The Lay of the Land

  Central Boulevard enters Ortley Beach from Seaside Heights without fanfare—both being Route 35—the same no-skyline weather-beaten townscape of closed sub shops, blue Slurpee stands, tropical fish outlets and metal-detector rentals, where I’m thinking the 5-K runners must have now come and gone, since I see none of them. In the election three weeks ago—the life-threatening part of which is still unsettled in the Florida court—Ortley Beach gave its own voters their chance to ratify a non-binding “opinion” by the Boro attorney that the town could secede from New Jersey and join a new entity called “South Jersey.” But like our naming-rights initiative, this was hooted down by Republicans as being fiscal suicide, not to mention civically odd and bad for business. Sea-Clift—nearer the end of Barnegat Neck, and farther south—would’ve ended up marooned in “Old Jersey,” tolls could’ve been exacted just for the privilege of leaving town, while Ortley would have had a different governor and a state bird. Municipal conflict would’ve erupted, had cooler heads not prevailed. Though even now I see a few inflaming SECESSION OR DIE stickers still plastered on stop signs and a few juice-shop windows. It’s always been a strange place here, though you can’t tell by looking.

  What I see as I approach the Neptune’s Daily Catch doesn’t make my heart hopeful. No cars are parked in front. The blue neon FISH sign is turned off. As I pull to the curb, inside appears empty. Grainy daylight falls in through the big windows, turning the interior dishwater gray. Chairs are upside down on tabletops. Next door, the Women of Substance second-hand shop is closed. The Parallel Universe video arcade is open three doors down, but only a thin bald man’s standing in the door alone, reading a magazine. Four men in khaki clothing and heavy corduroy jackets wait at the corner under the Garden State Parkway sign, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from the Wawa across Central. Mexicans, these are. Illegals—unlike my Hondurans—hoping to be picked up for a job across the bridge, unaware today’s a holiday. They eye me and laugh as if I’m the cops and they’re invisible.

  The thought, however, that I may be wrong and Bernice is inside at a back table having an Irish coffee alone, awaiting opening time, makes me get out and peer through the plate-glass window. Arnie Sikma, the owner, is an old Reed College SDSer who’s evolved into a community-activist, small-business booster, and has stuck various groups’ advertising stickers on his front window beside the door. ORTLEY, AN UNUSUAL NAME FOR THE USUAL PLACE. WE ROOT FOR THE PHILLIES. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS (from Gulf War days). PROTECT RAPTORS, NOT RAPISTS. THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS—JERSEY SHORE NEPHROLOGY CLINIC. PEOPLE HAVE TO DIE…SOMEWHERE (a hospice in Point Pleasant).

  But no Bernice when I peer in between my cupped hands. Or anyone. Arnie’s left the Christmas Muzak on outside—“Good King Wenceslas” sung by a choir. “Yon-der pea-sant, who is he, where and what his dwel-ling—” No one out in the cold hears it but me and the Mexicans.

  Though a hand-written note scotch-taped to the door announces that, “We will be closed Thanksgiving Day due to a loss in our family. God Bless You All. The Mgt.”—naturally a sign that alarms me. Since does it mean family family (Arnie’s of Dutch extraction in Hudson, New York, up-river—a distant relation of the original patroons)? Or does it mean extended family? The Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro “family” of trusted employees. Does it mean Bernice, heretofore scheduled to work the buffet? Though wouldn’t it mention her name—like the Van Tuyll daughter Ann told me about two nights ago? “Our trusted and beloved Miss B—”

  A hot sizzling sensation spreads up my cold neck, then spreads down again. How can I find out? I once called information to learn if Bernice was listed, in case I someday decided to call her and needed to be made to feel like my best self in return for a movie ticket to the Toms River Multiplex and a late dinner at Bump’s. I found out she possessed a phone but didn’t choose to list its number. Waitresses rarely do. I couldn’t very well tell the operator, “Yeah, but she thinks I’m great. It’s fine. I won’t give the number to anybody or do anything weird.” Those innocent days are behind us now.

