Sag Harbor

  “God's gonna melt that Nazi,” Marcus said.

  “You better melt that Nazi-ass motherfucker, God!” NP said. Then we heard Randy honking and we were outside in five seconds flat. Firemen had nothing on us when it was time to roll, the emergency we waited for.

  RANDY DROVE A MOSS-GREEN TOYOTA hatchback that he claimed to have bought for a hundred bucks. Its fenders were dented and dimpled, rust mottled the frame in leprous clumps, and the inside smelled like hippie anarchists on the lam had made it their commune. But who was I to cast aspersions? Randy had a license, he had a car, and our world had changed.

  Clive was in the passenger seat, radio and cooler at his feet. “What's up, what's up, what's up?”

  “You guys ready to go?” Randy asked, a bit exasperated, as if it were him who had been left waiting.

  “Maybe we should do a head count,” I said. Again: there were six of us, and five seats. Needless to say, this was a no-lap situation.

  “Your car only fits five, cuz,” NP said.

  “We can't all fit,” I said.

  “I got left behind last time,” Marcus said.

  We scanned one another's faces for weakness. “I'm skinny,” I added. “I have skinny legs.” There was no denying the twiglike nature of my legs.

  “Right,” Randy said, “Benji has skinny legs. Look at those Christmas hams you got there, Marcus—you take up two seats as it is.” The fix was in. He pretended to consider the options. “Maybe you could rock shotgun, but Clive has shotgun.”

  “I have shotgun,” Clive said.

  “And it wouldn't be fair to take that away from him,” Randy mused. “And Bobby, he got left last time.”

  “I was left last time!” Marcus said. He gripped his beach towel around his shoulders like a yoke.

  “That was two times ago,” Randy improvised, “on Thursday. On Friday we went to Bridgehampton and there was no room for Bobby, so he had to stay behind. That means you got left two times ago.” Randy looked at Bobby, and Bobby made a show of feeling wounded by this fictional abandonment. “Plus, you got your bike. You can ride your bike and meet us there.”

  “My bike is busted,” Bobby said.

  “I don't even have a goddamned bike,” NP said.

  “If you start pedaling now,” Clive said, “you might beat us there.” We all knew this was ridiculous.

  “Yeah, you better start pedaling now, nigger!” NP said.

  Marcus shook his head, reconciling himself to this brutal calculus. “Dag, y'all.” He got on his bike. “Can you at least take my towel?” he asked.

  Randy looked at him skeptically. “Is it … dry?” he said, wrinkling his nose.

  We were on the road a few minutes later, Randy ahem-aheming about gas money before we even got out of Azurest. I didn't approve of how Randy handled being the Kid with the Car, how swiftly he had been corrupted. The day before the summer started, he was a nobody. Now he was a sneering despot, honking his sick little horn. He rewarded brownnosing with a “I'll give you shotgun for a week,” punished with a “Just forgot to pick you up” for whatever critical mission was going on that day, the movies, Karts-a-Go-Go, the ocean.

  Even if there had been only five of us, he might have left Marcus behind. The backseat of his Toyota possessed this extradimensional quality where it fit max two or max three people depending on Randy's whim. Reggie and I kept our sliding doors open, no attitude.

  Aiding Randy's schemes was the fact that there were no girls around to distract us. Our troupe, at first glance, defied birth statistics. My sister's age group, four years older, was balanced between boys and girls. There were twenty or so kids in my sister's group, and over the summers they all dated one another, nursed crushes across years, traded first loves and first kisses and assorted first fondlings between them. One summer Elena dated Bill, two summers later she was driving around in Nat's convertible, and so on. Reggie and me benefited from this situation. The big kids had to be nice to us, lest word of their bullying misdeeds get back to our sister and ruin long-or short-term plans. The older boys ferried us in their backseats to the ocean, to the movies, they bought us comics at the Ideal in town, forked over the cash for ice cream at the Tuck Shop. Not bad at all.

  Then Elena's group turned eighteen, grabbed their diplomas, and stalked off into the big wide world, ceding control of the developments to our gang. We were a different breed. Whether it was martinis or cigarettes or the deleterious effects of ambient Nixonian radiation, '68 to '72 turned out to be a hard time for X chromosomes. The girls were scarce. Look at us in the car there. Boy's town.

