Sag Harbor Read online

  They wanted ice cream and we served them. We scooped and scooped. For crumbling entities held together only by the energy of their fierce disdain, who were often, paradoxically, nice tippers, go figure. Heiresses tugging dour poodles from place to place—“It's good to have someone to talk to”—and grizzled he-men who worked with their hands, sneering at and ripping off their clients, those pampered city infants whom they overcharged for wood and nails and spackle so that they could afford a special oil to rub into their calluses. The kept, the models and rent boys and sundry amenable, as if we were not all kept by this place in some way, so who were we to sneer. The strange cheerleaders and the weirdly smiling, the victims who just bobbed along on the current one time too many. Wasted clubbers drifting over from Bayside with eyes the color of raspberry sherbet, who pressed their noses up to the glass to view the stark majesty of the vats and shuddered at the plenty.

  They handed us money and dropped coins into the tip cup from time to time. Scrabbling creatures with power of attorney, swaggering instigators who would emerge unscathed from impending savings-and-loan disasters, cagey VP's of inscrutably named corporate divisions who skipped into the store half levitating on their own magnificence and sneered with impotent disdain at the numbers on the paper tickets. Renters whose thin complaints echoed in the halls of awesome mansions, renters in shabby clapboard shares that didn't have enough bathrooms, renters of total dud houses with overburdened septic tanks and serious drainage issues. Weekend hoboes without a place to stay, who hitched a ride on the five o'clock from Penn, jumped off and prowled after fun, caroused, fucked or did not fuck, found a bed or sofa or floor or slept on the beach and miraculously did not get molested in any way, dozed late and started again on Saturday, with more or less success in their adventures, and took the early train back Sunday morning reeking of their ills and hopes, nodding off in bliss.

  And there must have been creatures of such affluence that I cannot even speculate about their day-to-day, outside the fact of their sweet tooths. They lived over in South Hampton somewhere, on estates guarded by solemn hedges, an army of little green petals repelling all invading eyes. I imagine steaming mud and hairless reptilian creatures swooping down low from between fanlike prehistoric leaves. Beings emerge from the gray muck, raising their great eye-domes above the silt, flicking tongues. The exact shape of their bodies, the number of gills in their neck and suckers on their mottled digits, I cannot say, because in order to mingle with Earth people they needed to wear human-flesh costumes, for only then could they walk among us, and of course eventually they came through the doors of Jonni Waffle like all the rest, like all of us, and I served them ice cream.

  But not that night.

  The lights went out at 8:30, just when things were getting good and horrible in their familiar way. The pink paper tickets fluttered to the floor, stuck fast to melted goo. The hands received the cones. A stray boob collapsed against my elbow and I felt a tiny flutter in my groin. Sorry, sorry. Another sensory organ piped up: my nose. The smell of burned waffle turned the air acrid. NP was on the grills, displaying his customary pride in his job. I looked up and saw him toss a charred Frisbee into the trash—it dissolved into a black vapor as it flew through the air.

  Choppy waters. Bert performed a course correction, putting me on the grills to head off disaster—peril, thy name is waffle shortage. I traded places with NP. He handed me the apron. I put on the apron. He handed me the gloves. I put on the gloves. As I reached for the ladle, I glanced to my right, into the twinkling eyes of a towheaded urchin who looked up at me in wonder, a flying buttress of clear mucous attaching his nostril to the plastic barrier—and the lights went out.

  The only illumination was the crimson eye of the power indicator on Nick's radio. They wailed—inside the store, the evening strollers out on the Promenade and the wharf, the mid-amble folks on Main Street. Bert grumbled in the dark and appeared with some flashlights and we finished out our orders, on the house since the registers were out of commission. We banished the rest of the unfortunates from the premises. They milled around in the corridor outside, clutching their numbers as the news sunk in.

  “Thank God,” Meg said.

  “It was starting to get crazy in here,” Nick said. “Look at them …” Headlights washed over their bodies, producing scary silhouettes.

  “We're closed! It's a BLACKOUT, shit,” NP shouted.

