But I didn't say this to Marcus. I didn't know it myself. I just knew that it was okay to like both Afrika Bambaataa and Kraftwerk, and I liked what Afrika did with Kraftwerk. Across the ocean right there, the Germans banged out tunes on state-of-the-art synthesizers. Soulsonic Force, they had the reverb up so high it sounded like they were playing that “Trans-Europe Express” melody on some floor-model Casio job from Radio Shack, the dying C batteries croaking out through broken speakers. I pictured the beat box covered in electrical tape, only working if you kept it propped at a forty-five-degree angle due to a loose wire inside, envisioned them recording the song in a janitor's closet deep in the bowels of some uptown high-rise. They dismantled this piece of white culture and produced this freakish and sustaining thing, reconfiguring the chilly original into a communal artifact. They yelled, “Everybody say, ‘Rock it, don't stop it,’” and the crowd yelled back “Rock it, don't stop it” in dutiful assent. How could they not? Probably it was up on Planet Rock where I wanted to be half the time, where they transported all us unlikely chosen,
Close Encounters
–style. There were other places besides this, the song said. I wasn't trying to rag on Afrika, but salute his oddball achievement. His paradox.
Marcus wasn't having it. Because I didn't say it.
“You're lucky the Zulu Nation ain't around,” he said. “They'd scalp your shit, bury you up to your neck in the sand, and let the tide roll in. They ain't playing, son.”
I looked at him blankly.
He shook his head. “I was at this party one time and this sucker from Bed-Stuy was all, ‘Fuck Manhattan, Bed-Stuy blahzey-blah, Bed-Stuy blahzey-blah’ and these dudes from the Zulu Nation came up and wailed on him. My boy was like blubbering with blood and saliva and shit running down his face. You better watch what you say.”
“I was just trying to share some information.”
“Yeah, right, I forgot you like that white music, you fuckin' Siouxsie and the Banshees–listenin' motherfucker.” He scratched his chest and thought for a moment. “With your monkey ass.”
Let the record show that my black T-shirt was in fact a Bauhaus T-shirt, purchased the previous fall down in the Village on the very first of my weekly trips to scavenge for new albums, generally vinyl dispatches from the world of the pale and winnowed, but it was true that I had worn my Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt the week before. I didn't buy rap—I heard it all the time, Reggie and Elena had all the good stuff, so there was no reason to spend my allowance on it. Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan with a damp towel on your forehead, a minor-chord soundtrack as you moaned into reflecting pools about your elaborate miserableness. The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let's just put it out there: I liked the Smiths.
“I don't know what you're talking about, Marcus,” Clive said. “I put on that Tears for Fears song last night and you were all, ‘That's the shit.’”
Marcus winced. “I like that video, man. It's a good video.”
With that, the argument ended, the latest meaningless border skirmish in the long war over what white culture was acceptable and what was not. We redrew the maps feverishly, throwing out our agreements and concessions. This week surf wear was in, and we claimed Ocean Pacific T-shirts and Maui shorts as our own. Next year, Lacoste was out in enemy territory again, reclaimed by the diligent forces of segregation. There was one rule, though: Clive trumped everything. If Clive gave his blessing, it was okay, whether it was Donny and Marie or Twisted Sister. Golf, whatever. But for the rest of us, the rules changed daily. It kept you on your toes.
AFTER A TIME
, we stood one by one, and looked at the waves and one another and nodded: time to go in. The sun was a sick death ray cutting through the cloudless sky—ever since Clive told me about
the heat-gathering qualities of black T-shirts, an oven of 50-50 cotton-poly had broiled my flesh. I was pretty suggestible. Clive and Marcus shouted war cries and dove into the water. I ran down to the surf once, ran back, ran down again, ran back (I had a system), then burst into a full-speed wade, grimacing at each frigid centimeter's advance up my belly, holding my arms above the water as if battling quicksand. Randy dipped in a toe and padded back to his blanket.
