Sag Harbor Read online

  So forget the beach and the rest of it, the quality of the sunrises and sunsets … although it must be said that those two things were top-notch. Waking up early in that house was science-fiction stuff. The sky over the wetlands was a fine, simmering blue, slowly boiling up morning. Before you lay the dead, misty surface of the bay, an imperturbable line of dark gray, a slab of ancient stone come out from under the earth. A reversal there: the sky was liquid, the water a solid screen. There were fewer boats then to zit the surface of the bay. No one to be seen at that hour, emboldening that cherished dread of early risers, that you were the only being alive and awake in the world. Occasionally some drowsily dipping seagull shot into the water after low-tide crab, seized its quarry in its beak, and swooped back up to the sky, dropping the bits of shell after it nuzzled out the meat so that the dead pieces briefly rippled the water before all was silent again. A mute, primordial theater.

  Sunsets unfolded above the big houses in North Haven. The sunset made it appear that the sun and the sky were not separate things but different states of the same magnificent substance—as if the sky were a weakened diluted form of the sun, the blue and the white merely drained-away elements of the swirling red-and-orange disk sitting on the horizon. I'll wager on this: the sunsets closed the deal for that first generation, the ones who came here originally, my grandparents and their crew. After walking down through the woods off Hempstead Street, the meek trails that would one day be roads, it must have been wondrous to emerge on that unspoiled beach and see that sunset. No houses, no footprints even, just beach grass whispering to itself. Saying—what? You'd have to spend some time to learn its language. That first generation asked, Can we make it work? Will they allow us to have this? It doesn't matter what the world says, they answered each other. This place is ours. Over the years I have learned that the sunrises and sunsets of that beach are rare and astonishing but I did not know this then. Sunset meant that the damned gnats were coming out, that was it.

  NP SAID, “Benji, can I get a Coke?” His head was in the refrigerator.

  Cokes were no problem. My parents kept a healthy store of mixers and such. With their friends coming up from the beach for drinks, and now me and Reggie's gang spending so much time hanging out on our couch all day, they had adjusted their mixers supply. Food was something else, however, with Reggie and me on rations.

  That summer we switched from a Kid with the Pool–based hanging out economy to a Kid with the Empty House–based hanging out economy. Before his family moved to California and he stopped coming out, Kevin had been our Kid with the Pool, and the fact that we never saw his mother made it a prelude to the days of Empty Houses. I think I saw her once, when I was little. I think. We knew someone was in there—the afternoon soaps blared kissing music or about-to-kiss music through the windows and once in a while a hand clawed back the curtains overlooking the pool area. Safe to say we were unsupervised. As we horsed around in the pool, we pretended that we lived in a world without parents, but actually it didn't take that much pretending.

  We'd been moving toward Empty House status for a while. For years, we'd skulked in basement rec rooms, on screened porches, played tag on cracked patios. We heard footsteps above, inside, over there, but never saw who they belonged to. In every house there were secret rooms with locked doors and if you asked who was in there watching TV, the kid always said, “My grandma,” in the same dead tone. The moms ran through their summer itinerary, off to the beach with a folding chair under one arm and an overflowing wicker bag in the other, off to “a luncheon,” a cocktail party in the Hills, or an art opening in the backyard of someone who had a cousin with a bunch of friends who were said to be talented and known in Harlem galleries. The dads were in the city, making money, making something happen, reappearing on the Friday evening 7:25 train in East Hampton, staggering off the club car with big smiles: Showtime.

  That summer we just made it official. Reggie and I were the Kids with the Empty House, and the gang changed their schedules and routes accordingly. Our parents only came out on weekends, which meant that now me and Reggie had the place to ourselves most of the week. Our sister, Elena, used to be the one in charge, bossing us around with such relish that history's great lesson, “Power corrupts,” played out in intimate scale in our living room. How we cringed as she kept us in line with her powerful club, “I'll tell Daddy on you.” But she was gone now. Once you were old enough to go to college, you stopped coming out to Sag. It was kids' stuff, it was too bourgie, the city summoned, etc. Graduate from high school, and you graduated from Sag as well. Until you were called back.