  Gusty ocean air with a strong grease smell in it pushes a white Styrofoam container along the sidewalk—the kind of container you’d carry your unfinished fried calamari home in. One of the khaki-suited Mexicans gives the container a soccer kick out into the boulevard, which inspires another, smaller Mexican to address the box with a complex series of side kicks and heel kicks that finally send it flying in the air. His associates all laugh and sing out “Ronaldito,” which amuses the kicker, who sashays back up onto the curb and makes them all howl.

  A skinny, elderly bald man in red running shorts and a blue singlet with a 5-K card on his chest—#174—glides past us up Central on bulky in-lines, arm swings propelling him like a speed skater, one hand tucked behind, his old eagle’s face as serene as the breeze. He is heading home. The Mexicans all eye him with amusement.

  I gaze up to the woolen sky and think of good-soul Bernice, her sweet breath, full smiling lips, dainty ankles, dense virile hair not everyone would go for and that possibly I didn’t go for or else I’d know her phone number. Where is she today? Safe? Sound? Not so good? How would I find out? Call Arnie Sikma at home the minute I arrive. Ask for her number as a special favor. High up and to the north, a pale blue and optimistic fissure has opened in the undercloud. Two jet contrails, one southerly, one headed east and out to sea, have crossed there, leaving a giant and, for an instant, perfect X at 39,000 feet above where I am, in Ortley, outside a good fish place, contemplating the life of a friend. X marks my spot (and every place else that can see it). “Begin here. This is where I left it. This is where the gold is. This is—” what?

  Only the most dry-mouthed Cartesian wouldn’t see this as a patent signal, a communiqué from the spheres, an important box on an important form with my name on top—X’d in or X’d out, counted present or absent. You’d just need to know what the fucker means, wouldn’t you? There may have been others. Two swans on the bay shore. A quick red fox in the bedroom. A letter. A call. Three boats. All can be signage. I’d thought Ralph’s finality, my acceptance and succession to the Next Level and general fittedness to meet my Maker were my story, what the audience would know once my curtain closed—my, so-to-speak, character. “He made peace with things, finally, old Frank.” “He was kind of a shit-bird, but he got it sorted out pretty good just before—” “He actually seemed clear-sighted, damn near saint-like toward the end there—” This happens when you have cancer, though it’s not a fun happening.

  Except now there’s more? Just when you think you’ve been admitted to the boy-king’s burial chamber and can breathe the rich, ancient captured air with somber satisfaction, you find out it’s just another anteroom? That there’s more that bears watching, more signs requiring interpretation, that what you thought was all, isn’t? That this isn’t it? That there’s no it, only is. Hard to know if this is heartening or disheartening news to a man who, as my son says, believes in development.

  The cloud fissure has now closed primly, and what was a sign—like a rainbow—is no more. Somehow I know that Bernice Podmanicsky is not the family member lost. She’d laugh to know I even worried about her. “Oh, handsome”—she’d beam at me—“I didn’t know you cared. You’re just such an unusual man, aren’t ya? A real handful. Some lucky girl—” It’s odd how our fears, the ones we didn’t know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.

  The Mexicans are all looking at me as if I’ve been carrying on a boisterous conversation with myself. Possibly it’s my block-M. I should take it off and give it to them. Their faces are serious, their small grabby hands jammed in their tattered jacket pockets. Their expectancy of work is being clouded over by my suspicious starings into the Bistro and the firmament. They are religious men and on the lookout for signs of their own, one of which I may have become. Possibly I’m “touched” and am about to be drawn up into heaven by a lustrous beam of light and they (in the good version) will find true vocations at last: to tell the thing
they saw and of its wonders. Is that not the final wish of all of us on earth? To testify of our witness to wonders?

  But as an assurance, since I cannot ascend to heaven in front of them today, I’d still like to speak something typically First World and welcoming, put them off their guard. We are together, after all. Simple me. Simple them.

  Only when I turn their way, a welcome grin gladdening my cheeks, my eyes crinkling up happy, my mind concocting a formulation in their mother tongue—“Hola. ¿Cómo están? ¿Pasando un buen día?”—they stiffen, set their narrow shoulders and lock their knees inside their khakis, their faces organized to say they want nada of me, seek no assurance, offer none. So that all I can do is freeze my grin like a crazy man caught in his craziness. They look away at the empty boulevard to search for the truck that isn’t coming. For all five of us, together and apart, the moment for signs goes past.

