Sag Harbor Read online

  A few weeks earlier, the Coca-Cola Company had discontinued their signature cola. They'd lost market share to Pepsi. Diet Coke, the sister brand, had been too successful, luring away consumers with the promise of thinner thighs, a figure more in line with that Aerobicized You. The higher-ups hit upon a catastrophic solution. They decided to replace the most famous drink in the world with an impostor.

  I had been addicted to Coke for years, with a two-or three-can-a-day habit since the fifth grade, starting around the same time my schoolmates started stealing, now that I think about it. When my sister told me not to be so hyper, or my parents told me to knock it off, I vibrated with the strain of keeping still, and wondered why nature had cursed me so—it wasn't until I was in high school that I learned what caffeine was. My love for Coke went beyond mere buzz, however. How could one not be charmed by the effervescent joviality of a tall glass of the stuff—the manic activity of the bubbles, popping, reforming, popping anew, sliding up the inside of the glass to freedom, as if the beverage were actually, miraculously, caffeinated on itself. That tart first sip, preferably with ice knocking against the lips for an added sensory flourish, that stunned the brain into total recall of pleasure, of all the Cokes consumed before and all those impending Cokes, the long line of satisfaction underpinning a life. What forgiveness for the supreme disappointment of a fountain Coke that turned out to be fizzless and dead, or a lukewarm Coke that had been sitting for a while, falling away from its ideal temperature of 46.5 degrees Fahrenheit/8 degrees Celsius, all the bubbles fled, so that it had become a useless mud of sugar. Which is what New Coke tasted like, actually.

  I remember when I first heard that they were changing the formula. April 23, 1985. It was dinnertime and I'd wandered into the living room to ask my mother a question—I can't remember what it was, as it was erased by the terrible information. Dinnertime custom had Reggie and me eating in his room before an array of sitcoms, the M*A*S*Hs, the 'KRPs, while our parents ate in the living room watching the evening news. (I moved into my sister's room when she went to college, but Reggie got to keep the TV after a series of negotiations too Byzantine to go into, higher-level even-Stephen stuff beyond mortal ken.) I walked in just in time to hear the newscaster say, “A surprising announcement about an American classic.” Somehow I knew. I stayed through the commercial break and watched as Roberto Goizueta, the CEO of Coca-Cola, cheered the end of the world. It was inconceivable, like tampering with the laws of nature. Hey, let's try Gravity-Free Tuesdays, buckle up, motherfuckers. From this day on, water is incredibly flammable, see how that goes. I slunk back to my room, dizzy and confused. It was as if someone had popped the top of the world, and let all the air out.

  Within days, I'd cornered the local market on Old Coke in a grid defined by 106th Street to the north, Ninety-sixth to the south, and from Amsterdam to the river, buying up what I could from the corner bodegas, the increasingly slick delis popping up on Broadway, and the assorted stationery stores of the 'hood. By the time New Coke started to appear, a few days after the announcement, I was well prepared, with a huge stash in my closet, a prayer against Doomsday. (A secret stash, Klepto-style.) I had no dreams of profiteering, of selling my stock at a dear price to aficionados when the day came that the people of Earth discovered the treasure they had destroyed, as if the cola were an exquisite lizard or spiny bivalve driven to extinction in our race's savage drive to ruin. No. I wanted it all to myself, like an art thief who steals Nude Descending a Staircase or some key Picasso and hangs it on the wall of his own private gallery, for his wicked and ingrown pleasure, at peace with the fact that the world is unaware of his activities, and perhaps that is actually the point of the entire exercise—although such a sentiment is probably not too surprising coming from a boy whose main recreation was masturbation.

  When I'd finished my scurrying up and down the avenues, and hauled my six-packs back to my lair, it seemed as though I had enough Coke for a lifetime. But of course it went fast. I tried rationing myself to one can a day, but that didn't last long. I couldn't keep my hands off the stuff. My parents had a party, and my mother asked if she could “borrow” a few cans for mixers. Borrow! How did she even know about my stash—if she knew that, what else did she know? There were magazines in my possession I should maybe hide better. What could I answer but yes, since she could not see or just plain ignored the desperation in my eyes. What a horror it was to see all those half-finished cans strewn around the house, it was a battlefield, my own Gettysburg, and I learned that day what it is to mourn when I heard the sad, exhausted hissing as I poured the remains down the sink.

