Sag Harbor Read online

  BRISTOL'S ICE CREAM had their truck parked outside Jonni Waffle. Martine shifted the cans on the dolly to double-check them against his list of what had been pillaged in the preceding seven days. White mist boiled off the cans, disappearing in the afternoon heat. “Hello Benji,” Martine said, barely looking up.

  I no longer winced when he called me Benji. My great plans at the beginning of the summer of going by Ben had been disappointed, so I had given up on friends and family making the switch, concentrating instead on the understanding strangers of my future acquaintance, my hypothetical and impending easygoing chums. NP had fixed me in Benji-dom before I even got in the door. He'd brought me an application, which I filled out on the spot and gave back to him. Martine called me in the next day. “So you're Benji,” he said, right off the bat, and I knew I wasn't going to get out from under my name. Seeing that I was another one of black Sag Harbor's mysterious middle-class boys, Martine gave me a few spots in the rotation. My first job.

  I followed the delivery guy inside. The front of the shop, the customer side, wasn't that large, which made it all the more terrifying when you looked up from the vats during the evening rush to see such a ferocious throng. So much menace per square inch. When you walked in, the vats were right in front, and a gentle current of lust drew the customers forward to the glass, where they marveled at the frosty bounty before them. Before I went to work there, my idea of an exotic flavor was Mint Chocolate Chip, the Baskin-Robbins version of pushing the envelope. The labels on the vat windows inside Jonni Waffle destroyed my provincial notions. What the hell was a praline, and what would possess someone to insert it into a creature called Cran-Mocha? These were nefarious doings. But then, the secondary gimmick of the place, after the waffle cone, was infinite recombination. One scoop of this with another scoop of something else, and then cap that off with a topping. When all else failed, stick in some marshmallow.

  Again, I knew about sprinkles, but that was as far as things went for me, toppings-wise. Jonni Waffle had a vast Toppings Bar, featuring all kinds of wondrous things laid out in a gaudy pageant of gluttony American-style, freedom served as-you-like-it. A Plexiglas barrier protected the bar from the customers, I swear it was bulletproof and riot-tested. Is the toppings bar ready for its close-up? Let us cue the orchestra as we pan lovingly, lingeringly, over the delights in the tiny containers. Fragments of candy bars, chopped up Heath and Mounds, splinters of Snickers, Gummi Bears that we shoved headfirst into vanilla bluffs, M&M's and Reese's Pieces, containers of raspberries and blueberries that wore haloes of circling fruit flies. Chocolate chips, jimmies, shavings of coconut. We jabbed these items into the scoops, extra points if you heard a crack as the cone buckled under the strain, we dolloped on hot fudge and butterscotch on command with a fetishist's care. During slow stretches, the managers directed us to clean up the bar, and we scraped a sponge between the containers and swept the grisly dregs into our palms. The very residue of desire. At the end of the night the floor was tackier than the aisles of a porn theater, and our sneakers made creaky-sticky noises as we walked.

  Next to the vats was the huge freezer where Martine stored the unopened containers. The waffle apparatus was by the window. Squeeze past that and you were behind the counter, where, on that afternoon, Nick leaned against the Soft Serv machine. “What's up, Benji?” The toothpick bobbed on his lip.

  I saw he had a new gold chain. His old one said nick in two-inch letters, and was studded with tiny white rhinestones. His new chain said big nick in two-inch letters, and was studded with tiny white rhinestones that glittered more exuberantly than those of its predecessor, the ersatz diamond industry having made admirable strides in the last few months. “Nice,” I said.

  “Got my man in Queens Plaza to do it,” he said, peering down at his love. Nick was out full time now so he made a point of going back to the city a lot. He'd been a summer kid, one of our gang through many adventures, but something had happened between his parents—we never asked about family processes, only accepted the results when informed—and now he and his mom were living out in Sag Harbor Hills full time. Shudder. He went to Pierson High School, was technically a townie by definitions that he himself would have upheld, and was embarrassed by this. When his schoolmates entered the store, he went all casual, downplaying the connection, muttering “What can I get you?” with true summer-job contempt. “This whole Sag thing is just temporary,” he frequently told us, to reassure himself.

