Sag Harbor

THE HEYDAY OF DAG

THERE WERE SOME WHITE PEOPLE COMING UP THE beach so we got out the binoculars. White people owned the waterfront behind town, but the beach was ours, and any infiltration had to be checked out. The front wall of our living room was glass, giving us superior angles of surveillance, and my father kept binoculars handy for this very purpose. He owned two pairs, one for here and one for the city, where we faced West End Avenue and teeming beehives of naked potential. At any given moment, a nice percentage of apartments had their blinds up, their curtains spread, and you never knew what drama might emerge if you were on the lookout. Best to keep the binoculars close.

“That's trespassing,” NP said.

Bobby raised the binoculars. “It looks like two fags holding hands,” he said.

It was the heyday of fag. Get a bunch of teenage virgins and future premature ejaculators together, and you were going to hear fag a lot. Get a bunch of kids together who felt punked out in various ways, and the collective mind sought ways to punk out others. A touch of homophobia was also good for hiding any nascent predilections and/or yearnings lurking about. Binoculars: a device that facilitates looking down on people.

“They better not try to come up here,” NP said. “I'll bust their ass.”

“Shit, you'd be like, ‘Come up here, sailor, I just dropped the soap.’”

“Dag.”

It was also the heyday of dag. Dag was bitter acknowledgment of the brutish machinery of the world. It was a glimpse into the cruel void, as evidenced by the fact that it was often followed by “That was cold.” In the heyday of dag, we accepted our duty to call attention to such moments, taking turns at this minor masochism. It passed the time.

I took the binoculars from Bobby. The intruders were actually a middle-aged man and woman, soft and shuffling. They clutched their shoes and dug their toes into the damp sand. Every few steps, one of them pointed at some feature of the landscape — the lighthouse squatting on its nest of rocks, the green Mohawk of seaweed on a black stone, the pale carcass of an overturned horseshoe crab — as their companion gaped in wonder. The gender confusion — apart from some wishful thing on NP's part, as he was always trying to start some shit — came from their shapeless clothes, the way they disappeared into the T-shirt — khaki shorts combo that was the official uniform of tourists the world over.

“We should go down there and tell them to get off our beach,” Bobby said. He lived in Ninevah, down the way, hence his interest in keeping the sands undefiled by outsiders, but everybody in the developments, whether they lived on the beach or not, felt that selfish tug of ownership when they saw strangers — i.e., white people — on our little stretch. Most of the strollers came from the Public Beach, visiting friends for the afternoon and then letting their curiosity draw them toward Azurest. We made noises of outrage, but never did anything. There was an older lady or two of the first generation who were known to fly across the sand and admonish strangers that dogs weren't allowed on the beach, if the people in question happened to be chaperoning some yapping enthusiast off-leash, but mostly we grumbled to remind ourselves we had rights to assert, and that was enough.

Already the couple was turning back. Visitors never made it that far up the beach in those days. Watching them slow down, stop for a conference, and then turn back made you an audience to a familiar pantomime. Something was off. Everyone was brown. The ladies plopped on striped beach chairs and towels, the kids stirring sand with plastic shovels and chipped clamshells. They were every shade in the dessert menu of words beloved by romance novelists to describe African American skin, chocolate and caramel, butterscotch and mocha. Black eyes glared down from the beach houses, the lookouts on the decks of our armada. Yes, something is off, let's head back.

They rarely made it past the Rock. The Rock was a few houses down from ours and a powerful psychological meridian. Kids told each other, “I'll race you to the Rock,” because it was an impossible, panting distance. Parents warned, “Don't go past the Rock,” to keep their offspring in view as they gossiped and sipped Fresca. Parents let their attention lapse, argued, flirted, dozed — as long as the kids didn't stray past the Rock, nothing would happen to them. Perhaps this has happened to you, on beaches: you start drifting off while lying on a beach blanket, close your eyes and shut down your ears only to find yourself revisiting some personal torment still powerful enough after all these years to suck you into its undertow. Don't know what I'm talking about? Never mind. Take my word, friend, the Rock was an anchor to keep you from drifting too far.

It was our almanac, registering all things tidal, every off-season cataclysm. In the autumn and winter, nor'easters came to play in Sag Harbor Bay, big dumb children that never cleaned up after themselves. The great storms mucked up sand in impressive tonnage, shoving the tide line snug up to the beach grass one year, almost no place to walk, then clawing it back the next year so that low tide became a strictly ankle affair, wearying you to get halfway wet. Wade, wade, wade. You never knew how much beach you were going to see at the start of the summer, what kind of state the Rock was going to be in that year. This season, the Rock was high and proud, next season it had been brought down low, up to its neck in sand. But it was always a real trooper, bird-shitted and buried or no. After eons of being kicked around by glaciers, and then deposited on some random strip of beach, it must be hard to faze you.

The Rock, the Creek, the Point: the increments of our existence. Earth, solar system, galaxy. The shallow waves of the Creek put an end to the line of beach houses, and on the opposite bank the wetland outskirts of East Hampton whispered in their eternal huddle. Watching over a scrabble of inhospitable beach, the wetlands curved up to Barcelona Neck, aka the Point, and beyond that maps failed. Even the animals changed, so extreme the border between Sag Harbor and East Hampton. Crescent rinds of dried-out sand sharks littered the shore and this new breed of horseflies, the juvenile delinquents of their set, taunted and nipped the whole way to the Point, trying to suck the moisture on your legs. The Horsefly Shuffle was the one dance I could do, no hassle: bat at thighs and calves, skitter a few feet in a serpentine style, repeat. Also: shout “Dag!” whenever a horsefly raised a welt. Who knew what kind of fauna lurked around the bend of Barcelona Neck? Pterodactyls wearing ascots and sipping gin and tonics, trust-fund duck-billed platypuses complaining about “the help.” It was all hoity-toity over there.

When we were small, we were impatient for the day when we'd be able to undertake an expedition out to the Point. Sandwiches in baggies, orange soda, baleful glances backward after the soothing sight of our homes. By 1985, we knew it wasn't worth it, and had decided the same was true of the entire beach. This grousing about beach rights and intruders was beside the point because we never hung out down there anymore. The beach was for little kids and old people. We preferred the ocean, on the other side of the island. Especially now that we had access to a car. The ocean, in fact, was our destination that afternoon, once the guys finally showed up.