  I was susceptible, then, when I went into Karen's kitchen and someone opened the cabinet next to the sink and I saw a flash of red. As if in a dream, I knelt down to see and there it was, six-pack upon six-pack of Sweet Brown Gold. I was astounded—yes, there was more Coke in the world, but more important, there were others out there like me, those who had been disappointed by life but who did what they could to beat back chaos. I drifted away from the kitchen to let this revelation settle in. As I hung out with Bobby's friends and talked and joked with them, my dream of being adopted by their clan faded away. The cans, the cans kept returning to my mind, like a red curtain falling down to hide the world. After two beers I knew what I had to do. I'd never had two beers before.

  I retrieved my jacket from Karen's parents' bedroom, which had been commandeered as the coat room, and slipped back to the kitchen. A boy and a girl talked close together next to the fridge. I tossed some ice into a glass, loudly and emphatically, and declared, “Just looking for mixers,” and they smiled and moved away. Obscured by the cabinet door, I wrapped a six-pack in my jacket and pulled the next six-pack forward so that it appeared as if nothing were amiss. My crime might not be noticed for days. I stood. No one had noticed me.

  I walked very “act naturally” out into the living room. My plan was to stash the goods in a safe area in the coat room, and exit calmly with the stuff at the end of the party. The living room was quiet, the talking room as opposed to the dancing room, Karen's bedroom, where the music was cranked up. Which is what made the crash that much more loud. In my nervousness I had clumsily wrapped the six-pack, and when I adjusted it as I walked across the room, the cans slipped out in the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation. They clattered against the hardwood floors. Everyone looked over, but my crime was so inexplicable that outsiders could not comprehend what had just happened. They returned to their conversations as I picked up the six-pack. All of them except for Karen. She looked into my face and shook her head ever so slightly in sad assessment. She took the Coke from my hands and said, “I think you should go now.”

  In the following days, I don't know what I regretted more—my exile from those who might have been my new friends, my classmates from the school I might have gone to had I chosen differently, or the loss of six Cokes. Frankly, it was a toss-up. Bottom line, the episode put an end to my troublemaking efforts. What was the point? Move. Don't move. Act. Don't act. The results were the same. This was my labyrinth.

  NP PLACED HIS MOTHER'S PINT of ice cream in the freezer out front, to keep it out of the way.

  “I think I might have a hot dog,” I said.

  “In a waffle cone?” Meg shrieked malevolently, and we cracked up. My hand instinctively shot up to cover my mouth.

  My mouth. Is it possible I haven't mentioned my mouth yet? My mouth was everything you have ever found repellent gathered together, piled in a cauldron, melted down by sadists into an abhorrent alloy, and then shaped into clips and wire for placement on my teeth. I wore braces, you see, tiny self-esteem-sucking death's-heads all in a row, turning my smile into a food-flecked grimace. Oh, I kept them pretty clean, but a series of corn-on-the-cob-related incidents had planted the seeds of a neurosis, and every so often, if the psychological weather was right, my hand darted to cover my smile from view. So I guess something was brewing that day, because to observers it appeared as if I were sniffing my pa
lm.

  “Why are you sniffing your palm?” Meg asked.

  “Nothing!” I said.

  The families started trickling in, the early eaters full of pizza slices and fried miscellany from one of the seafood restaurants on Main Street that changed names and owners every summer. Only the distributors of processed frozen-fish parts remained the same, eternal in their way, maintaining supply lines season after season. Bert emerged, attended by his sound effect, a flushing toilet. He mopped his forehead with a wet towel and told me to take the garbage out back.

  The sky was getting dark. “Is it going to rain?” I asked Nick. The sole grace of the waffle apparatus was its proximity to the window, allowing a prisoner's view of the outside and inspiring many a waffle-duty space-out.

  “Not yet, but it's all cloudy.”