  Keep your voices down, I murmured to myself—the living dead will know we're inside. Bert locked the front doors for added protection and told us he was going to try to get Martine on the phone.

  “Maybe we're going to close early,” I said.

  Nick fiddled with his radio and found WLNG. “The power's out in the Town of South Hampton, and we're getting reports that the lights are out everywhere from Quogue to Amagansett…” It hadn't started raining yet, but obviously the storm was doing some damage up-island.

  “Martine must be freaking out,” NP said. “Blackout on a hot night like this—all this ice cream is going to be puddles, yo.”

  “Sucks for him,” Meg said.

  All of it was going to be soup if the lights took too long to come back on. That was a lot of money.

  Bert returned, flashlight under his chin to give his face a ghoulish cast, and told us that Martine wanted us to give it an hour to see if the electricity returned. Then we'd call it a night. Even if the lights came back on in a few hours, the night was a wash. Everybody was going to stay home in case the juice went out again.

  Who knew what was going on out there? It sounded wild. People whooping, cars honking at things that darted past in the night. The DJ was excited. Nothing ever happened, now this to savor: “We have a report from Eric of Watermill, who's standing outside the Candy Kitchen, and he says all of Main Street Bridgehampton is dark.” Bert told us of the last time he was in a blackout, a story that involved two Swedish exchange students, a borrowed Volvo, and two bottles of Jose Cuervo. “We didn't need lemons, if you know what I mean,” he said. I didn't. Outside the windows and beyond the glass doors of the store, the figures loped in the darkness, caught by random slashes of illumination. We heard their voices as they ran into comrades and shared info, trading disappointments. All in it together.

  The phone rang a bit later. “That's it, we're done,” Bert said as he came back out.

  “Shift over?” Nick said.

  “Our master has spoken.”

  “Master?” I asked, before NP beat me to it.

  “It's a figure of speech.”

  “We better get paid for a whole shift,” NP said.

  “I'm sure you'll get your $8.35,” Bert said, to our general contentment. Like I said, the money added up.

  We cleaned up what we could. Special blackout procedures called for us to lay down garbage bags on top of the open containers in the vats, to add another layer of insulation. Keep the cold inside where it belonged. Bert double-checked the bags when we were done, tucking their edges down tight. “He's going to freak if he comes in tomorrow and all this is melted,” he said.

  I was wiping down the waffle apparatus when the door started rattling. “We're closed, damn it, shit,” I said.

  “Let me in, fool!”

  It was the other cousin, Marsha. “You guys got off lucky,” she said when I opened the door. She'd come to fetch Meg. She and her date, and one of her date's buddies, were waiting outside.

  “Hey Bert, can I go?” Meg asked. She rearranged the slash of hair across her face, but given the lighting conditions, her lazy eye wasn't going to be an issue that night. There was a moment in the dark when I had pictured her giving me a ride home (had she driven to work? I didn't know) and then various things occurring. She grabbed her bag and was gone. “See you later!”

  Soon the rest of us were out on the wharf. The wind cooled the sweat that had soaked into our Jonni Waffle T-shirts. Folks were drinking beer and looking at the stars. The people on the boats had their radios up loud, the mandatory Motown faves from The
Big Chill soundtrack overlapping each other in the night. A few yards away, the windows of the Long Wharf Restaurant glowed from the tiny candles on the tables. Bert said he was going to head to the Corner Bar. His friend was bartending. It wasn't the first blackout night he'd spent there. Nick went over to the Long Wharf Restaurant to see when Randy was getting off. Maybe we could get a ride home or maybe there was a plan brewing.

  NP cursed. “Yo, Bert, can I get the key? I left my pint in there.” He disappeared into the Promenade with the keys. I was surprised that Bert just tossed him the keys. Of course NP wasn't going to steal anything, but I was always surprised by these little trusting gestures from white people in authority. Like when Gabe went outside the Tuck Shop for a smoke, full of faith in our character. I shouldn't have been surprised. We had earned it by being good boys. And look at Gabe now.