  “You're men now,” my father told me when I asked who was going to look after us. “You can take care of yourselves.” Men? A compliment and a curse: no more excuses, no one to blame. At first I thought he was joking. But there we were—me and Reggie alone during the week, and my parents only coming out on weekends. If then.

  Now that we had a free house, what did we do with it? Sit around and talk shit. That day it was me, NP, and Bobby. Reggie was working at Burger King. The smell of Reggie's grease-infused clothes crept from our bedroom, from the corner where he tossed his work duds, making us hungry whenever a breeze swept through.

  “You want sprinkles with that Coke?” Bobby asked. NP had a job at Jonni Waffle, the new ice-cream joint in town, and when we went to visit him for freebies we taunted him over the stupid shit he had to say all day. Whip on top, waffle cone, slob your knob? NP had also been ribbing Bobby about his “Scarsdale mansion” lately, causing Bobby to push back a little.

  “Shut up, you pleather Members Only–wearin' motherfucker,” NP said. Which might appear to be a non sequitur, as Bobby was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, but there was history there, context. It was a reference to some intel from Clive, who had informed us that he'd run into Bobby during the school year, and described how Bobby was wearing a Windbreaker that looked suspiciously like a knockoff Members Only jacket. No small misdemeanor, that, and Clive's alpha-dog status only magnified the dis.

  The trend that summer, insult-wise, was toward grammatical acrobatics, the unlikely collage. One smashed a colorful and evocative noun or proper noun into a pejorative, gluing them together with an-in' verb. I'm not sure of the syntactical parentage of the-in' verbs, so I'll just call them the-in' verbs. Verbal noun, gerundlike creature, cog in the adjectival machine, who knew—as was the case with some of the people in my living room, there was a little uncertainty in the bloodlines. “Lookin'” was a common-in' verb. Like so:

  “Wearin'” made the rounds as well:

  You could also preface things with a throat-clearing “You fuckin',” as in “You fuckin' Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost–lookin' motherfucker,” directed at Bobby, for example, who had light brown skin, light brown hair, and indeed shared these characteristics with the hominid sidekick on the Saturday morning adventure show Land of the Lost. “You fuckin'” acted as a rhetorical pause, allowing the speaker a few extra seconds to pluck some splendid modifier out of the invective ether, and giving the listener a chance to gird himself for the top-notch put-down/splendid imagery to follow.

  True masters of the style sometimes attached the nonsensical “with your monkey ass” as a kicker, to convey sincerity and depth of feeling. Hence, “You fuckin' Kunta Kinte–lookin' motherfucker … with your monkey ass.” You may have noticed that the-in' verbs were generally visual. The heart of the critique concerned what you were putting out into the world, the vibes you gave off. Which is what made them so devastating when executed well—this ordnance detonated in that area between you and the mirror, between you and what you thought everyone else was seeing.

  There was a loud squeaking noise. “Hear that?” I asked. It was Marcus on that messed-up bike of his, you heard him changing gears two miles away.

  We all sighed with relief. Marcus was a key player in that he reassured us that there was someone more unfortunate than ourselves. He possessed three primary mutant powers; we had all seen them in action
: 1. He was able to attract to his person all the free-floating derision in the vicinity through a strange magnetism. 2. He bent light waves, rendering the rest of us invisible to bullies. When Marcus was present, the big kids were incapable of seeing us, picking on him exclusively, delivering noogies, knuckle punches, and Indian rope burns to his waiting flesh. Indian rope burns always put an end to the torture, because everybody got distracted while bonding over their smidgen of Indian blood, one-eighth, one-sixteenth Seminole whatever, and that was that. 3. Superior olfactory capability. We heard his bike from two miles away; he smelled barbecue from twice that distance, attaining such mastery that he could ascertain, with the faintest nostril quivering, if the stuff on the grill had just been thrown on or was about to come off, and acted accordingly. Like a knife and fork, he appeared around dinnertime. I think there was a summer or two when he ate over every night, guzzling Hi-C and waving a plastic-coated paper plate around for seconds, more, more. Not until later did I wonder why there was no dinner at his house, why no one missed him at twilight. Call him a mooch to hurt his feelings, and he'd just smile, wipe his mouth with his wrist, and snatch the last piece of chicken, probably a wing, damn him. He was always hungry, like we all were, but at least he had the good sense to eat.

