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Moving On: Every Road Leads Back To Wildwood

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Harold-Feinstein-Bad-Luck-Tattoo-Coney-IslandBy Bob Hill

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.”

Day 600

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: The Season Finale

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By Bob Hill

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.

***

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: Bob Barker (& The Legend of Tin Can Alley)

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By Bob Hill

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 The Philadelphia 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.”

Day 148

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: In the Cold, Cold Night

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By Bob Hill

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.

Day 135

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: Wild Bobby’s Circus Story

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By Bob Hill

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.

Day 127

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: 10 Pounds’ Worth of Potatoes (Inside a 5-Lb Sack)

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By Bob Hill

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.

Day 99

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Prologue: Confessions of a Teenage Cliff Diver

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By Bob Hill

It is late now, 3 AM. And the coastal wind is whipping hard, creating a persistent clang as it zips through flagpole banners down below.

I am drunk, and disorderly, which explains why I am not only willing, but somehow eager, to follow through on pot-addled promises made from ground level less than 15 minutes prior.

There is no time for backing out, at least not at this point. The water is gushing from hydro jets all around me—funneling toward a drop point, where it slowly washes over the edge before disappearing into the void.

This is Raging Waters, circa 1992. And this is me, teetering high atop the Cliff Dive—a high-octane water slide that eases riders down a narrow canal before dropping them, feet first, into a five-story free fall at speeds of 45 MPH.

It isn’t the 50-foot drop that scares me. Nor is it the fact that I’m extremely drunk, and more than a little high. It isn’t the fact that there aren’t any EMTs—or even part-time safety personnel—capable of administering first aid in the event of an accident. No, sir. At this particular moment, the only thing that really scares me is the fact that I’m not positioned feet first, or even face first. On the contrary, I am positioned back up, legs akimbo, the sixth and final passenger in a five-man kayak boat.

Unlike the others, when one is the sixth and final passenger in a five-man kayak boat, he is instructed to let go of the restraints, give the backstop a slight push, and—at the exact instant when he can actually see the earth falling out from under him—repeat the words, “Make sure you bail out the second we hit the water,” over and over and over again until the kayak touches down.

It is upon this final point that I failed.

***

I wrote the preceding paragraphs almost 20 years ago, way back in the summer of 1992. I was 18 at the time—young, stupid, impulsive, and highly impressionable, living with two girls I barely knew in a drywall shack on the east end of 26th Street. I experienced a lot of things that summer, most of them good, some of them bad. When it was over, and I mean really over, I found some time to put my thoughts down on paper.

The more I wrote about that summer, the more I felt like the tone was self-indulgent, that there was either no real substance to what I’d been saying, or that I hadn’t chosen the proper medium to say it. Either way, I couldn’t seem to get past it. So I put away those pages, and I committed to drinking my way throughout a long and a lonely Wildwood winter.

I had nothing but time on my hands, time and a steady unemployment check meant to keep me afloat. Unemployment was, is, and always will be a consistent way of life for Wildwood’s year-round population (The off-season unemployment rate generally lingers somewhere between 23-25%). Local taxpayers work their asses off six months out of the year, then spend the subsequent six months lounging around on said ass.

So be it.

Above all, I learned two things by way of those early years in Wildwood:

  1. When the work is there, you work hard and you work right, and you do not stop until the work is done.
  2. When the work is not there, you’re more than entitled to fill the down time with consumption.

In other words: “Work hard. Play hard.” It’s the official motto of the Camborne School of Mines. And—for many years—it essentially summed up the way I lived.

But time moves forward, and the balance of work and play either becomes horribly skewed or you never really evolve from that freeloading asshole you were back in high school … a dynamic which may make you a big hit down at the local tap room, but does not bode well in terms of aspiration over the long haul.

***

By the time I hit 26, it no longer made sense for me to be working on the Wildwood Boardwalk. So I moved to Philadelphia, where I got a 9-to-5. From that point on, I had resigned to only drinking on weekends. I made this transition accordion-style—jamming seven nights’ worth of bingeing into several two-and-a-half-day loads. Come Friday at 5 PM, I blazed a white-hot trail out of the office. By Sunday evening, I felt more like a rocket, experiencing subtle-to-severe turbulence upon re-entering the atmosphere. During the weekdays, I was largely stationed at my desk, pretending to be the same corporate somebody everyone else in that office kept pretending to be. We all dressed alike, and talked alike, and even combed our hair alike. In fact, it was altogether stunning how wonderfully alike the lot of us were. The idea being that as a result of entering the corporate sphere, I learned to compartmentalize certain aspects of my life. Every weekend, when the majority of employees went traipsing off to their broken marriages, or their mistresses, or their porn-fetish PCs, I went out to get my drink on. Alcohol was my vice. It was the only worthwhile dalliance that my lifestyle would allow.