No, I cannot swim in the conventional sense. To this day. Over the years I have learned how to generate forward movement in a liquid medium through a combination of herky-jerky flip-flapping arm-and-leg movements, but nothing that approaches the standard definition of a stroke. I can float on my back—that counts for something, right? In the doomed-ocean-liner movie that runs in my head, more frequently than I like, I float on my back to the eventual safety of the rescue boat or deserted island. Splish-splashing around with a healthy stroke, hell, that's calling attention to yourself, alerting sharks, who are attracted to movements that resemble those of an “animal in distress,” according to what I read in my shark books in elementary school. Might as well be a traveling chum salesman. Best to float and pretend to be dead, or so my thinking went back then—and in calm water I found nothing more peaceful than doing that very thing. Letting my body go, as if I didn't have a body at all and there was no barrier between me and the sea, while waiting for one of my friends to flip me over or pull me under, because that's what friends do, but if I could get a few minutes alone out of the world I was happy.
I wasn't doing any of that freewheeling floating in the ocean. I needed to know where the bottom was. Anytime I strayed into a drop-off, where I knew there had to be a bottom and yet suddenly there wasn't, I panicked. Especially at Left Left, where there was no lifeguard. Clive and Marcus swam out and I stayed behind, up to my waist, turning around every minute to check out the next wave sneaking up on me.
I lumbered down the shore a ways so I could take a whiz without the sudden warm patch wafting over to my friends, jellyfish-like.
From down on the beach, you could only see the tops of the Sagaponack houses, but from the water you got a better view. Our houses on Sag Harbor Bay were bunched up all over one another, and it created a close-knit beach culture. Here the houses were moored behind the dunes like battleships. These were no quarter-acre lots like the ones around our way, who knew what was between these houses, Olympic pools and tennis courts. Croquet arenas where the players swatted human skulls across the grass. Behind the big windows, eyes considered and surveyed all, the gigantic tidal events as well as the minor human ones, the ones wearing bathing suits and sunblock. Behind the windows someone said, There were some black people coming up the beach so we got out our binoculars.
From the water, I saw the long arms of the beach, east and west. I saw Bobby and NP coming back, but no one else out strolling. On the bay, there was always somebody. Some galoot or other. The middle-aged ladies camped out in front of someone's house each afternoon, usually ours, as folks from Azurest and the Hills and Ninevah promenaded by, making the rounds, leaving footprints that were physical traces to a dozen conversations. Trading information—who's up, who's down—while the tiny waves nibbled at the shore. That was the social scene. They came up the steps to our house to fix themselves drinks, to use the bathroom, whether our parents were out or not. We sat up straight, stopped cursing, got into raised-right mode. They made gin and tonics and screwdrivers, moved TV dinners aside to get at the ice-cube trays, and asked when our parents were coming out.
I believed my parents when they said they were coming out, odds be damned. Retrieving the soup cans from the sink, rubbing the dried brown stains off the stove top. Even if in the end they didn't show, the threat kept the house from falling completely into utter teenage entropy. When they called to say they weren't coming, it was always a few minutes after we finished cleaning, as if they had us under surveillance. It kept us in line, the necessary illusion that they returned every Friday. Who knew how Reggie and I would have lived if we truly lived in a world without parents. When we told
their friends that they weren't coming out, we got smirks and shakes of the head before they retreated down to the beach to continue their circuit, ice clacking in their plastic Solo cups.
A wave knocked me down and sent me cartwheeling in swirling sand. I walked out farther to be safe. I thought, If they're going to keep skipping weekends, I was going to have to adapt. We needed TV dinners to survive. If the job at Jonni Waffle didn't come through, there was a dishwashing job at the Sandbar that Marcus told me about. I looked up and saw that Bobby and NP were back. Randy was up on his feet. NP said something outrageous—his arms spun in deep anecdote theatrics—and then I saw something strange. The three of them were laughing, and then NP extended his hand and Randy put his hand out, and the hands grew closer, almost in slow-mo, and then I could see it, even from that distance, as if I had binoculars, the most botched handshake of the day. NP approached serpentine, attempting to replicate the pump-'n'-dump that Bobby had used on him, adding a wiggle closer, but Randy was expecting something else entirely, going with a fingertip pull, double squeeze, before winding up with a shoulder-to-shoulder manly half-hug. They recovered and NP continued his story, Bobby nodding in enthusiasm.
