I looked over at Andy Stern, who was my buddy. We played D&D together, went way back, to Star Wars marathons. I remembered he passed notes to Emily for a while in the third grade. Was this okay? Would he take revenge as Dungeon Master? Those days we expressed aggression by siccing orcs, gryphons, and homunculi on each other. Andy Stern scratched beneath his bowl haircut, eyes vacant. What was the big deal? I didn't think of Spider in that way and why would anyone think of me in that way. I said, “Okay,” and we headed out.
It was all pretty innocent, just pals, as we dodged a flotilla of older kids skating together in a gossipy swarm and discovered a comfortable little slipstream on the inside of the track. Then she grabbed my hand and I almost jumped. Her hand was hot and moist. She was sweating a lot. I mention her sweatiness not to raise the specter of glandular aberration but to explain the sympathetic gushing of sweat it roused in my own hand. Guh. Our fingers slobbered over each other. I had been dragging a little behind her on account of my pained feet but I caught up and started matching her rhythm. We swooped past where our friends were hanging out but we didn't look at them. We kept them behind the aluminum rails and far from us. I did not witness any hypothetical thumbs-up Mr. Finkelstein threw my way. As my fingers slid in the grooves between her knuckles, I reckoned that her spidery fingers provided more points of contact than those of our classmates. If you were going to hold hands with someone, this was the hand to hold, volume-wise. My perception burrowed down into those places where our flesh rubbed together. I turned to her, she looked at me and I smiled and lifted my eyebrows, this suave tic. Then it was quickly eyes down again. Too much! I squeezed her hand twice in some kind of weird code and she squeezed back. And then my other hand occurred to me. It was empty. I wasn't pulling Reggie out of traffic or up out of bus seats so that we wouldn't miss our stop, he wasn't drifting behind me sloshing a cup of soda, he wasn't there at all. This was no threesome, I was alone with someone else. The awareness of my left hand faded and I returned to the little world of sweet contact in my right.
We were out there forever. How does one measure infinity in a roller rink? You can test the universe by asking questions—how many mirrored tiles on disco balls shooting how many pure white streaks across the walls and floors, how many ball bearings clacking into each other like agitated molecules in how many polyurethane wheels, how many inkblot colonies of bacteria blooming unchecked in the toe-ward gloom of how many rented skates. But let's say this notion of chintzy roller-rink infinity is best expressed by the number two. Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case “Big Shot” and “Bette Davis Eyes.” The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives. Spider and me slogged through the songs, hand in hand. Occasionally seeking each other's faces to trade brief, worried smiles.
Then “Xanadu” came on, murderer. We clomped off the track and rejoined our respective tribes, slouching male and female on opposite walls of the subterranean roller rink, never acknowledging this episode again. What made her step up? Next year we went to our separate high schools, and Emily might as well have been broken down into antimatter because we never saw each other again. Frankly, I took our moment of closeness for granted (this will be a running theme) and if I had known that that was the most girl contact I was going to have for many years, I would have taken a souvenir. Wiped her sweat off my hand with a handkerchief and cherished the hankie as an erotic aid during the long period of self-abuse that was to commence a few months later (initiated by a vision of a glistening Barbara Carrera in the minor James Bond vehicle Never Say Never Again, which featured many water-themed scenarios). Retrieved from its secret hiding place, the uncrumpled hankie, saturated with Emily's sweat, would have added an olfactory component to the visual artifacts I had in my mental files, mostly snippets of Cinemax movies and adolescent sex comedies of the Makin It–Doin' It–Losin' It ilk, plus the odd stray tit from National Lampoon as I was too afraid to buy Playboy. The surface area of her long fingers would have left more sweat than the average eighth-grade hand. I would have huffed that hankie for all it was worth.
The night of the roller-disco party I decided I was in big-boy territory. Other kids in our class were doing more than holding hands, and the fact of other people's greater pleasure was becoming a feature of my reality. Now even I was on my way, having received what I interpreted as an omen of glorious high school–style interaction into my fetid sandbox. Freshman year was going to be great. Reggie wouldn't even be in the same building. I was relieved the day he told me that he didn't want to go to my high school. “I'm tired of being everyone's little brother,” he said. (We have an older sister I haven't mentioned yet—we both bobbed in sibling wake all through elementary school.) Fair enough. I was tired of being everyone's older brother. By the summer of 1985, we were at a time when if someone asked, “Where's Reggie?,” I didn't know. And it was good to say I didn't know.
MY MOTHER SAID, “We're making good time.” The LIE had stopped slicing towns in half and now cut through untamed Nassau County greenery, always a good sign. Apart from the occasional lump of an office park on the side of the highway, we were in the trees. I slunk back down and tried to claw my way back into sleep. It was hard to get a nice deep sleep going when heading out there—all you could really do was splash around in shallow water—and I endured my usual messy dreams, although the reason for them requires a bit more context:
Before we started staying at the beach house, we used to stay at the Hempstead House, and behind the Hempstead House was a small white wood-frame cottage with dingy yellow trim. At night, spied through the thin wall of trees separating the properties, the light in their kitchen was the only thing alive in the dark, the constant moon of summer. The woman who lived there in the '50s, my mother reminded us from time to time, used to have a fish fry on Saturdays, selling lunches, and legend had it that DuBois came out to Sag once and ate there. I nodded in a show of pride whenever my mother told us this story even though I had no idea who DuBois was. I had learned to keep my mouth shut about things I didn't know when I sensed that I was expected to know them.
