Sag Harbor (21 page)

Run-D.M.C. boasting about staying in school—quaint days in the history of hip-hop. “We played Go Fish before the Scrabble marathon—Ha Huh!” To my chagrin, I had never heard the song before they started singing it. Too much Buzzcocks. I thought I knew all of Run-D.M.C.'s records, the self-titled debut and
King of Rock
, but I was a square. The song was a limited-edition live recording made at a club called the Funhouse, taped “Funky fresh for 1983,” according to the lyrics. Any mention of a Real Club bedeviled me with scenes of silver leisure suits and telephone book–sized high heels, imagery drawn from the old eleven o'clock news segments tsk-tsking about “Decadence at Studio 54” that I used to endure before
Saturday Night Live
came on. Years later the sound of the crowd on the recording was a reminder that people were out chilling and I was still home in my pajamas waiting for a good video to come on
Night Flight
.

Bobby introduced the song to Reggie, who dubbed a copy of “Here We Go” on Nick's boom box. Distracted by their rhyme skills, no one followed up on my Karts-a-Go-Go plan, with its money-competition-fame glamour. In my jealousy, I saw Bobby and Reggie performing their bit behind the counter at Burger King, their clubhouse where I was not allowed, in their paper Burger King caps and hairnets, while the retarded guy chimed in with “Hot oil! Hot oil!” like an amen.

We continued to brainstorm. No progress. Then someone said, “We should have a BB gunfight,” and it stuck. The only thing to silence the new hunger. That was that. Our house was full of mosquitoes for a week, and me and Reggie had to sleep with our heads under the sheets to keep them out of our ears.

And then I had one. The next day Randy drove me and Clive to Caldor's. After consulting our savings, kept in battered envelopes in top-notch hiding places around the house to prevent each other from skimming some off the top, Reggie and me decided it would be best if we shared a BB pistol, with one of us borrowing Randy's spare for the fight itself. Sharing—the half that is always less than half. This arrangement also allowed me to keep track of Reggie's gun activity. He was going to hurt himself. Bobby'd cook up some dumb idea and Reggie would go along with it and he'd get hurt. I had to look out for him—in fact, the night of the Mosquito Summit, I decided to try and get the BB gunfight scheduled for during one of his shifts at Burger King. We all missed key shenanigans because of work. There was no reason this couldn't be one of Reggie's times to listen to glorious tales and rue his absence until the end of time. The BB gunfight was stupid, but this stupidity I reserved for myself.

Clive rattled a fist on the screen door. As soon as the last micrometer of my body passed the doorframe, he shouted “Shotgun!,” dibsing the front seat. Clive was a man of priorities, and a peerless shotgun-caller. Those days, shotgun—calling it, planning for it, successfully disputing outcomes—was another popular brand of sublimated warfare, the brawling urge directed toward protecting front-seat passenger turf. Literally protecting your ass. He rushed
ahead of me despite his indisputable victory, jumping into the car and slamming the door shut.

We took the back roads, arguing like real live grown-ups over the One True Route, murmuring the incantations. Right at Texaco, left at Scuttlehole, turn at the Farm. There was a secret combination that unlocked the East End and we all thought we had it in our pocket. The power of pure lore. You truly live in a place when you don't bother with chump stuff like street names, because the names of the streets are irrelevant. The Big Red Barn, the Burned-Out House, the second left, these were inarguable coordinates and all the map you needed.

The old Caldor complex is a big mall now. These days every brand name that ever befouled your mailbox with catalogues has a storefront, but back then there were only three entities of note: Caldor, King Kullen, and the Drive-In. Former playgrounds in less particular times. The Drive-In was closed, and had a postapocalyptic vibe. It was easy to picture the survivors of the Big One congregating in the lot, hair falling off, teeth bobbing in their gums, and flesh ablaze with God-awful rashes as they looked up at the dirty screen for messages from their fallen world. The weeds and grasses broke through the asphalt as if they were the last of their kind, they drooped in the air, fleshy kin to the gray speaker boxes flowing on their iron stalks. In our jammies, under the threadbare summer-home blankets, we'd lived for double features, the scratched-up Disney prints from the '60s and early '70s, then the scary second feature we tried to keep our eyes open for. We'd wake up for a glimpse of low-budget horror, stirring on cue from some lot-wide tremor to see the Good Parts we'd relive among ourselves the next day. Look, it's a young Dirk Benedict from
The A-Team
turning into a human snake, scale by scale.

The Drive-In was closed. Had been for a while.

Dapper dancing hot dogs beckoned us to the concession stand between features and we got lost in the vehicles, desperate for silhouettes of our acquaintance. In the daytime we also got lost and separated in search of food, among the gigantic aisles of King
Kullen. A supermarket, although super is too weak a modifier for the formidable bounty of Kullen's realm. The meat aisle alone was a griller's paradise, a chunk of bloody plenty. We'd rumbled through the aisles, our feet tucked into the rails of the shopping cart. We were there to police our mother, who sometimes neglected to see the wisdom in a family-sized pack of Yodels. But that summer we were past our enthusiasm for that exercise. Downright unmanly, calling shotgun for a grocery trip.

And then there was Caldor, the East End's one-stop emporium for action figures and beach towels, insect-repelling candles and beach chairs, lighter fluid and flip-flops. The maintenance supplies that kept the vacation humming and going, as any lapse in movement forced contemplation of that off-season life waiting on the other side of Labor Day, when nothing in the shelves of Caldor could stop the inevitable written on the snappy breezes and quick sunsets. There was one aisle we never had cause to enter, the Man Aisle, full of accoutrements and props, gas tanks, barbecue paraphernalia of obscure purpose, chrome shapes worked over in the coarse lathe of male id, heavy and gleaming on hooks. And BB guns. That day we passed the toy section without thought, en route to our new toy aisle.

