It was Thursday night, but weekend traffic clotted the intersection of Bay and Main. One of the town cops chopped at the air to keep things going. They were already gathering, lining up outside and packed in little groups, waiting for the rest of their party to arrive, having a cigarette, sucking at the damp end of a roach. I scanned the crowd, assuming they'd gone in without me, but then I saw Bobby and them over by the windmill. From their body language, things were boiling over, with Bobby and NP angled into each other, and Devon and Erica patting each other's arms in support.
“You know he's not a practicing physician,” Bobby said.
“But he had to read all those medical books to come up with those rhymes, so that's where he got it from,” NP responded.
“I'm not paying you shit until I get some more proof.”
“You better give me my money, with your cheap ass.”
“You boys use some foul language,” Erica said.
I said, “Hey, guys.”
After a few remarks about my costume (“Spaz,” “Poindexter,” “Warren T. Higginbotham the Third”), we headed over to Bayside. “Where's Marlon?” Bobby asked.
The inside man was nowhere to be seen. Squatting on a red stool at the palace gate was Freddie the Fierce, just now grabbing an ID from a quivering anorexic who'd been in a terrible hair-spray accident. He shook his head dismissively These were his despised Boat People, disheveled travelers from the dead kingdom of boredom, with their desperate faces and Day-Glo attire.
“I thought you said you were going to get us in.” Devon pouted.
“He probably stepped away for a second,” NP said, rubbing Erica's back. “Plus, I'm on the list.”
“That's you,” Bobby said. “What about us?”
We got in line behind a coked-out couple. The guy had a Mercedes-Benz logo on his T-shirt, Ray-Bans covering his eyes, while his girlfriend wore Daisy Dukes and fishnets, one shoulder poking out of her sweatshirt. In those one-bared-shoulder days, it was easy to picture her hidden shoulder white and veined from lack of sun. I stood up straight and my back cracked, my lungs confused at this sudden roominess in my chest cavity. I felt like a giraffe, with my three extra inches of height, but I fit right in with the freakish menagerie around me. There were the standard-issue older guys wearing white jackets over monochrome T-shirts,
Miami Vice
–style, the white fabric giving their overtanned flesh a reptilian cast. Their arm candy tottered on the sidewalk with teased-out ostrich hair, in leather pants, snakeskin pants, motley-colored pantaloons, their blouses open to the navel and shoulder pads sticking out. The ubiquitous pastels reigned that year, and oversized jewelry, bracelets as big as inner tubes flopping on wrists and belt buckles like license plates sparkling in the streetlights. Looking back, there must have been some underlying theory to it all, an agreed-upon notion, but like I said, I wasn't getting those weekly updates, and in this case I wasn't missing out.
Devon and Erica checked the tails of their white shirts, flattening them against their matching pink corduroy skirts. “Get ready,” NP said. “Benji, why don't you stand behind us and, uh, let us go in first?”
I said to myself, I paid for this ticket with hard-earned money.
The four of them stepped up and Freddie scrutinized them as if mulling pressure points and nerve clusters to jujitsu.
“Where's Marlon?” NP asked, cozy. Bobby extended a manly head-bob.
“He got arrested,” Freddie drawled, looking at Devon and Erica.
“He was going to hook us up,” NP said, whispering. “I work next door and he always comes in.”
“I don't know anything about that.” He flicked his head at the girls. “What are they, thirteen?”
“We're on the list,” NP said. “U.T.F.O. put us on their list.”
Freddie roused a paw and consulted his sheets. Perhaps he'd had an earlier career in civil service. “They don't have anyone down here.”
“We have to be there,” NP said, a bit frantic now.
“Even if you were on the list, I can't let these little girls in. You two maybe, but these little girls? They'd shut us down.”
Another flameout at the gates of Bayside. We'd seen it before all summer, the broken faces and the inevitable stunned drifting-away. I followed. There was no use. We marched off to the grass.
Erica said, “He called us little girls.”
“We're not little girls,” her cousin said.
NP straightened. “Well, I'm going in.”
“What about us?”
“You heard him,” NP said. “They'd get shut down. I'm sorry, baby.” A soldier explaining the facts of war.
“You can't just leave us out here.”
“What do you expect me to do? Miss the concert?”
