This is what Robert Connors said. He was buzzed, but not drunk, slumped alone over a barstool at the Firehouse Tavern around 2 AM. It was the second Friday in May, a week prior to when the crowds and city ordinances would allow for every bar to remain open until 5.
Frederick Simmons had just entered along with a second man whom Robert Connors did not recognize. The two of them were drunk, coked-up, both black and in their mid-thirties, with Simmons looming large over the second man at 6’0, 290. The two men separated, with Frederick Simmons flanking Connors as his partner cruised the bar.
Robert Connors was a local, and he knew Frederick Simmons from winter nights spent working at the Wildwood Bowl. The two of them exchanged pleasantries, at which point Connors noticed something out of the corner of his eye. The second man, John Poteat, was brandishing a club, which he slammed down on the galley, demanding money from the bar.
When the bartender refused, John Poteat struck him in the shoulder, wooden club glancing the deltoid with a thud. Frederick Simmons escorted Connors into a bathroom, where he flew into a rage, slamming Connors’ head into a sink with such intent it broke the mold. There was water spurting forth now, and the two of them slid down low onto the floor. Connors turned, just long enough to see Simmons’ head cast like a halo. There was a flash, and then a thunder, a rusty switchblade piercing Connors before it garroted his throat. There was blood, the sound of gurgling, hot water hissing forth from broken pipes. Frederick Simmons pushed himself up off the body, trudged wet footprints through the bar. John Poteat was on the sidewalk, fighting off a battered bartender who had refused to let him go. Simmons emerged, then doubled back, thinking better of getting caught up in the mess. He hurried south toward a service exit, making his getaway alone.
Ernest Ingenito was a wayward seed, boy; a stinkin’ varmint void of core.
Ernest Ingenito, who spent his adolescence spinning in and out of juvie, who was drafted during World War II; who was dishonorably discharged after assaulting his commanding officer; who served a two-year bid at Sing-Sing before settling down in southern Jersey; who found himself a second wife and built himself a family; who drifted into exile; who philandered like a hog.
Ernest Ingenito, boy, who lit out across the Pine Barrens one November night in 1950, en route to see his estranged wife and two children; who forced his way in through their parlor before gunning down his father-in-law; who shot his wife down with a carbine while both sons hid down the hall; who chased his mother-in-law out through a door, across a field, into a home, where he blew her brains against a wall.
Ernest Ingenito, boy, whose batshit crazy killing spree claimed the lives of five innocent people while critically injuring four more; whose wife, Theresa, lived to tell despite a bullet in her torso; who, upon final sentencing, was quoted as insisting, “I am sorry about them, naturally. But I do not feel as if I am responsible at all.”
Ernest Ingenito, boy, who benefited from a loophole in the system that allowed him to serve out five life sentences concurrently; who was released from Jersey Prison during the Spring of ’74; who found a home in Mercer County and sought out work as a stone mason; who’d been remanded to state prison during July of ’94; who would die while serving out 200 years as a result of 38 counts of deviant sexual behavior, each of them involving the prepubescent daughter of his girlfriend.
Ernest Ingenito, boy, who came up hard on the mean streets of Philly; who was stationed in Virginia throughout the height of World War II; who once massacred nine people across both Gloucester and Atlantic Counties; who was born – and for a time, raised – in Wildwood, New Jersey.
***
It was the second week in September, 1994, and I was sitting on a boardwalk bench along the jagged crook at 26th Street, sharing a Marlboro cigarette with a Derry lass named Anna Kaye. Anna Kaye was pale as paper, short and thin with auburn hair. Anna was dressed in orange clamdiggers, still boasting a slight blonde streak from the summer days that had passed.
Anna Kaye was all but stuck now, stuck in Wildwood, stuck in Jersey, having exceeded her work visa more than a year or so before. Anna was renting a one-bedroom down on Spicer Avenue, living alone in the same space that she had once shared with her ex-boyfriend. Anna ran the boardwalk games just south of Mariner’s Landing, and – much like me – she’d been scrounging for what little work was still available, tearing down the very tentpole stands where she had previously been employed.
Anna Kaye did not like to talk about her family. She never talked about her friends or all the dreams that she had left behind. Anna never talked about the fact that there were now seeds of southern Jersey in her accent; that her once-sharp diphthong had since grown dull. Anna never talked about the fact that barring marriage, fraud or deportation, she might never see North Ireland again. She was a stranger in a strange land now, a disconnected number with no further information. As a consequence, Anna had grown ultra-inquisitive, forcing the arc of idle discourse to prevent it from circling back to her.
Anna Kaye and I were on a half-hour break, mulling over a page-one story from The Philadelphia Inquirer. This story was about a 17-year old named Dolores DellaPenna who’d gone missing from the Tacony section of Northeast Philadelphia during July of 1972. According to The Inquirer, 11 days after DellaPenna disappeared, her arms and torso had been discovered off an old dirt road in Ocean County, New Jersey – every fingertip shaved down to avoid identification. One week later, DellaPenna’s legs were discovered along an unbeaten stretch of Route 571, eight miles removed from the original site.
DellaPenna’s head had never been recovered, nor had anyone ever been officially charged in connection with the crime. But her story had suddenly taken on new relevance, thanks in large part to a pair of highly credible state’s witnesses, both of whom had surfaced almost simultaneously, more than 20 years after the crime.
Both witnesses were prison inmates, one of them an outlaw biker who had previously written to DellaPenna’s father, confessing he was the former owner of a borrowed vehicle that was used in the abduction. The second witness, who was only 16 years old at the time of the attack, put himself inside a North Philadelphia auto garage where he claims DellaPenna had been taken on that evening. According to the second witness’s testimony, DellaPenna had been brutally beaten and then gang-raped by a small group of drug dealers, all before being held down and dismembered via a machete.
Dolores DellaPenna, the second witness insisted, was still very much alive when the dismembering began.
The one significant detail both witnesses seemed to agree upon was that Dolores DellaPenna had originally been marked for abduction following the alleged theft of a small quantity of drugs from a summer stash house located in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey.
Twenty-two years had passed between Dolores’s initial abduction and the point at which these two witnesses had come forward. Due to the delay, three of the six main suspects were now dead.
***
The violent crime rate in Wildwood had dropped by an astounding 16% during 1994, including a 26% drop in sexual assaults and a 23% drop in aggravated assaults. The local police force had gotten back to making quality arrests, improving its year-to-year clearance rate by 6%. Nonetheless, the island’s public image was continuing to suffer, due in large part to several highly-publicized incidents that had taken place inside the city limits. There was the unresolved matter of Rene Ouellet – a Canadian transsexual who had disappeared into the Wildwood night during the summer of 1992. There was also the long-lingering matter of Susan Negersmith, a 20-year old from Carmel, New York whose 1990 death in Wildwood had been ruled accidental, despite 26 separate areas of trauma on her body. In addition, there had been a significant uproar surrounding the recent acquittal of one Stephen Freeman, a 20-year old from Delaware County who had been accused of fatally stabbing his high school rival while on vacation in North Wildwood during the Summer of 1992.
Anna Kaye and I spent close to an hour discussing the ins and outs of Wildwood’s public image on that afternoon.
“So this Stephen Freeman,” Anna asked me at one point, “you’re telling me that he was from Delaware?”
“No,” I said. I was staring straight up at the sky, “Stephen Freeman traveled to North Wildwood from Delaware County. Delaware County is a tiny suburb in southeastern Pennsylvania, about 15 miles north of the Delaware state line. Delaware County is mostly white, upper-middle class, Catholic … you get the idea.”