  My father would've kicked me out of the house if I walked in with a gold chain around my neck. Not that it ever would've occurred to me to get a gold chain. “Who does he think he is?” I can hear my father say. “Where does he think he comes from, the Street?” The Street in my father's mind was a vast, abstract plane of black pathology. He'd grown up poor, fighting his way home every day off Lenox Avenue, and any hint that he hadn't escaped, that all his suffering had been for naught, kindled his temper and his deep fear that aspiration was an illusion and the Street a labyrinth without exit, a mess of connecting alleys and avenues always leading back into itself. So no gold chains, no.

  The stereotype stuff was hard, no joke, no matter where you came from. Look, we had all kinds in Azurest. We had die-hard bourgies, we had first-generation college strivers, fake WASPs, the odd mellowing Militant, but no matter where you fell on the spectrum of righteousness, down with the cause or up with The Man, there were certain things you did not do. Too many people watching.

  You didn't, for example, walk down Main Street with a watermelon under your arm. Even if you had a pretty good reason. Like, you were going to a potluck and each person had to bring an item and your item just happened to be a watermelon, luck of the draw, and you wrote this on a sign so everyone would understand the context, and as you walked down Main Street you held the sign in one hand and the explained watermelon in the other, all casual, perhaps nodding between the watermelon and the sign for extra emphasis if you made eye contact. This would not happen. We were on display. You'd add cover purchases, as if you were buying hemorrhoid cream or something, throw some apples into the basket, a carton of milk, butter, some fucking saltines, and all smiles at the register.

  For argument's sake, let's say there was a brand of character who was able to say, Forget that, I'm going to walk up and down Main Street with a watermelon under each arm! And one between my legs! Big grin on my face! Peak o' rush hour! Such rebellion was inherently self-conscious, overly determined. It doth protest too much, described an inner conflict as big as that of the watermelon-avoiders. We were all of us stuck whether we wanted to admit it or not. We were people, not performance artists, all appearances to the contrary.

  But Nick! Nick embraced early '80s fashion of young black boys with verve and unashamed gusto. He loved two-tone jeans, gray in the front, black in the back, months out of fashion but authentic city artifacts in Sag. The fat laces on his Adidas were puffy and magnificent, and if he wasn't wearing his Jonni Waffle shirt with the sleeves rolled up juvenile delinquent–style, he wore a Knicks jersey that showed off his muscles. Said muscles which had been produced by lugging his radio around.

  His radio was the most ridiculous thing, the biggest radio any of us had ever seen or ever would see. For the most part, the consumerelectronics industry focused its innovation toward miniaturization, the lighter Walkman, the more compact stereo. They reserved their passion for the gigantic for their televisions—except in the case of Nick's radio. In this one area, did they spare themselves their love for the discreet, the handsomely detailed diminutive. His radio was a yard wide, half as much tall, a gleaming silver slab of stereophonic dynamism. It didn't do much. Played the terrible East End radio stations. Played cassettes. Made a dub at the touch of a button. For all I know it was mostly air inside, save for the bushel of double-D batteries it took to power the thing, and which Nick spent most of his wages on. That, and the gold. Its only true talent was in the realm of volume, of producing the sound promised by its formidable frame. Nick never turned
the dial past 7, after an incident he refused to describe. The two speakers were like big black eyes glaring out from the face of defiance itself. The radio said, I am, and what of it?

  When we walked down the street with it—I could barely carry the thing, I'll admit—white people stared and elbowed each other in the gut and made little jokes to each other, which we could not hear because the radio was so perversely loud. Our parents shook their heads when they saw it, and said, “So, that's some radio Nick has,” when they saw his mother. We all worshipped it, and Nick was one of Martine's favorites so the radio had its own perch by the window.

  “I'M BEAT,” Nick said.

  “You're telling me,” I said. We'd both been on last night's shift. Wednesdays were the slowest days—it wasn't the rush that killed you, but the boredom. Boredom made you eat. Some more ice cream, another milk shake. Then when we had to mop, swab the decks out front, we could barely prod the bucket across the floor.

