Sag Harbor

BREATHING TIPS OF GREAT AMERICAN BEATBOXERS

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.

I climbed the steps up to Bobby's house. His grandfather let me in. He hadn't shaved, a thin white fur covering his cheeks, and he looked harrowed in his faded blue Morgan Stanley T-shirt, a souvenir from his daughter's job. I didn't know he'd returned — two weeks earlier, he'd had some kind of “health scare” and gone back to the city to get checked out. He slid the screen door wide, smiling, but I noticed a new, gingerly quality in his movements, like he had broken glass in his slippers.

He told me Bobby would be right down. He asked after my parents, and Reggie, and then said, “Been doing any fishing?”

“Not this summer, no.” Six years ago, he'd taken me and Reggie and Bobby out to the Long Wharf to fish for snapper and porgies, calling a huddle to share his method for threading the bait securely through the hooks. “If the eye pops out, you know it's good and tight.” Except for night bluefishing off Montauk, which was an excuse to stay up until 4 am and drink seven-ounce Millers, I hadn't fished since that day.

“Your grandfather loved to fish out here. We used to go out all the time on that little boat he had back then.”

I nodded.

“It's nice to see the young people following in the tradition. I know he would have liked to see you out there, dropping a line like we used to.”

“I like fishing,” I said. I heard Bobby thumping around upstairs so I sent a telepathic blast to make him hurry. My grandparents died before I was born and I didn't know how to feel when people talked about them. I had this thing in my head where they sat me down and laid it all out, the way things work, how to move, what to be, but I'd never get that information now. Except the hard way. I picked a burr off my socks, but didn't know where to put it, so I just held it in my hand.

“That's the beauty of coming out here,” Bobby's grandfather said. “Having this place. People like your grandfather working hard to make something for his family, and passing it down to your generation.” He suddenly realized how the dark had crept in around us and he groped under the lampshades. “You're lucky, you know that?”

“Yes.”

“To have all of this.”

“Yes.”

When Bobby and I got in the car, we tried to come up with a plan. Everybody was working that night except for us and Nick, but Nick had gone to the city to buy records. (Sounds, the East Hampton music store, didn't cater to us unless we wanted something Top 40.) We needed beer. The quest for beer, with its daily intrigues, reversals, and cliff-hangers, had become our favorite subplot. How to get it, who to buy it, where to drink it, starting all over again the next day. Our tall friends weren't around. We'd drunk a few of my father's beers already that week, and I didn't want to push it. It was a long shot, but we finally decided to hit town, and then the other key places, like the 7-Eleven in South Hampton, to see if any amenable parties materialized. Like one of my sister's group, or Orrin. Orrin was this older white hippie guy who oozed around the towns, perpetually en route to or in between odd jobs and escapades, and he'd buy a six-pack for you if you listened to his latest sad story of “I was just minding my own business when.” He smelled like a backed-up sewer, but it was worth it.

“They have these place mats at the Corner Bar,” Bobby told me as we broke out of Ninevah, “that have the history of the Hamptons written on them and they said that Sagaponac is an Indian word meaning ‘the land of the big brown nuts.’ I was eating a hamburger and just busted out laughing.”

“That's funny.”

“I was like, ‘I got your big brown nuts right here.’”

“Your sacadiliac,” I said.

He looked over at me. I told him, “Like in ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, when Melle Mel raps”—I tried to get it right—“‘Neon King Kong standin' on my back, Can't turn around, broke my sacadiliac.’ His nut sack. He's saying everything's so tough, it's like getting kicked in the balls.”

“I never knew what he was talking about there.”

“Yeah, well.”

Bobby turned into Azurest and informed me that he was going to drive by Devon's house to see if she was back from her family outing. “If she's there, I gotta give you the boot, dude.” I'd just dragged myself to his house. I thought: Chaotic Evil. I hadn't done that in a while, tripping down the alignments. During my big D&D phase (October 1981–April 1983), I'd taken the game's classification system to heart, doling out alignments to the world. See, according to The Player's Handbook, people and monsters can be broken down by their inner natures, with Good, Evil, and Neutral on one axis, and Lawful and Chaotic on the other. Lawful Good, for example, described a knight's dutiful temperament, and Lawful Evil the personality of a dictator or evil king — they had an order they obeyed, sticking by their rules whether it called for them to save people's asses or cut off their heads. Neutrals bent toward Good or Evil depending on whether they dabbled in the occasional altruistic act or had a penchant for stabbing people in the back. Robin Hood was a Chaotic Good type, lawless and unpredictable but lending a helping hand, and Chaotic Evil was the banner of twisted prankster, like the Joker in Batman comics. Or guys with their first cars.