It was unmistakable. Everybody was faking it.
A big wave lifted me off my feet and when it rolled past, I sought the bottom, but it wasn't there. My toes poked around, but I couldn't feel anything. I had been pulled out, and my dog-paddler's mind tripped into full fear mode, my fight-or-flight imperative kicking in with a fury. (Thank you, reptilian brainstem.) I understood instantly that the water wasn't merely an inch over my head, but fathoms. I was in the undertow, en route to Europe, there were sharks, and no shark whistle to signal that I was in danger. My hands reached out. I tried to make the water into a rope—from the outside I'm sure it looked as if I was pulling myself toward shore, hand over hand. But I made no progress. My chest tightened and my feet scrabbled vainly for the bottom again and my chest tightened even more. Clive said, “I'm going in.” He was right next to me.
“Hey! I need—can you give me a hand?” I asked.
He looked confused, then stuck out his hand and towed me in half a foot.
I felt the sand beneath my feet, or tippy-toes specifically. I had water up to my neck and I was loving it. I started to explain the situation but Clive cut me off. “Hey, no problem,” he said. “They're back,” he said, pointing. I saw that Marcus was already out of the water and heading toward the others.
NP debriefed us when we joined them. “There was no one out there but this old white man out walking one of those horse-lookin' dogs,” he said. “Dog came up to his chest, lookin' like it wanted to eat him, if you ask me. So this guy sees us walking up to him and he starts frowning like we were trying to move in next door to his house.”
“Looked like a prune,” Bobby said.
“Prune-ass bitch. We kept going, but we didn't see one naked lady. They must be farther down the beach, I don't know where they're hanging out. But you know we're not going to walk all the way to Montauk.”
“So we turn around.”
“Bobby's like, ‘I'm tired,’ and we start heading back and who do we see again but that old white man and his big dog. And he's eye-balling us again. Just flat-out staring. So I'm like, he wants to look at something, he can look at this, and I pulled my shorts down and mooned his funky ass. I was like, ‘Kiss my black ass,’” he said, making a robotic self-spanking motion. “‘Kiss it!’”
We busted out laughing. Lying motherfucker.
“He looked like he was going to have a heart attack right there. And you know that dog would have ate him, too. Be all,” NP put forth his best shaggy-dog voice, “‘I'm sorry you're dead, master, but a nigger's gotta eat.’”
Randy shook sand out of his T-shirt. “I'm ready to head back,” he announced. He was the driver. That was that. We packed up our stuff.
We walked up the dune in single file, end-of-the-afternoon
weary, casting our familiar silhouettes. Five o'clock June light, wrung out by the sun, sanded and damp—this day was one in a long series. We had been doing this for years, making adjustments at the beginning of the summer, fine-tuning, to get used to each other again after nine months stuck in our different corners of the city. Figuring out the next version of each other. Somebody was coming with the stuff from their neighborhood, the other guy was bringing the stuff from his neighborhood, and they collided. By the end of the summer we were all on the same page. I was already saying
def and fresh
at quadruple my off-season rate.
We didn't change all that much year to year, we just became more of ourselves. Where were we the next summer? A few inches closer to it. Bobby returned with a more refined version of his misguided Black Panther–ness, as interpreted by a privileged West-chester kid who hadn't read that much. NP reappeared with a more durable clown persona, getting the gestures and punch lines down, understanding the pauses and various cues that trained your friends and family into being your audience. Everybody on their own trajectory although we sometimes intersected. And me? Keeping my eyes open, gathering data, more and more facts, because if I had enough information I might know how to be. Listening and watching, taking notes for something that might one day be a diagram for an invention, a working self with moving parts.
Until then fumbling, trying to get a sure grip. Hoping no one noticed.
“Get all the sand off your feet before you get in,” Randy ordered. “I don't want you messing up my car. You know you're some sand-gettin'-in motherfuckers.”
We rolled our eyes and clubbed our feet with our towels. We slammed the doors shut. I looked out the back window to watch Marcus disappear around the bend. We became more of ourselves, but what did that mean in Marcus's case? He had a long ride ahead.