***

In the Summer of 2006, I made the move from Philadelphia to New York City, which meant I was no longer reporting to an office. Working offsite meant I was losing a certain social component. For a while, I thought I could compensate by meeting new people in the local bars and coffeehouses. But the more I pursued that line of thinking, the more it reinforced the notion that I was no longer in my mid-20s. Before long, the entire charade began to feel desperate, as if I was inching closer and closer to becoming that old guy along the end of the bar.

I was 35 years old then, and I had downshifted into going out for drinks once or maybe twice per month. As a result, I had developed an urge for staying out as long as I could … or as long as it took, for lack of any better way of putting it. My advice to other would-be alcoholics: Do not try this. You wind up looking just as lonely as you are. Come 4 AM, the last thing any eligible chick wants is to get it on with the drunk loner in the corner … that same guy who has been ogling her for well over a half hour.

Invariably, once I drank myself past the point of oblivion, I’d just keep on going, until a point when either the liquor or the late hour led me to ruin. A couple of years back, an Upper East Side bartender found me on the verge of collapse, leaning on a keg in a basement stockroom after last call. A year prior to that, I got bitch-slapped by a bouncer after trying to hit on his girlfriend. And, really, those were only minor calamities in comparison to some of my all-time greatest gaffes.

A few months back, just before I called it quits, I woke up naked in a pitch-black room about an hour before dawn. This was on the tail end of a 36-hr bender that included more nonsense than I care to disclose. But the reason I bring it up is that I remember feeling lost … like, literally, hopelessly lost. More lost than I think I’ve ever been. I felt anxious, and cold, and scared, and I feared what might lie ahead once the lingering effects of all that alcohol wore off.

There was a warm body lying next to me. I leaned in close, breathing quietly until I could remember a name. A minute later, that body got up and turned on a light. And for the next hour, the two of us sat bolt upright in bed, helping each other piece together the circumstances that had brought us to that point.

I remember the girl asking me what I was thinking. And I remember telling her: “Right now, I’m thinking that if anyone had told me when I went out [in Brooklyn] on Friday night, that I’d wind up in a basement somewhere in the heart of Virginia 36 hours later, I would’ve told them they were crazy.”

It was true. Only the joke would’ve been on me, because I wasn’t in Virginia. I was on the southern fork of Long Island, in the downstairs guestroom of a couple whose daughter I’d met out on the streets of Manhattan, well past 5 AM the previous morning. We had been drinking, and drugging, and who-knows-what-else-ing for a full 24 hours.

A couple of days after that incident—once both my brain and my body had settled back into the atmosphere—I began digging through my closet, searching for that unfinished essay I’d abandoned two decades prior. I’d spent the entire ride home from Long Island feeling as if I’d been barreling off the same cliff for the past 20 years. A nick here, a graze there, and yet, nothing quite so critical that it could keep me out of the game.

All of which brings me back to that windy August night way back in the Summer of ’92.

After I let go of the restraints, our five-man kayak drifted slowly toward the precipice, where it teetered for a few seconds before plummeting in a whirlwind blur of terminal velocity and sand. I felt so overwhelmed I completely neglected to abandon ship. And so the five-man kayak went skimming, skimming clear across the pool, at which point I braced myself—the lone passenger who had failed to bail out upon impact. At the last possible moment I jumped … straight left, not right. The momentum sent me sledding into a wall of concrete.

I somehow managed to limp away, despite a fast-forming bruise that ran the entire length of my backside. For a good three weeks after, I wore that bruise like a badge of honor, regaling others with the tale of how we’d broken into the water park, how we’d tamed the mighty Cliff Dive.

Looking back, I have a different perspective. While I’m not familiar enough with the physics involved to determine whether that kayak could’ve just as easily capsized, dumping the lot of us out like a crate full of eggs, I can tell you that I think myself quite an asshole for the arrogance. I mean, consider the margin of error involved; all the various ways in which we could’ve wound up dead, dismembered, or permanently discombobulated.

No, sir. I simply cannot abide it. Not at this juncture, that’s for sure.

But so now there you have it, what happened at the top of that slide, and what happened at the bottom. What follows is the eight-year history of what took place in between.

Day 68

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill