Sag Harbor (28 page)

Then I remembered that I hated dogs. Because dogs hated me. My whole life they chased me like I was made out of kibble. They bared their teeth and slick pink gums, excavating harrowing sounds from deep in their bellies. Big dogs, small dogs. They smelled it on me. Fear, some kind of weakness. They sensed the part of me that relished being crushed and destroyed. It was always in there, the goblin mind, salivating and rubbing its claws together, waiting for the dinner bell announcing it was time to feast on my humiliations. They barked and snarled at me with the brute understanding that this was all that I wanted and deserved.

“Now clean that up and get me some goddamned plastic plates.”

A few years ago, me and Reggie went exploring on our bikes. We'd run out of places to make ours, so we struck out where it had never occurred to us to go. We went down Division Street, in the white part of town. We didn't know where it went. We just knew we were sick of our old places and tired circuits around Sag Harbor.

It's a small town. Once you're off the highway, you can go for a long time without a car driving by or someone coming out of their house to get the mail. We only went a few blocks, but even one avenue off our map felt like miles. Reggie and me smiled at each other. Pedaling off into adventure.

The Doberman galloped out into the street and we were paralyzed. It stopped two feet away, muscles vivid under the skin, bright yellow teeth snapping. Time stopped. Its paws scraped on the asphalt in its furious half steps. I thought it was going to rip us to shreds. Doberman pinschers had replaced the German shepherd as the most fearsome dog around, in those quaint days before the pit bull hit the big time. We'd heard the stories. It was ready to leap up and tear out our throats, first me and then my brother. There was no one around. No one called him off. No one cared.

We didn't say anything. We backed up a slow inch at a time. For the first few feet the Doberman stayed with us, continuing his threats. Eventually he reached the end of his territory and stopped. We left him there in the middle of the street, us going backward on our bikes, paddling our feet on the pavement, until we got around the corner. We went home and gulped down a lot of Hi-C to replace what we'd sweated out, and told the story of Division Street to our freaked-out friends, who were envious that we had something to talk about. They said, “Wow.”

When our parents came out that weekend—this was when Elena was in charge during the week—our father told us to get in the car and show him where it happened. We were scared until Reggie pointed out that the dog couldn't get us through the car. We kept the windows rolled up and locked the doors just in case.

“You see that there,” he said.

“What?” I waited for the Doberman to come loping out.

“That.” We hadn't seen the lawn jockey the first time. The little midget stood in the middle of the lawn holding a gold ring, grinning in his bright red getup. Shining, well-polished.

“That's how they train it to attack black people,” he explained.

“That cracker in there tosses raw meat by the lawn jockey, the dog eats there every day and then when it sees black people it thinks, Food. You're lucky it didn't tear you apart.”

I looked at Reggie and Reggie looked at me. Dag.

“It's not the dog's fault. It's how it was trained.” He stepped on the gas. “I want you to stay away from that house,” he said. “I don't want you coming here again.”

The
Road Warrior's
score thundered now that the yelling was over. I turned down the volume.

“Look at this,” he said, holding up the first batch. “I love it!” He transferred the chicken into a glass bowl. “I'd grill on the moon if I could,” he said wistfully. And Mars and Saturn and beyond. Is there grilling in Heaven? Who knows what angels eat. But I know there's barbecuing in hell, and its your very guts and inner stuff blackening before your eyes.

“You ready for some good chicken?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

We were a made-for-TV family and when he called “Action!” we hit our marks and delivered our lines like pros. The scripts were all the same. We had the formula down.

Mrs. Gardner returned to use the facilities. “Where's Gail?” she asked, knocking the sand off her feet before she stepped inside.

He didn't answer so I said, “She had to run to the store. She'll be right back.”

She nodded and went into the bathroom. When she came out, he stopped her. “Girl, you best take a wing if you know what's good for you,” he said.

