“Where's my towel?” Marcus asked.
We shaded our eyes with our hands and squinted up at him.
Randy said, “You said, can you bring it in the car, not can you lug it down the beach for me.” He gave Marcus the keys and Marcus returned to the dune.
“Dag,” Bobby said.
“That was cold,” Clive said.
Randy yawned and stretched. He turned over on his back, exposing his great mammaries. They bobbed on his stomach. “Ain't nothing but a thang,” he said.
“Why don't you put your shirt back on, Randy,” NP said. “You're going to scare the white people.”
“Yeah, Randy, shit,” I said.
“Sh-ee-it,” Randy said, slapping his chest vigorously. He was in a good mood, or else he would have thrown out “You want to walk home?,” his now-standard, signifying-ending response.
“Shit, I'll show them something to be scared of,” Bobby said.
“What are you going to show them, you fuckin' albino-lookin' bitch?” NP said.
Everybody cracked up except for Bobby, who growled, “Shut the fuck up,” and turned over to even up his tan. He was a fierce and aggressive tanner in the early part of the summer, to giddyap his skin to a level-playing-field brown. By late July, albino wouldn't apply as an insult, except in a retro kind of way when you couldn't think of anything else. It was always nice to have a spare.
These were the early stages of Bobby's transformation into that weird creature, the prep-schooled militant. We were made to think of ourselves as odd birds, right? According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were. What kind of bourgie sell-out Negroes were we, with BMWs in the driveway (Black Man's Wagon, in case you didn't know) and private schools to teach us how to use a knife and fork, sort that from dat? What about keeping it real? What about the news, statistics, the great narrative of black pathology? Just check out the newspapers, preferably in a movie-style montage sequence, the alarming headlines dropping in-frame with a thud, one after the other: CRISIS IN THE INNER CITY!, WHITHER ALL THE BABY DADDIES, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WELFARE STATE: THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO WORK, NOT LIKE IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Hey, let's stop pussyfooting around and bring back slavery already, just look at these dishpan hands.
Black boys with beach houses. It could mess with your head sometimes, if you were the susceptible sort. And if it messed with your head, got under your brown skin, there were some typical and well-known remedies. You could embrace the beach part—revel in the luxury, the perception of status, wallow without care in what it meant to be born in America with money, or the appearance of money, as the case may be. No apologies. You could embrace the black part—take some idea you had about what real blackness was, and make theater of it, your 24-7 one-man show. Folks of this type could pick Bootstrapping Striver or Proud Pillar, but the most popular brands were Militant or Street, Militant being the opposite of bourgie capitulation to The Man, and Street being the antidote to Upper Middle Class emasculation. Street, ghetto. Act hard, act out, act in a way that would come to be called gangsterish, pulling petty crimes, a soft kind of tough, knowing there was someone to post bail if one of your grubby schemes fell apart.
Or you could embrace the contradiction, say, what you call paradox, I call myself. In theory. Those inclined to this remedy didn't have many obvious models.
In Bobby's case, his birthright, if we can call it that, made him a premature nationalist. The customary schedule for good middle-class boys and girls called for them to get Militant and fashionably Afrocentric the first semester of freshman year in college. Underlining key passages in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and that passed-around paperback of Black Skin, White Masks. Organize a march or two to protest the lack of tenure for that controversial professor in the Department of Black Studies. Organize a march or two to protest the lack of a Department of Black Studies. It passed the time until business school. Bobby got an early start on all that, returning to Sag from his sophomore year of high school with a new, clipped pronunciation of the word whitey, and a fondness for using the phrases “white-identified” and “false consciousness” while watching The Cosby Show. It caused problems as he fretted over his zip code (“Scarsdale ain't nothing but a high-class shantytown. It's a gilded lean-to”) and how changing his name might affect his Ivy League prospects (“Your transcript says Bobby Grant, but you said your name was Sadat X”).
We used to make fun of him for being so light-skinned, and this probably contributed to some of his overcompensating. The joke was that if the KKK came pounding on Bobby's door and demanded, “Where the black people at?” (it's well known, the fondness of the KKK for ending sentences with a preposition), he'd say, “They went thataway!” with a minstrel eye-roll and vaudeville arm flourish. He rebelled against his genes, the Caucasian DNA in his veins square-dancing in there with strong African DNA. It's a tough battle, defending one flank against nature while nurture snuck in from the east with whole battalions. He directed most of his hostile talk at his mother, who worked on Wall Street. “My mom wouldn't give me twenty dollars for the weekend. She's sucking the white man's dick all day, Morgan Stanley cracker, and can't give me twenty dollars!” In two weeks, his parents were going to give him a used Saab for his birthday, generosity that created a whole new genre of bitterness. “My mother's so busy trying to get a pat on the head from Massa that she can't give me gas money. Telling me I should get a job—doing what, sucking the white man's dick?” His mother bore the brunt of his misguided rage, even though his father worked at Goldman Sachs, so it's not like he was dashiki-clad and running a community center somewhere. Get a bunch of teenage virgins together, and you're bound to rub up against some mother issues. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, cast the first plucked-out orb of Oedipal horror.