So forget the beach and the rest of it, the quality of the sunrises and sunsets … although it must be said that those two things were top-notch. Waking up early in that house was science-fiction stuff. The sky over the wetlands was a fine, simmering blue, slowly boiling up morning. Before you lay the dead, misty surface of the bay, an imperturbable line of dark gray, a slab of ancient stone come out from under the earth. A reversal there: the sky was liquid, the water a solid screen. There were fewer boats then to zit the surface of the bay. No one to be seen at that hour, emboldening that cherished dread of early risers, that you were the only being alive and awake in the world. Occasionally some drowsily dipping seagull shot into the water after low-tide crab, seized its quarry in its beak, and swooped back up to the sky, dropping the bits of shell after it nuzzled out the meat so that the dead pieces briefly rippled the water before all was silent again. A mute, primordial theater.

Sunsets unfolded above the big houses in North Haven. The sunset made it appear that the sun and the sky were not separate things but different states of the same magnificent substance — as if the sky were a weakened diluted form of the sun, the blue and the white merely drained-away elements of the swirling red-and-orange disk sitting on the horizon. I'll wager on this: the sunsets closed the deal for that first generation, the ones who came here originally, my grandparents and their crew. After walking down through the woods off Hempstead Street, the meek trails that would one day be roads, it must have been wondrous to emerge on that unspoiled beach and see that sunset. No houses, no footprints even, just beach grass whispering to itself. Saying — what? You'd have to spend some time to learn its language. That first generation asked, Can we make it work? Will they allow us to have this? It doesn't matter what the world says, they answered each other. This place is ours. Over the years I have learned that the sunrises and sunsets of that beach are rare and astonishing but I did not know this then. Sunset meant that the damned gnats were coming out, that was it.

NP SAID, “Benji, can I get a Coke?” His head was in the refrigerator.

Cokes were no problem. My parents kept a healthy store of mixers and such. With their friends coming up from the beach for drinks, and now me and Reggie's gang spending so much time hanging out on our couch all day, they had adjusted their mixers supply. Food was something else, however, with Reggie and me on rations.

That summer we switched from a Kid with the Pool — based hanging out economy to a Kid with the Empty House — based hanging out economy. Before his family moved to California and he stopped coming out, Kevin had been our Kid with the Pool, and the fact that we never saw his mother made it a prelude to the days of Empty Houses. I think I saw her once, when I was little. I think. We knew someone was in there — the afternoon soaps blared kissing music or about-to-kiss music through the windows and once in a while a hand clawed back the curtains overlooking the pool area. Safe to say we were unsupervised. As we horsed around in the pool, we pretended that we lived in a world without parents, but actually it didn't take that much pretending.

We'd been moving toward Empty House status for a while. For years, we'd skulked in basement rec rooms, on screened porches, played tag on cracked patios. We heard footsteps above, inside, over there, but never saw who they belonged to. In every house there were secret rooms with locked doors and if you asked who was in there watching TV, the kid always said, “My grandma,” in the same dead tone. The moms ran through their summer itinerary, off to the beach with a folding chair under one arm and an overflowing wicker bag in the other, off to “a luncheon,” a cocktail party in the Hills, or an art opening in the backyard of someone who had a cousin with a bunch of friends who were said to be talented and known in Harlem galleries. The dads were in the city, making money, making something happen, reappearing on the Friday evening 7:25 train in East Hampton, staggering off the club car with big smiles: Showtime.

That summer we just made it official. Reggie and I were the Kids with the Empty House, and the gang changed their schedules and routes accordingly. Our parents only came out on weekends, which meant that now me and Reggie had the place to ourselves most of the week. Our sister, Elena, used to be the one in charge, bossing us around with such relish that history's great lesson, “Power corrupts,” played out in intimate scale in our living room. How we cringed as she kept us in line with her powerful club, “I'll tell Daddy on you.” But she was gone now. Once you were old enough to go to college, you stopped coming out to Sag. It was kids' stuff, it was too bourgie, the city summoned, etc. Graduate from high school, and you graduated from Sag as well. Until you were called back.

“You're men now,” my father told me when I asked who was going to look after us. “You can take care of yourselves.” Men? A compliment and a curse: no more excuses, no one to blame. At first I thought he was joking. But there we were — me and Reggie alone during the week, and my parents only coming out on weekends. If then.

Now that we had a free house, what did we do with it? Sit around and talk shit. That day it was me, NP, and Bobby. Reggie was working at Burger King. The smell of Reggie's grease-infused clothes crept from our bedroom, from the corner where he tossed his work duds, making us hungry whenever a breeze swept through.

“You want sprinkles with that Coke?” Bobby asked. NP had a job at Jonni Waffle, the new ice-cream joint in town, and when we went to visit him for freebies we taunted him over the stupid shit he had to say all day. Whip on top, waffle cone, slob your knob? NP had also been ribbing Bobby about his “Scarsdale mansion” lately, causing Bobby to push back a little.

“Shut up, you pleather Members Only — wearin' motherfucker,” NP said. Which might appear to be a non sequitur, as Bobby was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, but there was history there, context. It was a reference to some intel from Clive, who had informed us that he'd run into Bobby during the school year, and described how Bobby was wearing a Windbreaker that looked suspiciously like a knockoff Members Only jacket. No small misdemeanor, that, and Clive's alpha-dog status only magnified the dis.

The trend that summer, insult-wise, was toward grammatical acrobatics, the unlikely collage. One smashed a colorful and evocative noun or proper noun into a pejorative, gluing them together with an-in' verb. I'm not sure of the syntactical parentage of the-in' verbs, so I'll just call them the-in' verbs. Verbal noun, gerundlike creature, cog in the adjectival machine, who knew — as was the case with some of the people in my living room, there was a little uncertainty in the bloodlines. “Lookin'” was a common-in' verb. Like so:

“Wearin'” made the rounds as well:

You could also preface things with a throat-clearing “You fuckin',” as in “You fuckin' Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost—lookin' motherfucker,” directed at Bobby, for example, who had light brown skin, light brown hair, and indeed shared these characteristics with the hominid sidekick on the Saturday morning adventure show Land of the Lost. “You fuckin'” acted as a rhetorical pause, allowing the speaker a few extra seconds to pluck some splendid modifier out of the invective ether, and giving the listener a chance to gird himself for the top-notch put-down/splendid imagery to follow.

