“Marlon's working that night,” NP said, “I already checked. I'm not worried.”
I NEVER TRIED TO GET IN. My daily routine already generated plenty of embarrassment—why get greedy? But as August got closer, I fixated on the concert, drawing up plans for one, determined sortie. Not being particularly tall, and possessing a prepubescent mien I found impossible to shake, my idea was to wear some preppie camouflage to help me fit in with the stream of East End swells—no mummy-bandage Chuck Taylors or Flipper T-shirt—and hold my advance-purchase ticket as if it were identity papers at a border crossing. Since I'd come over time to believe that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say, I tended to mumble or talk fast in an attempt to help people more easily ignore me, so I practiced adamant phrasings of facts like “I bought this ticket” and “I paid money for this ticket.” I also crossed my fingers that the no-doubt-complicated refund process represented a bureaucratic hassle the bouncer didn't want to get involved in. That's all I had going.
The night before the concert, I walked up to Bobby's to begin the hunt. A normal person would've picked me up at my house, but Bobby, like so many before him, was lost in the moral fog of first-car ownership. Apparently I have issues in this area—why did a change in circumstance mean a change in character? It seemed a brand of weakness. His recent promotion probably had something to do with it. He'd been kicked upstairs, from Little Bobby to just Bobby. Given the strict hierarchy of age classes out in Sag, nomenclature problems arose from time to time. If kids in two different age groups had the same name then, logically, one was Little and one was Big. Big Bobby was in my sister's group, a few years older than us. Since his day of birth, our Bobby had been saddled with the Little sign hanging around his neck.
There was one easy rule: if there was a Big X, and a Little X, they had to have night-and-day personalities. Big Bobby was a jerk, no dispute. He cut in line at the video games in town, whet the sadistic aspects of his personality on Marcus with cool diligence, and was known to rip the heads off Han Solo action figures and eat them. I had actually witnessed this last despicable act, and it haunts me still. But Big Bobby had stopped coming out, you see. Working in the city, whatever, so Bobby was unqualified, just Bobby, and free to unfetter his character. Bygone Little Bobby, he was like me—a nice kid, conveniently invisible, beloved by aunts and uncles, perpetually pre-wince in anticipation of having his plump and inviting cheeks pinched by some elderly relative with boundary issues. Now, he could be a jerk. It wouldn't have surprised me if there was another Bobby playing in the sand of the Sag beach, thus crowning our Bobby Big Bobby, and this hypothetical tyke donning the nice-kid mantle. Nature abhors a vacuum.
As I passed the Sag Harbor Hills beach, the stragglers were folding their beach chairs and whipping the sand from their blankets. The gnats gathered in bobbing clouds and in the long grass the chittering insects saluted twilight. It was getting dark earlier, the endless summer days no longer so patient with our attempts to cram it all in.
I climbed the steps up to Bobby's house. His grandfather let me in. He hadn't shaved, a thin white fur covering his cheeks, and he looked harrowed in his faded blue Morgan Stanley T-shirt, a souvenir from his daughter's job. I didn't know he'd returned—two weeks earlier, he'd had some kind of “health scare” and gone back to the city to get checked out. He slid the screen door wide, smiling, but I noticed a new, gingerly quality in his movements, like he had broken glass in his slippers.
He told me Bobby would be right down. He asked after my parents, and Reggie, and then said, “Been doing any fishing?”
“Not this summer, no.” Six years ago, he'd taken me and Reggie and Bobby out to the Long Wharf to fish for snapper and porgies, calling a huddle to share his method for threading the bait securely through the hooks. “If the eye pops out, you know it's good and tight.” Except for night bluefishing off Montauk, which was an excuse to stay up until 4 am and drink seven-ounce Millers, I hadn't fished since that day.
“Your grandfather loved to fish out here. We used to go out all the time on that little boat he had back then.”
I nodded.
“It's nice to see the young people following in the tradition. I know he would have liked to see you out there, dropping a line like we used to.”