  Martine held the freezer open for the delivery guy, directing the Oreo to the top for easy access. We went through Oreo pretty quickly and Martine had a keen sense of his customers' habits, the ebb and flow of their cravings. He was a new kind of entrepreneur in our sleepy hamlet, indeed the East End in general. A harbinger.

  For years we'd hit the Tuck Shop for all our ice-cream needs. It was just around the corner next to the bank, and home to the town's video games. We spent a lot of time there, buying sodas, candy, and the occasional cone from Gabe, the owner and sole employee of the joint. We slapped our quarters down for next-up on Asteroids, Robotron, Galaga, Berzerk, the whole beeping-and-blipping rogues' gallery, establishing dibs by laying our coins next to the brown wounds in the plastic where the big kids had set down their cigarettes.

  Gabe was a strange guy, an aging beatnik shipwrecked in Sag Harbor after what must have been a long unlikely story. Had he won the Tuck Shop in a weeklong poker marathon, or had it been left to him by an estranged uncle who wanted to make a man out of him? We saw him every day and didn't know anything about him. Tall and gaunt, his long dark hair rubber-banded into a ponytail, he wore a gray tweed jacket even on the hottest days and liked to pace out in front of the store smoking Pall Malls. He'd look out toward the water, smoothing out his Vandyke in thought, leaving us alone inside, trusting that the black boys wouldn't steal anything. And we didn't, though we obsessed over the fact that he left us alone. “That's a crazy white man right there.”

  We'd graduated to different diversions and more pressing business and didn't loiter at the Tuck Shop anymore. The rest of the town, too—how could the humble Tuck Shop, with its paltry sugar and wafer cones, compete with the waffle, which was the future itself? Get outta here with that horse-and-buggy shit. Nope, Martine had the gimmick that got the people in the door and kept them coming back. The Sag Harbor Jonni Waffle was his third shop—he had two others up-island somewhere, successful enough for him to expand. It wasn't much of a gamble.

  Martine was a stocky Dominican dude with pale eyes and stiff, short-cropped orange hair. He'd come to America as a teenager and described himself as “a real immigrant success story,” having worked his way up from bag boy at a grocery store in Queens to manager, to owner of that store and others. Recently he'd sold his empire and moved to Long Island, where he got into the ice-cream trade. I can see Martine sitting in the lounger of his new living-room set, plotting what to do with his grocery-store profits, flipping through a fat binder of franchise brochures. He comes to the Jonni Waffle pamphlet—“True Belgian Flavor!”—and the pictures and text address something deep in his nomad soul. “This is a nation of immigrants,” he'd say in wonder, when he came in on Monday and surveyed the damage of the weekend rushes. Which didn't make much sense—was he saying that our customers were literally immigrants, or was he addressing a larger notion of universal dispossession briefly remedied by ice cream? “Immigrants!”

  “Some of us came on slave ships,” NP would say.

  “Always so negative!” Martine responded. NP was on the ten-cent-raise track. So you know.

  Martine had plenty of philosophical nuggets he'd scoop out and share from time to time, mostly related to the intersection of certain theories he had about human behavior and ice-cream-store management. “No one wants to look at fruit flies,” he'd murmur to the Toppings Bar, while shooing away the tiny swarm hovering over the raspberries, the tenor of his voice making it clear he wasn't really referring to fruit flies but something else. Some elusive profundity. “Heavy cone, light of heart” was another favorite, expressing his joy at the sight of a customer's arm dipping under the weight of a triple-scooped extravaganza. “People come here for a crunchy flight of fancy” was an end-of-shift declaration of satisfaction at his life's course.

  Obviously, he was black.

  “Don't pull that shit on me,” NP told Nick, the architect of this provocation. “He has blue eyes and blond hair.”

  “I'd say they were hazel, shit, your sister Mary has those hazel eyes,” Nick countered, anticipating this attack. “And his hair is that red you see on those Caribbean niggers sometimes, and that's where he's from, Dominica.”