“Mmmm,” she said. “I was hoping to get a piece of that barbecue.” She grabbed a wing and topped off her white wine before rejoining the ladies on the beach.

For all his fear that people were watching all the time, that people will talk about you unless you're vigilant about what they see, no one was watching at all. No one cares about what goes on in other people's houses. The grubby dramas. It was just us. The soundstage
was empty, the production lot scheduled for demolition. They'd turned off the electricity long ago. We delivered our lines in the darkness.

“Here you go,” he said, handing me a quadruple-reinforced paper plate of chicken wings.

You have a fucked-up haircut and everyone knows you have a fucked-up haircut. But no one says anything. You don't know you have a fucked-up haircut, or know it and can't admit it. Until one day you face the fact that you have a fucked-up haircut and you get a new one and everyone says, Good job, as if they'd been waiting for it. As if they cared.

“How is it?” he asked. He held the next tray of chicken in his hand, one foot inside the house and the other on the deck.

I took a bite. It was like biting into sand. The juices had boiled away or splattered the coals, leaving these dried-up shreds sticking to bone. I looked at the other wings on the plate in my lap. They were charred and shrunken, the lot of them, crumbling into black specks. I chewed up the sand and swallowed.

“It's great,” I said.

            
THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE SUMMER WAS THE U.T.F.O.
—Lisa Lisa concert at Bayside. Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam headlined, thanks to their crossover hit “I Wonder if I Take You Home,” but U.T.F.O. was the real draw in our neck of the woods. They'd ruled the winter with “Roxanne, Roxanne,” a lamentation about a fly girl who wouldn't give them the time of day. In the tradition of the Village People, they employed theme personalities. The Educated Rapper boasted of his capacious intellect (“She needs a guy like me, with a High IQ”), Doctor Ice wooed her with his knowledge of the medical world (“Dermatology is treatment of the skin … There's anesthesiology ophthalmology, internal medicine and plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery and pathology”), while the Kangol Kid put his
faith in … his Kangol, though frankly one should never underestimate the power of accessories to help one stand out in the crowd. Mix Master Ice, their DJ, kept silent, preferring “to speak with his hands,” as they said in his milieu.

A young lady calling herself Roxanne Shanté released an answer record called
The Real Roxanne
, a Rashomon-style revision of her dealings with “dictionary breath” and his friends. Answer records to answer records escalated matters, with Roxanne's “parents” chiming in, her big “brothers,” far-flung second cousins, and the occasional bystander, culminating in “Roxanne's a Man,” which, like a hip-hop Hiroshima, stunned all involved and effectively ended the conflict. In revisiting the Roxanne Wars of the mid-'8os, I know I run the risk of stirring the deep and fierce emotions associated with that unfortunate episode, but I feel the background is necessary to explain our excitement. U.T.F.O. (Un Touchable Force Organization) represented teenage striving, youthful perseverance against the odds, and goofball personas that made our own stabs at reinvention look like genius. Bayside advertised the concert in
Dan's Papers
all summer, so by August we were in a bit of a froth.

You had to be eighteen to get into the club. It was a former roller rink, a kinda sketchy operation where the skates squished unwholesomely moist on your feet and the squirrelly DJ often disappeared, putting
Off the Wall
on repeat and slipping out the back. Since the revamp, we'd been barred. The more adventurous among us tried all summer to breach the walls in a string of legendary failures involving strategic facial hair, studied nonchalance, and some inspired business about the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It was sad to see Clive and Nick get into character and shuffle up to the velvet rope only to twist back to Earth with melted-off feathers. If they got in, it was like all of us getting in. When they failed, we accepted our portion of shame.

By the time the big day rolled around, the only person with a real shot was NP, who'd been bribing Marlon the Bouncer for weeks with the Long Wharf's top currency—ice cream. Marlon came into Jonni Waffle a couple of times a night, NP ducking supervisors as he
fixed him a cup with a conspiratorial nod. Marlon resumed his post, slowly eating his Banana Mint as a gaggle of preening Hamptonites queued up for inspection. He sucked on the tiny spoon with a pensive air while appraising those before him, some nice theater that lent his judgments the air of demented caprice.