“I like fishing,” I said. I heard Bobby thumping around upstairs so I sent a telepathic blast to make him hurry. My grandparents died before I was born and I didn't know how to feel when people talked about them. I had this thing in my head where they sat me down and laid it all out, the way things work, how to move, what to be, but I'd never get that information now. Except the hard way. I picked a burr off my socks, but didn't know where to put it, so I just held it in my hand.
“That's the beauty of coming out here,” Bobby's grandfather said. “Having this place. People like your grandfather working hard to make something for his family, and passing it down to your generation.” He suddenly realized how the dark had crept in around us and he groped under the lampshades. “You're lucky, you know that?”
“Yes.”
“To have all of this.”
“Yes.”
When Bobby and I got in the car, we tried to come up with a plan. Everybody was working that night except for us and Nick, but Nick had gone to the city to buy records. (Sounds, the East Hampton music store, didn't cater to us unless we wanted something Top 40.) We needed beer. The quest for beer, with its daily intrigues, reversals, and cliff-hangers, had become our favorite subplot. How to get it, who to buy it, where to drink it, starting all over again the next day. Our tall friends weren't around. We'd drunk a few of my father's beers already that week, and I didn't want to push it. It was a long shot, but we finally decided to hit town, and then the other key places, like the 7-Eleven in South Hampton, to see if any amenable parties materialized. Like one of my sister's group, or Orrin. Orrin was this older white hippie guy who oozed around the towns, perpetually en route to or in between odd jobs and escapades, and he'd buy a six-pack for you if you listened to his latest sad story of “I was just minding my own business when.” He smelled like a backed-up sewer, but it was worth it.
“They have these place mats at the Corner Bar,” Bobby told me as we broke out of Ninevah, “that have the history of the Hamptons written on them and they said that Sagaponac is an Indian word meaning ‘the land of the big brown nuts.’ I was eating a hamburger and just busted out laughing.”
“That's funny.”
“I was like, ‘I got your big brown nuts right here.’”
“Your sacadiliac,” I said.
He looked over at me. I told him, “Like in ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, when Melle Mel raps”—I tried to get it right—“‘Neon King Kong standin' on my back, Can't turn around, broke my sacadiliac.’ His nut sack. He's saying everything's so tough, it's like getting kicked in the balls.”
“I never knew what he was talking about there.”
“Yeah, well.”
Bobby turned into Azurest and informed me that he was going to drive by Devon's house to see if she was back from her family outing. “If she's there, I gotta give you the boot, dude.” I'd just dragged myself to his house. I thought: Chaotic Evil. I hadn't done that in a while, tripping down the alignments. During my big D&D phase (October 1981–April 1983), I'd taken the game's classification system to heart, doling out alignments to the world. See, according to The Player's Handbook, people and monsters can be broken down by their inner natures, with Good, Evil, and Neutral on one axis, and Lawful and Chaotic on the other. Lawful Good, for example, described a knight's dutiful temperament, and Lawful Evil the personality of a dictator or evil king—they had an order they obeyed, sticking by their rules whether it called for them to save people's asses or cut off their heads. Neutrals bent toward Good or Evil depending on whether they dabbled in the occasional altruistic act or had a penchant for stabbing people in the back. Robin Hood was a Chaotic Good type, lawless and unpredictable but le
nding a helping hand, and Chaotic Evil was the banner of twisted prankster, like the Joker in Batman comics. Or guys with their first cars.
I took this taxonomy seriously. It just made sense: people had alignments, an essential nature. If you could see who and what they were, you'd be better equipped to deal with them. Before my sister became a potential girlfriend and they had to treat us better, the Older Boys of Sag were Chaotic Evil through and through. Coming across a group of them hanging out on the corner of Terry or Milton, you had to steel yourself. They'd say, “Nice bike! Can I see it for a second?” and then book up the hill, seesawing on your tiny Huffy, leaving you in the midst of their howling cronies. You'd discover it dumped on your front lawn hours later with grass smeared in the pedals, just when you were about to rat them out. Marcus was their plaything, abused and disrespected. They tripped him and sent him sprawling into the sharp gravel, pissed in his Coke, stomped his kites. Chaotic Evil, like I said.