  If the rain came quickly, we'd have an easy night. I took out the garbage. Now I'm no chemist, so I can't break down the reaction with any real authority, but I'd have to say that Bristol's had been forced into an unholy pact when they devised their ice-cream formula. In exchange for supernaturally delicious flavor, the ice cream could not survive for long outside its containers. It started rotting immediately when exposed to room temperature. Standard Deal-with-the-Devil trade-off stuff. By the evening, that morning's ice cream reeked like curdled hell.

  There was always a hole somewhere. I dripped a multicolored trail above the previous day's dried trail like a dipshit Jackson Pollock, along the Promenade, around the back of Bayside, to the official Jonni Waffle Dumpster. With some difficulty, I tossed the heavy bags inside, turned—and saw Gabe across the street, leaning against the door of the Tuck Shop, eyeballing me. I looked down, took a step, looked up again, and he was still staring at me. And that expression on his face—was it disapproval?

  Not only was my Jonni Waffle T-shirt stinking but now it blazed an obnoxious neon red, the white logo blinking its message: Traitor, Treason, Traitor, Treason. No, we didn't visit Gabe anymore. Once in a while we'd get seized by nostalgia and walk in to play a video game. The place was always empty. The games seemed so silly. How could we have spent so many hours in there, standing like morons, our fingers tapping, eyes glazed? I walked back to the store, looking at the ground. I remembered an incident from a few weeks ago, when Gabe had stopped me on my way to Jonni Waffle saying, “Hey, you guys never come in these days,” jabbing his Pall Mall toward me. And I said, “Yeah,” not even stopping to be polite. I was late for work.

  I made it past the Tuck Shop, ignoring Gabe's stare. Who wouldn't be mad at being replaced? Just another smear under Mar-tine's steamroller. Pat pat. “Whatever happened to the Tuck Shop?” you'd hear in the coming years. It was “destroyed by fire.” Next summer it was a health-food store.

  The wind was picking up, the sky over the wharf a dirty gray foam. Although I'd only been gone four minutes, the store was packed. Often they came out of nowhere, at the behest of a signal out of range of human ears. Bert caught my eyes as I wriggled through the crowd. “Incoming!” he yelled from the other side.

  Incoming, exactly. War and siege analogies came easily in there, during a rush. I was most partial to a scenario I called the Zombie Hideout, given my early training in horror movies: the human beings in the house, the furniture nailed up against the doors and windows to repel the living dead. Dawn of the Dead, with its consumer-society subtext, had its particular lessons. For those who may have missed it, basically the dead have come to life and desire human flesh. In ballerina costumes, policeman uniforms, and terry-cloth robes, the dead roam the streets in search of prey. Once they were normal people. In this entry in the Living Dead series, human survivors have barricaded themselves in a mall, a micro society with all the packaged food and consumer items they could want. At one point in the film, as the characters stand at the doors and look at the hundreds of mindless zombies gathered outside, they wonder what drives them. “It's some kind of instinct,” one of them says. “This was an important place in their lives.” Their brains are gone, but they retain this one thing. I know now that when the living dead come, it will not be at the mall that they gather but at the ice-cream shop.

  Once in a while, in the city, I'll come across a white person, and Sag Harbor will come up and they'll say, “Oh, I didn't know black people went out there.” Which I always find funny, because until that summer, I thought all the white people I saw in town were townies. Townies with checkered pants. That's how we saw things from our neck of the woods. Working at Jonni Waffle taught me that all those white people who came in couldn't have been townies because if the tiny hamlet had been home to that much miscreancy year-round, it would have been swallowed by the Earth long ago.

  They took a number from the pink plastic dispenser and waited, the entire Hamptons. The smell of the waffle cones drew them inside, the same way we had caught minnows with old sheets and bedspreads—they flung themselves toward the open seas of their desire. They wore flip-flops that smacked like wet lips, they shuffled forward in tasseled loafers, in white tennis sneaks, and their polo shirts prowled the entire pastel spectrum, from lime green to Creamsicle orange to baboon-butt pink. They were members of varied fraternities, yacht clubs, golf clubs, secret-handshake groups, they were strivers, inheritors, and the privileged bored.