  Marcus pried open the glass doors. They were sticky. Decades of sand filled their tracks. “What's up?” He had his beach towel around his neck, and he wore dark-green-and-gray plaid shorts, and a T-shirt that read boy's harbor JULY 4 fireworks 1983. He extended his hand to Bobby and I witnessed a blur of choreography.

  Yes, the new handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? I was all thumbs when it came to shakes. Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment. Like this? No, you didn't stick the landing: the judges give it 4.6. (The judge from Hollis, Queens, was a notorious dick, undermining everyone from the other boroughs.) No one ever commented on my fumbles, though, and I was grateful. I had all summer to get it right, unless someone went back to the city and returned with some new variation that spread like a virus, and which my strong dork constitution produced countless antibodies against.

  NP slapped Marcus's hand. “Hey, Act—” NP began, before cutting himself off. He was about to use last year's nickname.

  We used to call Marcus “Arthur Ashe.” Two summers ago, Marcus had suffered a dry patch—actually multiple dry patches, on his elbows, knees, in the webbing between his fingers and toes. “Why'd his mother let him out the house like that,” we'd all wonder, but never say aloud, because talking about someone's mother was, well, talking about someone's mother. Talking about someone's mother was talking about your own mother: it opened a door.

  Obviously the nickname affected him deeply. Perhaps the sight of a tennis racket mortifying him, all those long months of the school year, or a chance encounter with someone dressed in crisp white clothing curdling his mood. All I know is that the next summer Marcus returned so profoundly moisturized that there was nary a flake of ash to be seen on his skin. In fact his skin was so lubed up that he glistened mightily whenever the sun hit his flesh, and even when it didn't. He had become, sadly, a living Jheri Curl.

  “Hey, Activator!” NP called out one afternoon, while making little spritzing motions about his head, and Arthur Ashe was now Activator until Labor Day.

  It was the last week of June, still early in the season, so there was no telling what kind of handle Marcus would get this year. Whatever nickname he got, it was likely to be of the kinder variety—he had grown four inches over the year and started lifting weights, or tied-together phone books, some kind of heavy object. Maybe he'd cast his disappointments in lead. No one had put him to the test yet, but powwows over the matter, even our diluted one-eighth or one-sixteenth powwows, decided that he could kick all our asses, and we had it coming.

  I did a head count: four of us, Randy and Clive on their way. There were five seats in Randy's car.

  “They're not here yet?”

  Bobby sucked his teeth. “Waiting on them all day.”

  “It's going to be dark by the time they get here.”

  “It's going to be six of us?” I asked. I was trying to get the fight started over who was coming in the car. Let everybody get their arguments for inclusion going beforehand, and see where I stood.

  “Shit, I know I'm going, I had to ride my bike last time,” Marcus said.

  “I know I'm going—he's my cousin,” NP countered.

  I decided to make some lunch, to fortify myself for the battle to come. Reggie and me didn't agree on much when it came to food, but we were both partial to Campbell's Homestyle Chicken Soup with Egg Noodles. It was the Cadillac of canned soup, the noodles firm yet pliant on the tongue, the ratio of celery and carrots consistent and reliable. The tiny amber globules of fat shimmered on the surface in an enticing display, to delight the eye. There was one can left; I'd traded it with Reggie that morning for a bag of Lay's Potato Chips and two ice-cream sandwiches. Every couple of days, Reggie and I walked over to Frederico's and stocked up on food. Our family had a credit account there.