  Blame for Randy's sudden appearance in our group should fall on his parents' lovemaking schedule. He was an in-betweener, living like a weed in the cracks between the micro-demographic groups of the developments. Too old to hang out with us, really, and too young to be fully accepted by my sister's group, he had wafted in a social netherworld for years. Frankly, before he started putt-putting around town in his Toyota, I had little idea who he was, never saw him except at the annual Labor Day party. Randy had just finished his freshman year in college, but against usual custom, he still came out to Sag. No Great Exodus for him—why leave when the pond was so small, and you were so big? He relished his new status. He had a car, he was old enough to buy us beer, and for this we accepted him into our tribe. It has been observed by wiser men than me that kids who hang out with kids who are too young for them often make themselves useful in the transportation and beer-buying sectors. We overlooked his shortcomings.

  The No-Girls thing was true in essence, although there were a few exceptions. Let us open the case files. Marnie was two years older than me, but had never been part of our group, even when we were very young and the boy-girl divide a nonissue. The girls of Elena's group kept her as a sort of mascot, ditching her only when it was rec-room slow-jam time or walk-down-the-beach-at-night time, and once they left Sag Harbor, she started spending her summers in the city as well, in premature exit. And then there was Francesca, whom we had barely seen for years. She was a bit of a debutante, popping out of her mother's womb with elbow-length white gloves, so it was said, and come junior high she spent all her time on the ocean side with her finishing-school friends. Occasionally we'd see her being dropped off in a white Porsche or similar chariot, and she'd delicately wave in our direction and run inside her house as if we were swarming paparazzi. So in truth, there were girls our age—they just didn't want to hang out with us, and frankly who could blame them. This was to change in a few weeks, but we didn't know that yet.

  “Look at that goofy motherfucker up there!”

  We passed Marcus on the turn to Sagg Road, which was a dead shot through the South Fork to the Atlantic. Marcus'd made good time. For his efforts we heckled him. Fists and catcalls out the windows.

  “Better change that gear!”

  “My grandma goes faster than that in her wheelchair, sucker!”

  Check out Marcus huffing away. What had formerly been the embodiment of cool—ten, count 'em, ten speeds!—was now the ultimate signifier of lameness. That summer you walked like a man, a summering desperado, or drove, behind the wheel or shotgun. Marcus was making good time, but let's face it, he was on a bike.

  “Leave him alone,” Clive said. And we did. Except for some obscene gestures through the tiny Toyota's back window as we pulled ahead.

  The houses thinned out, dangling in mystery at the end of snaking driveways, and we entered the no-man's-land in the middle of the island. Outside our black enclave and lighting out for the white side of the island. It was only a few miles to the ocean, but our sense of scale was off from spending so many summers in our safe little circuits. We had formed scouting parties to explore the dirt trails behind Mashashimuet Park, striking out toward Bridgehampton, and made occasional forays up 114 to the twisty, forsaken bends of Swamp Road, in a tentative East Hamptonly salvo, but generally we confined our shenanigans to the developments, to obsessive loops up and down Main Street in town. The coming of the c
ars changed all that.

  My mother used to say that the white people went to the ocean beaches in the morning and the black people in the afternoon. I don't know how much of that was flat-out segregation or a matter of temperament—white people getting a jump on the day to do white-people things, and black people, well, getting there when they get there. Certainly that first generation claimed and settled on Sag Harbor Bay because the south side was off-limits—the white people owned the coastline, South Hampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton. And the Jersey shore, and every other sandy stretch of vista-full property in the tristate area, the natural places of escape from city life. No Negroes, please. That first generation came from Harlem, Brownstone Brooklyn, inland Jersey islands of the black community. They were doctors, lawyers, city workers, teachers by the dozen. Undertakers. Respectable professions of need, after Jim Crow's logic: white doctors won't lay a hand on us, we have to heal ourselves; white people won't deliver us to God, we must save ourselves; white people won't throw dirt in our graves, we must bury ourselves. Fill a need well, and you prospered. Prosper and you took what was yours. Once The War was over (there was only one War when the old heads took us to school), finished, and the new American future beckoned—with bony skeletal fingers, but beckoning nonetheless, don't quibble—and why shouldn't they answer? They had fought to make a good life for themselves, vanquished the primitives and barbarians out to kill them, keep them out, string them up, and they wanted all the spoils of their struggle. A place to go in the summer with their families. To make something new.