  NP returned. I said, “Damn, I forgot my mix tape! Can I go and get it?”

  Bert shook his head and handed me the keys. “Hurry up, man. I need a goddamn beer.”

  I can't explain what happened. I can only tell you, the best I am able, about how I used to live.

  Mix tapes were the perfect alibi. All of us in the teenage crew had them, they were a snapshot of this month's soul translated into music and arranged in perfect order. We let everything else go but we were fascists about our mix tapes. They were our necessary evidence. We took turns, sticking them into Nick's radio when it was our go, to make somebody listen finally. I had a fall guy in NP, who by his own admission had returned to the freezer to retrieve his pint. I unlocked the front door and stood before the mammoth freezer. You had to really pull hard on the freezer doors. They were designed to stay shut and make a strong seal. I pulled them open and the cool air tumbled over my face. I couldn't see it, but I pictured the white mist in the darkness spilling out in chilly, ghostly tendrils. The heat and humidity reached inside, brushing their fingertips along the side of the cans and transforming the frost there into beads of water. It was an exchange, the outside coming inside and the inside entering outside, like a tiny darkness that grew and then spread to cover whole towns. I left the doors open, first at a ten-degree angle, then a twenty-five-degree angle. Like that.

  I gave the keys back to Bert. He slapped us five and padded over to the Corner Bar, the headlights of the creeping cars lighting his way. At the intersection, a cop waved a glowing red cone around and around. Nick had some Budweisers in his hands, a bribe from Randy for us to wait until he finished his shift. I was tired and I smelled and I decided to go home.

  It was so different walking home without streetlights, especially once I got past the marina, where people had their boats lit up and were having a high old time, drinking and laughing. Surely the young ladies at the Cormaria Retreat House were dancing with their candelabra under the stars with extra passion tonight. The farther I got from town the darker it got and there were fewer cars slowly nudging their way through the dark to light my path. The rain still hadn't come, but the wind fussed the trees and this was the only sound I heard. The candles and kerosene lanterns burned in the windows of the houses, pulsating in orange and yellow, showing the way, just as they had a hundred years ago. I couldn't see the power lines and telephone and cable wires and I couldn't make out the fancy cars in the driveways. Events had pulled the plug on the modern world. As if it had never been. The lights in the windows of the familiar old houses had guided the men home when they returned from sea, the earthbound constellations they recognized and trusted and steered by. I knew where I was. I had walked these streets my whole life. For a few minutes I was a true son of Eastville, returning with my brothers in the dark down Bay Street and Hempstead Street after a good day's work.

  The lights were on when I woke up the next morning. The rain never made it. Reggie and I spent the afternoon cleaning up the house, undoing the mess of our days. Our parents arrived that evening and it all started again.

  I didn't work that weekend—Nick had asked for my Saturday night shift to help pay off his gold—and when I came in Monday there was no mention of the open freezer and the ice cream inside, solid or otherwise. I didn't ask about it. Jonni Waffle was a family, and my experience of family was that you didn't ask too many questions. A few days later, on the wall above the desk in the back of the store, Martine taped up a sheet with a list of Blackout Rules, the last of which was: double-CHECK THAT THE FREEZER DOORS ARE SHUT! The following summer, the list was still there, and next to it was a picture of Martine and his brother, taken at a family reunion “back home,” or so he told us. They had their arms crooked around each other's necks and cups of pale beer in their hands. They looked a lot alike in the face and had the same smile. If you disbelieved what people told you, all you had to do was look at the smile. His brother was black as hell, no joke, with a crazy crown of kink on his head.

  The Coca-Cola Company brought back Coke—now called Classic Coke—soon after the blackout, on July 10, 1985.

  I worked at Jonni Waffle for another two summers, eating ice cream all shift, every shift. The smell of the batter haunts me still. My metabolism was such that I never got fat, but eventually my gorging turned into a form of aversion therapy and made me hate ice cream, the very sight of it, and this hatred spread to the entire dessert world, and most sweets. It's a terrible thing to hate dessert, to remove yourself from the ways of civilized people. You learn to see things differently from the other side, standing there behind the protective plastic, looking at the normals and their easy pleasure in simple things.