For instance: there were Famous Black People I had never heard of, but it was too late to ask who they were because I was old enough, by some secret measure, that it was a disgrace that I didn't know who they were, these people who had struggled and suffered for every last comfort I enjoyed. How ungrateful. One of my uncles would be over and mention Marcus Garvey and I'd ask, “Who's that?,” as the eyes of all the adults in the room slitted for a sad round of tsk-tsking. “Who's Toussaint L'Ouverture?” I'd stupidly inquire, and my father would shoot back, “You don't know who Toussaint L'Ouverture is? What do they teach you at that fancy school I bust my ass to send you to?” Not “Iconic Figures of Black Nationalism,” that's for sure.
What I did know about DuBois was that he fell into the category of Famous Black People—there was a way people said certain names so that they had an emanation or halo. The respectful way my mother pronounced DuBois told me that the man had uplifted the race. Years later in college I'd read his most famous essay and be blown away. And I quote: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” I thought to myself: The guy who wrote that was chowing fried fish behind my house!
Driving with my father, it was potholes of double consciousness the whole way. There were only two things he would listen to on the radio:
Easy Listening and Afrocentric Talk Radio. When a song came on that he didn't like or stirred a feeling he didn't want to have, he switched over to the turbulent rhetoric of the call-in shows, and when some knucklehead came on advocating some idea he found too cowardly or too much of a sellout, he switched back to the music. And all these sounds seeped into my dreams. One minute we were listening to the Carpenters singing “I'm on the top of the world looking down on creation,” like so:
Such a feeling's coming over me
There is wonder in most everything I see
Not a cloud in the sky
Got the sun in my eyes
And I wont be surprised if it's a dream
Everything I want the world to be
Is now coming true especially for me
And the reason is clear
It's because you are here
You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen
Every time Karen Carpenter moved her mouth it was like the lid of a sugar bowl tinkling open and closed to expose deep dunes of whiteness. Then the next song would send my father's fingers to the preset stations and we were knee-deep into police brutality, the crummy schools, the mechanistic cruelty of city hall. The playlist of the city in those days was headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpurs shot to death by cops, Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs. On WLIB, they played the black Top 40, and the lyrics went like this:
What I want to know is
When are we going to have our day of justice
These white people think they can kill us in our homes
Cant walk down the street
Without some cracker with a baseball bat
Trying to murder us
Murder our children, our future
When are we going to have our day?
My father announced his approval by singing along or muttering “That's just common sense,” depending on the song or stump speech. Is it any wonder my dreams were troubled? Ease and disquiet weaved in and out of reception, chasing each other down, two signals too weak to be heard for more than a few moments.
My father shut off the radio once we hit the manic nowhere that was East End radio, where ads for car dealerships and ladies' night at the latest one-season wonder duked it out between last month's hits. Ads for places we never went, services we never needed rendered. At the opening of summer, the words of the local DJs and merchants were cinder blocks, rebar, I beams, and bit by bit the edifice of the summer world rose from the dirt. Avoid the fender-bender on Stephen Hands Path, red flag at Mecox Beach, no swimming. With every mention of a landmark, that place came into being after nine months of banishment by the city. The words from the radio said, Stephen Hands Path exists again, Mecox Beach exists again, pulled out of mothballs, and even the tide itself has been conjured back to the shores. For we have returned.
We ditched Route 27 and cruise control and weaved down Scuttlehole Road, zipping past the white fencing and rusting wire that held back the bulging acres at the side of the road. I smelled the sweetly muddy fumes of the potato fields and pictured the corn stalks in their long regiments. My mother said, “That sweet Long Island corn,” as she always did. Reggie had been farting for the last five minutes while pretending to be asleep. My feet scrabbled under the front seat in anticipation. Almost there. We slowed by the old red barn at the turnpike and made the left. From there to our house was like falling down a chute, nothing left to do but prepare for landing.
I kept my eyes closed. A few years earlier, I would have been panting at this point, up on my knees at the window and whipping my tail at the prospect of returning to Sag Harbor. I was beyond that—anything I could have seen here was not part of summer in a true sense, just a bit of warming up. I pictured what was outside and trees and houses in gray silhouette scrolled by, the featureless, unremarkable spots I had no connection to. The gray was interrupted by places that glowed, charged in my mind by association. The charred, heaped remains of that double-wide that burned down a few seasons back—we saw the fire, rubbernecking on the way to Caldor one afternoon. The dump, expeditions to which always had me and Reggie run-walking to the Dumpsters before the over-full bags broke open. Sometimes we pushed our luck, putting off a visit to the dump during a hot spell, and writhing maggots drizzled on our sneakers.