  If only they could see us now. O Pioneers!

  Through the rusted hole in the backseat floor, I watched the asphalt blur. Randy warned us constantly to be careful around the snowflaked edges of the hole, so as not to make it worse. Every big bump in the road, bits of it fell away into the void. I nudged the rusted edge with my foot and saw it disintegrate and fly away. Up front, Randy started in with a story of last night's shift at the Long Wharf, the restaurant on the town pier. His work stories invariably revolved around tips, elaborate up-and-down melodramas full of defeats and sudden, triumphant reversals. “At first we thought it was going to be a slow night…” I remembered to ask NP about his job at Jonni Waffle.

  “I like working there. The manager is cool,” NP said. “And sometimes they let you bring a pint home.”

  “Can you get me an application?” I asked. I'd put it off, but I needed a job. I was out of money, we needed TV dinners for the next few days, and as it stood now Reggie was going to have to pay for them out of his Burger King paycheck. My mother would reimburse him when they came out, but I didn't relish having to beg soup money from him. So: fill out an application for Jonni Waffle and take it from there.

  We rumbled across the wooden bridge over the railroad track, and traversed 27 after not too long a wait. Before July Fourth weekend, crossing Route 27 was a minor hassle. But after the Fourth, the crypts up-island disgorged their Hamptonite Undead in earnest, and you never knew how long you'd spend stranded, waiting for the caravan to thin. (Helpful Hint #236 for the Hamptonite Undead: sunscreen slows down the rate of decomposition by solar rays when you are riding around with the top down.) Then we were in Sagaponack, popping into the roadside deli for supplies, and a few minutes later we pulled up at Left Left, the beach down from the town beach. No permit needed, no lifeguards. And this year, no parents.

  WE TRUDGED IN FORMATION UP THE DUNE, beach grass lashing our calves, entering that strange zone of black sand at the head of the beach. The black sand was twice as hot as the rest of the sand on the beach, inspiring cartoony cries of “Ow, ow, ow!” in former times, and a stoic teeth-gritting today. There weren't many people. We had our pick of spots.

  “Let's go over there,” Randy said.

  “Over here,” Clive countered, and we followed him to a spot above the tide line, demarcated by a garland of dried seaweed. Clive had always been the leader of our group. He was just cool, no joke. I pitied Marcus for his victimhood; I pitied Clive because he had to hang out with us. He was that rare thing among us: halfway normal, socialized and capable and charismatic. Like—he did sports. Basketball and track, captain of one of the teams at his school, I can't remember which, he was good at both of them. Sometimes he tried to get a basketball game together, two-on-two, but after a while we just started playing three against him, and he still won, leaving us a sorry sight at the side of the court, bent over and dizzy, palms on our knees and reaching for imaginary asthma inhalers. Imaginary asthma inhalers created a placebo effect, which was better than nothing.

  Before Reggie and I had an Empty House, and thus the meeting place/departure point for expeditions, the one sure way not to be excluded from that day's adventures was to be the first one over at Clive's crib, where all the major decisions went down. Crack of dawn was a bit excessive, but the thinking went that you couldn't be ditched if you stuck close to Clive. Tall and muscular, he had the physical might to beat us up, but he broke up fights between us instead, separating combatants while dodging their whirling fists, and no one complained. A reluctant Solomon with a soul patch, he ended disputes over the important issues of the day, such as who called shotgun first, who had next on the diving board, who was up on Punch-Out, the video game in the lobby of the East Hampton movie theater that we worshipped like a pagan totem while the white people stared. He knew how to talk to girls, had girlfriends, plural. Good-looking girlfriends, too, from all accounts, with all their teeth and everything. Last summer he'd even dated an older woman—in her twenties! Who lived in Springs! Who had a kid! He had his problems like the rest of us but he hadn't let them deform his character yet. Not back then.

  We picked our spots around camp, laying our towels down, weighing down their edges with sneakers and sodas to keep them from flipping up. And it happened, like that, after an increment of time so tiny that neutrons and protons were the only witnesses: we got sanded. In the towels, scalps, clumping on sweat along our limbs. It had begun, the gritification of the day. Some windy afternoons, the wind agitated the sand into a needling layer two inches thick. It hovered above the beach, the atmosphere of a different planet, saying, You should not be here. But what was another warning among so many?