  Headed home now, fully contextualized, vacant of useful longing. Bernice could’ve conferred a sporty insularity, made me feel my own weight less. Even un-ideal women can do this. But help’s not available, which is a legitimate mode of acceptance. It just doesn’t feel good.

  Traffic lights are working again, candy-cane ornaments weakly lit. Commerce is flickering to life as I drive out of Seaside Park and reenter Sea-Clift. LIQUOR has illuminated its big yellow letters at noon, and cars are flocking. The drive-thru ATM at South Shore Savings is doing a smart business, as is the adult books, Guppies to Puppies and the bottle redemption center—the former Ford dealership. The Wiggle Room has opened up, and a hefty blue New Jersey Waste snail-back is swaying into its back alley. There are even tourists outside the mini-golf/batting cage, their nonchalant gestures betraying seasonal uncertainty, their gazes skyward. The green EMS wagon rests back in its Fire Department bay, the same crew as earlier out front under the waving American flag, sharing a smoke and a joke with the two jodhpured motorcycle cops who guarded the race. The Tru-Value is holding its “Last Chance Y-2K Special” on plastic containers and gas masks. THE FUTURE WAS A BOMB, their hand-lettered sign says.

  Many of the 5-K runners are here straggling home along the sidewalks and down the residential side streets, their race run, their faces relaxed, limbs loosened by honest non-cutthroat competition, their water bottles empty, their gazes turned toward what’s next in the way of healthy, wholesome Thanksgiving partaking. (There’s no sign of the Africans.) I still wouldn’t want to be any of them. Though one scrawny red-shoed runner waves at my car as I pass—I have no idea who—someone I sold a house to or busted my ass trying, but left a good impression of the kinda guy I am. I give a honk but head on.

  When I cruise past my Realty-Wise office, Mike’s Infiniti sits by itself in front. The pizza place is lighted and going, though no one seems to want a pizza for Thanksgiving. Doubtless, Mike’s at his desk tweaking his business plan, re-conferring with his new friend, the money bags. He may be trying the Bagosh family on his cell before they hit the Parkway after lunch. I lack the usual gusto to go have a look-see at what he’s up to—which makes business itself seem far away and its hand-over a sounder idea. How, though, will I feel to “have sold” real estate and sell it no more? The romance of it could fade once the past tense takes over. Different from, “Well, yeah, I usta fly 16’s up in that Bacca Valley. Pretty hairy up there.” Or, “Our whole lab shared credit on the malaria cure.” The only way to keep the glamour lights on in the real-estate commitment is to keep doing it. Do it till you drop dead, so you never have to look back and see the shadows. Most of the old-timers know that, which is why so many go feet first. This won’t please Mike, but fuck Mike. It’s my business, not his.

  Ahead, beyond the old shuttered Dad ’n Lad, where the Boro of Sea-Clift originally ended because the topsoil ran out and the primeval white sand beach took up, the old Ocean Vista Cemetery, where Sea-Clift’s citizens were buried back in the twenties, lies shabbily ignored and gone to weeds. The Boro officially maintains it, keeps up its New Orleans-style wrought iron fence and little arched filigree gate that opens pleasantly down a slender allée three-quarters of a city block toward the sea, where the ocean vista’s long been blocked by grandfathered frame residences that have gone to seed themselves but can’t be replaced. No one is currently at rest in Ocean Vista, not even gravestones remain. The ground—alongside the Dad ’n Lad—looks like nothing but a small-size shard of excess urban landscape awaiting assignment by developers who’ll tear down the whole block of elderly structures and put up a Red Roof Inn or a UPS store—the same as happened on a grand scale in Atlantic City.

  The particular reason our only town cemetery no longer has residents is that the great-great-grandchildren of Sea-Clift’s first Negro pioneer, a freed slave known only as “Jonah,” somehow discovered him interred plumb in the middle of the otherwise-white cemetery, and began agitating at the state level for a monument solemnizing his life and toilsome times as a “black trailblazer” back when being a trailblazer wasn’t cool. Jonah’s progeny turned out to be noisy, well-heeled Philadelphia and D.C. plutocrat lawyers and M.D.’s, who wanted to have their ancestor memorialized as another stop on the Coastal Heritage Trail, with an interactive display about his life and the lives of folk like him who valiantly diversified the Shore—a story that was possibly not going to be all that flattering to his white contemporaries.