True masters of the style sometimes attached the nonsensical “with your monkey ass” as a kicker, to convey sincerity and depth of feeling. Hence, “You fuckin' Kunta Kinte — lookin' motherfucker … with your monkey ass.” You may have noticed that the-in' verbs were generally visual. The heart of the critique concerned what you were putting out into the world, the vibes you gave off. Which is what made them so devastating when executed well — this ordnance detonated in that area between you and the mirror, between you and what you thought everyone else was seeing.

There was a loud squeaking noise. “Hear that?” I asked. It was Marcus on that messed-up bike of his, you heard him changing gears two miles away.

We all sighed with relief. Marcus was a key player in that he reassured us that there was someone more unfortunate than ourselves. He possessed three primary mutant powers; we had all seen them in action: 1. He was able to attract to his person all the free-floating derision in the vicinity through a strange magnetism. 2. He bent light waves, rendering the rest of us invisible to bullies. When Marcus was present, the big kids were incapable of seeing us, picking on him exclusively, delivering noogies, knuckle punches, and Indian rope burns to his waiting flesh. Indian rope burns always put an end to the torture, because everybody got distracted while bonding over their smidgen of Indian blood, one-eighth, one-sixteenth Seminole whatever, and that was that. 3. Superior olfactory capability. We heard his bike from two miles away; he smelled barbecue from twice that distance, attaining such mastery that he could ascertain, with the faintest nostril quivering, if the stuff on the grill had just been thrown on or was about to come off, and acted accordingly. Like a knife and fork, he appeared around dinnertime. I think there was a summer or two when he ate over every night, guzzling Hi-C and waving a plastic-coated paper plate around for seconds, more, more. Not until later did I wonder why there was no dinner at his house, why no one missed him at twilight. Call him a mooch to hurt his feelings, and he'd just smile, wipe his mouth with his wrist, and snatch the last piece of chicken, probably a wing, damn him. He was always hungry, like we all were, but at least he had the good sense to eat.

Marcus pried open the glass doors. They were sticky. Decades of sand filled their tracks. “What's up?” He had his beach towel around his neck, and he wore dark-green-and-gray plaid shorts, and a T-shirt that read boy's harbor JULY 4 fireworks 1983. He extended his hand to Bobby and I witnessed a blur of choreography.

Yes, the new handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? I was all thumbs when it came to shakes. Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment. Like this? No, you didn't stick the landing: the judges give it 4.6. (The judge from Hollis, Queens, was a notorious dick, undermining everyone from the other boroughs.) No one ever commented on my fumbles, though, and I was grateful. I had all summer to get it right, unless someone went back to the city and returned with some new variation that spread like a virus, and which my strong dork constitution produced countless antibodies against.

NP slapped Marcus's hand. “Hey, Act—” NP began, before cutting himself off. He was about to use last year's nickname.

We used to call Marcus “Arthur Ashe.” Two summers ago, Marcus had suffered a dry patch — actually multiple dry patches, on his elbows, knees, in the webbing between his fingers and toes. “Why'd his mother let him out the house like that,” we'd all wonder, but never say aloud, because talking about someone's mother was, well, talking about someone's mother. Talking about someone's mother was talking about your own mother: it opened a door.

Obviously the nickname affected him deeply. Perhaps the sight of a tennis racket mortifying him, all those long months of the school year, or a chance encounter with someone dressed in crisp white clothing curdling his mood. All I know is that the next summer Marcus returned so profoundly moisturized that there was nary a flake of ash to be seen on his skin. In fact his skin was so lubed up that he glistened mightily whenever the sun hit his flesh, and even when it didn't. He had become, sadly, a living Jheri Curl.

“Hey, Activator!” NP called out one afternoon, while making little spritzing motions about his head, and Arthur Ashe was now Activator until Labor Day.

It was the last week of June, still early in the season, so there was no telling what kind of handle Marcus would get this year. Whatever nickname he got, it was likely to be of the kinder variety — he had grown four inches over the year and started lifting weights, or tied-together phone books, some kind of heavy object. Maybe he'd cast his disappointments in lead. No one had put him to the test yet, but powwows over the matter, even our diluted one-eighth or one-sixteenth powwows, decided that he could kick all our asses, and we had it coming.

I did a head count: four of us, Randy and Clive on their way. There were five seats in Randy's car.

“They're not here yet?”

Bobby sucked his teeth. “Waiting on them all day.”

“It's going to be dark by the time they get here.”

“It's going to be six of us?” I asked. I was trying to get the fight started over who was coming in the car. Let everybody get their arguments for inclusion going beforehand, and see where I stood.

“Shit, I know I'm going, I had to ride my bike last time,” Marcus said.

“I know I'm going — he's my cousin,” NP countered.

I decided to make some lunch, to fortify myself for the battle to come. Reggie and me didn't agree on much when it came to food, but we were both partial to Campbell's Homestyle Chicken Soup with Egg Noodles. It was the Cadillac of canned soup, the noodles firm yet pliant on the tongue, the ratio of celery and carrots consistent and reliable. The tiny amber globules of fat shimmered on the surface in an enticing display, to delight the eye. There was one can left; I'd traded it with Reggie that morning for a bag of Lay's Potato Chips and two ice-cream sandwiches. Every couple of days, Reggie and I walked over to Frederico's and stocked up on food. Our family had a credit account there.

Everybody had their brands, black kids, white kids. Sperry, Girbaud, and Benetton, Lee jeans and Le Tigre polos, according to the plumage theory of social commerce. If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong. I was more survival-oriented. The brands I worshipped lived in the soup aisle, in the freezer section behind glass. I'm talking frozen food here. Swanson, of course, was the standard, the elegant marriage of form and function. The four food groups (meat, veg, starch, apple cobbler) lay pristine in their separate foil compartments, which were in fact, presto, a serving dish. Meal and plate in one slim rectangle — this was American ingenuity at its best and most sustaining. Fried Chicken, Turkey, Salisbury Steak, that was three days of the week right there.

All hail Stouffer's! Pure royalty, their bright-orange packaging a beacon in refrigerator sections across the NY metro area. French Bread Pizzas — so continental! Turkey Tetrazzini, Chicken Pot Pie, Beef Pot Pie. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Stouffer's employed the best minds the prepackaged food industry had to offer, no doubt luring geniuses from rival firms with groovy perks and extensive benefit packages, ultimately producing that sublime Boil-in-Bag technology, up there with penicillin and the microchip in the pantheon of twentieth-century scientific achievement. I will admit to an unwholesome fascination with Boil-in-Bag technology. Chicken à la King, Swedish Meatballs, Beef Stroganoff with Parsley Noodles—'twas satisfaction itself that oozed out of the plastic bags and murked our waiting bowls.

There were, as well, renegades to whom we had given our hearts, like Howard Johnson's Tendersweet Fried Clams, 95 percent batter plus a special ingredient that made you forget that they were 95 percent batter the next time you reached for them in the supermarket.

And the rare and valued Weight Watchers Chicken Cutlet & Vegetable Medley, tough to find on account of some complex distribution quirk beyond my ken, and entering our menu rotation by accident; my mother had bought a box for herself one time, and in a famished episode I had devoured it and become addicted. I felt ridiculous buying a Weight Watchers meal, the sight of the pink box sliding across the scanner rousing my sundry manhood issues, the gentle ping of the bar-code reader becoming in my mind a gigantic church bell ding-donging my worthlessness throughout Food Emporium and beyond, to the entire zip code, but there was no denying the tantalizing breading on the cutlet, featuring a blend of spices so well-calibrated for delight that it was hard to accept that it had been squirted on by machine, for surely this was human tenderness and love of craft before you, and the orange butter sauce, yes, the orange butter sauce, more of a chutney really, covering the veg medley. Believe this one truth in my story if nothing else.

Finally, soup. Broth of life. We were Campbell's men, had been for years, and nothing took the edge off like the talent in their boutique Chunky line. We adopted the advertising slogan of Chunky's Soup as our rallying cry and motto — it was indeed the Soup That Eats Like A Meal. Or we forced ourselves to believe this over time by necessity. Like I said, I was survival-oriented.

Mondays we usually ate leftover barbecue from the weekend, but our parents had told us on Friday that they weren't coming out after all, so our stash took a big hit, plus the last time we went to Frederico's, the manager told us that we'd maxed out our credit, those boxes of Yodels pushing us over the edge a couple of days ago, and our mother was going to have to give them a call to discuss it. Which I didn't know if she had. After the can of Homestyle Chicken Soup with Egg Noodles, there was one can of Hormel Chili with Beans left for Reggie — I couldn't abide the stuff — and the legendary icicled box of Macaroni & Beef with Tomatoes. If Stouffer's was royalty, this guy was the inbred dolt everyone feared ascending the throne. Reggie and I sometimes spooked each other with tales of its wretchedness. It was hard times when you opened the freezer door to discover that you were sentenced to Macaroni & Beef with Tomatoes. Purchased by accident a few years prior (in a hurry we had mistaken it for Lasagna with Meat Sauce), the sight of that accursed package, nestled in there with its frosted cohort of aluminum foil — covered enigmas, was an indictment of our character: if that was your only choice, you deserved to eat it. We prayed against that day.

I gobbled my soup as we watched TV. Raiders of the Lost Ark was winding down on Showtime, one of our favorite parts, The Burning of the Nazis by Heaven. If we had a VCR, we'd be playing the sequence frame by frame, so as not to miss a second of the elaborate special effects, which had merited a cover story in Fangoria magazine, although I now knew better than to admit to this knowledge.

“God's gonna melt that Nazi,” Marcus said.

“You better melt that Nazi-ass motherfucker, God!” NP said. Then we heard Randy honking and we were outside in five seconds flat. Firemen had nothing on us when it was time to roll, the emergency we waited for.

RANDY DROVE A MOSS-GREEN TOYOTA hatchback that he claimed to have bought for a hundred bucks. Its fenders were dented and dimpled, rust mottled the frame in leprous clumps, and the inside smelled like hippie anarchists on the lam had made it their commune. But who was I to cast aspersions? Randy had a license, he had a car, and our world had changed.

Clive was in the passenger seat, radio and cooler at his feet. “What's up, what's up, what's up?”

“You guys ready to go?” Randy asked, a bit exasperated, as if it were him who had been left waiting.

“Maybe we should do a head count,” I said. Again: there were six of us, and five seats. Needless to say, this was a no-lap situation.

“Your car only fits five, cuz,” NP said.

“We can't all fit,” I said.

“I got left behind last time,” Marcus said.

We scanned one another's faces for weakness. “I'm skinny,” I added. “I have skinny legs.” There was no denying the twiglike nature of my legs.

“Right,” Randy said, “Benji has skinny legs. Look at those Christmas hams you got there, Marcus — you take up two seats as it is.” The fix was in. He pretended to consider the options. “Maybe you could rock shotgun, but Clive has shotgun.”

“I have shotgun,” Clive said.

“And it wouldn't be fair to take that away from him,” Randy mused. “And Bobby, he got left last time.”

“I was left last time!” Marcus said. He gripped his beach towel around his shoulders like a yoke.

“That was two times ago,” Randy improvised, “on Thursday. On Friday we went to Bridgehampton and there was no room for Bobby, so he had to stay behind. That means you got left two times ago.” Randy looked at Bobby, and Bobby made a show of feeling wounded by this fictional abandonment. “Plus, you got your bike. You can ride your bike and meet us there.”

“My bike is busted,” Bobby said.

“I don't even have a goddamned bike,” NP said.

“If you start pedaling now,” Clive said, “you might beat us there.” We all knew this was ridiculous.

“Yeah, you better start pedaling now, nigger!” NP said.

Marcus shook his head, reconciling himself to this brutal calculus. “Dag, y'all.” He got on his bike. “Can you at least take my towel?” he asked.

Randy looked at him skeptically. “Is it … dry?” he said, wrinkling his nose.

We were on the road a few minutes later, Randy ahem-aheming about gas money before we even got out of Azurest. I didn't approve of how Randy handled being the Kid with the Car, how swiftly he had been corrupted. The day before the summer started, he was a nobody. Now he was a sneering despot, honking his sick little horn. He rewarded brownnosing with a “I'll give you shotgun for a week,” punished with a “Just forgot to pick you up” for whatever critical mission was going on that day, the movies, Karts-a-Go-Go, the ocean.

Even if there had been only five of us, he might have left Marcus behind. The backseat of his Toyota possessed this extradimensional quality where it fit max two or max three people depending on Randy's whim. Reggie and I kept our sliding doors open, no attitude.

Aiding Randy's schemes was the fact that there were no girls around to distract us. Our troupe, at first glance, defied birth statistics. My sister's age group, four years older, was balanced between boys and girls. There were twenty or so kids in my sister's group, and over the summers they all dated one another, nursed crushes across years, traded first loves and first kisses and assorted first fondlings between them. One summer Elena dated Bill, two summers later she was driving around in Nat's convertible, and so on. Reggie and me benefited from this situation. The big kids had to be nice to us, lest word of their bullying misdeeds get back to our sister and ruin long-or short-term plans. The older boys ferried us in their backseats to the ocean, to the movies, they bought us comics at the Ideal in town, forked over the cash for ice cream at the Tuck Shop. Not bad at all.

Then Elena's group turned eighteen, grabbed their diplomas, and stalked off into the big wide world, ceding control of the developments to our gang. We were a different breed. Whether it was martinis or cigarettes or the deleterious effects of ambient Nixonian radiation, '68 to '72 turned out to be a hard time for X chromosomes. The girls were scarce. Look at us in the car there. Boy's town.

Blame for Randy's sudden appearance in our group should fall on his parents' lovemaking schedule. He was an in-betweener, living like a weed in the cracks between the micro-demographic groups of the developments. Too old to hang out with us, really, and too young to be fully accepted by my sister's group, he had wafted in a social netherworld for years. Frankly, before he started putt-putting around town in his Toyota, I had little idea who he was, never saw him except at the annual Labor Day party. Randy had just finished his freshman year in college, but against usual custom, he still came out to Sag. No Great Exodus for him — why leave when the pond was so small, and you were so big? He relished his new status. He had a car, he was old enough to buy us beer, and for this we accepted him into our tribe. It has been observed by wiser men than me that kids who hang out with kids who are too young for them often make themselves useful in the transportation and beer-buying sectors. We overlooked his shortcomings.

The No-Girls thing was true in essence, although there were a few exceptions. Let us open the case files. Marnie was two years older than me, but had never been part of our group, even when we were very young and the boy-girl divide a nonissue. The girls of Elena's group kept her as a sort of mascot, ditching her only when it was rec-room slow-jam time or walk-down-the-beach-at-night time, and once they left Sag Harbor, she started spending her summers in the city as well, in premature exit. And then there was Francesca, whom we had barely seen for years. She was a bit of a debutante, popping out of her mother's womb with elbow-length white gloves, so it was said, and come junior high she spent all her time on the ocean side with her finishing-school friends. Occasionally we'd see her being dropped off in a white Porsche or similar chariot, and she'd delicately wave in our direction and run inside her house as if we were swarming paparazzi. So in truth, there were girls our age — they just didn't want to hang out with us, and frankly who could blame them. This was to change in a few weeks, but we didn't know that yet.

“Look at that goofy motherfucker up there!”

We passed Marcus on the turn to Sagg Road, which was a dead shot through the South Fork to the Atlantic. Marcus'd made good time. For his efforts we heckled him. Fists and catcalls out the windows.

“Better change that gear!”

“My grandma goes faster than that in her wheelchair, sucker!”

Check out Marcus huffing away. What had formerly been the embodiment of cool — ten, count 'em, ten speeds! — was now the ultimate signifier of lameness. That summer you walked like a man, a summering desperado, or drove, behind the wheel or shotgun. Marcus was making good time, but let's face it, he was on a bike.

“Leave him alone,” Clive said. And we did. Except for some obscene gestures through the tiny Toyota's back window as we pulled ahead.

The houses thinned out, dangling in mystery at the end of snaking driveways, and we entered the no-man's-land in the middle of the island. Outside our black enclave and lighting out for the white side of the island. It was only a few miles to the ocean, but our sense of scale was off from spending so many summers in our safe little circuits. We had formed scouting parties to explore the dirt trails behind Mashashimuet Park, striking out toward Bridgehampton, and made occasional forays up 114 to the twisty, forsaken bends of Swamp Road, in a tentative East Hamptonly salvo, but generally we confined our shenanigans to the developments, to obsessive loops up and down Main Street in town. The coming of the cars changed all that.

My mother used to say that the white people went to the ocean beaches in the morning and the black people in the afternoon. I don't know how much of that was flat-out segregation or a matter of temperament — white people getting a jump on the day to do white-people things, and black people, well, getting there when they get there. Certainly that first generation claimed and settled on Sag Harbor Bay because the south side was off-limits — the white people owned the coastline, South Hampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton. And the Jersey shore, and every other sandy stretch of vista-full property in the tristate area, the natural places of escape from city life. No Negroes, please. That first generation came from Harlem, Brownstone Brooklyn, inland Jersey islands of the black community. They were doctors, lawyers, city workers, teachers by the dozen. Undertakers. Respectable professions of need, after Jim Crow's logic: white doctors won't lay a hand on us, we have to heal ourselves; white people won't deliver us to God, we must save ourselves; white people won't throw dirt in our graves, we must bury ourselves. Fill a need well, and you prospered. Prosper and you took what was yours. Once The War was over (there was only one War when the old heads took us to school), finished, and the new American future beckoned — with bony skeletal fingers, but beckoning nonetheless, don't quibble — and why shouldn't they answer? They had fought to make a good life for themselves, vanquished the primitives and barbarians out to kill them, keep them out, string them up, and they wanted all the spoils of their struggle. A place to go in the summer with their families. To make something new.