“And how exactly is it you became such an expert on Delaware County?” Anna Kaye asked sarcastically, “What are ya, from there?”
“Fuck, no,” I said. I was folding up The Philadelphia Inquirer as I stood to leave. “I’m from here.”
It was just past 8 pm on a Tuesday when I received word that my grandmother was dying. She had been in a coma for several hours, and her vital signs were fading. Last Rites had already been administered twice.
My father had been dispatched to collect me. He and I drove back to Swarthmore in silence, my thoughts and focus facing forward as we sped north on 55.
The doctors could not pinpoint what it was that had caused my grandmother to collapse, but they were sure it had something to do with a previously undiagnosed case of emphysema. My grandmother was not a smoker, but my late uncle was. For 30 years, my grandmother and my uncle had lived together in a two-bedroom walk-up 10 miles south of Philadelphia. My uncle had died half a decade prior.
***
My mother insisted that it would be a good idea for me to have a few minutes alone with my grandmother in her hospital room. My grandmother had been laid out in a gown. She was all purple veins and tulips. It was cloudy outside, and that made the room seem damp. I held my grandmother’s hand. The skin on her fingers felt like loose scales. After a few minutes, I began wailing, while also pleading with my grandmother not to die. My cousin Carolyn had somehow slipped into the room behind me, and she was standing in wait now. I stood up, and I stepped back out into the hall.
A half hour later, the whole thing was over.
***
In the months that followed my late uncle’s death, I’d spend entire weekends at my grandmother’s apartment – a youthful presence enlisted to lift her spirits. I’d set up shop in my late uncle’s bedroom, where there was a library along with a cherrywood desk. The refrigerator was always stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon, which I drank while sitting on a cast-iron porch after my grandmother had fallen asleep. There were records by Nat King Cole and there were TV dinners a la Stouffer’s. There were month-old crosswords jammed between the sofa cushions, and there was a faded page-one headline hanging on the back of a door that read, “ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.”
My cousin Dave lived with his mother in a two-bedroom downstairs, and Dave was kind enough to let me tag along whenever he went out drinking with his friends. Dave had a suitcase full of cassettes featuring some of the premier artists of the 60s and 70s. Sometimes, when my grandmother would slide me a few bucks, I’d hightail it over to The Bazaar, where I’d pick out something odd and wonderful by The Who, The Doors, The Lovin Spoonful, or Pink Floyd. This is how I came into contact with great LPs like Quadrophenia and The River, Blood on the Tracks and Harvest Moon. This is how I came to realize there was more to the FM dial than the Hot Eight at Eight and Terry “The Motormouth” Young.
Somehow, it felt like that era of great discovery had officially ended now. There would be no more weekend trips to my grandmother’s apartment, no more late-night beers on her second-floor porch, no more Boxcar Willie playing loudly from her living room, no more writing by the desktop light. There would only be a three-day mourning period, capped off with beads and flowers in some dimly-lit slumber room where we would all be lined up like lemmings, made to exchange phatic pleasantries with 300 or more of our closest friends and relatives, all before driving single-file to a church, where some know-nothing preacher would stand behind a pulpit and butcher my grandmother’s first name repeatedly, all the while trying to convince us that this was not so much a day of mourning as it was a celebration.
Then we’d all line up a second time, and we’d bawl our way into the sunlight … an organ playing us out to the heartfelt strains of “Eagle’s Wings”. We’d load the old gal into a wagon, and 30 minutes later, we’d look on in tinted silence as she got lowered into the earth. From there, we’d all head off to lunch at some swanky black-tie joint. “What a fitting sendoff,” any number of people might say. “What a fitting sendoff.” Of course.
***
I do not remember exactly when or how I returned to Wildwood that Labor Day weekend. I do remember that I had two bags’ worth of groceries under each arm upon my arrival, and that the doorknob to my apartment had a medieval-sized padlock clamped down over it. The padlock had a handwritten note attached to it. That note read: “See Sam at the Shore Plaza for a key to unlock door.”
Sam was my landlord. Sam was also the owner of both Sam’s Pizza and the Shore Plaza Hotel. Sam stood 5’3 with a shiny head, and Sam spent most afternoons in the main lobby of the Shore Plaza. Whenever Sam saw me shuffling toward the apartment, he’d wander out onto the sidewalk. The building that housed our apartment was located directly across the street from the Shore Plaza. If I was walking toward the apartment alone, Sam would stare at me without saying a word. If I came shuffling down the block with a girl on my arm, Sam would call out from across the street, “She’s not living there, is she?” “No, Sam. She’s not,” I’d call back.
Sam was intrusive in an old-country way, and I was in no position to dispute that. My name did not appear on any lease, and I had recently become the only tenant left occupying our 4th-floor apartment. My lone roommate, Jen, had set out for school the previous weekend. Jen had hit me up for cash to pay off the remaining balance of our seasonal rent before she left. As a result, Sam could conceivably – and legally – double his take by kicking me out and taking on another tenant for the month of September.
I kept all of this in mind as I wandered over to the Shore Plaza to confront Sam about the padlock.
“You livin’ over there?” Sam asked, as he glanced around the Shore Plaza lobby.
“Umm, yes,” I said. “I’ve been living over there for the better part of two months. You know me. You say hi to me sometimes.”
“That place is a mess,” Sam said. He had obviously sent someone over to inspect the apartment during my absence. “You need to clean it up.”
I assured Sam that I would.
“What about the rent?” Sam said, just before he handed me the key to the padlock.
“What about the rent?” I said. “Jen paid the rest of the rent about a week ago.”
“No, no, no,” Sam said, snapping his fingers. “That was the rent for August. That girl who always live with you … What’s her name?”
“Jen,” I said.
“Jen,” Sam said. “Right. Jen told me you pay off the rest of the rent for September when she drop off her key here last Sunday.”
“How much?” I said.
“How much what?” Sam said.
“How much for September?” I said.
“280,” Sam said, flatly.
I dug into my pocket, which also functioned as a cash-n-carry, and I counted out seven 20s. “I’ll pay off the rest next Thursday,” I said.
Sam handed me a key for the padlock. “You’re a good boy,” Sam said.
***
September in Wildwood was the most beautiful thing.
September was the Stonehenge solstice, the magnetic fields of Finland; September was the pride before the fall, when thinning crowds meant fewer hours, and the island blazed in pristine shades of auburn. September was the engine cooling, the Sunday paper, the sublime sound of ebb tides rolling in outside your door. September was cold beers and citronella, deep-sea fishing on the fly. September was the month when summer suntans slowly faded, when a million grains of sand began to migrate off the jetties. September meant drunk firemen and Harley hogs, classic cars and kite conventions. September was the month when hardcore flotsam washed ashore, when motel decks, they set to buckling. September was the month when beatnik locals hawked their wares. September was the month that culminated with an end-of-season fire sale along the boards.
That fire sale was known as Super Sunday. Super Sunday was a six-hour street bazaar during which seaside merchants sold off as much surplus stock as possible, rather than box that stock up and take their chances trying to sell it the following May.
I worked in Tin Can Alley on Super Sunday. Around 6 PM, I leaned my shoulder against a pillar, and I tossed the headset microphone aside. I looked on as the night watchman fastened a steel chain across the central gateway to the pier. That steel chain had a wooden sign on it that read: “PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING.”
A few minutes later, I waved goodbye to all the maintenance workers as they stepped over the steel chain en route to a nearby bar.
“C’mon, man,” one of the maintenance workers said. He turned in stride and tossed me a softball. “We’re all headed to the Tiki. You comin’?”
I caught the softball and I tossed it back. “I’ll be down there in a bit,” I said.