  Everybody had their brands, black kids, white kids. Sperry, Girbaud, and Benetton, Lee jeans and Le Tigre polos, according to the plumage theory of social commerce. If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong. I was more survival-oriented. The brands I worshipped lived in the soup aisle, in the freezer section behind glass. I'm talking frozen food here. Swanson, of course, was the standard, the elegant marriage of form and function. The four food groups (meat, veg, starch, apple cobbler) lay pristine in their separate foil compartments, which were in fact, presto, a serving dish. Meal and plate in one slim rectangle—this was American ingenuity at its best and most sustaining. Fried Chicken, Turkey, Salisbury Steak, that was three days of the week right there.

  All hail Stouffer's! Pure royalty, their bright-orange packaging a beacon in refrigerator sections across the NY metro area. French Bread Pizzas—so continental! Turkey Tetrazzini, Chicken Pot Pie, Beef Pot Pie. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Stouffer's employed the best minds the prepackaged food industry had to offer, no doubt luring geniuses from rival firms with groovy perks and extensive benefit packages, ultimately producing that sublime Boil-in-Bag technology, up there with penicillin and the microchip in the pantheon of twentieth-century scientific achievement. I will admit to an unwholesome fascination with Boil-in-Bag technology. Chicken à la King, Swedish Meatballs, Beef Stroganoff with Parsley Noodles—'twas satisfaction itself that oozed out of the plastic bags and murked our waiting bowls.

  There were, as well, renegades to whom we had given our hearts, like Howard Johnson's Tendersweet Fried Clams, 95 percent batter plus a special ingredient that made you forget that they were 95 percent batter the next time you reached for them in the supermarket.

  And the rare and valued Weight Watchers Chicken Cutlet & Vegetable Medley, tough to find on account of some complex distribution quirk beyond my ken, and entering our menu rotation by accident; my mother had bought a box for herself one time, and in a famished episode I had devoured it and become addicted. I felt ridiculous buying a Weight Watchers meal, the sight of the pink box sliding across the scanner rousing my sundry manhood issues, the gentle ping of the bar-code reader becoming in my mind a gigantic church bell ding-donging my worthlessness throughout Food Emporium and beyond, to the entire zip code, but there was no denying the tantalizing breading on the cutlet, featuring a blend of spices so well-calibrated for delight that it was hard to accept that it had been squirted on by machine, for surely this was human tenderness and love of craft before you, and the orange butter sauce, yes, the orange butter sauce, more of a chutney really, covering the veg medley. Believe this one truth in my story if nothing else.

  Finally, soup. Broth of life. We were Campbell's men, had been for years, and no
thing took the edge off like the talent in their boutique Chunky line. We adopted the advertising slogan of Chunky's Soup as our rallying cry and motto—it was indeed the Soup That Eats Like A Meal. Or we forced ourselves to believe this over time by necessity. Like I said, I was survival-oriented.

  Mondays we usually ate leftover barbecue from the weekend, but our parents had told us on Friday that they weren't coming out after all, so our stash took a big hit, plus the last time we went to Frederico's, the manager told us that we'd maxed out our credit, those boxes of Yodels pushing us over the edge a couple of days ago, and our mother was going to have to give them a call to discuss it. Which I didn't know if she had. After the can of Homestyle Chicken Soup with Egg Noodles, there was one can of Hormel Chili with Beans left for Reggie—I couldn't abide the stuff—and the legendary icicled box of Macaroni & Beef with Tomatoes. If Stouffer's was royalty, this guy was the inbred dolt everyone feared ascending the throne. Reggie and I sometimes spooked each other with tales of its wretchedness. It was hard times when you opened the freezer door to discover that you were sentenced to Macaroni & Beef with Tomatoes. Purchased by accident a few years prior (in a hurry we had mistaken it for Lasagna with Meat Sauce), the sight of that accursed package, nestled in there with its frosted cohort of aluminum foil–covered enigmas, was an indictment of our character: if that was your only choice, you deserved to eat it. We prayed against that day.

  I gobbled my soup as we watched TV. Raiders of the Lost Ark was winding down on Showtime, one of our favorite parts, The Burning of the Nazis by Heaven. If we had a VCR, we'd be playing the sequence frame by frame, so as not to miss a second of the elaborate special effects, which had merited a cover story in Fangoria magazine, although I now knew better than to admit to this knowledge.