“Bobby,” Devon said, “I want you to take me home.”
“Me, too!”
Bobby looked like he'd swallowed a bucket of fishhooks.
“We're not going to walk, motherfucker,” Devon said.
• • •
THE GIRLS AND THEIR DRIVER LEFT
. I'd like to say that NP and Erica's bond was strong enough to survive this little contretemps, but it was not to be. Shit was tense. In the following days, Bobby's refusal to honor his debt and NP's constant griping that he “need to get paid,” pitted the cousins against each other as they defended their boys. Throw in the girls' resentment over being ditched, which they probably egged on between themselves when they got bored, and it was all too much for the young lovers, untested as they were in this arena. A week later, Erica kicked NP to the curb, and Devon realized that it wasn't as fun dating by herself, so she broke up with Bobby as well.
As for my role in the breakup, I can only shrug over my misreading of “The Message.” In reconstructing my sacadiliac theory, I have to go back to when I first heard the song, when I was twelve. Melle Mel was on the mike unfurling his litany of urban disquiet—“Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge … It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under, ah huh huh huh”—and when he got to the part in question, I thought he was saying that getting kicked in the balls was on par with transit strikes and getting his car repoed. He added what sounded to me like “adiliac” to “sac,” in order to round out the rhyme, some nonsense syllables for rhythm, like “ah huh huh huh.” Then over time I forgot how I'd wrassled down that conclusion, and sacadiliac became an official medical term in my mind. On second thought, I take back my shrug. Mishearing song lyrics, making your specific travesty of the words, is the right of every human being. Getting socked in the nuts, the dungeon—these were metaphors that made a lot of sense to me. Blame society.
Every time the doors opened, the music came out in a great gust. “Super Freak” was the tipping point. What is there to say about “Super Freak”? Figure out a way to harness the essence of “Super Freak” and you'd put Exxon out of business. Flying cars, funky flying
cities. That was it. I told NP I was going ahead with my plan. “I paid good money for this ticket,” I told him.
“Freddie,” NP reasoned, “I think I can talk to Freddie. ‘And this is our game plan.’”
It was over like that. We got back in line, and when we reached Freddie's stool, he barely glanced at my ticket and waved me through. He waved NP through, too, with a curt, “You better hook me up with some of that shit you sell over there.”
And so it came to pass that NP and me were the first of our crew to get into Bayside. That was my only excursion that summer, but NP milked his dual hookup until Labor Day. (Marlon got out on bail the next day.) That fall, in the city, I'd smuggle myself into the Peppermint Lounge and Area a few times, in my different costume of plaid New Wave jacket and combat boots, but they raised the drinking age to twenty-one that December and it was a long time before I got into a club again.
Stepping inside, I saw they'd done a lot of work to the place since its roller-rink days. Instead of bodies drifting in circles, now people's minds performed endless circuits, gliding through need-a-drink wanna-dance like-to-fuck need-a-drink, the club-land loop of desire. People waded in and out of the human surf around the bars, holding drinks above their shoulders to keep them above water. Waitresses in nipple-popping T-shirts, battle-worn from a summer of rough duty, carried trays up to the VIP section on the second floor, the ring of tables circling the dance floor. How nice to look down on those below! Look at her, that one looks like she's into it. The DJ cut it up in his perch, interpreting the crowd through Lennon sunglasses, the twisting bodies like tea leaves. He took counsel from the lady at his side, who stood in the dark as the floodlights zagged around her, hiding her features but casting the eerie shadow of her Afro-puffs against the wall. His muse, the temper of our night. By the stage, techies hunched over the monitors like disco Igors, unwinding the cables coiled around their arms, jabbering into walkie-talkies. Check one, check two. Mix Master Ice's turntables waited at
the back of the stage, cross-faders set to zero, black styluses poised like the grim heads of gargoyles.
Rainbow lights strafed our bodies. My head bobbed, with a little extra on the downbeat. Thinking about U.T.F.O. now, it's hard to remember why I was so excited. The beat is immortal, sure, but the lyrics of “Roxanne, Roxanne” are so fucking corny, man. It's a classic because of when it came out, those early days of hip-hop when anything with a bit of novelty was mesmerizing, but it's goofy as hell. Nowadays I read about them doing nostalgia gigs, reunion shows with people like Whodini and Kool Moe Dee and Dana Dane, break dancing on their aching sacroiliacs, busting out their hits for the aging fans. Bringing it all back. For Bobby and NP and Devon and Erica, hearing the song probably calls up memories of their double-dating days, sneaking around after curfew, parking at Haven's Beach in the dark. For me, I'm reminded of a caper that didn't go wrong for once, looking back fondly on a day without injury.