“I know I'm getting in—I set him
up
!” NP told us.

“Better hope Freddie isn't on that night,” Marcus pointed out. “He'd be like, Nigger, please, Nigger Please.”

Freddie was this big bruiser from Bridgehampton, known for his martial-arts expertise. In addition to working Bayside, he bounced some nights at the Reef, a club on 27 where Marcus had worked earlier in the summer during one of his short-lived gigs. (“The barback said I stole two bottles of peach schnapps, but I was framed.”) “He has this case in his trunk where he keeps his nunchucks and sai and throwing stars,” Marcus warned us. “One night Freddie was working the door and this redneck got up in his face so he busted out his sai like
boom-bip!
and sent that bitch into traction.” Adding, “High all the time on coke, too.” All I knew about him was that when he ordered his Orange Sherbet, he never tipped, avoiding the sight of the tip cup as if it contained pictures of his pre-dumbbell, ninety-nine-pound weakling self.

“Marlon's working that night,” NP said, “I already checked. I'm not worried.”

I NEVER TRIED TO GET IN
. My daily routine already generated plenty of embarrassment—why get greedy? But as August got closer, I fixated on the concert, drawing up plans for one, determined sortie. Not being particularly tall, and possessing a prepubescent mien I found impossible to shake, my idea was to wear some preppie camouflage to help me fit in with the stream of East End swells—no mummy-bandage Chuck Taylors or Flipper T-shirt—and hold my advance-purchase ticket as if it were identity papers at a border crossing. Since I'd come over time to believe that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say, I tended to mumble or talk fast
in an attempt to help people more easily ignore me, so I practiced adamant phrasings of facts like “I bought this ticket” and “I paid money for this ticket.” I also crossed my fingers that the no-doubt-complicated refund process represented a bureaucratic hassle the bouncer didn't want to get involved in. That's all I had going.

The night before the concert, I walked up to Bobby's to begin the hunt. A normal person would've picked me up at my house, but Bobby, like so many before him, was lost in the moral fog of first-car ownership. Apparently I have issues in this area—why did a change in circumstance mean a change in character? It seemed a brand of weakness. His recent promotion probably had something to do with it. He'd been kicked upstairs, from Little Bobby to just Bobby. Given the strict hierarchy of age classes out in Sag, nomenclature problems arose from time to time. If kids in two different age groups had the same name then, logically, one was Little and one was Big. Big Bobby was in my sister's group, a few years older than us. Since his day of birth, our Bobby had been saddled with the Little sign hanging around his neck.

There was one easy rule: if there was a Big X, and a Little X, they had to have night-and-day personalities. Big Bobby was a jerk, no dispute. He cut in line at the video games in town, whet the sadistic aspects of his personality on Marcus with cool diligence, and was known to rip the heads off Han Solo action figures and eat them. I had actually witnessed this last despicable act, and it haunts me still. But Big Bobby had stopped coming out, you see. Working in the city, whatever, so Bobby was unqualified, just Bobby, and free to unfetter his character. Bygone Little Bobby, he was like me—a nice kid, conveniently invisible, beloved by aunts and uncles, perpetually pre-wince in anticipation of having his plump and inviting cheeks pinched by some elderly relative with boundary issues. Now, he could be a jerk. It wouldn't have surprised me if there was another Bobby playing in the sand of the Sag beach, thus crowning our Bobby Big Bobby, and this hypothetical tyke donning the nice-kid mantle. Nature abhors a vacuum.

As I passed the Sag Harbor Hills beach, the stragglers were folding their beach chairs and whipping the sand from their blankets. The gnats gathered in bobbing clouds and in the long grass the chittering insects saluted twilight. It was getting dark earlier, the endless summer days no longer so patient with our attempts to cram it all in.