June Gloom and Golden Sand
by
Erik C Martin
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June Gloom and Golden Sand
Copyright 2011 by Erik C. Martin
Originally published in A Year in Ink Anthology Volume 4, 2011, The Ink Spot Press.
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Coronado Beach was covered in gold.
As a child I fervently believed this. I remember walking across the hot sand from the Hotel Del Coronado to where the surf had wet the land and looking down in amazement. The brown sand was flecked with prodigious, sparkling gold dust! I ran to tell my father, who at noon was by the pool, already working on his second Johnny Walker.
“Gold? You’d better figure out how to collect it before anyone else finds out about it. Maybe you’ll be able to buy that dirt bike that you’ve been wanting,” he’d said, his voice slightly slurred.
He was right, I thought. I was going to be rich. At eight years old, I already knew that being rich was like having fabulous superpowers. Forget about a dirt bike; I’d get a helicopter, or a jet pack and fly to school. The possibility seemed so vivid, so real.
So, what did I know about collecting gold? A lot, I had thought. The previous summer, my family had gone on vacation in Jamestown, California and I had learned all about panning for gold. I had even stood in a cold stream with a little pan of my own and...what? I remember playing in the water. I remember that I got cold and cried. But I must have found gold—I had a tiny vial on my shelf with a few flecks of gold dust inside of it. I was certain that once I got started it would all come back to me.
I needed a pan.
It occurred to me that my mom had bought a pie from the grocery store last night for dessert and the leftovers were in our suite’s refrigerator in a tin—the perfect pan for panning gold. Our suite was right off of the beach. I raced to it, being careful to be quiet once inside. My mother was resting. She’d had a headache if I remember right—she used to get a lot of headaches. I found the pie and put the last slice onto a paper plate, which I put back into the refrigerator. I rinsed out the tin. I also took a small plastic shovel and bucket. I would need the bucket to carry my gold. I envisioned getting buckets of the shiny stuff and wondered how much each bucketful would be worth.
I think I tried to pan for about an hour before I gave up.
I remember scooping my pie tin full of wet sand and shaking it back and forth like I was supposed to. But what was left at the end didn’t look like gold at all, just bigger pieces of sand and small pebbles. I could see it there lying on the ground all around me, but I could not collect the first speck. I remember picking the sand up with my hand and seeing it sparkle in my palm. But whatever it was, it was beyond my ability to isolate and gather. An elusive will-o-the-wisp of childhood.
I had been terribly disappointed. I had forgotten about that disappointment until now.
I went back and told my father. He was no longer by the pool. I found him in our suite. My mother was up then, making lunch. For some reason I remember the lunch vividly—boiled hotdogs, potato sticks, and a Twinkie.
“Dad, I couldn’t get the gold,” I said. “Will you help me after lunch?”
“What gold? Don’t be stupid,” he had said.
“But you said I have to get it before anyone else does,” I whined.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Sweetie, come here and eat your hotdog,” my mother said.
I went to the table and started to eat. Between mouthfuls I told her about the gold.
“Sweetie, there isn’t really any gold on the beach. Your father was just teasing you. It’s just the sun reflecting off of minerals—probably quartz,” she told me.
I was crestfallen for all of about five minutes. Then my mother asked me if I wanted to walk to the nearby store where they sold shells and shark’s teeth. The mysterious gold of Coronado was forgotten, pushed out by the awesome possibility of getting shark’s teeth.
It’s funny that I thought of that now. I hadn’t remembered the gold. It just came back as I was staring out of the window of my cab down at San Diego Bay. Such a powerful memory to have forgotten. I’m going back to the Del, back to Coronado Beach. Why would I go if there was no gold? I’m going because for years that trip that we took when I was eight seemed like the last happy time, the last normal time that my family had. And lately things haven’t been going well for me. I’m hoping that by coming to the last happy place in my childhood, that maybe I’ll be able to reconnect with something that I lost. It isn’t a heartening sign that the first memory to come back to me, panning for gold on the beach and my tremendous disappointment at learning that there was no gold, also revealed that my father was already an erratic drunk, and my mother had already begun to have symptoms of her illness.
We passed a sign on the Coronado Bridge. It read, Need help? Make the call. Suicide is never the answer. There was a phone number.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
When I got to the hotel and checked in, it was nearly night. The hotel looked pretty much as I remembered it. I didn’t feel like going to the beach yet. Instead I walked down the street until I found a liquor store about a block away. I bought a fifth—bourbon, not scotch—I wasn’t completely my father’s son.
I got back to my room—a room, not a suite—I couldn’t afford a suite. I poured a drink into one of the hotel glasses and turned on the television. I wasn’t really watching it though. I was thinking back to our vacation and how things fell apart afterwards. It had seemed to me, as a child, that things were still good when we had vacationed here, that my parents were still in love, that we were happy. I’ve already realized now that this wasn’t the case. My memories had been filtered through the rose-tinted—no, gold-tinted eyes of the child I had been. Memories of gold that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t until the vacation had ended and we had arrived back in Ohio that I had known something was wrong. My father was drunk all of the time and my parents had fought a lot. My mom was sick—headaches she said. A year later, they separated and then divorced. I lived with mom at first. I was ten. But her behavior became as bizarre and erratic as my father’s, even though she never drank. When I was eleven, we learned that she had a brain tumor. When I was twelve, she died.
I drank more than half of the fifth of bourbon on my first night back at the Hotel Del. At some point I passed out.