The glowing places were previews to the main attraction, previews most definitely, because some of them had ratings. Mashashimuet Park, Rated G for General Audiences, home to the only really good playground for miles, where Reggie and I and the crew had jumped, dangled on bars, and chased one another until we were sick, vomiting Pop Rocks and cola. There was also the PG part of Mashashimuet, the scrabbly baseball field, where the boys of my sister's age group had had a few mini race wars a few years back—black city kids versus white town kids over loitering rights to dirt and burrs. Then the turn at the pond and another hundred yards to the House on Otter Pond, Rated R restricted, as it was one of my parents' haunts, where they went out to eat without us and drank and did adult stuff. And on past the graveyard, the biggest coming attraction of all, rated I for Inevitable, where custom called for you to hold your breath as you passed, no matter what age you were, lest a spirit enter your open mouth. Or so it was said.
ONE SMALL ASIDE ON MOVIE PREVIEWS, more or less germane: our local movie palace was the Olympia on 107th and Broadway, chronic matinee destination for Reggie and me, and sometimes Friday night, too, when we had no other plans, which was more frequent than we liked. Site of what little hanging out we did that year, Hangover Central, a place to recover from the weeklong bender of misfitry that was our high-school experience thus far. The Olympia had survived the bad run that was the lot of uptown theaters in the '70s, when critters of insect and rodent descent often jumped into your lap for a little popcorn and the back rows were lost in the oily fog of cheap, laced cheeba. The real grimy joints had banks of phone booths in the lobby, old-school sliding doors and everything, so you could make a deal or a plea during the slow parts, and the worst characters were always diddling the coin slots with their fingers after that crucial dime.
The Olympia had a new marquee of hot-pink neon and new seats with red upholstery, but was still beset by a few gremlins. Management couldn't get the curtains going. First came the crackling of the speakers, and then we watched as the No Smoking/No Crying Babies messages and the first half of the previews played out on the stalled, crimson curtain in front of the screen. The ruffled images continued until the audience's invective grew loud enough that the projectionist or whatever multitasking character up there in the booth hit the switch and the curtain creaked apart. Every time. A couple of years earlier and you would have been bracing yourself for the volley of bullets aimed at the white slot of the booth, no joke.
The curtains always bugged me, apart from the obvious way they bothered everyone else. The curtains were just wrong in there, considering the dingy exploitation fare we had paid to see, the slasher flicks, the low-budget pyrotechnics of time-traveling Terminators.It was a sentimental relic of the time when people came to the Olympia for the stage spectacles of a kinder, classier age, and had no place in our lives. As a former twin, I liked things separate. You are there, me over here. Be nostalgic for the old days, but do it over there on your own time. Right here is the way things are now. We're trying to watch a movie.
WE DROVE PAST the weathered and splitting shingles of the old houses on Jermain Avenue and Madison Street, and the empty porches that referred to conversations long past or yet to come, never now, then the quiet plot that was Pierson High School, where no soul was ever seen, as if to aid in the illusion that the town was switched off when we weren't around. Those of a narcissistic bent could find such proof in any old place, everything was a prop if you wanted it to be, the beaches, Main Street, the sky, all of it gathering dust and waiting for your animating grace.
We stopped, which meant that my father was waiting f
or an opening to cross Route 114, and then we were rolling down Hemp-stead, the official start of our hood. Official—the book said so. We had this book, Guide to Sag Harbor: Landmarks, Homes & History, which we kept handy by the couch, for visitors I suppose, except that the only people who ever visited were other summer people, so we might as well have been displaying a pamphlet called An Illustrated Guide to Your Own Damn Hand. The book had a nice map of the village in it, tucked in between chronicles of the whaling boom and florid salutes to the quaint architecture, and we knew where our neighborhood began because that's where the map ended. The black part of town was off in the margins.
Hempstead was where the houses started to have names, with stories and histories attached. “That's the Grables,” “That's the Huntingtons,” even if the Grables and Huntingtons had sold off years ago. If I didn't know the people, I populated the houses using stories I'd heard, drawing material from the inflections of the speaker and the reactions of the listeners. The patriarch or numberone son of the Franklin House, for example, was surely a skirt-chasing horndog, if my hoard of random intel was any indication. Call: “Then Bob Franklin walked in with this young little gal who looked country as hell, with that big hair like they're wearing these days and skirt up so high so everybody could get a look at her stuff.” Response: Shaking of heads, sliver of a smile.
Past Yardley Florist, whose greenhouses were visible from our old tree house. Our old tree house, which consisted of two pieces of rotting plywood lying in the dirt and three nails in the dead bark of an oak tree, was actually an ex–tree house, staked out by older kids years earlier, then abandoned. Maybe it had never been more than the idea of a tree house, an afternoon's fancy. But we had come upon it one day in the woods and decided it had been a home to adventure and we would make it so again. We were always coming upon paths made by those who had come before us, retracing their discoveries and mistakes. We told each other, some more wood, some nails pilfered from a jar in somebody's basement, and we'd make it into a real hideout. We hadn't been near it in years.