“Well,” NP said, “I think it's time for this Negro to get himself down the beach and see if he can check out some titties.”
“There's nothing down there, man,” I said. It was an old game, and rigged. Every summer we hiked off in search of that cloud-cloaked Shangri-la, the nude beach. Legends had circulated for years, in hushed tones delivered to wide eyes. Our mothers occasionally sniffed about “those French people lying around with their tops off,” and older kids wowed us with tales of long-limbed honeys sunbathing in little packs. If at long last you discovered their nesting grounds, there was one last hurdle. They might be lying on their stomachs. Tough luck that. But maybe they were on their backs, and if the stars aligned you saw them turn over—in unison, glorious unison—to expose their gifts to the world. They were ambassadors of the international jet set, the kind of lovelies populating James Bond movies and Duran Duran videos. I heard “Watch out for the undertow!” when I looked at the water, and a voice cooing “Oh, James!” when I looked down the beach, in a kind of Madonna/Whore whiplash.
For years we told our moms that we were “going for a walk,” while visions of empty bottles of Bain de Soleil and supermassive fried-egg areolas danced in our heads. We walked and we walked and we never saw anything, returning, forever returning, with slumped shoulders and a faintly mumbled “Next time.” Some of us still held out hope. I knew better, my learned helplessness enjoying a banner year.
“I'm down,” Bobby said. He stood, holding up his arm and inspecting his skin for the slightest change in shade. He seemed pleased.
“That's what I'm talking about,” NP said, thrusting out his hand so that his jive-ass flutter smashed into Bobby's more aggressive pump-'n'-dump, the two quite different shake styles misfiring before finding common ground in the two-finger snap. As if their historic hand summit had come off magnificently, NP yelped, “Alright!” and turned to admonish us. “You'll see what happens when we get back and tell you about the monstrous, most bodacious tatas you missed. You'll be like, ‘Damn I shoulda gone!’”
That left me and Randy and Clive
and Marcus. I think I dozed off for a while. I did not dream. I woke up, disoriented, to the sound of an alien spaceship landing. Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force's “Planet Rock” clanged out of Clive's radio.
“That's a classic joint right there,” Marcus said.
“I haven't heard this in a while,” Randy said. “We used to open up parties at my fraternity house with this.” Clive and I smirked at each other. Randy's constant references to his frat amused us, frankly. The way he talked about it, it sounded like nonstop back rubs and “hey let's wrestle”–type horsing around. But he had a car.
“‘C'mon ladeezz!’” Marcus sang, his bobbing head loose on his neck.
“You know they bit that off Kraftwerk,” I said.
“Bit what off who?” Marcus asked.
“That part right there.” I hummed along. “Kraftwerk is this German band that pretended to be robots. They have this song, ‘Trans-Europe Express,’ that has that ‘Da Dah Da’ part.”
“Afrika Bambaataa didn't steal anything. This is their song.”
“I'm serious, it's true,” I said.
“This song came out first.”
Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force said, “Keep tickin' and tockin', work it all around the clock.”
“No,” I said, “‘Trans-Europe Express’ came out in the late '70s, I'm tellin' you. Elena had the eight-track.” Reggie and I inherited her old stereo when she went all high-tech and futuristic with cassettes, which was great, except that somehow we only ended up with two eight-track tapes: Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk, and The Best of the Commodores. It was a grueling couple of months, listening to those two albums over and over—so I knew I was right.
I didn't understand back then why Marcus was hassling me, but I get it now. A couple of years later, if someone said “I stole that off an old Lou Donaldson record,” and the sample kicked it, you got respect for your expertise and keen ear. Funk, free jazz, disco, cartoons, German synthesizer music—it didn't matter where it came from, the art was in converting it to new use. Manipulating what you had at your disposal for your own purposes, jerry-rigging your new creation. But before sampling became an art form with a philosophy, biting off somebody was a major crime, thuggery on an atrocious scale. Your style, your vibe, was all you had. It was toiled on, worried over, your latest tweak presented to the world each day for approval. Pull your pockets out so that they hung out of your pants in a classic broke-ass pose, and you still had your style. If someone was stealing your style, they were stealing your soul.
But I didn't say this to Marcus. I didn't know it myself. I just knew that it was okay to like both Afrika Bambaataa and Kraftwerk, and I liked what Afrika did with Kraftwerk. Across the ocean right there, the Germans banged out tunes on state-of-the-art synthesizers. Soulsonic Force, they had the reverb up so high it sounded like they were playing that “Trans-Europe Express” melody on some floor-model Casio job from Radio Shack, the dying C batteries croaking out through broken speakers. I pictured the beat box covered in electrical tape, only working if you kept it propped at a forty-five-degree angle due to a loose wire inside, envisioned them recording the song in a janitor's closet deep in the bowels of some uptown high-rise. They dismantled this piece of white culture and produced this freakish and sustaining thing, reconfiguring the chilly original into a communal artifact. They yelled, “Everybody say, ‘Rock it, don't stop it,’” and the crowd yelled back “Rock it, don't stop it” in dutiful assent. How could they not? Probably it was up on Planet Rock where I wanted to be half the time, where they transported all us unlikely chosen, Close Encounters–style. There were other places besides this, the song said. I wasn't trying to rag on Afrika, but salute his oddball achievement. His paradox.