The DJ dropped “Raspberry Beret,” to seismic effect. Most of them weren't there to see the concert. It's a safe bet the older white people, the middle-aged East End denizens, were not die-hard U.T.F.O. fans. They showed up because they'd heard that Bayside was the place to be that night. Refugees from the known and humdrum, the smothering day-to-day I coulda bought a beer, but I didn't want to push my luck, picturing the music cutting off and Klaxons sounding as the bartender discovered I'd made it past security. Everything coming to a stop as they all looked at me, the utter opposite of what was going on now. No one looked at me. I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we're here together. The bass bounced my shirt on my chest. My elbow mashed the rib cage of this forty-something white lady in a green metallic jumpsuit and when I turned to apologize, she simply smiled and continued swaying to the music. At some point I'd started dancing. I was a pretty crappy dancer, but how could I muster shame with that music rewiring my every system?
We can rebuild him
. A plane of blue light sifted
through the crowd, dead in my eyes for an instant. NP was off somewhere, getting up to something. I didn't know anyone. And it was okay. Something good was about to happen. I just had to wait. Weird trendoids surrounded me, fearsome geezers, drugged-out wackos, but now we were comrades. We were all there for the same thing. The DJ hovered above us, throwing down his thunderbolts. He mixed in a segment of Debbie Harry singing “Rapture” and they screamed. Actually, I decided, I'm not dancing that badly at all. I thought, This is Good. No qualifier, chaotic or otherwise. Simply: Good.
I knew what Evil looked like.
THE NIGHT BEFORE
, after Uncle Nelson bought beer for us, we had to carry out our part of the bargain and take him around the Hills. “I just want to see if some people are out,” he told us from the backseat. “A look-see. I'll be quick.”
“How come you don't come out anymore?” I asked. I had the six-pack between my feet. If my conversation rankled him, he'd have to fight me for it.
“You know, I want to,” he said, “but I have too much stuff to do, I got a lot of stuff I'm trying to get off the ground. Little this, little that. Can't be drinking beer on the beach all day with all these people.”
We turned onto Beach Avenue. “Still here,” he said.
“Left or right?”
“Right. Up there …” he trailed off. The white house was dark, the lawn bushy and monstrous. One of the shutters tilted down forty-five degrees on its remaining hinge, exposing shattered panes and the darkness within. “Guess they aren't around,” Uncle Nelson said. “That's Lionel's house. That's where we always hung out. Day and night.”
I'd never seen anyone in there. It was one of our haunted houses, with a drooling man-child chained up in the basement nibbling animal crackers or a batty old lady stirring up a pot of Kid Soup. What
would our houses look like thirty years from now? We'd still be here, right? Or would we be out in the world like Uncle Nelson, our homes shadowed, the gutters sprouting flora, the driveways buckled and ripped? Haunted by us. And one of the other houses up the block or around the corner the new hangout spot for the next generation. Those future kids tossing pebbles at our windows and running away screaming, or daring each other to knock on the door. Double-dare you—crazy people used to live there and they'll get you.
He resumed the tour of his developments, superimposing his houses over the houses we knew, leading us beachward. When he saw the lights outside the Nicholses', he asked us to slow down. My mother always said, “Looks like someone's having a party,” when she saw a line of cars like that, bunched up on the curb. Figures moved in the bay windows and beyond the screen door.
“Here?” Bobby asked.
“I'll catch up with them later,” Uncle Nelson said. “There's one more place I want to see.”
Bobby scowled and kept driving. We reached the last street in Sag Harbor Hills, the dead end on the water. “Pull up there on the left,” my uncle told us. We parked in front of the Lee's, where Abby, one of my sister's friends, used to stay. Maybe he knew her parents from the old days. I turned around to ask him what he wanted to do. He was staring out the window, across the street at the Yellow House, his parents' place. I'd forgotten that's where it was.