Beach breeze

I find myself back at the beach. The beaches all have the same feel on the eastern seabord, this Jersey beach and the ones in Maryland and Delaware I grew up going to, the same pizza joints and boardwalks and salt-sea smell laced with danger and possibility, the smell wafting into the window in the room at Ocean City’s Wellington Motel where I lost my virginity, a room that came equipped with a mirror that I consulted while Wendy, whom I had met the day before and was an aspiring secretary from Pennsylvania who had tried all kinds of drugs and would say “cha” to everything for some reason that made a little more sense at the time, but not much, was in the shower, as if I were looking at an organism that had metamorphosed from juvenile to adult in the span of a minute.

That was the time they called “Beach Week,” the obligatory trip to the beach after high school graduation. I was with Rick, boyhood friend. We had tried to score a free room with two sets of people we had in the haze of high school gauged to be friends, but both of which we realized as they were turning us away were perhaps better thought of as acquaintances. That’s how we’d wound up in our $25 room at the Wellington. Across the hall was Wendy and her big-boned friend Karen, whom Rick had kindly agreed to take to the beach to play Frisbee while Wendy and I discussed secretarial school.

Wendy had a very slight gap between her front teeth every bit as elegant as Letterman’s and Madonna’s, but Rick still teases me about it, to the point where all my friends think I lost my virginity to a toothless woman, or, as they said in our day, Leon Spinks.

I say there’s danger in the sea breeze not for the primordial reason there should be, namely that it could so easily suck us out to our deaths, but for the more cultural reason that none of the countless other beaches in the world that I have visited have felt as charged with machismo as these eastern beaches. Rick and I, both being skinny, could not walk down the boardwalk without guy after guy intentionally trying to slam his shoulder into our shoulder to provoke a fight. In the arcades where we played Zookeeper and Donkey Kong Junior and Mrs. Pac-Man it was the same thing, we had to avert our shoulders because we weren’t interested in fighting. There was one game on the boardwalk where you punched a bag and your force would be rated. I slammed that thing with all my fury then tried to pretend I hadn’t almost just sprained my wrist.

"Down on the boardwalk they're gettin' ready for a fight," sang Springsteen. I squat on the boardwalk and see the Asbury Park Press sings today of gun murder, not fists. And the governor in an outquote saying “de minimis,” perhaps using Latin to demonstrate full recovery of his brain after the car accident. A black woman beside me squats over a two-foot-high parking meter, as if trying to insert it, to the delight of her friends.

I don’t remember ever seeing a non-white person on the boardwalks of my youth, although I’m sure I did. Today, there’s everyone. A Chinese kid screams in my ear so loud that I stand up from my squat. Four Russians dribble a soccer ball up the boardwalk. A Central American family throws a volleyball back and forth in the sand. Two black women call down to me from a motel room. I wave and they whoop like guys on Bourbon Street.

Four retirees with metal detectors have finished their day’s scouring for treasure. A woman gestures with her metal detector as she yells, “I’ve never seen a poor Jew, and I’ll tell you why.” I slow for the answer, but can’t stop because then the answer might not come. Instead she repeats a little louder, perhaps because it’s getting dark, “I’ve never seen a poor Jew, and I’ll tell you why!” She says “woo-aye” in that whiny New York accent that is sometimes Jewish, sometimes Italian. Most of her words blow away but a phrase rises up dancing on the wind as if a message sent from the sea itself: “Help each other.”

A police car passes slowly but there’s nothing it can do about the ancient story unfolding beside me, the sibling power struggle. “Dad says we have to go home now,” a big brother yells down to the sand, but the little brother refuses to budge. Big calls mom on his cell: “Sam’s being Sam. He’s walking to the shore now.” His face filled with loathing for the creature half his size.

A girl passes me on a green bicycle, her body so perfect I immediately think “European.” She actually checks me out then her head snaps back forward at the sight of my face, as if she’s shy or I’m a monster. Perhaps it’s my three-quarter-full beard.

There were no guns in our time. The only threats other than the fists of the assholes were the sexual predators, one of whom asked Rick into his trailer. Well, first he sat beside him on a bench and asked, “Aren’t you into pulling your dick out at night?” Then he asked him into his trailer. And Rick, though he’s straight, went, though nothing ended up happening. As Rick points out, when you’re that age you just do what adults say.

I pass by two teens playing baseball catch, a boy and girl, perhaps siblings. Her body launches a choir of angels, and I almost ask if I can play. I remember how I hated it when guys hit on my sister, like the time two boys tossed a football into the sand near our towels just so they could talk to her. And she actually went swimming with the guy, whose name I can almost remember. I wanted to shout, “Didn’t you see what he did? It was a trick!” This memory has nothing to do with why I don’t sit on the bench to look at this girl jumping around, to see exactly how high her boy shorts go in the back. Instead it is the sense that with my three-quarters beard and awkward solitary demeanor I might be considered one of the sexual predators Rick and I dreaded.

The European passes me again on her green bicycle and I briefly consider sprinting after her, though I know my endurance won’t hold out. Instead I walk barefoot in the sand. A young couple I assume to be from the city is collecting trash and putting it in a barrel. I see tags from new clothing, and I wonder who thinks it’s okay to take the shirt and toss the tags onto the sand, my mind offering its recurrent bait on humanity, on why humans are destined to destroy everything they touch, but I don’t take it. It’s a lot cleaner than Chowpati Beach in Bombay and after all there was that couple picking up trash.

The sea, the sea, why do I feel nothing. Where’s the music, the sadness, the magic of existence. Oh, I would tremble with the power of nature every time I met it when I was younger, whether it was the sea or the forest. I would have to walk away from whomever I was with so I could be alone with this great mystery. I would figure out nothing; it was enough just to contemplate it. Where is that now? I squat in the sand and time my breaths with the sea’s, inhaling and exhaling. That shimmering, that palpitating, that incredible feeling, it seems to have faded forever. Perhaps I can get a slice of it sometimes with music but I don’t know where it went. Now I can just breathe with the sea, and maybe the Eastern thinkers would see an advance in that, that I see this connection now between the sea’s rhythm and our own, and that the rest was illusion—but no, it was not illusion, of that I am sure, as sure as I am that this is no advance.

What happens to the perceptual mind as we age? Rick and I took a return trip to the beach a few summers later. This time we had an acquaintance named Boisseau who acted like a friend by letting us stay with him. He was a few years older. We sat and watched while these men and women in their 20s talked about things like home improvements. One woman said, “Oh, he watches public television? I respect anyone who watches public television.” Then they went on talking about nothing for hours. “Rick,” I said, “We gotta get outta here. And if you ever see me talking like that, please put me out of my misery.”

It was like we were peering into the future, and it was a horrifying picture. Today I stood in the front yard and listened to the neighbor talk about the details of his roofing project. The words all started to run together, although by this age I had had a roof put on myself and so knew enough to keep the conversation going. Why was I keeping it going? There was the character interest, to be sure, the vague urge to see how this crazy guy’s mind worked. But that wasn’t enough to stay this long. Ira Glass popped into my head. Not because I admire him, but because as a busy person he would have to extricate himself. What would he do? I was a busy person, and I was having exactly the conversation I vowed never to have in my life. I was waiting for him to end it, but he never would. I was like the kid being talked into the beach trailer, except that this wasn’t a trailer of sexual predation but a trailer of suburban void. Equally fearsome, since they both meant a form of death.

“Hey, I should get going,” I said. “The sun’s going down and I gotta get over to the beach.”