  We were the only black people on the beach. My sister's group was grown up, dispersed, and most of the moms from our neighborhood frequented the town beach, which had a lifeguard. “Stay within the markers!” There was a nice bit of suspense when you rounded the bend to the town beach and saw the flag—red, yellow, or white—signaling how rough the surf was that day. On red-flag days you heard the thunderous hammer of the waves before you got over the dune and saw the mist of smashed-down water floating above the battered shore. On calmer days the most important sound was the lifeguard blowing his “Shark Attack!” whistle. Everybody wanted their Jaws moment. Seeing the fin of the “must have been a Great White” gliding in the waves was cool, and bonus points if you were in the water when the whistle blew and you had to paddle to the shore for dear life.

  One important fact: the town beach did not allow radio playing.

  Pure fascism. As soon as he was settled, NP cranked up the volume on Clive's radio, a yellow waterproof Sony. It was a mix tape he'd recorded off the radio, KISS FM, lighthouse to the lost. On clear days the signal came through all the way to Sag, and we crowded around the radio like people in the olden days. You say Martians have touched down in Grover's Mill, New Jersey? Or are these far-off sounds an invasion of metropolitan funk, a different kind of alien altogether?

  The songs started ten seconds in, the time it took NP to run across his bedroom, dodging mounds of dirty clothes and comic books, and press Record. The songs ended with the DJ's truncated explications: “Alright, that was the boombastic—” “That's for all you in the Queensbridge Houses, Boogie Down Bronx—”

  “Doug E. Fresh stole my cousin's rhymes,” NP said, apropos of nothing.

  “I thought you said Doug E. Fresh was your cousin,” I said. NP was a notorious “t
hat's my cousin” -er. I certainly didn't remember him claiming Randy in his kinship group before Randy got wheels.

  “What are you, high? Think I don't know who my own cousin is? No, he bit them, check it out, I was at this house party …” and he trailed off on one of his chronicles. I looked up at the sky and his words were sucked away by the wind. A small plane chuggered parallel to the shoreline, a banner slithering behind it: VISIT BUZZ CHEW.

  I walked up to where the beach crumbled away into the ocean. Left Left faced the Atlantic, not that meager, lapping bay crap. Not big enough to surf in except in front of an advancing hurricane—you had to go up to Montauk for that, and none of us was so inclined. There were no houses beyond the waves, no slim spits of land, as on our turf. Just invisible continents. It was the Edge of Things, and the Edge liked to grab at you, pull you in. I wasn't even toe-deep in the water when I heard my mother's warning in my ears, “Watch out for the undertow!,” which wasn't a bad philosophy, really, applicable to most situations in a metaphorical sense, but I hated being so conditioned. I never went past where I could feel the bottom beneath my feet, so riptides and undertow weren't much of a concern. But you could feel it, even in the shallows—the ravenous pull when the ocean sucked back into itself to gather for the next wave, the next volley in its siege against land and landlubbers—i.e., you. The ocean was kidnapping arms and a muffled voice that said, You ain't much at all, are you? Nope, not much at all. Sand beneath my feet, that was my rule.

  “Aren't you hot in that shirt, man?” Clive asked when I sat back down.

  “No. Why?”

  “Black absorbs light,” he said. “So it heats up—that's why on a hot day you're more comfortable wearing light clothes.”

  I didn't know that, but as I looked around, I didn't notice anyone wearing black. Maybe there was something to it.

  “Hey! Hey! Yo!”

  Marcus hot-footed it over the black sand. He'd made good time, but then he was putting in a lot of biking time to and from work. Marcus had only been out for a week and he was already on his second job. Every summer he went through a dozen, easy. He got his foot in the door no problem, spinning his dismissal from his last job to his new bosses the same way he spun them to us. “The day manager was out to get me,” he'd tell us, or, “I had a personality conflict with the cook.” “The owner was all coked-out,” he explained, pointing toward the realities of the mid-'8os resort-town restaurant business. Most of those people were coked-out, basic fact. If we knew that he got the ax for stealing booze—not a bottle or two but a whole crate—he trumped us with, “They were some straight-up racists.” Which always worked. In any sphere. Who among us could refute such a judgment? It was like saying “It's hot” during a heat wave. No dispute.