  NP shook his head.

  “What about Little John?” I said. Little John was Bobby's cousin. He had straight dirty-blond hair, gray eyes, and an indisputably Caucasian cast to his features, profile-on-a-coin Caucasian cast. But he was Bobby's cousin, and he acted black enough … frankly we never really talked about it. In fact, maybe we made an extra effort not to talk about it.

  “Exactly!” Nick said.

  “But that's Little John,” NP said dismissively

  “Martine keeps his hair short because it's kinky as hell,” Nick said. “You know that.”

  “He's not no black Dominican.”

  “They got Dominicans walking round blacker than all of us.”

  “But if you called them black they'd punch you in your face.”

  “That's true,” Nick had to concede.

  NP looked at me. “What do you think, Benji?”

  “I don't know.” I shrugged. “You never know.”

  It was Nick versus NP in this quarrel, which went on for weeks, with each side coming back with their new evidence to bolster their cases.

  “Why do you think he hired so many of us?” Nick demanded one evening when the last of the rush trickled out. “You know these white people out here don't want to have black people behind the counter.”

  “Because he pays minimum wage?”

  One shift, Nick had been on edge. Messing up more than usual. Giving the incorrect change, confusing Chocolate Banana with Chocolate Banana Hazelnut, peeling mealy waffles off the grill—rookie stuff like that. Martine was in the store that day, in the back making a lot of calls. I noticed that Nick kept eyeballing him. When Martine said good-bye and walked out of the store, Nick summoned us excitedly to the window.

  “You see! You see!” Nick said.

  “What?”

  “Martine walking to his car.”

  “What about it?”

  “You can't tell me that's not a black walk!”

  “I don't see it.”

  “His arms! His hips!”

  A couple of days after that, Smokey Robinson came over Nick's radio and Martine started in on a lumbering shuffle while talking to a distributor on the phone. He was a bit stiff, but well within the range of Middle-Aged Black Man Getting His Groove On. Nick elbowed me in the stomach and I heard a crack—in surprise, I'd fractured the Two Scoops Raspberry Swirl in a Waffle Cone that I'd been packing. Nick tipped his head toward Martine and glared. You see? You see?

  See indeed. We'd strayed into deep eye-of-the-beholder terrain. And you know we weren't going to ask. If he wasn't, he'd fire us for thinking that he was, and if he was, he'd fire us for it not being obvious. The question would have remained academic if not for the Head-Patting Incident, which raised the stakes. Drawing me in, actually, even though I'd tried to stay on the sidelines.

  THE DAY OUR ELECTRICITY WENT OUT
, NP sauntered in late, wearing a fresh Jonni Waffle shirt his mother had washed for him. His mother was no weekend parent. She was a teacher by profession, and dashed out to Sag, packed for the summer, as soon as the final school bell of the year started ringing. He said hi to Nick, slapped my hand, and then looked at my hair and, with a glance at Martine, said, “You sure you want to leave it all exposed like that? You want a hat?”

  I said, “Shut up, bitch.” I'd been experimenting with “bitch,” trying it out every couple of days. Going well so far, from the response.

  Nick flicked NP's arm with his finger. “Why you got to instigate something all the time?” he asked.

  NP headed straight for the soda machine and shouted out, “Martine, you get enough Pistachio this time?” winking at us over his fake diligence.

  The Head-Patting Incident had occurred the week before, after a post-lunch rush. It was a hot day, steaming, riling the natives. The waffle-cone supply was low when the rush hit, and of everybody on shift, I was known as a clutch waffle-roller, knocking them out at an enviable rate when the pressure was on, not that such a skill was worthy of envy, but you get the point, I got the job done without sacrificing quality and with few rejects. The rush ended on a brutal note when a family of six, mom and dad and their nattering brood in every species of khaki shorts—Sansabelt, pleated, hip-hugging elastic—decided it would be neat if they all had banana splits. Which were our absolute bane because everyone thought the banana split was very exotic and so they eyeballed every step of the construction process and traded notes afterward, with one of the group inevitably complaining when their split had a smidgen less fudge than their companions'.