If only they could see us now. O Pioneers!

Through the rusted hole in the backseat floor, I watched the asphalt blur. Randy warned us constantly to be careful around the snowflaked edges of the hole, so as not to make it worse. Every big bump in the road, bits of it fell away into the void. I nudged the rusted edge with my foot and saw it disintegrate and fly away. Up front, Randy started in with a story of last night's shift at the Long Wharf, the restaurant on the town pier. His work stories invariably revolved around tips, elaborate up-and-down melodramas full of defeats and sudden, triumphant reversals. “At first we thought it was going to be a slow night…” I remembered to ask NP about his job at Jonni Waffle.

“I like working there. The manager is cool,” NP said. “And sometimes they let you bring a pint home.”

“Can you get me an application?” I asked. I'd put it off, but I needed a job. I was out of money, we needed TV dinners for the next few days, and as it stood now Reggie was going to have to pay for them out of his Burger King paycheck. My mother would reimburse him when they came out, but I didn't relish having to beg soup money from him. So: fill out an application for Jonni Waffle and take it from there.

We rumbled across the wooden bridge over the railroad track, and traversed 27 after not too long a wait. Before July Fourth weekend, crossing Route 27 was a minor hassle. But after the Fourth, the crypts up-island disgorged their Hamptonite Undead in earnest, and you never knew how long you'd spend stranded, waiting for the caravan to thin. (Helpful Hint #236 for the Hamptonite Undead: sunscreen slows down the rate of decomposition by solar rays when you are riding around with the top down.) Then we were in Sagaponack, popping into the roadside deli for supplies, and a few minutes later we pulled up at Left Left, the beach down from the town beach. No permit needed, no lifeguards. And this year, no parents.

WE TRUDGED IN FORMATION UP THE DUNE, beach grass lashing our calves, entering that strange zone of black sand at the head of the beach. The black sand was twice as hot as the rest of the sand on the beach, inspiring cartoony cries of “Ow, ow, ow!” in former times, and a stoic teeth-gritting today. There weren't many people. We had our pick of spots.

“Let's go over there,” Randy said.

“Over here,” Clive countered, and we followed him to a spot above the tide line, demarcated by a garland of dried seaweed. Clive had always been the leader of our group. He was just cool, no joke. I pitied Marcus for his victimhood; I pitied Clive because he had to hang out with us. He was that rare thing among us: halfway normal, socialized and capable and charismatic. Like — he did sports. Basketball and track, captain of one of the teams at his school, I can't remember which, he was good at both of them. Sometimes he tried to get a basketball game together, two-on-two, but after a while we just started playing three against him, and he still won, leaving us a sorry sight at the side of the court, bent over and dizzy, palms on our knees and reaching for imaginary asthma inhalers. Imaginary asthma inhalers created a placebo effect, which was better than nothing.

Before Reggie and I had an Empty House, and thus the meeting place/departure point for expeditions, the one sure way not to be excluded from that day's adventures was to be the first one over at Clive's crib, where all the major decisions went down. Crack of dawn was a bit excessive, but the thinking went that you couldn't be ditched if you stuck close to Clive. Tall and muscular, he had the physical might to beat us up, but he broke up fights between us instead, separating combatants while dodging their whirling fists, and no one complained. A reluctant Solomon with a soul patch, he ended disputes over the important issues of the day, such as who called shotgun first, who had next on the diving board, who was up on Punch-Out, the video game in the lobby of the East Hampton movie theater that we worshipped like a pagan totem while the white people stared. He knew how to talk to girls, had girlfriends, plural. Good-looking girlfriends, too, from all accounts, with all their teeth and everything. Last summer he'd even dated an older woman — in her twenties! Who lived in Springs! Who had a kid! He had his problems like the rest of us but he hadn't let them deform his character yet. Not back then.

We picked our spots around camp, laying our towels down, weighing down their edges with sneakers and sodas to keep them from flipping up. And it happened, like that, after an increment of time so tiny that neutrons and protons were the only witnesses: we got sanded. In the towels, scalps, clumping on sweat along our limbs. It had begun, the gritification of the day. Some windy afternoons, the wind agitated the sand into a needling layer two inches thick. It hovered above the beach, the atmosphere of a different planet, saying, You should not be here. But what was another warning among so many?

We were the only black people on the beach. My sister's group was grown up, dispersed, and most of the moms from our neighborhood frequented the town beach, which had a lifeguard. “Stay within the markers!” There was a nice bit of suspense when you rounded the bend to the town beach and saw the flag — red, yellow, or white — signaling how rough the surf was that day. On red-flag days you heard the thunderous hammer of the waves before you got over the dune and saw the mist of smashed-down water floating above the battered shore. On calmer days the most important sound was the lifeguard blowing his “Shark Attack!” whistle. Everybody wanted their Jaws moment. Seeing the fin of the “must have been a Great White” gliding in the waves was cool, and bonus points if you were in the water when the whistle blew and you had to paddle to the shore for dear life.

One important fact: the town beach did not allow radio playing.

Pure fascism. As soon as he was settled, NP cranked up the volume on Clive's radio, a yellow waterproof Sony. It was a mix tape he'd recorded off the radio, KISS FM, lighthouse to the lost. On clear days the signal came through all the way to Sag, and we crowded around the radio like people in the olden days. You say Martians have touched down in Grover's Mill, New Jersey? Or are these far-off sounds an invasion of metropolitan funk, a different kind of alien altogether?

The songs started ten seconds in, the time it took NP to run across his bedroom, dodging mounds of dirty clothes and comic books, and press Record. The songs ended with the DJ's truncated explications: “Alright, that was the boombastic—” “That's for all you in the Queensbridge Houses, Boogie Down Bronx—”

“Doug E. Fresh stole my cousin's rhymes,” NP said, apropos of nothing.