  All kinds of flies out there in the summer, stuck to the gently swirling brown strips.

  We served them. Gardeners who spent the afternoons shepherding rows of tomatoes to a vulgar fullness through elegantly gritted overpriced gloves. Retirees shaking their heads over the weekend traffic and hissing invective at the young, young street cops and their new regulations, these peach-fuzz constables who treated them like newcomers even though they'd been coming out for years. The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels, looking down on the new money and reminiscing about the silent Main Street of yore, when you could walk whole yards without being insulted by sniveling little emissaries of the upstart future. There were people who emerged from big old cars that they don't make anymore, which sat under tarps in immaculate garages waiting for the three days of the year they gulped and started down the lanes, these gawked-at luxury rides of the dead, slowly tooling down the main drags of the towns for all to see and ponder.

  They came from all over the East End. The youthful princes who swerved drunkenly down the back roads and were written up by eager deputies who saw their reports crumpled up by wizened sheriffs with a curt “What are you, stupid?,” as the police blotters of the weeklies detailed tawdry domestic disturbances next to tear-out coupons advertising “2-for-i Nite at Jonni Waffle.” Indeed police-blotter habitués staggered into the store in between capers. “I think I know that guy.” Those deposited by helicopter, those who putt-putted down 27 in jalopies, those who blessed the Earth with every footstep, those who deigned, those who stooped to, those who would get their pictures next to their obituaries in the Times, and those who would lie on the floor of their abject rooms for days before being discovered.

  You got to know the locals. There were people who had uprooted their lives at great cost, the converts who had just become year-rounders with schemes of belonging. Entrepreneurs who fell in love with the silence and the sunsets and convinced themselves that their establishments would succeed against the odds—restaurants serving lovingly produced food of a specialized bent, curio shops whose shelves buckled under knickknacks that were physical manifestation of their owner's psychology. The shopkeepers who shivered with desperation and pounced whenever a visitor roused the sleepy bells over their front doors, the shopkeepers who would take until grim October to accept what was obvious, when they frantically tried to renegotiate their leases, and came into Jonni Waffle less frequently as the summer wore on, as they started to cut back on extras, and when has ice cream been anything but the definition of extra?

  We didn't discriminate, we scooped. For the burnouts, the flotsam, the human tumbleweeds who were all o
f us but for our choices, who found purchase in Springs, outside Amagansett, between towns on dirt roads, in little rooms above Main Street storefronts, in basements of bleak illumination. Magazine editors who assigned articles on the hot spots in order to avail themselves of comps thereafter, oh how they waddled in. The caretakers of other people's property, the people who lived on boats, the painters out to capture that fabled East End light, stoop-shouldered writers ironically digging the affluence while sniffing around for patrons. Posers. Celebrities in shades. Sailors without ships. Descendants of locally famous whalers, whose names hung on street signs to remind people of what they had never known. Potato farmers deliberating offers from developers, the summer influx of help, the waitresses and bartenders and sous-chefs flapping in on their annual migration. Deckhands of yachts on the lookout for wedding rings on fingers, the easy prey, those well-acquainted with knots of all kinds, au pairs stumbling in high heels on their night off and wearing too much makeup and helplessness on their faces. Two scoops, please.

  They pointed through the glass and ordered us around. C-list celebrities visiting the houses of their B-list friends, hovering impatiently at the counter as they tried to juggle condescension and confusion at the same time. Old ladies with oddball things on their heads: turbans, pillbox hats fresh out of mothballs, floppy wicker creations that drooped over their big dark sunglasses. Weekend houseguests full of love and ideas and fretful talk of schedules, the train on Sunday that would take them away too soon. Weekenders, weekenders of every disposition, saying, Look at this, Check this out, Isn't that the cutest, the quaintest, dawdling before window displays while the ice cream melted in sweet rivulets over their fingers, Isn't this the kind of thing we can display in our houses and have a little story about if anyone should ask, and we hope they ask, because if they don't there is this great abyss of us we must navigate. Young enthusiasts of fudge. The smeared, the daubed, the ugly eaters out for their favorite treat.