With that, I set to closing Tin Can Alley for the season. I took my time and I let the breeze run through me. I watched a napkin as it fumbled down the strand.
Day 182
“Saratoga Summer Song” originally written by Kate McGarrigle.
And so it came to pass, somewhere in the deep weeds of August, 1992, that I began working nights along Surfside Pier. I agreed to take the job because I needed the money, and my buddy Mike needed an extra body to slot in for the J-1 Irish, many of whom were reaching the tail end of their visas. Mike and I ironed out the details over beer and cards one evening. I would work from noon to six at the water gun game on 24th Street, then grab a bite and make a beeline for the pier, where Mike would plug me in from eight to close.
I still had no official form of ID, and the pier wasn’t willing to pay any employee under the table, so Mike offered to cut a deal with a nearby business owner who would, in turn, cash my checks through his bank deposit. That business owner was an uber-tan matchstick of a man named Gary Rutkowski.
Gary was an equal partner in Gary’s Balloons – a step-up joint that generated slick profits and a record number of fines from the state gaming commission. Gary had moved his entire family from New Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to North Wildwood, New Jersey – two generations worth of hayseed yokels speaking their minds like flatbed politicians. Gary, in particular, stretched his “oll”s into “awl”s, and his short “a”s into long ones. Dollars became dawlers. Ears became airs.
The first time I met Gary, I watched him talk a 10-year-old paperboy into giving him a free copy of ThePhiladelphia Daily News. The second time I met Gary, I watched him talk me out of the better part of 10 bucks.
“Do you remember the percentage that we agreed upon?” I asked Gary, as I stood signing over my first paycheck.
“Sure,” Gary told me. “I’m pretty sure it was four percent of the gross.”
“Actually, I think it was two percent of the net,” I said, without looking up.
“Oh, right … two percent,” Gary said, slapping me on the shoulder. “I was just playin’ with ya, madman.”
With that, Gary pulled the check and the pen from my still-wringing hand, then disappeared behind the counter. He reemerged a half hour later, cradling a coffee can full of change underneath his left arm.
“Here ya go, madman,” Gary said, as he pushed the canister toward me. “I was a little low on cash back there, so I had to give it to ya in quarters.”
I stood there, head tilted, counting up the number of rolls lining the canister.
“There’s only a hundred dollars in here,” I said. “My check was for 113.”
“Yeah, well, I was a little low on quarters this week, too,” Gary said, laughing. “Tell ya what … I’ll catch you with a tip the next time around. Sound good, madman?”
It did not sound good. In fact, it sounded pretty fucking bad. Even more so, given the next time around Gary not only disappeared with my check for well over five hours, but he subsequently paid me in an array of singles and dimes, shortchanging me for more than $12 in the process.
George Hull once told a reporter, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Gary Rutkowski once told me, “There’s no such thing as a hustle in which the mark is aware that it’s a scam.”
And thus it was settled: I was a sucker, but I could not be labeled as a mark.
***
By the third week in August, I was earning enough money to afford three meals a day. Only my schedule wouldn’t allow for it, and neither would my drinking. If I woke up on 26th Street, that meant a quick breakfast sandwich, which I’d wash down with a can of Jolt Cola and a cigarette. If I came to at the flophouse over on Davis Avenue, I’d usually go with a 50-cent burger from Snow White, which I’d devour on the 15-minute tram ride from Davis Avenue to 24th Street.
Snow White served up burgers that looked like old dog toys. What’s more, customers would hand-pick their own patties from a dozen steaming burgers left wading in a tub. Snow White was the only boardwalk eatery with a barker. During off-peak hours, management would play a prerecorded list of menu items from a pair of amped-out speakers on a loop. Once primetime hit, a microphone would be passed between veteran servers, each of whom would blurt out split-second specials. “Hot dogs! Foot-longs! Corn on and off the cob! Beef pies! French fries! Forty-five-cent sides of slaw!”
Lunch was nonexistent for me, and dinner became a toss-up. On a good day, I’d spend my break along the south side of Surfside Pier, feasting on stromboli from Sorrento’s or a bucket of french fries from Curley’s. On a bad day, I’d knock back a cold slice of pizza on my way back to the apartment on 26th Street, where I’d set an alarm and sneak in a nap.
The best pizza on the boardwalk was hiding two blocks north of Surfside Pier in a tiny Greek eatery known as Fisher’s. The Greeks cooked their pizza in a pan, as opposed to a brick oven, and they layered it with feta, the combination of which offered a refreshing alternative to the generic blend of mozzarella and ketchup most boardwalk businesses tried to pass off as cuisine. Italians, by and large, have absolutely no idea what it is Americans have done to their traditional margherita. Authentic Mediterranean pizza is flavored with various oils and lard, and every diner at the table is presented with his or her own personal pan.
Italians have no interest in sharing their slices.
Americans have no interest in sharing their pie.
Mangia! Mangia! You too-big-to-fail motherfuckers.
***
I spent my first week at Surfside Pier learning how to work the low-maintenance games … kiddie joints like the Duck Pond and the Troll Wheel. By the end of that week, I’d graduated to the Bottle-Up and the Fishy-Fish – both of which required a certain degree of hand-eye coordination. From there it was on to the Break-a-Plate, then the Ball Toss, before eventually getting called up to work in Tin Can Alley.
Tin Can Alley was a 30-foot stand located front and center across the gateway to the pier. The game attracted traffic from all sides, and it had three decades worth of rides and attractions serving as a backdrop. During prime-time hours, Tin Can Alley was a magnet for the tourists. The Gambit, which was located one block north, had superior microphone operators and flash, but Gambit was a roll-a-ball game, which meant the turnover time for a single race could run anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes. Because of the way Tin Can Alley was set up, a lot of its races could be completed in 15 seconds. This allowed the operator to zip straight up and down the line, collecting more money, faster.
Tin Can Alley was furnished with eight brightly-colored trash cans, each of them lined up against a wall, facing a 25-foot trough of polyvinyl balls. A traffic signal rose behind each can, with a series of seven red, yellow and green lights. Once the game was set in motion, all eight lids would open in unison for a period of five seconds, then close again for an equal period of time. Players would use this down time to reload, over and over again, until one player managed to land seven balls inside a can.
Tin Can Alley was stocked to the gills with all manner of Tiny Toons plush (i.e., Plucky Duck and Dizzy Devil, Babs and Buster Bunny). Once a minute, the Tiny Toons Adventures song would ring out like a battle call: “We’re tiny. We’re toony. We’re all a little loony. And in this cartoony, we’re invading your TV …”
It was a scene. And it provided an ideal platform for me to hone my skills on the microphone. Unlike the majority of race games, which were built with a three-and-a-half foot counter that cut off above the waist, Tin Can Alley was built on a downward slope with a rolling strip of Astroturf that redirected delinquent balls toward the trough. I used that strip like a stage. I was still learning how to minimize the turnover time between races, but the counter remained packed, so no one saw fit to complain. I had a knack for putting up strong numbers during the late-night hours, hours during which most of the other boardwalk operators had either grown too groggy or too tired to bother with what little business was left out on the boards.
Late-night drunks would shuffle over to each outlet full of verve, urging every member of their tribe to follow suit. The Alpha drunks would usually attempt some half-ass headcount, then offer to foot the bill for the entire crew. Offer the late-night drunks a raucous time, and they’d reward you with big bills. Try and take them for a ride, and they might tear you, limb by limb.
Fortunately, the games on Surfside Pier were meant to reflect a family atmosphere, and – as such – full-time employees were never urged to milk a patron down to nil. With the exception of bending rims and waxing boards, management made zero effort to manipulate the odds. Most of the kids who worked the pier games were young and clean-cut, sailing through state college on their way to middling things.
These coeds held no interest in fleecing wide-eyed tourists. And yet they had no qualms when it came to stiffing their employer. Boardwalk games were a cash business, and this was long before the bean counters installed an eye in the sky to monitor every stand. As a result, a considerable percentage of the game operators were stealing. One Surfside employee who I knew that summer had enlisted a full-time partner. This partner would arrive at the game his friend was working six nights a week, then pay to play the gamem using a one-dollar bill. The friend/game operator would, in turn, dig into his apron, making change for a $10 or a $20 bill. Now and again, management might mark a bill to nab someone in the act, but this was rare, and it certainly never happened in the aforementioned case. By and large, the nonverbal agreement was that if you pulled your weight, and you hit your numbers, then management could turn a blind eye to just about anything else.
***
“You’ve got a phone call,” an operations manager told me. It was 8 pm on a Saturday, the final week in August. “You can take it inside wardrobe.”
A phone call? For me? Inside wardrobe?
Who on earth could it b …
“Bob, it’s your mother.”
It was my mother.
“How did you know to call me here?” I asked.
“It’s not like you have a phone,” my mother told me.
“No, I meant to call me here,” I said.
“I looked up the number,” my mother told me. “Listen, I’m just wondering when to expect you.”
“Expect me for what?” I said.
“The fall semester,” my mother said. “It starts in two days.”
“Yeah, well, look, I don’t think I’m gonna be doing that right now,” I said. I was staring at the wardrobe ladies. They were staring back at me.
“What d’you mean, you don’t think you’re going to be doing that right now?” my mother asked.
“I mean I’m not going back there this semester,” I said.
“Well, then, when are you going back?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “All I can tell you is that I’m not going back right now.”
“What are you gonna do, work at the circus for the rest of your life?” my mother asked.
Silence.
“Look, I don’t have time to get into this right now,” I said. “I’m really busy.”
“Yeah, well, your father and I have been really busy for the past 18 years,” my mother insisted, “trying to put the four of you through school.”
“What?” I said.
“What?” my mother said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Look, I gotta go. I’ll give you a call during the week, once things begin to settle down a little bit.”
“Goodbye,” my mother told me. She hung up the receiver.
“Who was that?” one of the wardrobe ladies asked.
“It was my mother,” I told her.
“At 8:15 on a Saturday?” the woman said. She was directing the emphasis much more toward her colleagues than me. “I mean, you’d think some of these people never worked.”
I am alone now, and I am shivering, mangled beyond all recognition in the rear pew of St. Ann’s Catholic Church. It is late now, well past 4 am, and all that’s left along the strand is a pale and wanton cast of zombies, spilling out into the night as Holly Beach marquees go dark. This is what Scottish warlocks refer to as the Devil’s Pocket – a vacuum-black void that exists between pitch dark and dawn. The Devil’s Pocket is no time to go wandering dead-end streets alone, that is unless you happen to be carrying a gun, or a badge, or both, and you have absolutely no qualms about brandishing either one.
Down along the east end of Cresse, local authorities are just now beginning to investigate the sudden disappearance of a Canadian transvestite named Rene Ouellet. Rene was last seen wandering toward the beach with an unidentified male right around this hour of the night. Less than a week prior to Rene’s disappearance, a recent high school graduate by the name of Steven Freeman had been arrested and charged with the fatal stabbing of a classmate outside a North Wildwood hotel along the corner of 11th and Surf Avenue.
Two summers before that on Memorial Day weekend, the half-naked body of a 20-year old named Susan Negersmith had been found beaten and bloody behind a dumpster outside Schellenger’s Restaurant. Negersmith’s body had been discovered by two busboys, her T-shirt and bra had been pushed up around her neck, her jeans and underwear had been bunched up around one foot. There were 26 areas of trauma on Susan Negersmith’s body, including vaginal bruising and the presence of semen.
At the time, the Cape May County Coroner’s Office tried to pass off Susan’s death as nothing more than routine alcohol poisoning. That is until the state police, the FBI, and a forensic pathologist by the name of Michael Baden simultaneously descended on the area, declaring the entire investigation (or general lack thereof) an obscene miscarriage of justice. Those sources concluded, much like any other sane, uncompromising human being might, that Susan Negersmith had been raped, and then strangled, and then left to die upon a filthy piece of cardboard. “It would seem to me you could not rule it any other way,” State Police Superintendent Justin Dintino had been later quoted as saying.
In the blazing shitstorm that ensued, Mary Ann Clayton, a state medical examiner who had assisted in Susan Negersmith’s initial autopsy, admitted a “grievous error” had been made, and offered to amend the official cause of death. Clayton was overruled by her superiors, many of whom insisted upon sticking to their story. This despite the fact there was still an unrepentant rapist/murderer left wandering the streets.
All of this kept swimming around in my head as I ducked into the bowels of a catholic church at 4 o’clock in the morning. I was drunk, and severely stoned, and I was more than a little bit afraid. More to the point, I had no idea how I had gotten there. I mean, I knew where I was. And I knew that I had wandered in there, and that the door had been unlocked. I simply could not stitch together how I had gone from smoking hash in someone’s attic to staring at a row of votive candles during the middle of the night.
***
I was seeing the world through kaleidoscope eyes now, an array of dancing prisms set adrift in my periphery. The votive candles were fucking with my vision something wicked; I could see the stained-glass glow of blinking traffic signals along the altar. I could hear the rhythmic purr of dual exhaust and static pounding … a pair of ghetto dragsters battling hard along Atlantic. The screeching tires set me reeling, reeling forward past the altar, past the candles and the stained glass, past the streetlights and the shivering, past it all until I reappeared inside the bare-bones attic of some beach house, smoking pot out of a bong that may or may not be nicknamed Sue.
I hold that bong down at an angle, much like a mortar or an alpine horn. The skunk weed sets me spinning, the hashish sets my mind afloat … afloat and confused, like some cosmic whirling dervish. I am lost now, doggy-paddling, set adrift a thousand miles at sea. I will myself toward the shore, battling currents and black ripples, battling eddies and fierce winds, battling my way beneath the surface … battling deep, deep down into the nether until I find myself right back again, inside the vast and empty confines of a church past 4 am.
I slip out of the church through a side door. I wander down along East Maple. I take a seat upon the front steps of a house where I once lived. An unmarked cruiser stops in front of me, a plain-clothes officer asks, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m just on my way home,” I somehow manage to tell the officer.
“Home where?” the officer asks.
“Home here,” I say, without hesitation. “I live up on the second floor.”
The officer glances upward, considers whether to call me on my bullshit.
“In that case, get upstairs,” he says. “You don’t want to be out here by yourself this time of night.”
I stand up, and then nod. I climb upstairs toward the door. I disappear into the shadows, pulling curtains close behind me. I stand there, still and silent in the hallway of that beach house. I hold my breath and shut my eyes. I pray to god no tenant sees me.
I creep toward the window, making sure the coast is clear. Then I dart back down the steps and high-tail it to the beach. It is light now, nearly dawn, and the sun will soon be breaking coast. It’s time for me to get back home. It’s time for me to get some sleep.
I was working the microphone of an eight-player race game located on the corner of 24th and the Boardwalk. I was living in a one-bedroom apartment less than two blocks away. My roommates were a pair of potheads named Jen and Heidi. Jen and Heidi had only agreed to take me on so they could afford to buy more weed.
Jen and I shared a room, and, what’s more, we shared a mattress. On certain nights, the two of us would lie awake, and we would debate what the repercussions might be if we decided to have sex. Eventually, one or both of us would fall asleep, beaded foreheads mingling sweat toward the center of our pillow.
Heidi slept alone, on an off-white futon in the living room. Heidi had recently been diagnosed with herpes, and, for a time, she would talk about this openly. Eventually, our social circle made an in-joke out of Heidi’s sexually transmitted disease. “Herpes Heidi! Herpes Heidi!” drunken hecklers would call out from behind Heidi at parties. Then one morning, Jen informed me that Heidi had moved out.
“Wow, really?” I responded. The two of us were still lying in bed.
“Yep,” Jen told me. Jen took a drag off of her cigarette.
“Want to have sex?” I asked Jen.
“Not right now,” Jen told me.
***
The day before I moved into Jen and Heidi’s apartment on 26th Street, I got fired from my job as a part-time dishwasher at Samuel’s Pancake House. I had landed the position through a friend, who was both gracious and sympathetic enough to put in a good word. What that friend did not account for was my drinking. Most mornings, the manager would either have to send someone to fetch me or gamble on letting the dishes pile up until I arrived. Once a shift, I would fall asleep while standing up. A stack of plates might shatter. The boys working the grill would look over at me and say things like, “Stupid motherfucker,” under their breath. Some days I’d arrive at work so famished, I’d sneak leftover scraps before scraping a plate into the garbage. I was entitled to one free meal at the tail-end of every shift. Other than that, I was living on a steady diet of cheap beer and nicotine, burning more electrolytes than my body could afford.
Anyway, the point being that eventually I got fired. What’s more, I had to sign over the only two paychecks I had received to a Korean girl named Ronnie, who, in turn, cashed those checks through her account for a nominal fee. I still hadn’t gotten any picture ID, and there wasn’t a check-cashing joint on the island game enough to accept the word of an 18-year old who was all cheek acne and bones.
Toward the end of July, I accepted an offer to talk to Bob Satanoff. Bob ran the Beach Grill and several other snack carts along Morey’s Pier. He also ran a water gun game on the west side of 24th Street.
“I hear you have a drinking problem,” Bob said to me, after I had introduced myself.
“Where’d you hear that?” I replied, taken aback.
“Bill Salerno,” Bob said.
“I don’t know who that is,” I said.
“Well, he knows who you are,” Bob said.
“Apparently not,” I shot back.
“You ever worked a game on the boardwalk?” Bob asked.
“No, but I can learn,” I said.
“Everybody thinks they can learn,” Bob told me.
“No, I’m serious,” I said. “I can do it. I swear.”
“You ever worked on a microphone?” Bob asked me.
“I used to be the lead singer of a band named 13,” I lied.
Bob hired me on the spot. The following morning I reported to the Beach Grill, where I collected my bank, and a set of keys. From there, I taught myself how to operate the stand.
My only full-time coworker was some slicked-back motherfucker named Dan. Dan worked the night shifts, whereas I worked the days. Dan was selling drugs out of the stand. My fourth day on the job, I found a quarter-ounce of weed buried inside a box full of plush behind the counter. One day later, some black dude with a scar across his chest approached the stand, asking where my “partner” was.
“Dan?” I said, sarcastically. “Dan won’t be around until tonight.”
The dude looked to his left, and then to his right. Then he looked directly at me.
“Yo, you holdin’?” the dude asked. He sniffled, wiped his nose clean with his hand.
“Holden who?” I wondered.
“Yo, nevermind,” the dude said.
He leaned the top half of his body over and into the stand, like a fisherman stretching starboard to reel in his catch. The dude was digging into a crate of stuffed animals now. “Anything I can do to help?” I asked. I had stashed the quarter-ounce of weed behind the stand earlier that morning.
“Nah, I’m good,” the dude said. He pulled his body from the bins, and then he shot me a knowing glance.
A few days later, Dan got fired – replaced by a 37-year old named Karen. Karen stood 5’2, tan and stocky. Karen wore a belt pack over a tanktop and short shorts. Karen was authoritative, and she liked to justify a lot of her attitude by saying, “I’m an agent, dude. The last thing I need is somebody trying to tell me what to do.”
Karen eventually agreed to let me work the stand alongside her (entirely off the clock). My goal was to attain some sense of how Karen achieved a natural rhythm on the microphone. But all I came away with was the sense that Karen wasn’t actually that good. The entire shift felt like a grind, punctuated by Karen smoking menthols in the corner, vaguely attempting to call in passing tourists between drags. There were prolonged spans of dead air time, uncomfortable periods during which Karen would school me on all the reasons people weren’t stopping by to play the game. Karen cited shitty lighting, half-ass flash, outdated stock, and a one-speaker sound system that was turned inward, rather than out.
“And I’ll tell you one other thing,” Karen insisted, “This stand’s located two blocks north of where all the real action is.”
Karen pulled a prescription pill bottle out of her windbreaker. She counted out a few whites, washed them back with a quick belt of water.
“Don’t ever get old, dude,” Karen instructed me. “Don’t ever get old, and don’t ever get scabies.”
***
I spent the next few nights wandering the boardwalk, gaining a feel for how the best microphone operators transitioned through a crowd. There was Ricky Nickels down on Midway Pier, whose nasal delivery seemed more suited to a DJ booth. There was a 6-ft Scottish chick who ran the race games down by Mariner’s Landing. And then there were Sean and E.J. Dougherty – a pair of brothers from South Philadelphia who both looked and sounded the part to a T.
Sean and E.J. ran the Gambit – a huge, free-standing race game located along the east side of 24th Street. Both brothers had second-generation ties to North Wildwood, and they also had an instinctive sense of what stood missing from a lot of the midway attractions. Gambit’s music, sound, and lighting were all fantastic. The Gambit was located one block south of Sportland Pier – a rotting piece of flotsam boasting old-school attractions like the Hell Hole and the House of Horrors. Sportland Pier was also home to Wild Wes and Lucky Lou, equal partners in an industrial-sized bushel joint situated directly across the way from Bob Satanoff’s water-gun game.
Lou was tall and fat, pot-bellied like a walrus. Wes was short and tan, with whitewash dentures and a mustache. Lou and Wes employed a molting nest of vipers, the lot of whom detested me on principle. The better I became at working on a microphone, the more those vipers hissed at me from across the boards. Every night at 6 pm when Karen showed up to relieve me, the Sportland boys would break out into applause. Most of them had worked with Karen, and they showered her with nicknames like Madame General and The Sarge.
The first Thursday in August, Bob Satanoff instructed me to hand-deliver Karen’s wages. Bob wrote Karen’s total on the outside of an envelope, which is how I discovered Karen was earning more than $600 per week (25% of her nightly gross, with no adjustment made for costs). I maxed out at $260 ($6 per hour with no taxes taken out). The revelation didn’t bother me so much as the fact that Karen sucked at what she was doing. Given the disparity, I intended upon proving that I was the bigger draw.
There was no chance of me rivaling Karen’s totals during an average beach day. But every time I caught a boardwalk afternoon (i.e. clouds but no rain), I’d throw down on that microphone much like a madman hawking cattle. I started running $3 races for $7 tigers, upselling dollar stock at $4-5 a pop. My day-time totals began to increase, and then double. Karen, on the other hand, grew increasingly frustrated, spending the first 10 minutes of every night shift dismissing whatever it was I had accomplished. “You had the clouds working for ya today,” she might comment, or “I’m guessing people spent so much this afternoon that they won’t put out a dime tonight.”
I’d taken to walking each afternoon’s total over to Bob Satanoff, thereby avoiding any risk of Karen taking credit for my work. Toward the end of August, Nick the Greek – the man who actually owned the boardwalk block that I was working on – handed me an envelope with a hundred dollars in it.
“Good work, Bill,” Nick said to me.
The day after I received that bonus, a slow and steady rain fell down upon North Wildwood. I sat alone along the counter, sifting through some old cassettes. I turned the speaker out toward the boardwalk, sang along into the microphone. Around 2 pm, Lucky Lou wandered over from across the way, leaned his back against the counter.
“How’s it goin’?” Lou wondered.
“How’s it goin’? It’s goin’ alright,” I said. “How’s it goin’ with you?”
“Aaaaaah, it’s a washout,” Lou said. He swung his body round to face me, squeezed the trigger of a water gun. “Might as well roll down the shutters and call it a day.”
“I hear ya,” I said, laughing. “I could use a few more hours of sleep, if you know what I’m sayin’.”
“So, listen,” Lou told me, completely ignoring my last comment. “I was talking to my guys over there, and we were wondering if you could do us a small favor.”
“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Just tell me what you need.”
“I, well, we, need you to stop singing over the microphone. Otherwise, the entire lot of us are gonna need to come over here and shove that goddamn speaker up your ass.”
Lou stood still and silent for a moment, sizing me up like a pitbull might a rabbit. He took a breath, then lumbered back across the boardwalk, where he fell asleep across a bed of plush.
You could tell by the way that kid came screaming around the corner – all high knees and elbows – there was trouble closing fast behind. Seconds later, a pair of shirtless silhouettes appeared in his wake, twin aluminum bats reflecting in the moonlight.
The kid was a quarter of the way down the block before one of the silhouettes wound up and let fly, chucking his bat end-over-end, like a pickaxe in mid-air. It struck the kid square in the back, propelling him forward, where he fumbled for a moment, before falling to the ground.
Then the entire world went silent, save for the static thud of aluminum alloy, and the guttural screams of that scrawny, helpless kid, writhing wildly on the sidewalk.
I watched the horrid episode from a second-story porch across the way. Once both the silhouettes had disappeared, I put my beer down and hurried off toward the steps.
“What the fuck are you doing?” my roommate John asked.
John was one of several roommates I was living with at the time. John had orange hair and pasty skin. John was staring over at me, a 12-ounce bottle in his hand.
“We gotta go see if that kid’s OK,” I said. I stood frozen at the top of a flight of stairs.
“The fuck we do,” John said. “Get back over here, man. You’re liable to get yourself killed down there.”
I looked across the street at that kid, who was struggling to his feet. He made it two steps, maybe three, before collapsing to the sidewalk. The kid was beaten, and bloody, and you could tell by several abbreviated movements that critical ligaments were no longer making full connections.
“C’mon, man,” John said.
I did an about-face. I started back toward my seat. As if on cue, a flatbed truck came zipping around the intersection – a pair of shirtless silhouettes standing upright in the back. The driver stopped just short of where that poor kid still lay, struggling. One of the silhouettes leaned down, picked up a brick from the flatbed, then launched it at the back of that kid’s head, delivering what appeared to be a knockout blow.
The truck peeled off heading west along Maple, followed less than 30 seconds later by the sound of EMTs arriving on the scene. Drunken neighbors went filtering out into the street now.
“You see?” John said, patting me on the shoulder. “No matter how bad it might seem, you don’t ever get involved. Ever.”
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “I still feel kind of bad.”
“Why?” John asked. “You don’t know who that kid was. You don’t know what he might’ve gotten himself into. In fact, you don’t know whether that kid just got exactly what he had coming to him, which is exactly why you do not get involved.”
I watched the kid get wheeled into an ambulance. It could’ve been me, according to John. Or maybe it didn’t have to be anyone. These ghetto streets weren’t made for martyrs.
***
During the first few weeks of that summer, John taught me how to work a job for a couple off-peak hours, then quit and suggest petty cash in lieu of paperwork. He taught me how to make a proper fist (I spent 18 years sandwiching my thumb inside four fingers), and he taught me about the Christian House – a nearby homeless shelter that offered cost-free meals three times a day.
The Christian House represented an ideal way to keep from starving. The only trade-off being that the bread was stale, and volunteers read from scripture at the beginning of each meal. “I was dying,” one guy sitting next to me insisted as we were eating one evening. “I’d been sleeping in this shed for damn near a month, without any food or water. Then one day, this asshole comes along and tosses me, for real. That same night a big ole’ snowstorm hit. That shit came piling down in droves, man. Real hard. Like so hard I got this frostbite all the way up on the foretips of my fingers.”
He lifted both hands, and then he wiggled his fingers, as if to show me it worked out.
“In the moments just before I was about to pass out, I looked down into this snowdrift, see. And I saw Jesus, and he was just staring right on up at me. There he was, man, plain as day. As soon as he appeared, I didn’t feel so cold no more. And when I looked back down the road, I could see this pair of headlights approachin’. Them headlights were attached to somethin’ big, man, a big ole’ fuckin’ truck, see. And so eventually, this truck driver, he slowed down to ask me if I needed a ride. Took me into town, man. Found me a warm bed. Saved my fuckin’ life, man. To this day, I truly believe that man to have been my savior. I ain’t never been the same since. Like, not ever. Never.”
It was still early June then, which meant dire straits for a poacher like me. What little scams I’d learned – counting cards, upselling beer for a dollar a can – required a constant flow of people, and there really weren’t any, at least during the week. I was sharing an apartment with 15 other tenants, and all of those tenants with the exception of me were weekenders. Come Sunday night, they would all drive back to Philadelphia. The loneliness didn’t affect me. I had become friends with Lou, the property manager, and I could always wander over to his place for some free beer and weed. Lou had introduced me to Vince – an African-American drug delaer from Bedford-Stuyesant. One night Vince told me the story of a rival drug dealer from Flatbush, Brooklyn. This dealer had beaten Vince’s brother for a bag of money and some coke. One week later, Vince and his crew had tracked that dealer down, jumped him from behind, forced him to the ground, and then hacked into his kneecaps with a machete. “You want to sever that motherfuckin’ ligament at just the right angle,” Vince assured me, demonstrating the downward motion with his arm. “Sometimes you even gotta step on that fucker’s hamstring for leverage, cause pulling a machete out of the flesh is a little bit like pulling a goddamn axe out of a tree.”
***
Alone and hungry, I would regularly break into the apartment upstairs, using a kitchen knife to slip the lock. On most occasions, I’d steal either a handful of loose change or a 5-oz box of macaroni and cheese. If I stole a box of macaroni and cheese, I would boil it on the stove in our apartment, then eat it raw out of the pot. If I stole a handful of change, I’d walk across the street to the Maple Deli, where I could usually afford either a pair of soft pretzels or a pack of Ramen noodles.
The first week in June, I landed a job as a cashier at Curley’s Fries. Curley’s was a popular boardwalk fry joint that employed a largely Mexican staff. Curley’s would pay me under the table (I had no photo ID), which meant that I would be capable of affording a cheeseburger or a bar of soap or a 12-pack of beer within a few days.
I was living with a group of jocks, the majority of whom had graduated from a rival high school back in Delaware County. John had emerged as the unofficial leader of the group, and it was John who had initially agreed to let me stay at the apartment. But it was also John who was charging me double what the other tenants were paying, a detail I did not become aware of until a few weeks down the line.
There were parties every Saturday, and by mid-June the apartment’s walls had gotten marked up and riddled with holes. The kitchen table had collapsed. There was a gaping tear along the living room ceiling. Fearing that we would get evicted, I started holding back rent. Money was tight, I reasoned, and if things eased up, I could still pay off the remaining balance before September. Shortly after, what little possessions I owned began disappearing from my bureau. One weekend, my portable radio went missing; the next weekend, a bag of cassettes. Battle lines were being drawn, and it did not take long before the majority of my roommates started walking away from me in mid-sentence. One of those roommates had even threatened to beat me up.
Toward the end of June, our landlord showed up with a pair of Class II police officers and ordered us to vacate the premises no later than July 5th. He posted an eviction notice on the apartment door. In response, my roommates planned one final blowout to coincide with the 4th of July. I packed my bags, and I left my belongings at a friend’s apartment on East 24th Street. I spent the first two weeks of July sleeping on the beach.
One night, I wound up walking the streets well past 2 am with a summer girl named Tonya. There were “too many drunk people lying about” for us to crash at Tonya’s apartment, so I decided to take her over to the ex-apartment on East Maple. The landlord couldn’t have completed all the necessary repairs, I figured, which meant the place would still be empty. What’s more, I knew three different ways to break into that apartment without a key.
When Tonya and I made a left onto Pacific Avenue two blocks south of Maple, a trio of drunk dudes fell in behind us.
“You lookin’ for somebody to walk you home?” one of the drunk dudes shouted to Tonya.
“I’m fine, thanks,” I responded.
“The fuck d’you say?” one of the drunk dudes shot back. He sprinted forward until he and I stood parallel. Then he elbowed Tonya out of the way. “The FUCK d’you say!?” he asked me a second time.
This dude had a shaved head, and he flicked his cigarette against my shirt. He made a proper fist, tight and white. He was backing me up now, against a storefront. I could feel my fight-or-flight response kick in. And that’s when something struck me … something strong and solid with the force of a wave. That something sent me stumbling. I landed on the sidewalk, where I curled into a ball.
“Are you FUCKIN’ with him?” I heard a gravelly voice demand from above. “I said, are you FUCKIN’ with him? Answer me, motherfucker. Are you or are you not FUCKIN’ with that white boy on the ground?”
It was Vince from Brooklyn. Vince had that dude jacked up against the storefront. The other two drunk dudes took off.
“Look at me,” Vince said, his tone more relaxed. “I want that you should look at me. Are you lookin’ at me?”
The drunk dude was looking at Vince.
“I want you to remember this face. D’you think you can remember this face?”
The drunk dude did believe that he could remember that face.
“I want you to remember this motherfucker too,” Vince said, forcing the drunk dude’s face down within a few inches of mine. “D’you think you can remember this motherfucker’s face?”
The drunk dude did believe that he could remember my face.
“You fuck with him,” Vince said, pointing to me with his index finger, “You fuck with me. We clear?”
They were.
“Now get the fuck out of here,” Vince tossed the drunk dude aside.
“Thanks, man,” I said. I was clapping gravel off both hands. “Seriously, thanks. Those guys would’ve killed me if it hadn’t been for you.”
“Tell me about it,” Vince said. There was a vein pulsing along the side of his neck. “I didn’t even realize that that was you until I got all up in that motherfucker’s grill.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Nope,” Vince told me. “I wouldn’t kid about no shit like that.”
“So why intervene?” I said.
“I turned the corner and saw three wetback motherfuckers about to roll some skinny-ass white dude,” Vince said. “What the fuck was I supposed to do?”
Twenty years ago in the side bedroom of a second-story shack on the 100 block of East Maple, two drunk kids set to wrestling at each other in the dark – he in a second-hand pair of Umbros, she in a pink-cotton halter and button-fly skirt.
The room was damp and quiet. The walls were white and bare. And the gaping void between filled up with shadows from each passing car.
The windowsills ran vile, a stagnant film of dust and paint. There were twin beds on both sides, pushed up against the walls. The buttons from the mattress pierced her back at jagged angles, carving tiny cuts into the left side of her shoulder.
He pushed the halter up above her chest. She pushed the Umbros down below his thighs.
He used his foot to push her skirt down, heard it jangle, and then crash.
Her neck, it smelled like nicotine. His breath, it reeked like booze.
They’d been seeing each other for three weeks now, and he’d been homeless nearly all that time. The first and only date they’d shared was a last-minute trip to see The Cutting Edge. He would always remember that she insisted on paying because he had no money to his name. She would always remember dropping him off outside a party, how he never thought to ask her in.
There came a pounding at the door now, followed by a turning of the knob. The two of them ignored the noise, descended deep into each other’s arms. His hands, they felt like meat hooks, and she kept digging in behind. She was clinging tight and desperate, latching on in desperation.
He lunged forward with an awkward shift, fell inside her with a sigh.
She braced herself against the storm, gripped a pillow to her side.
His hair was whipping fast now, loose strands brushing across her face, and through her mouth. She kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling, cracked and spotty, full of mold.
She handed him a cigarette, then lit one for herself. He pinched the filter like a bedbug, blew the smoke out with a shrug. He studied how she took each puff, measured how she held each drag. She eased her head onto a pillow, ashed her smoke onto the ground. He waited till she looked away before repeating the same move.
When the rod burned down to cotton, she cast her butt into a can. Then she set her frame against his arm, took note of his last drag.
She had a thousand misconceptions about who he was and where he’d been.
He feared how things might change after reality set in.
A week after I left home, my parents put the word out they had taken the spare house key from its usual spot. They had fastened all the windows. They had secured all points of entry.
It was an absurd stance to take, especially given I knew of at least three alternate ways to access the house, and none of them required a key. As a child, I was often reprimanded for slipping the clasp on our front window, then reaching through to unfasten the front door. I never had a house key. I never needed one.
To that end I had a close friend drive me over to my parents’ house one mid-May morning – a morning when I knew my mother, my father and my younger sister would be out. I requested that this friend park his car around the corner, allowing me to make my approach across back fences. I used a pocket knife to slip the lock on our back door, then shuffled upstairs to my bedroom, where I found two stacks of laundry folded neatly on my bureau.
I remember streaks of daylight breaking through the pastel curtains. I remember awkward silence mixed with pangs of guilt. I remember bagging clothes, then running out the basement door. I remember how that door slammed shut, then locked itself behind me. I remember my father intercepting me a few days later on a crosstown walk from Ridley Park to Springfield. I remember he was driving south along 420 when I noticed him pass by. He broke full-bore into a U-turn, swerving round to block my path.
“Get in,” my father said. He pushed the passenger-side door open.
“No,” I said back.
“Get in,” my father said, looking everywhere but at me. “I just want to talk, that’s all.”
“Well, then talk,” I said. “But I’m not getting in that car.”
My father considered this for a moment. “What if I pull into that vacant lot?” he suggested, gesturing with his chin. “That way I can turn off the car, and you can get out whenever you want.”
“OK,” I said. “Pull around. I’ll meet you there.”
And so for the ensuing four minutes, my father and I sat in a vacant parking lot along a shady patch of Route 420, both of us staring forward at reflections on the dash. He offered me no quarter, and I offered him none back. We just sat. And stared. And then we sat and stared some more.
Eventually, my father insisted that I come back to the house. I, in turn, insisted there was nothing left to say. I looked out the window, asked my father to let my mother know I was getting by OK. Then I opened the side door, and – for the first time in my life – I turned my back upon my father. For the first time in his life, he simply let me go.
***
Come Memorial Day weekend, I made the full-time move to Wildwood, New Jersey. My parents, meanwhile, had taken to contacting as many of my friends’ parents as possible, desperate for any update on my whereabouts. Their general plea was for my safety, my father maintaining he had reason to believe I’d gotten mixed up in drugs. When none of my friends stepped forward to volunteer information, my parents cast a wider net, placing calls to several people I hadn’t spoken to since high school. They called my friend Michelle. They called some dude I used to drink with. They even called some girl I’d shared a tryst with during Senior Week.
Fearful that my choices had begun impacting others, I called my parents from a pay phone and arranged for them to come visit me in Wildwood. The afternoon they arrived, I hurried down from a 2nd-floor apartment I had been living in and met them on the street. There were several people inside the apartment on that afternoon – drunks and cokeheads. I was doing my best to keep my parents from wandering in upon that scene.
My parents bought me lunch around the corner. Our conversation was awkward. My parents made it clear they disagreed with what I was doing, and I made it clear that their opinion held no sway. Once lunch was over, the three of us wandered back to my apartment. Out front, I introduced my parents to one of my drunk roommates, who kept repeating the phrase, “So you two are Bob’s parents,” over and over and over again.
Before my mother left that afternoon, she handed me a piece of paper with a phone number written on it. The number belonged to my cousin Dave, who was staying at a nearby house in Sea Isle, New Jersey. Dave was four years older than me, and he occupied the big-brother function in my life that my real-life big brother had not filled. Dave was intelligent, non-judgmental. Back in high school, he introduced me to Tolkien and Vonnegut; JIm Morrison and Roger Waters. Dave took me to see my first concert, and then, a year later, he took me to see my second. He taught me how to play pinball and poker, checkers and chess. He was the only one of my relatives who did not approach me like a chore.
I called my cousin from a pay phone a few days later.
One ring. Two ring. Three ring. Four.
“Hello,” an unfamiliar voice said.
“Dave?”
“No, no. This is Kevin. Who’s this?”
“Kevin, it’s Bud.” a family nickname.
“Buuuuuuuuuuuuuud,” Kevin said. “What’s up, man?”
“Not much. I’m actually calling from a pay phone over in Wildwood right now, so I was wondering if my cousin Dave might be around.”
“Yeah, man. He’s right here. Hold on.”
“Hello,” my cousin Dave said.
“Hey, man. What’s up? It’s Bud.”
“What’s up?” my cousin Dave said. “Nothing’s up. What’s up with you?”
“Me? Well, nothing, actually.”
“Uh-huh,” Dave said. “So what are you calling me for?”
“Well, my mom gave me this number,” I said, “and she told me that you wanted me to call.”
“I said that?” Dave said.
“Well, yeah,” I told Dave. “I mean, that’s what she told me.”
“I don’t think so,” Dave said.
“Oh. Well, maybe she just figured since the two of us were both down the shore for the sum — ”
“No,” my cousin Dave said.
“No what?” I said. I was confused. “Is there something wrong here?”
“Something wrong with me?” my cousin Dave said.
“I don’t know, something.”
“There might be something wrong with you,” my cousin Dave said, “but there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Something wrong with me like what?” I said.
“Something like 10 pounds’ worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack,” my cousin Dave said.
“Huh?” I said back.
“You heard me. Nothing more than 10 pounds’ worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking abou — ”
What followed was the sound of change dropping. The phone had swallowed my deposit. I gathered another handful of quarters, redialed the same number.
“Hello,” my cousin Dave said.
“Hey, man. I think we must’ve gotten disconnected.”
“We didn’t get disconnected,” my cousin Dave said. “I hung up on you.”
And then again, as if to demonstrate his point, my cousin disconnected the call, leaving me alone at the corner of Glenwood and Pacific, staring at my reflection in the keypad.
“Ten pounds worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack,” I murmured.
Nothing more than 10 pounds worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack.
I showed up drunk for my first day of college. I showed up barely coherent, waving like a buoy, reeking like a bad sock that had been bathed in turpentine.
After 18 years spent sweating it out in Delaware County, just waiting for the moment when I could break out, bust out, explode across the cosmos, there I sat, half-baked on a set of bleachers, hunkered deep inside a low-budget gym, watching some dude named Bird lead a “WE ARE …” chant as he charged across mid-court, unfurling an industrial-sized banner.
I was there to be acclimated, indoctrinated, to pledge allegiance to the drag. Only I had no interest in being acclimated, or indoctrinated, or even cheering on some dude named Bird. In fact, the only thing I did have interest in at that particular moment was sleep … sleep, and the fleeting hope that when I awoke, all of this would somehow vanish, clearing a path for me to continue along my way.
Delaware County is not a place where fertile dreams are given to flower.
All of which explains why I had spent the bulk of that past summer running … running and sometimes even praying that something somewhere might come along and lift me out of this grind. I was young, and I was poor, and I was devoid of any means or transportation, which meant the furthest I could go was a close friend’s beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey, where there was enough free liquor to see me through until the fall.
The night before college orientation I wound up at a friend’s house, drunk and belligerent, pleading with that friend’s older sister to give me a ride to the PA Turnpike. Once there, I planned on hitchhiking clear across to the Ohio state line. Was I a bit over the moon with drama? Yes, I was a bit over the moon with drama. But I was also deadly serious. In the end, my midnight ride would never come to pass. Instead, I would simply drink my way to morning, at which point my mother would drop me off at the local Penn State campus.
***
Within weeks of orientation, I fell in with a small group of burnouts whose lack of interest paralleled mine. Every morning, the lot of us would ditch class, and wander over to the Commons Building, where we would panhandle loose change until we had accumulated enough to afford a case of beer.
The defining moment of my freshman year occurred during the height of February. Driving cold had forced the students indoors, and a few of us had taken to spending the afternoons watching movies in one of the library’s AV rooms.
One morning, I arrived on campus earlier than usual, hungover and unkempt. I commandeered the audio-visual room, where I lay down to take a nap. When I came to—face down in a pile of denim—I could hear a voice, a rhetorical voice, the kind of voice that one might associate with a lecture. My eyes were shut, but my bearings were intact, which is how I knew that I was still lying in the center of the AV room. I rolled over, interrupting a class in mid-session. A dozen students sat huddled around me in a horseshoe curve. A lone moderator stood at the fore. I sat up. I gathered my belongings. I made a beeline for the door.
***
A week after the spring semester ended, my father and I got into a vicious argument. We had been fighting almost daily—loud and vile, tooth and bone. It was during one of these arguments, at a point when the two of us very nearly came to blows, that my father opened the front door and invited me to leave. And so I did.
I left behind a rambling letter that placed the brunt of the ordeal on me. This was my father’s house, I reasoned, and so long as I was living in it, I had to abide by his rules. Skipping town was a good move, the right move, a move I should have made immediately after I had graduated high school. The only thing that had held me back was my own fear, a fear of failure, a fear of my father, a fear of ignorance, a fear of working papers, a fear of being out there, on the road, alone, without proper means or understanding; a fear of all the cautionary tales I had been fed over the years; a fear of how cold and cruel and stark-raving mad the world at large could become. This was a fear that had been instilled in me since early childhood, reinforced by my parents and my teachers and my peers. Everyone was so afraid for me, but what did they know, really? None of them had ever pursued a life outside of that whiny and pedestrian and wholly unremarkable little town.
***
One week later, I fell asleep alongside a set of railroad tracks, using an Acme bag as my bedroll. I remember lying there, stubborn weeds poking at my sides. I remember thinking if I could just lay low until the break of day, I might be able to keep walking without substantial risk of being arrested, or molested, or even robbed. I also remember looking up into the sky, and thinking I was about to enter yet another weird stage in my young life. This would be the first time that I could dictate my own choices. I remember thinking that the most liberating thing about entering any new stage, whether it be a new relationship, a new job, a change of address, or even a school transfer, is that a person has the opportunity to start over, to go clear, to wipe away all of the shame that has built up over the years.
The goal now, so far as I could tell, would be to gather momentum, not moss.