“I thought you said Doug E. Fresh was your cousin,” I said. NP was a notorious “that's my cousin” — er. I certainly didn't remember him claiming Randy in his kinship group before Randy got wheels.

“What are you, high? Think I don't know who my own cousin is? No, he bit them, check it out, I was at this house party …” and he trailed off on one of his chronicles. I looked up at the sky and his words were sucked away by the wind. A small plane chuggered parallel to the shoreline, a banner slithering behind it: VISIT BUZZ CHEW.

I walked up to where the beach crumbled away into the ocean. Left Left faced the Atlantic, not that meager, lapping bay crap. Not big enough to surf in except in front of an advancing hurricane — you had to go up to Montauk for that, and none of us was so inclined. There were no houses beyond the waves, no slim spits of land, as on our turf. Just invisible continents. It was the Edge of Things, and the Edge liked to grab at you, pull you in. I wasn't even toe-deep in the water when I heard my mother's warning in my ears, “Watch out for the undertow!” which wasn't a bad philosophy, really, applicable to most situations in a metaphorical sense, but I hated being so conditioned. I never went past where I could feel the bottom beneath my feet, so riptides and undertow weren't much of a concern. But you could feel it, even in the shallows — the ravenous pull when the ocean sucked back into itself to gather for the next wave, the next volley in its siege against land and landlubbers — i.e., you. The ocean was kidnapping arms and a muffled voice that said, You ain't much at all, are you? Nope, not much at all. Sand beneath my feet, that was my rule.

“Aren't you hot in that shirt, man?” Clive asked when I sat back down.

“No. Why?”

“Black absorbs light,” he said. “So it heats up — that's why on a hot day you're more comfortable wearing light clothes.”

I didn't know that, but as I looked around, I didn't notice anyone wearing black. Maybe there was something to it.

“Hey! Hey! Yo!”

Marcus hot-footed it over the black sand. He'd made good time, but then he was putting in a lot of biking time to and from work. Marcus had only been out for a week and he was already on his second job. Every summer he went through a dozen, easy. He got his foot in the door no problem, spinning his dismissal from his last job to his new bosses the same way he spun them to us. “The day manager was out to get me,” he'd tell us, or, “I had a personality conflict with the cook.” “The owner was all coked-out,” he explained, pointing toward the realities of the mid-'8os resort-town restaurant business. Most of those people were coked-out, basic fact. If we knew that he got the ax for stealing booze — not a bottle or two but a whole crate — he trumped us with, “They were some straight-up racists.” Which always worked. In any sphere. Who among us could refute such a judgment? It was like saying “It's hot” during a heat wave. No dispute.

“Where's my towel?” Marcus asked.

We shaded our eyes with our hands and squinted up at him.

Randy said, “You said, can you bring it in the car, not can you lug it down the beach for me.” He gave Marcus the keys and Marcus returned to the dune.

“Dag,” Bobby said.

“That was cold,” Clive said.

Randy yawned and stretched. He turned over on his back, exposing his great mammaries. They bobbed on his stomach. “Ain't nothing but a thang,” he said.

“Why don't you put your shirt back on, Randy,” NP said. “You're going to scare the white people.”

“Yeah, Randy, shit,” I said.

“Sh-ee-it,” Randy said, slapping his chest vigorously. He was in a good mood, or else he would have thrown out “You want to walk home?” his now-standard, signifying-ending response.

“Shit, I'll show them something to be scared of,” Bobby said.

“What are you going to show them, you fuckin' albino-lookin' bitch?” NP said.

Everybody cracked up except for Bobby, who growled, “Shut the fuck up,” and turned over to even up his tan. He was a fierce and aggressive tanner in the early part of the summer, to giddyap his skin to a level-playing-field brown. By late July, albino wouldn't apply as an insult, except in a retro kind of way when you couldn't think of anything else. It was always nice to have a spare.

These were the early stages of Bobby's transformation into that weird creature, the prep-schooled militant. We were made to think of ourselves as odd birds, right? According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were. What kind of bourgie sell-out Negroes were we, with BMWs in the driveway (Black Man's Wagon, in case you didn't know) and private schools to teach us how to use a knife and fork, sort that from dat? What about keeping it real? What about the news, statistics, the great narrative of black pathology? Just check out the newspapers, preferably in a movie-style montage sequence, the alarming headlines dropping in-frame with a thud, one after the other: CRISIS IN THE INNER CITY! WHITHER ALL THE BABY DADDIES, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WELFARE STATE: THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO WORK, NOT LIKE IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Hey, let's stop pussyfooting around and bring back slavery already, just look at these dishpan hands.

Black boys with beach houses. It could mess with your head sometimes, if you were the susceptible sort. And if it messed with your head, got under your brown skin, there were some typical and well-known remedies. You could embrace the beach part — revel in the luxury, the perception of status, wallow without care in what it meant to be born in America with money, or the appearance of money, as the case may be. No apologies. You could embrace the black part — take some idea you had about what real blackness was, and make theater of it, your 24-7 one-man show. Folks of this type could pick Bootstrapping Striver or Proud Pillar, but the most popular brands were Militant or Street, Militant being the opposite of bourgie capitulation to The Man, and Street being the antidote to Upper Middle Class emasculation. Street, ghetto. Act hard, act out, act in a way that would come to be called gangsterish, pulling petty crimes, a soft kind of tough, knowing there was someone to post bail if one of your grubby schemes fell apart.

Or you could embrace the contradiction, say, what you call paradox, I call myself. In theory. Those inclined to this remedy didn't have many obvious models.

In Bobby's case, his birthright, if we can call it that, made him a premature nationalist. The customary schedule for good middle-class boys and girls called for them to get Militant and fashionably Afrocentric the first semester of freshman year in college. Underlining key passages in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and that passed-around paperback of Black Skin, White Masks. Organize a march or two to protest the lack of tenure for that controversial professor in the Department of Black Studies. Organize a march or two to protest the lack of a Department of Black Studies. It passed the time until business school. Bobby got an early start on all that, returning to Sag from his sophomore year of high school with a new, clipped pronunciation of the word whitey, and a fondness for using the phrases “white-identified” and “false consciousness” while watching The Cosby Show. It caused problems as he fretted over his zip code (“Scarsdale ain't nothing but a high-class shantytown. It's a gilded lean-to”) and how changing his name might affect his Ivy League prospects (“Your transcript says Bobby Grant, but you said your name was Sadat X”).