  From time to time, I think of the freezer and have a vision of the catastrophe. As the night grows long, the containers at the bottom of the pile start to buckle under their burden. What is inside has gone soft and weak. The bottom cans collapse under the weight of their brothers and the ones up high tumble out of the freezer, knocking the doors wide, the lids of the cans popping off. The cans splash out their guts, one after the other. It's dark, and no one can see it but me, I can see it, the rainbow calamity on the tile, the green mint and bloodred sherbet and other assorted plenty in a cookie-clotted sludge oozing out across the floor, marshmallows floating like broken teeth, all this in a slow and ugly wave, reaching toward me like a hand.

  ALL THE ILL SHIT WENT DOWN ON THURSDAYS LIKE clockwork. Mondays we slept in, lulled by the silence in the rest of the house. The only racket was the carpenter ants gnawing the soft wood under the deck, not much of a racket at all. It was safe. When we met up with the rest of the crew, we traded baroque schemes about what we'd get up to before the parents came out again. The rest of the week was a vast continent for us to explore and conquer. Then suddenly we ran out of land. Wednesdays we woke up agitated, realizing our idyll was half over. We got busy to cram it all in. Sometimes we messed up on Wednesdays, but it was never a Thursday-sized mess-up. No, Thursday we reserved for the thoroughly botched, mishaps that called for shame and first aid and apologies. All the ill shit went down on Thursdays, the disasters we made with our own hands, because on Friday the parents returned and our disasters were out of our control.

  The first gun was Randy's. Which should have been a sign that we were headed toward a classic Thursday. I never went to Randy's—he didn't have a hanging-out house. But everybody else was working. Nick at Jonni Waffle or in the city buying stuff for his B-boy disguise, Clive barbacking at the Long Wharf Restaurant, Reggie and Bobby at Burger King. I felt like I hadn't seen Reggie in weeks. We had contrary schedules, me working in town, him off flipping Whoppers in South Hampton. When we overlapped in the house we were too exhausted from work or gearing up for the next shift to even bicker properly. I had no other option but to call NP, not my number-one choice, and his mother told me he was at Randy's. Normally I would have said forget it, but there was a chance they might be driving somewhere, an expedition to Karts-a-Go-Go or Hither Hills, and I'd have to hear them exaggerate how much fun they had.

  Randy lived in Sag Harbor Hills on Hillside Drive, a dead-end street off our usual circuit. I knew it as the stree
t where the Yellow House was, the one Mark James used to stay in. Mark was a nerdy kid I got along with, who came out for a few summers to visit his grandmother, who was of that first generation. When I turned the corner to Hillside, I saw that the Yellow House's yard was still overgrown and the blinds were drawn, as they had been for years now. I hadn't seen Mark in a long time but a few weeks ago, by coincidence, I'd asked my mother if she knew why he didn't come out anymore and she said, “Oh, it turned out that Mr. James had another family.”

  There was a lot of Other Family going around that summer. People disappeared. I asked, “What happened to the Peterses?” and my mother responded, “Oh, it turned out Mr. Peters had another family, so they don't come out anymore.” And what happened to the Barrowses, hadn't seen those guys in a while, Little Timmy with his crutches. “Oh, it turned out Mr. Barrows had another family so they're selling the house.”

  For a while it verged on an epidemic. I found it fascinating, wondering at the mechanics. One family in New Jersey and one in Kansas—what kind of cover story hid those miles? These were lies to aspire to. And who was to say which was the Real Family and which was the Other Family? Was the Sag Harbor family of our acquaintance the shadowy, antimatter family or was it the other way around, that family living in that new Delaware subdivision, the one gobbling crumbs with a smile? I picture the kids scrambling to the front door at the sound of Daddy's car in the driveway after so long (the brief phone calls from the road only magnify absence) and Daddy taking a few moments after he turns off the ignition to orient himself, figure out who and where he is this time. Yes, I recognize those people standing in the doorway—that's my family.