I took this taxonomy seriously. It just made sense: people had alignments, an essential nature. If you could see who and what they were, you'd be better equipped to deal with them. Before my sister became a potential girlfriend and they had to treat us better, the Older Boys of Sag were Chaotic Evil through and through. Coming across a group of them hanging out on the corner of Terry or Milton, you had to steel yourself. They'd say, “Nice bike! Can I see it for a second?” and then book up the hill, seesawing on your tiny Huffy, leaving you in the midst of their howling cronies. You'd discover it dumped on your front lawn hours later with grass smeared in the pedals, just when you were about to rat them out. Marcus was their plaything, abused and disrespected. They tripped him and sent him sprawling into the sharp gravel, pissed in his Coke, stomped his kites. Chaotic Evil, like I said.

The first week of eighth grade, I leaned over to Andy Stern in the middle of second-period Science and whispered, “Don't you think Dr. Nadler is Lawful Evil?” Yes, Dr. Nadler, the dragon waiting deep in the cave of junior high. We'd heard the tales for years, and now here he was, with wild red eyes and scaly armor. A late lab report knocked your grade off five points, five points that could only be earned back through extra credit. An unyielding faith in a bogus system. Lawful Evil.

“What?” Andy asked, wincing.

“Lawful Evil, man.”

“Shush!” He looked around for eavesdroppers and ignored me the rest of class. This was my first indication that I lagged in lame/not-lame knowledge, what could be said when girls or cool kids were around, and what couldn't. Mentioning D&D, you might as well fart while playing seven minutes in heaven, not that I'd ever played seven minutes in heaven, but I had spent some time thinking about it and it had occurred to me that farting was something you shouldn't do, if the occasion arose. I'd have to get used to it, falling behind, because this was no temporary condition. The guy dropping off the weekly pamphlets outlining the shifting teenage codes and edicts skipped my house, or someone stole them from my doorstep before I got up.

I was undeterred. Taken with the reassuring clarity of the alignments, I didn't stop with people, proceeding on to label inanimate objects, abstract systems, and states of being. A nap — Lawful Good, certainly. The Assassination of Betamax at the hands of dastardly VHS — that was Lawful Evil all over, for what was capitalism but malevolent design exercising its power? Getting up for school was Neutral Evil by my sights, the blank slate of the day with its possibility for fun or misery Neutral in itself, the Evil creeping in with the school thing, being forced to play my part in the social apparatus. I was a dork, not a cog.

D&D had few other real-life applications, except as a means of perpetuating virginity and in its depiction of existence as a never-ending series of grim adventures in dungeons. I rued the former, embraced the latter as an elegant metaphor. (Or, in my language of the time, “Yeah, man, that really sums it up.”) Eventually I forgot about the alignment thing. I lost my taste for nuance once I became a teenager. Nuance got you nowhere. Either/or was where it was at.

We hit Meredith Avenue. “NP's going to get me and the girls into U.T.F.O.,” Bobby said. “They have to give it up after that.”

“Right,” I said.

The lights in Devon's house were out, and Bobby drove by without comment. The hunt was on. Halfway up Bay Street, we rolled up on this guy walking back from town under the weeping willows. It was dark, but I thought I knew him. Our eyes locked when we passed each other, and even though he didn't recognize me, I asked Bobby to turn around. “That's my uncle,” I said. This went against my strict rules for avoiding all but the most inevitable interactions with grown-ups, but for some reason I wanted to say hi. I think I wanted to show off that my friend had a car, that we'd entered the next level.

“Maybe he can buy us beer,” Bobby said.

“Are you crazy? He'll tell on us.” Everyone over the age of thirty was in cahoots in my book, Telexing reports to the command center so that the colored pin on the wall map held my current position. “Suspect is walking gawkily in a south-southeasterly direction.”

“Uncle Nelson,” I said. “It's Ben. Benji.”

He peered into the car. “Where's Reggie?”

“He's working at Burger King.”

Uncle Nelson nodded. He'd settled into a bearish pudge since I'd last seen him, his polo shirt tight on his chest and exposing a centimeter of belly when he moved. His hair thinned in the same pattern as his father's, the gray retreating from a shiny atoll of scalp. I'd always liked Uncle Nelson, rascally Uncle Nelson with his shitty luck and wide, eager face. He was my mother's cousin off some branch I couldn't keep track of, the important part being that his parents and my mother's parents had been part of the first Sag wave. Mention his name and heads shook, hands wrung. My mother's family was proper, well mannered, raised right. Uncle Nelson was “bad,” in their classification system. “That's where Nelson drove up on the lawn,” my mother reminded us whenever we went down Sagg Road, in tribute to that summer scandal of yore. He'd dropped out of dental school (the horror), played house with That Spanish Woman (cringe, cringe), and worst of all, Moved to California, which was code for smoking pot and group sex. All this was in the '60s and early '70s, before I was aware; I received these stories as pure history, When Uncle Nelson Sank the Chris-Craft up there with Washington Crossing the Delaware and Jimi Hendrix Choking on His Own Vomit, of equal import. I hadn't seen him in years. It had been a while since he came out to make the rounds. Chaotic Good, I would've said — bucking the bourgie system, but daring and bighearted.

“What are you boys getting up to?”

“Just going for a drive,” I said, as if I were some South Hampton fossil taking out his Model T “You staying over at the Yellow House?”

His eyes dipped and he said, “I'm hanging out at Eddie Baxter's this weekend, seeing what he's up to. But they're putting the grand-kids to bed, so I decided to go out for a little bit. I'm too old for—”

“Do you think you can buy us some beer?” Bobby asked.

“I'll buy you some beer,” Uncle Nelson said, in a blink. “Just don't tell your mother, Benji. I know I'm her favorite cousin, but she'd still wring my neck.”

Bobby'd asked the only old-time Sag Harbor guy who'd do it for us, as if recognizing Uncle Nelson's mischievous bent right off. I wanted to punch him in his face, like the old days. I think he wanted word to get back to his parents, to prove that despite accepting the car (and gas money, despite his constant tithing of us), he could still bring them misery. Bring, in fact, a new kind of misery.

I offered Uncle Nelson the front seat but he wrinkled his face. I remembered the time he squeezed in with us at the kids' table during a family reunion, begging, “Lemme in here, I'm one of you guys.” We laughed, and he entertained us for the rest of the meal, clowning around. Off behind him, his father grimaced as he watched Uncle Nelson's big legs bouncing on the tiny chair.

He leaned forward, jamming his elbows into the front seats. “You just have to do me a favor and take me around the Hills when we're done.”

“Bet.”

“Uncle Nelson used to have an MG,” I said. There was a picture in the Hempstead House of him leaning on the hood of this emerald Speed Racer vehicle. Cool as hell. He was wearing hip visor shades and had a beatnik V of hair shrouding his lip. No, not exactly in line with the standard Sag Harbor alignment.

“Fresh,” Bobby said.

“That was the best time,” Uncle Nelson said, “taking that baby up these roads. Getting up to no good.” He sat back, smacking his hands on the upholstery. “Long time ago, boy,” he said. “Now it's your turn to do all that stuff we used to do.” It was quiet back there as we zipped up the turnpike, and I kept my mouth shut in case I said something kidlike, and he changed his mind.

After we went to 7-Eleven and came back and dropped him off, Bobby and me went over to my house and drank the beer and watched Hooper and Terror Train. “That's the killer, right?” he asked after every suspicious twitch, and I said, “Keep watching.” We didn't stay up late. We had a big day tomorrow.

I WORKED THE NEXT AFTERNOON. Change had come to Jonni Waffle over the weeks, autumnal telegrams to remind us of the fleetingness of the season. The new Soft Serv machine arrived, a single nozzle delivering chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry with the press of a button. It buzzed all day with an unholy power. Jonni Waffle HQ sent over a box of T-shirts with the new logo — a smiling cone with spindly arms and legs. More than one customer remarked that it looked like a dancing dildo. I didn't know what a dildo was, so I had to ask. The customers were always right in Jonni Waffle. And finally, the cousins were gone. Martine fired them after they'd robbed one too many Reddi-wip cans of its NO, causing the white liquid to pour over the cones and boats instead of producing a handsome, vertical swirl. Yeah, Meg and Marsha had developed quite a whippets problem to cope with the stress of life in the waffle-cone trenches, and polite society rendered its punishment. My elbow tingled occasionally in phantom arousal and to this day remains charged, a shameful erogenous zone.