The first week of eighth grade, I leaned over to Andy Stern in the middle of second-period Science and whispered, “Don't you think Dr. Nadler is Lawful Evil?” Yes, Dr. Nadler, the dragon waiting deep in the cave of junior high. We'd heard the tales for years, and now here he was, with wild red eyes and scaly armor. A late lab report knocked your grade off five points, five points that could only be earned back through extra credit. An unyielding faith in a bogus system. Lawful Evil.
“What?” Andy asked, wincing.
“Lawful Evil, man.”
“Shush!” He looked around for eavesdroppers and ignored me the rest of class. This was my first indication that I lagged in lame/not-lame knowledge, what could be said when girls or cool kids were around, and what couldn't. Mentioning D&D, you might as well fart while playing seven minutes in heaven, not that I'd ever played seven minutes in heaven, but I had spent some time thinking about it and it had occurred to me that farting was something you shouldn't do, if the occasion arose. I'd have to get used to it, falling behind, because this was no temporary condition. The guy dropping off the weekly pamphlets outlining the shifting teenage codes and edicts skipped my house, or someone stole them from my doorstep before I got up.
I was undeterred. Taken with the reassuring clarity of the alignments, I didn't stop with people, proceeding on to label inanimate objects, abstract systems, and states of being. A nap—Lawful Good, certainly. The Assassination of Betamax at the hands of dastardly VHS—that was Lawful Evil all over, for what was capitalism but malevolent design exercising its power? Getting up for school was Neutral Evil by my sights, the blank slate of the day with its possibility for fun or misery Neutral in itself, the Evil creeping in with the school thing, being forced to play my part in the social apparatus. I was a dork, not a cog.
D&D had few other real-life applications, except as a means of perpetuating virginity and in its depiction of existence as a never-ending series of grim adventures in dungeons. I rued the former, embraced the latter as an elegant metaphor. (Or, in my language of the time, “Yeah, man, that really sums it up.”) Eventually I forgot about the alignment thing. I lost my taste for nuance once I became a teenager. Nuance got you nowhere. Either/or was where it was at.
We hit Meredith Avenue. “NP's going to get me and the girls into U.T.F.O.,” Bobby said. “They have to give it up after that.”
“Right,” I said.
The lights in Devon's house were out, and Bobby drove by without comment. The hunt was on. Halfway up Bay Street, we rolled up on this guy walking back from town under the weeping willows. It was dark, but I thought I knew him. Our eyes locked when we passed each other, and even though he didn't recognize me, I asked Bobby to turn around. “That's my uncle,” I said. This went against my strict rules for avoiding all but the most inevitable interactions with grown-ups, but for some reason I wanted to say hi. I think I wanted to show off that my friend had a car, that we'd entered the next level.
“Maybe he can buy us beer,” Bobby said.
“Are you crazy? He'll tell on us.” Everyone over the age of thirty was in cahoots in my book, Telexing reports to the command center so that the colored pin on the wall map held my current position. “Suspect is walking gawkily in a south-southeasterly direction.”
“Uncle Nelson,” I said. “It's Ben. Benji.”
He peered into the car. “Where's Reggie?”
“He's working at Burger King.”
Uncle Nelson nodded. He'd settled into a bearish pudge since I'd last seen him, his polo shirt tight on his chest and exposing a centimeter of belly when he moved. His hair thinned in the same pattern as his father's, the gray retreating from a shiny atoll of scalp. I'd always liked Uncle Nelson, rascally Uncle Nelson with his shitty luck and wide, eager face. He was my mother's cousin off some branch I couldn't keep track of, the important part being that his parents and my mother's parents had been part of the first Sag wave. Mention his name and heads shook, hands wrung. My mother's family was proper, well mannered, raised right. Uncle Nelson was “bad,” in their classification system. “That's where Nelson drove up on the lawn,” my mother reminded us whenever we went down Sagg Road, in tribute to that summer scandal of yore. He'd dropped out of dental school (the horror), played house with That Spanish Woman (cringe, cringe), and worst of all, Moved to California, which was code for smoking pot and group sex. All this was in the '60s and early '70s, before I was aware; I received these stories as pure history, When Uncle Nelson Sank the Chris-Craft up there with Washington Crossing the Delaware and Jimi Hendrix Choking on His Own Vomit, of equal import. I hadn't seen him in years. It had been a while since he came out to make the rounds. Chaotic Good, I would've said—bucking the bourgie system, but daring and bighearted.