Marcus wasn't having it. Because I didn't say it.
“You're lucky the Zulu Nation ain't around,” he said. “They'd scalp your shit, bury you up to your neck in the sand, and let the tide roll in. They ain't playing, son.”
I looked at him blankly.
He shook his head. “I was at this party one time and this sucker from Bed-Stuy was all, ‘Fuck Manhattan, Bed-Stuy blahzey-blah, Bed-Stuy blahzey-blah’ and these dudes from the Zulu Nation came up and wailed on him. My boy was like blubbering with blood and saliva and shit running down his face. You better watch what you say.”
“I was just trying to share some information.”
“Yeah, right, I forgot you like that white music, you fuckin' Siouxsie and the Banshees–listenin' motherfucker.” He scratched his chest and thought for a moment. “With your monkey ass.”
Let the record show that my black T-shirt was in fact a Bauhaus T-shirt, purchased the previous fall down in the Village on the very first of my weekly trips to scavenge for new albums, generally vinyl dispatches from the world of the pale and winnowed, but it was true that I had worn my Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt the week before. I didn't buy rap—I heard it all the time, Reggie and Elena had all the good stuff, so there was no reason to spend my allowance on it. Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan with a damp towel on your forehead, a minor-chord soundtrack as you moaned into reflecting pools about your elaborate miserableness. The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let's just put it out there: I liked the Smiths.
“I don't know what you're talking about, Marcus,” Clive said. “I put on that Tears for Fears song last night and you were all, ‘That's the shit.’”
Marcus winced. “I like that video, man. It's a good video.”
With that, the argument ended, the latest meaningless border skirmish in the long war over what white culture was acceptable and what was not. We redrew the maps feverishly, throwing out our agreements and concessions. This week surf wear was in, and we claimed Ocean Pacific T-shirts and Maui shorts as our own. Next year, Lacoste was out in enemy territory again, reclaimed by the diligent forces of segregation. There was one rule, though: Clive trumped everything. If Clive gave his blessing, it was okay, whether it was Donny and Marie or Twisted Sister. Golf, whatever. But for the rest of us, the rules changed daily. It kept you on your toes.
AFTER A TIME, we stood one by one, and looked at the waves and one another and nodded: time to go in. The sun was a sick death ray cutting through the cloudless sky—ever since Clive told me about the heat-gathering qualities of black T-shirts, an oven of 50-50 cotton-poly had broiled my flesh. I was pretty suggestible. Clive and Marcus shouted war cries and dove into the water. I ran down to the surf once, ran back, ran down again, ran back (I had a system), then burst into a full-speed wade, grimacing at each frigid centimeter's advance up my belly, holding my arms above the water as if battling quicksand. Randy dipped in a toe and padded back to his blanket.
No, I cannot swim in the conventional sense. To this day. Over the years I have learned how to generate forward movement in a liquid medium through a combination of herky-jerky flip-flapping arm-and-leg movements, but nothing that approaches the standard definition of a stroke. I can float on my back—that counts for something, right? In the doomed-ocean-liner movie that runs in my head, more frequently than I like, I float on my back to the eventual safety of the rescue boat or deserted island. Splish-splashing around with a healthy stroke, hell, that's calling attention to yourself, alerting sharks, who are attracted to movements that resemble those of an “animal in distress,” according to what I read in my shark books in elementary school. Might as well be a traveling chum salesman. Best to float and pretend to be dead, or so my thinking went back then—and in calm water I found nothing more peaceful than doing that very thing. Letting my body go, as if I didn't have a body at all and there was no barrier between me and the sea, while waiting for one of my friends to flip me over or pull me under, because that's what friends do, but if I could g
et a few minutes alone out of the world I was happy.
I wasn't doing any of that freewheeling floating in the ocean. I needed to know where the bottom was. Anytime I strayed into a drop-off, where I knew there had to be a bottom and yet suddenly there wasn't, I panicked. Especially at Left Left, where there was no lifeguard. Clive and Marcus swam out and I stayed behind, up to my waist, turning around every minute to check out the next wave sneaking up on me.
I lumbered down the shore a ways so I could take a whiz without the sudden warm patch wafting over to my friends, jellyfish-like.
From down on the beach, you could only see the tops of the Sagaponack houses, but from the water you got a better view. Our houses on Sag Harbor Bay were bunched up all over one another, and it created a close-knit beach culture. Here the houses were moored behind the dunes like battleships. These were no quarter-acre lots like the ones around our way, who knew what was between these houses, Olympic pools and tennis courts. Croquet arenas where the players swatted human skulls across the grass. Behind the big windows, eyes considered and surveyed all, the gigantic tidal events as well as the minor human ones, the ones wearing bathing suits and sunblock. Behind the windows someone said, There were some black people coming up the beach so we got out our binoculars.