Taking their shifts was Jen, a redheaded local girl and student of New York State's labor laws, especially with regard to the duration and frequency of breaks. She declared, “I'm going on my break,” as if daring the manager to stop her, and when no one said anything, because no one was paying attention, she added, “We're allowed two ten-minute breaks per shift!” before storming away. For some reason I can't fathom, she was a tip magnet, which was fortunate because we divvied up the tip cup evenly, a nice system for someone like me, who sent customers' change plummeting down their pockets.

D-day, I was on with Jen and NP. The start of the shift was so uneventful, I almost forgot it was a weekday. Then Jen said, “The Boat People are here.”

The Boat People, done picking Main Street clean, came our way to continue their destruction. What I knew about Connecticut could fit in a thimble, or more properly, a sugar cone or blue eight-ounce plastic serving dish, but I did know this: every weekday morning, residents of that fine state boarded a ferry for an outing to the Hamptons. That the boat didn't sink is a wonder, given the stupendous human mass that poured down the gangplanks onto the Long Wharf at noon. They raided the curio shops, stopped traffic as the slow herd of them meandered across the street, dawdled in glassy-eyed pleasure at the kitschy whaling paraphernalia and WASP accoutrements in the windows. They stopped to eat. They rose from the tables in unison, greasy napkins falling from their laps like a flock of doves in sudden, communal heart attack. They strolled back to the ferry up Main Street, up the asphalt of the Long Wharf, patting their bellies, which gurgled with fish-and-chips and fried clams and battered cod, the bottom halves of their bodies busy with digestion and their brains full of that peculiar melancholy that marks the end of an adventure or of an exploit winding down. Then they smelled it. The waffle-cone aroma dancing on the sea breeze, and they were renewed, stampeding into Jonni Waffle with their tongues hanging over their lips.

Boat People rushes were brief — no one wanted to be left at the end of the wharf, waving at the disappearing ship — but the departure-time anxiety made the customers all the more boorish and bullying. It was overwhelming. I reminded myself that it would soon be over. The assault had a finite length. I used that rationalization a lot in those days. When things wound down, I drifted into one of my midscoop space-outs. Sometimes when you had your head down in the vats, time stopped. The swirling white mist stalled in the air, hanging like ribbons. All sound dropped out, the whirring of the blender and the radio, and even the static-y buzz of your own thoughts. I don't know where I went during those spells. They only lasted a few moments yet they contained a little scoop of the infinite, a waffle-perfumed eternity.

I heard a knocking on the glass and assumed it was the customer scolding me for scooping the wrong flavor, but it was Erica, frantically waving hi once I looked up.

“You're really working in there!”

I was still partial to Erica's charms, but had put aside my fantasies of her dumping NP and then in the exhilaration of her new freedom realizing my virtues. It didn't seem like the NP-Erica unit was going anywhere, making it hard to look at her sometimes, especially when she had her hair in a ponytail and her face became a still life of teenage promise, dark and benevolent. If I had a coffee shop or dry cleaners, I'd put her head shot on the wall by the register even though she wasn't a celebrity. NP'd stopped giving us updates on whether he had touched her tit or whatever, adopting a reserve and circumspection we'd never seen in him before. His elaborate yarns dried up, at least when it came to stories about girls. Is tamed the word? He came out from the back of the store and we took our breaks, Jen nodding with proud, motherly encouragement.

Outside, Devon waited with Bobby. Devon wore a blue polka-dot bikini top, khaki shorts, and red toenail polish; Erica wore a red polka-dot bikini top, khaki shorts, and blue toenail polish. It had been a busy morning. Devon smiled at me while radiating that familiar school-year vibe that she was very, very unimpressed with me. I was standing out in the sun, the seagulls pecking a few feet away, but I could've been back in the city, stumbling like a clod through the hallways of my high school. Picture the great factory churning out the women who would never smile my way except in condescension, the busy assembly lines, the intricate distribution plan that ensured that my vicinity was well stocked. Erica, at least, would chuckle at some oddball comment of mine. Devon didn't understand a single word out of my mouth, but she was raised right and didn't express her revulsion overtly. I think she was simply puzzled by me.

We stood on the little strip of green across from Jonni Waffle, me and the double-daters. The thing about dating cousins, I observed, was that it generated a lot of nonverbal communication, bushels of quick glances and raised eyebrows, as the boys reassured themselves that their banter and posturing was working, and the girls checked in with each other to make sure they'd made good choices.

It was a famous part of the Sag Harbor experience, dating within the developments, swapping spit with other chosen ones. Your own kind. There were famous local teenage pairings that went on forever, led to marriage, repopulation of the neighborhood, extension of the brand. NP's parents were one such Golden Couple. When they first started coming out, their houses were across the street from each other — see them waving at each other before they turned in at night, the mosquitoes hopping on the screens. Everybody knew everybody's family, so partners came prequalified and notarized. Whether things worked or not, you were going to be in each other's faces for the rest of your lives. The double-daters had to ask themselves, Where is this going?

The bridge to North Haven was a long white frown before us. From time to time, suicidal painters and playwrights (few artists from other disciplines partook for some reason) flung themselves from its concrete heights, but the water wasn't very deep, and they usually ended up being dragged by a gaffer's hook onto a passing motorboat, or wading out dejectedly, pissed that they'd lost their wallet. A few yards from our feet, seagulls staggered and pecked at a fallen waffle cone — run the film backward and the bits fly up into the hand of an anguished child, un-breaking and fitting together as his face transforms from anguish to absentminded, Oreo-licking ecstasy.

Bobby rubbed his leg and told us a story about how on the way out of the house, he tried to jump into his car like Crockett and Tubbs when he slipped. “I almost crushed my sacadiliac,” he said.

We all laughed except for NP, who said, “Saca-what?”

“My nut sack,” he said, gesturing at me for backup.

I said, “I read a book about Sagaponac by Honoré de Ballsack,” but that only confused things more so Bobby explained about the big brown nuts and the rest. “Look it up.”

“In what?” NP asked. He was right — no one had a dictionary out there. Maybe an old Scrabble dictionary, missing half its pages and frothing with silverfish, but that was it. “I'll bet you a hundred dollars you're wrong,” he said. From time to time, this competition emerged between NP and Bobby over who was the alpha dog in this double date, complicated by the fact that Bobby had the car keys. A hundred-dollar bet was a serious escalation of stakes, three weeks' wages.

Bobby couldn't back down. His girl was watching. His girl's cousin was watching. He looked at me for reassurance, and I shrugged, but it was already too late anyway. He was committed. The money was in the bag — if you can't trust a nerd with a big word, who can you trust?

The hydraulic wail startled us and we turned as the big tour bus pulled up in front of Bayside. Destination: CHARTER. Roadie-looking guys in black T-shirts stepped out and Erica squealed, “It's them!”

Devon said, “I have to get a look at the Educated Rapper,” starting a discussion with Erica over who was “all that,” him or Doc Ice.

We walked over, halting at an invisible line by the planters that we sensed civilians shouldn't cross. We waited for a glimpse. “I'm going to get y'all in,” NP said. “I got the hookup. Except for you, Benji. I don't have that much of a hookup.”

I wasn't offended. I had my own scheme, and even though it cycled between doom and sure thing every five minutes, I was going to execute it. I wanted in. But to say it was to kill it, to express a want out loud was to be slapped back down. I kept my mouth shut.

When no one else got out of the bus, I said, “Maybe it's just their equipment.” Devon scowled at me as if I were their tour manager, arranging their travel to stymie her. It was exactly the sort of buzz-kill comment a puzzling fellow like me would make.

We gave up. NP and me returned to work, and Bobby took the girls home so they could “get ready for tonight.” Perhaps something else of note happened in the next hour and a half, but I don't remember because Lisa Lisa and U.T.F.O. walked in.

Yeah, we got celebrities in Jonni Waffle. Nowadays Bayside is this big theater, so there's always some actor or actress who's doing a show there, hanging around the wharf, plus Sag Harbor itself is not the same place, so the ambient celebrity quotient has gone up, our baseline celebrity presence, but back then it was different. They came for Bayside, to club, and sometimes they came into Jonni Waffle. F'rinstance, do you know the actor Saul Rubinek? He always plays the weaselly lawyer guy, the supporting player who double-crosses the leading man, like in Against All Odds. Anyway, he starred in this romantic comedy called Soup for One, which I don't think got a big release, but I saw it on TV during one of my many becalmed afternoons and not long after, he walked into Jonni Waffle.

“Hey, you were in Soup for One” I said.

He seemed dubious. Or even disappointed for some reason. “Where did you see that?”

“Cable,” I said. He looked sad. I didn't give him free ice cream. Karen Allen from Raiders walked in once and I gave her free ice cream, because who in the world didn't have a thing for Karen Allen, who literally would have been the coolest girlfriend in the world. Punching out motherfuckers, shooting Nazis. She had these incredible freckles covering her face like sprinkles. Some other celebrities came in, drunk or high after going a few rounds in Bayside, and scooper-customer confidentiality forbids me from naming them, but let me just say that you'd be surprised (Lori Singer). The biggest sighting, of course, was when Lisa Lisa and U.T.F.O. walked in that day.

Lisa Lisa was shorter in person, but her chest was bigger. I signed off on that. She wore a red leather jacket with long fringes and tight tight jeans rhinestoned down the overworked seams. Cult Jam, the two guys who were her backup players, weren't with her. They were probably putting on their mascara, a lengthy process judging from the music video. There weren't any other customers, but Lisa Lisa ripped a number from the dispenser anyway and looked at us meaningfully with tender puppy eyes. Jen jumped up. She didn't recognize her.

U.T.F.O. was dressed in Adidas track suits, out of character — Doctor Ice's stethoscope and white smock waited in the wardrobe trunk — except for the Kangol Kid, who wore his trademark chapeau. NP and me rushed to take their orders, giving cool-cat head-nods by way of introduction.

“So you guys are playing tonight, huh,” NP said, grabbing a scooper from one of the tiny sinks attached to the vats.

The Educated Rapper grunted and tapped the glass above the Mocha Praline Surprise.

The Kangol Kid asked for two scoops of Strawberry with M&Ms. “In a waffle cone?” I asked.

“What's that?”

“It's a cone made out of waffle.”

“Yeah, one of those.”

I made it for him and he told me, “Mix Master Ice will have two scoops of Fudge Ripple.” I hadn't heard the DJ speak.

“In a waffle cone?” My eyes darted between the two men.

The Kangol Kid checked in with his partner. Mix Master Ice blinked slowly and tilted his head ever so slightly. “Yes, a waffle cone,” the Kangol Kid said.

I dug into the vats with NP. “This is cool,” I said.

“I'm going to ask the Educated Rapper.”

“Ask him what?”

“About the sacadiliac,” he said. “I ain't losing no hundred dollars.”

“Why don't you try Doc Ice instead?” I suggested. “Since it's a part of the body.”

“Good idea.”

He handed Doc Ice his cone and said, “Can I ask you a medical question?”

“Shoot.”

“What's a sacadiliac?”

“Excuse me?”

“The sacadiliac.”

“Perhaps you're referring to the sacroiliac joint, between the sacrum and the ilium. Is that possible?”

NP looked at me. “Is that it?”

I said, “You know, from ‘The Message’?”

“Oh yeah, Melle Mel is always going on about his back problems. The sac-ro-i-li-ac. Can I help you with anything else?”

We shook our heads and Doc Ice reached into his pocket.

“No, it's on the house, brother,” NP said. “No problem.” Doc Ice thanked him, and NP quickly snuck in, “But there is one thing … since we're helping each other out here, you know … can you put me on the list tonight? So that I get in? I've been like dying to see your show all summer.”

Doc Ice glanced over at his crew. They licked their ice cream. Mix Master Ice nodded.

“I can do you plus one. What's your name?”

“NP.”

“NP what?”

“Just NP. They know me there.”

After they left, he said, “Just in case.” Now that the day had arrived, I wasn't going in for that if-one-of-us-gets-in crap. I was pissed at the thought of them inside and me standing outside the club like a fucking jerk. We leaned against the counter. The new Soft Serv machine hummed ominously, underscoring the emptiness that was our lives in the aftermath of a celebrity sighting. C-list, but still. Jen said, “Sacadiliac?”

AT HOME, I laid out my costume. I dug in the closet and retrieved a pair of Sperry Top-Siders from two summers ago. They didn't fit, but I could fake comfort until I got inside. I grabbed one of my father's Ralph Lauren polos, my skinny arms poking out like sticks. I inspected the pleated khaki shorts my mother got me at the beginning of the summer. She bought them on automatic pilot as if I still wore clothes like that, hoping that my bummy phase had exhausted itself. I had five hairs on my face, two on the left, and three on the right, which I hadn't shaved since July, in anticipation. I pepped them with my fingernails so they stuck up — grotesquely, in retrospect, but I was satisfied with the effect. With any luck, I wouldn't have to speak, just hand my ticket over and shuffle in. Because of my fucking braces.

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.

The Yellow House was a cozy bungalow, perpetually musty and overstuffed with sailing memorabilia. Rudders and shiny brass cleats owned prime decorating real estate, the remains of beloved vessels long gone. Uncle Nelson's father was one of that seafaring generation, like my grandfather and Bobby's grandfather, hitching his motorboat to the station wagon at the start of the season, chugging out into the deep water to fish, tooling around the Caribbean in the winter. Uncle Nelson had inherited some of that. His old Sunfish spent its final, neglected summers lodged in the beach grass in front of our house, its mildewing white-and-yellow sail collecting dirty lakes during rainstorms. When I was little, our parents hauled us to the Yellow House to reunion barbecues or birthday parties for some Southern cousin my age whom I'd never met before and would never see again. The kids running on the grass, the parents on the patio, sipping their drinks. So many years ago.

“You getting out?” Bobby asked.

“No.”

He sat there looking at his old house, not saying anything. I didn't see anyone inside, but all the lights were on. The bug zapper sparked. “Is your father out?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How's he doing?”

“I don't know.”

We called his father Uncle Gideon, which was what our mother called him. Look at Uncle Nelson now and you saw him in there. Although he was as skinny as me when he was younger, Nelson had grown into his father's shape, his belly spreading out, his cheeks rounding into apples. Uncle Gideon didn't have much time for kids, which was fine with me, and I didn't remember that much about him beyond what trickled out in my mother's stories about her cousin's misadventures. “Uncle Gideon was mad.” “You should have seen Uncle Gideon's face when he got the bill.” In my mind he was a character standing to the side of one of the bad-boy anecdotes, tsk-tsking at high jinks. One of the founding fathers, with their ideas of how proper black people should act.

Bobby cleared his throat.

Uncle Nelson said, “He told me, ‘Don't set foot in my house ever again.’ So I'm not.” I stared straight ahead. “That doesn't mean I can't look, does it?” he asked. The developments were usually hopping this late in the season. It wasn't too late. You could count on a barbecue or two at least, winding down to stragglers, a get-together shrinking to diehards, the people with nowhere else to go. But no one was around. I heard nothing except my uncle's breathing. The previous stops had been window-dressing. This is where he wanted to be. “I can look, right?”

An insect sizzled in the zapper, converted to smoke. He flipped a switch in himself. He clapped his hands together loudly and said, “Let's go, boys! If you drop me at the Nicholses', I'll be much obliged, and I'll see those fine fine people and relieve them of their fine fine liquor. It's early yet!”

“Okay,” I said.

When we dropped him off, Bobby said, “Well, that was a buzz kill.”

I said, “Yeah.” But mostly I thought, Evil. Nothing else to call it. I could've made up my own lyrics to what passed between the father and the son, something about misunderstandings, the ones that don't matter and the ones that are everything, but I would've gotten the words wrong. Make up lyrics to someone else's song and you put yourself in there, botching it all.

AS “RAPTURE” TRANSFORMED INTO “BAD GIRLS,” NP tapped my shoulder, materializing in the crowd with two Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers in his hands. He gave me one. He started to speak but it was too loud to hear him. I knew what he was saying anyway. It was going to be a great night.

One more thing, before the concert starts, and they're going to go on any second, you can feel it. It's not that important, but in case it comes up — Sagaponac is a Native American word meaning “the land of big ground nuts,” not “big brown nuts.” The place mats of the Corner Bar contain a world of knowledge, never to be doubted. Bobby misread. I'd hate for you to repeat that in conversation. It might lead to complications.

Now you'll have to excuse me. Can you feel it? It's about to start.