, spinning the requisite Motown and Beatles and barefoot singer-songwriters to justify themselves to advertisers, but their specialty was the oddball tune, the one-hit wonders and fluke achievers, the “Popcorn”s, the “Monster Mash”es, the sublimely dreadful “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”s.

  Everybody'd heard those goofy songs a million times before, and it was a cold cold heart that didn't hum along for at least a second. What sent people trampling to the exits was a different kind of onehit wonder, a species of song so cloying and unashamed that the soul shivered in recognition. They came to WLNG to die, these misfit ditties: feverish declarations of affection, tearjerkers about magical last-chance afternoons, odes to the everlasting that were thinly veiled bids for restraining orders. Rented-by-the-hour string sections sawed away at our resistance, lonesome sax solos paraphrased heartbreak. I can't tell you the names of the songs because I don't know, can't say who got the songwriting credit and who cashed the royalties. All I could do was succumb to the LNG Effect when these songs came on.

  It proceeded thusly: out of the speakers emerged a song you'd heard only once before in your life, one that left such a faint record in your brain that it was a memory of a memory. Paralyzed by confusion, you wondered, Where have I heard this before? The answer was, Nowhere important. Far from scoring some significant life passage, it was most likely the soundtrack of an anti-event
—searching for the matching sock, wiping tartar sauce from your lip—but the deep sense of familiarity and loss was unshakable. That was the LNG Effect—a feeling of nostalgia for something that never existed. It creeped people out. And maybe you'd never even heard the song before, only thought you had and completely invented the connection, so nimble the song's persuasion. There was a quality to the voices of the singers, these faceless warblers and sweater-vested harmonizers, that made their corny scenarios and schmaltzy pleas hypnotizing, transporting. For a few verses, that was you trotting along by the departing train car, coming around to tell the truth after all this time, that was you in the foxhole begging your girl back home to stay true, that was you standing there without defenses for once, in the pouring rain, saying what had to be said. You can't say longing without the l, n, and g.

  At some weak moment these songs had hit the pop charts, mingling with the more likely pop creations for one brief, glorious instant. Out of place at the party, digging their elbows into the wall and nervously chugging punch before they were found out. They fell out of the Top 40 and tumbled down the rankings, plummeting away from most people's consciousness … out of our universe and into another, welcomed into the WLNG firmament the second they hit 41, twinkling in their bygone constellation. I imagine that the LNG Effect was exactly the opposite for the singers. For them, hearing their songs come on wasn't the reinforcement of an illusion but the affirmation of reality—if someone was playing their record after all this time, then they actually existed and it wasn't just a dream, their moment onstage. They heard their words again, restored after being stripped by Muzak-makers and elevator composers, and were made whole.

  Everybody hated WLNG because WLNG fucked you up. They turned the station in a New York minute. My friends had no time for it, fiddling for rogue, clear-day broadcasts from KISS FM in the city. My brother was entering a big reggae phase. My mother liked classical music, zooming past 92.1 on the way to all that public radio wine and cheese at the bottom of the dial. And while my father had a well-known weakness for Easy Listening, he loathed the voice of LNG's afternoon guy, Rusty Potz—Rusty Potz!—whom he referred to as “that man” before shutting off the little Panasonic boom box in the corner of the dining area.