There was no attendant at the counter, and despite my imaginings no red-aproned drone rushed to shoo us away. Randy showed off his knowledge with the arrangements behind the glass. Those are the speed loaders, those are the scopes. And there, my boys, there are the guns themselves. You had to be eighteen or older to buy one, so we handed our ragged, balled-up dollar bills over to Randy and summoned a teenage lackey. She pulled out her key chain to unlock the case.

“Do you want the black or the silver?”

Black, baby. (Internal voice “baby,” not external people-voice “baby”)

Reggie and I didn't have toy guns growing up, so we had to catch up. Even when the house was empty, I got nervous walking around with it. Green or orange water pistols had been okay, but anything else sent our father speechifying. “That's some white-man shit,” he'd
say, confiscating the cap gun from a birthday party goody bag. “Whitey loves his guns. Shoot somebody he loves that shit. So let him. No kid of mine is going to get that mind-set.” I practiced solo, deep in the recesses of the Creek, out of sight of beachgoers and homeowners. Why startle the happy vacationers with the sight of a skinny, slouching teenager, the sun glinting off his braces and handgun? All they wanted was to get out of the city for a few days and put their feet up. I rounded up some mussel shells from the dark sand at the edge of the Creek and stuck them in a thin black row. My great aim the first day was just dumb luck, a little taste to get me hooked. I nicked the shells, tinking off bits. The day of the fight, I'd have the bigger targets of my friends.

We armed one by one. Reggie told me he was “going off to practice with Bobby,” and disappeared for one of their secret confabs, probably a razzle-dazzle rapping/shooting extravaganza of great theater. It's like that y'all. Anticipating the hip-hop stars a few years off. Not that the rest of us were immune. NP tucked his piece into his belt like a swaggering cop on the take or the cracker sheriff of a Jim Crow Podunk, Clive was observed busting a Dirty Harry move when he thought we weren't looking, and Randy was often found cradling his rifle to his chest, a gruesome sneer on his face as if he were about to take an East Hampton bistro hostage. I myself favored a two-handed promising-rookie pose, favored by
Starsky and Hutch
extras who got clipped before the first commercial and were avenged for the rest of the hour. “He woulda made a good cop, just like his old man.”

When we all got together in the days leading up to the event, it was only a matter of time before we started posing for album covers. (The photographer always gets a kick out of taking pictures of these rap guys, they preen and strut more than supermodels.) We stood in a line, in character. The movie and TV comparison is the natural analogy, because back then we were informed by cop movies and cop shows, but given the future of rap music, the album cover is the better fit. Not one from innocent '85, but a few years in the future, when the music changed. We were a posse: the Azurest Boys.

We'd learned to change the character of our fighting and would continue to do so for the rest of our lives, readjusting for different provocations, different stakes. The music grew up, too, testicles dropping, voice changing, going from this:

To this, in so short a time:

Lyrics from the aforementioned “Here We Go” and then “Now I Gotta Wet'cha,” copyright 1992 by Ice Cube, born the same year as me, who grew up on Run-D.M.C like we all did. “Wet'cha,” as in “wet your shirt with blood.” All of us, the singers and the audience, were of the same generation. Something happened. Something happened that changed the terms and we went from fighting (I'll knock that grin off your face) to annihilation (I will wipe you from this Earth). How we got from here to there are the key passages in the history of young black men that no one cares to write. We live it instead.

You were hard or else you were soft, in the slang drawn from the territory of manhood, the state of your erected self. Word on the Street was that we were soft, with our private-school uniforms, in our cozy beach communities, so we learned to walk like hard rocks, like B-boys, the unimpeachably down. Even if we knew better. We
heard the voices of the constant damning chorus that told us we lived false, and we decided to be otherwise. We talked one way in school, one way in our homes, and another way to each other. We got guns. We got guns for a few days one summer and then got rid of them. Later some of us got real guns.

ON WEDNESDAY WE WENT OVER THE RULES
at Clive's house. Me, Marcus, Randy, and Clive. Clive's parents worked for the Board of Ed and only came out on weekends, and he had a nice deck on which to discuss matters of importance. The deck furniture was brand-new, fuming up a cloud of plastic musk. We weren't allowed to sit on it. The week before, according to Nick, he'd come over for a visit, and joined Clive at the table. Clive's mother summoned Clive into the house, and when he came out, he went around to the back of the house and fetched an old mildewy chair for Nick to sit on. The forbidden aspect made the meeting seem more official.

No face/No shooting at the eyes, that was a no-brainer. No cheating—if you're hit, you're hit, don't be a bitch about it. Sag Harbor Hills was the boundary of the battlefield, no cutting through to other developments and sneaking back to emerge ambush-style. I said we should all wear goggles just in case, and to my surprise they seemed to agree. There was talk of synchronizing watches, but no one wore a watch in the summer except me, because summer is its own time and I was the only one who didn't know this. When the scheduling question came up, I said, “Tomorrow night?,” during Reggie's shift, and everyone at the table was free then so there were no objections. The weekend was out—too many people around—and no one wanted to put it off 'til next week. Reggie was benched and I was glad.

Not that it could have gone down any other way. Although we hatched the plan for the BB-gun war on a Monday, there was no doubt that in the end it would go down on a Thursday.

There was one matter left to discuss. Clive brought out some lemonade. Classy. I took notes. Me and Reggie's house was a hangout
pad for the guys during the week, but Clive made better use of his Kid with an Empty House situation, bringing home girls from Bayside and even having girls from his high school out for a few days. He bused them in from the city, and didn't even pay for the Jitney. The boy had style, our Hefner in Kangol.