We used to make fun of him for being so light-skinned, and this probably contributed to some of his overcompensating. The joke was that if the KKK came pounding on Bobby's door and demanded, “Where the black people at?” (it's well known, the fondness of the KKK for ending sentences with a preposition), he'd say, “They went thataway!” with a minstrel eye-roll and vaudeville arm flourish. He rebelled against his genes, the Caucasian DNA in his veins square-dancing in there with strong African DNA. It's a tough battle, defending one flank against nature while nurture snuck in from the east with whole battalions. He directed most of his hostile talk at his mother, who worked on Wall Street. “My mom wouldn't give me twenty dollars for the weekend. She's sucking the white man's dick all day, Morgan Stanley cracker, and can't give me twenty dollars!” In two weeks, his parents were going to give him a used Saab for his birthday, generosity that created a whole new genre of bitterness. “My mother's so busy trying to get a pat on the head from Massa that she can't give me gas money. Telling me I should get a job — doing what, sucking the white man's dick?” His mother bore the brunt of his misguided rage, even though his father worked at Goldman Sachs, so it's not like he was dashiki-clad and running a community center somewhere. Get a bunch of teenage virgins together, and you're bound to rub up against some mother issues. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, cast the first plucked-out orb of Oedipal horror.

“Well,” NP said, “I think it's time for this Negro to get himself down the beach and see if he can check out some titties.”

“There's nothing down there, man,” I said. It was an old game, and rigged. Every summer we hiked off in search of that cloud-cloaked Shangri-la, the nude beach. Legends had circulated for years, in hushed tones delivered to wide eyes. Our mothers occasionally sniffed about “those French people lying around with their tops off,” and older kids wowed us with tales of long-limbed honeys sunbathing in little packs. If at long last you discovered their nesting grounds, there was one last hurdle. They might be lying on their stomachs. Tough luck that. But maybe they were on their backs, and if the stars aligned you saw them turn over — in unison, glorious unison — to expose their gifts to the world. They were ambassadors of the international jet set, the kind of lovelies populating James Bond movies and Duran Duran videos. I heard “Watch out for the undertow!” when I looked at the water, and a voice cooing “Oh, James!” when I looked down the beach, in a kind of Madonna/Whore whiplash.

For years we told our moms that we were “going for a walk,” while visions of empty bottles of Bain de Soleil and supermassive fried-egg areolas danced in our heads. We walked and we walked and we never saw anything, returning, forever returning, with slumped shoulders and a faintly mumbled “Next time.” Some of us still held out hope. I knew better, my learned helplessness enjoying a banner year.

“I'm down,” Bobby said. He stood, holding up his arm and inspecting his skin for the slightest change in shade. He seemed pleased.

“That's what I'm talking about,” NP said, thrusting out his hand so that his jive-ass flutter smashed into Bobby's more aggressive pump-'n'-dump, the two quite different shake styles misfiring before finding common ground in the two-finger snap. As if their historic hand summit had come off magnificently, NP yelped, “Alright!” and turned to admonish us. “You'll see what happens when we get back and tell you about the monstrous, most bodacious tatas you missed. You'll be like, ‘Damn I shoulda gone!’”

That left me and Randy and Clive and Marcus. I think I dozed off for a while. I did not dream. I woke up, disoriented, to the sound of an alien spaceship landing. Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force's “Planet Rock” clanged out of Clive's radio.

“That's a classic joint right there,” Marcus said.

“I haven't heard this in a while,” Randy said. “We used to open up parties at my fraternity house with this.” Clive and I smirked at each other. Randy's constant references to his frat amused us, frankly. The way he talked about it, it sounded like nonstop back rubs and “hey let's wrestle”—type horsing around. But he had a car.

“‘C'mon ladeezz!’” Marcus sang, his bobbing head loose on his neck.

“You know they bit that off Kraftwerk,” I said.

“Bit what off who?” Marcus asked.

“That part right there.” I hummed along. “Kraftwerk is this German band that pretended to be robots. They have this song, ‘Trans-Europe Express,’ that has that ‘Da Dah Da’ part.”

“Afrika Bambaataa didn't steal anything. This is their song.”

“I'm serious, it's true,” I said.

“This song came out first.”

Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force said, “Keep tickin' and tockin', work it all around the clock.”

“No,” I said, “‘Trans-Europe Express’ came out in the late '70s, I'm tellin' you. Elena had the eight-track.” Reggie and I inherited her old stereo when she went all high-tech and futuristic with cassettes, which was great, except that somehow we only ended up with two eight-track tapes: Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk, and The Best of the Commodores. It was a grueling couple of months, listening to those two albums over and over — so I knew I was right.

I didn't understand back then why Marcus was hassling me, but I get it now. A couple of years later, if someone said “I stole that off an old Lou Donaldson record,” and the sample kicked it, you got respect for your expertise and keen ear. Funk, free jazz, disco, cartoons, German synthesizer music — it didn't matter where it came from, the art was in converting it to new use. Manipulating what you had at your disposal for your own purposes, jerry-rigging your new creation. But before sampling became an art form with a philosophy, biting off somebody was a major crime, thuggery on an atrocious scale. Your style, your vibe, was all you had. It was toiled on, worried over, your latest tweak presented to the world each day for approval. Pull your pockets out so that they hung out of your pants in a classic broke-ass pose, and you still had your style. If someone was stealing your style, they were stealing your soul.

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.

Ten minutes later we were still sitting there. The car wouldn't start. There was a pay phone over at the town beach, which we could use to call a tow truck, but not at Left Left. We went to Left Left to be left to ourselves.

Randy tried the engine one more time. Nothing happened. I pictured rust sprinkling down into a pile underneath the motor each time he turned the key.

We sat for a minute.

“Dag.”