“What are you boys getting up to?”
“Just going for a drive,” I said, as if I were some South Hampton fossil taking out his Model T “You staying over at the Yellow House?”
His eyes dipped and he said, “I'm hanging out at Eddie Baxter's this weekend, seeing what he's up to. But they're putting the grand-kids to bed, so I decided to go out for a little bit. I'm too old for—”
“Do you think you can buy us some beer?” Bobby asked.
“I'll buy you some beer,” Uncle Nelson said, in a blink. “Just don't tell your mother, Benji. I know I'm her favorite cousin, but she'd still wring my neck.”
Bobby'd asked the only old-time Sag Harbor guy who'd do it for us, as if recognizing Uncle Nelson's mischievous bent right off. I wanted to punch him in his face, like the old days. I think he wanted word to get back to his parents, to prove that despite accepting the car (and gas money, despite his constant tithing of us), he could still bring them misery. Bring, in fact, a new kind of misery.
I offered Uncle Nelson the front seat but he wrinkled his face. I remembered the time he squeezed in with us at the kids' table during a family reunion, begging, “Lemme in here, I'm one of you guys.” We laughed, and he entertained us for the rest of the meal, clowning around. Off behind him, his father grimaced as he watched Uncle Nelson's big legs bouncing on the tiny chair.
He leaned forward, jamming his elbows into the front seats. “You just have to do me a favor and take me around the Hills when we're done.”
“Bet.”
“Uncle Nelson used to have an MG,” I said. There was a picture in the Hempstead House of him leaning on the hood of this emerald Speed Racer vehicle. Cool as hell. He was wearing hip visor shades and had a beatnik V of hair shrouding his lip. No, not exactly in line with the standard Sag Harbor alignment.
“Fresh,” Bobby said.
“That was the best time,” Uncle Nelson said, “taking that baby up these roads. Getting up to no good.” He sat back, smacking his hands on the upholstery. “Long time ago, boy,” he said. “Now it's your turn to do all that stuff we used to do.” It was quiet back there as we zipped up the turnpike, and I kept my mouth shut in case I said something kidlike, and he changed his mind.
After we went to 7-Eleven and came back and dropped him off, Bo
bby and me went over to my house and drank the beer and watched Hooper and Terror Train. “That's the killer, right?” he asked after every suspicious twitch, and I said, “Keep watching.” We didn't stay up late. We had a big day tomorrow.
I WORKED THE NEXT AFTERNOON. Change had come to Jonni Waffle over the weeks, autumnal telegrams to remind us of the fleetingness of the season. The new Soft Serv machine arrived, a single nozzle delivering chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry with the press of a button. It buzzed all day with an unholy power. Jonni Waffle HQ sent over a box of T-shirts with the new logo—a smiling cone with spindly arms and legs. More than one customer remarked that it looked like a dancing dildo. I didn't know what a dildo was, so I had to ask. The customers were always right in Jonni Waffle. And finally, the cousins were gone. Martine fired them after they'd robbed one too many Reddi-wip cans of its NO, causing the white liquid to pour over the cones and boats instead of producing a handsome, vertical swirl. Yeah, Meg and Marsha had developed quite a whippets problem to cope with the stress of life in the waffle-cone trenches, and polite society rendered its punishment. My elbow tingled occasionally in phantom arousal and to this day remains charged, a shameful erogenous zone.
Taking their shifts was Jen, a redheaded local girl and student of New York State's labor laws, especially with regard to the duration and frequency of breaks. She declared, “I'm going on my break,” as if daring the manager to stop her, and when no one said anything, because no one was paying attention, she added, “We're allowed two ten-minute breaks per shift!” before storming away. For some reason I can't fathom, she was a tip magnet, which was fortunate because we divvied up the tip cup evenly, a nice system for someone like me, who sent customers' change plummeting down their pockets.