  Whereupon all hell broke loose. The town elders, who’d always known about Jonah’s resting place and felt fine about him sharing it with their ancestors, did not, however, want him “stealing” the cemetery and posthumously militating for importance he apparently hadn’t claimed in life. Jonah had his rightful place, it was felt, among other Sea-Clifters, and that was enough. The grandchildren, however, sniffing prejudice, commenced court proceedings and EEOC actions to have the Boro Council sued in federal court. Everything got instantly blown out of proportion, at which point an opportunistic burial-vault company with European Alliance affiliations in Brick Township offered free of charge to dig up and re-inter anybody whose family wanted its loved one to enjoy better facilities in a new and treeless memory park they had land for out Highway 88. Everyone—there were only fifteen families—said sure. The town issued permits. All the graves—except Jonah’s—were lovingly opened, their sacred contents hearsed away, until in a month’s time poor old Jonah had the cemetery all to his lonesome. Whereupon, the litigious Philadelphians decided Jonah and his significance had been municipally disrespected and so applied for a permit themselves and moved him to Cherry Hill, where people apparently know better how to treat a hero.

  The town is still proprietor of the cemetery and awaits the happy day when the Red Roof site-evaluation crew shows up seeking a variance and a deconsecration order. For a time—two winters ago—I proposed buying the ground myself and turning it into a vernal park as a gesture of civic giving, while retaining development rights should the moment ever come. I even considered not deconsecrating it and having myself buried there—a kingdom of one. This was, of course, before my prostate issues. I’d always pondered—without a smidge of trepidation—where I’d “end up,” since once you wander far from your own soil, you never know where your final resting place might be. Which is why many people don’t stray off their porch or far from familiar sights and sounds. Because if you’re from Hog Dooky, Alabama, you don’t want to wind up dead and anonymously buried in Metuchen, New Jersey. In my case, I thought it would’ve saved my children the trouble of knowing what in the hell to do with “me,” and just deciding to entrust my remains to some broken-down old Cap’n Mouzakis who’d “return” me to the sea from whence as a frog I came. You could say it’s a general problem, however—uncertainty over where and how you want to be eternally stowed. Either it represents your last clinging to life, or else it’s the final muddled equivocation about the life you’ve actually lived.

  Not surprisingly, insider development interests on the Dollars For Doers Council saw disguised dreams of empire behind my petition and declined my cash offer for the cemete
ry. The “civic giving” part put them on their guard. Which was and is fine with me. Money not spent is money saved, in my economy. Though it has left as an open subject the awkward issue of my ending-up formalities. I have a will which leaves the house and Realty-Wise to Sally and all remaining assets to the kids—not much, though they’ll get plenty from their mom, including a membership in the Huron Mountain Club. But that picture’s different since Sally left for Mull, and could shift again, since she could come back and Mike now wants the business. I’d even thought the three of us nuclear-family components might sit around a congenial breakfast table during the coming days and talk these sensitive matters into commonsense resolution. But that was prior to reexposure to Paul (and Jill), and hearing of his secret dreams to be my business partner. And before Clarissa hied off to Atlantic City, leaving me with the uneasy sensation she’ll return changed. In other words, events have left life and my grasp on the future in as fucked-up a shape as I can imagine them. Life alters when you get sick, no matter what I told Ann. Don’t let any of these Sunny Jims tell you different.

  What I don’t expect to find in my driveway is activity. But activity is what I find. Next door at the Feensters’, as well. Thanksgiving, in my playbook, is an indoor event acted out between kitchen and table, table and TV, TV and couch (and later bed). Outdoor activity, particularly driveway activity, foreshadows problems and events unwanted: genies exiting bottles, dikes bursting, de-stability at the top—anti-Thanksgiving gremlins sending celebrants scattering for their cars. The outcome I didn’t want.