Two shore holidays passed within the last eight days, and all the full time residence of the Jersey shore (The Mainlanders for we live on the continent, not the islands next to it) celebrated in their way, barbeques, and pool parties, avoiding the beach for the last time this summer. It begins our new year whether we are Jewish, Catholic, Hindi or Atheist.
These special dates have meaning and religious significance that is unmeasured else where in New Jersey or maybe even the United States.
On Sunday August 31st I cracked open two Murphy’s Stouts for me, and a California Chardonnay for Tink. She let me grill a Porterhouse to celebrate Return to Uni Day. The date when most of the college students, who have been partying every night – weekdays and weekends – at the shore, return to some institute of higher drinking, excuse me, I mean thinking. The loss of the walking polluted is to be celebrated with solemn silence, so we know they have really left.
As Pam was already with her Mom in New York, I never saw the other side of Return to Uni Day. The one where families suffer the anxiety of separation, if I had, I would have worried more about when they gather at the on campus fraternities, playing shot games and birthday drinking. I’ll rant about that another day.
Walking the boards at night will no longer involve the loud thump of the bass to signal the tribal message that temporary mating selections can be found here. Like we used to hear at the baseball games, “Get ya beeer heere.” The drums say to guys, “She’s in here, as near as a leer. So if you’re not queer, get in here.”
Since I’m not a girl, I can’t say what the bass means to them, but Tink doesn’t like the loud noise. At least that’s what she tells me. She is vocal about past experiences in the butcher shops at the shore, standing around as if she were Prime USDA choice and being ogled by guys with just enough brains to figure out the tab and a tip, with a pocket calculator. She became a professional wing girl. At least that’s what she tells me.
Shore bars filled to overflowing with girls wearing tank tops and minis. Hanging from their pierced umbilicus is scrollwork that could adorn the front door of the British Parliament. They have filigree on the crest of their buttocks that look like the logo for a Harley Davidson. The posture and demeanor says they’ll offer a test drive. The tank tops allow you to view the artwork coming and going.
The pitch and height of their shoes could give nosebleeds to a Sherpa guide. Like that 50’s song “Yak-kitty-Yak, thongs T-ed up their back.” This can’t be just the generation gap, it must be something more cosmic that rankles my sense of oy vey, or is it my feng shui? Remember when it was considered evil to give someone a wedgie? Now it’s girlish fashion.
The boards at Belmar across Ocean Ave. form a backrest for the drunk, high or romantic ones that actually attempt to talk first. They loll back and slur soft nothings or yell to their partner as if he or she is deaf or not paying attention or is across the Atlantic but requires their urgent communication. The scary part is they are less than a foot apart and they can’t see or hear each other, and one is going to climb in a car and drive them home or to a room.
You try not to listen, but most of the time you can’t help but hear. When you do, you wish you hadn’t. It’s fair, as the punishment fits the crime of eavesdropping. He wants to do what with which??? And you’re willing??? Sometimes even though I’m a doctor, the anatomic possibilities exceed my comprehension.
The ones who aren’t communicating via verbal signs, are using physical signals to get their message across. Lingual tonsil exams. Messages, oh my god, or are they massages. Kneading of secondary sexual organs, chest and buttocks, not to mention the ever popular, but not so subtle, groin rub; they should really get a room.
Someone who was lucky faster than them probably already occupies their room. Gives new meaning to the expression “the early bird catches the worm.” Boyo, that picture sort of skuzzes me out. Who knew Aesop wrote porno? Wouldn’t bet against the early bird catching an STD as well. Think about that Aesop.
Back to another gripe, they live in the rentals that sprawl over the several blocks from Main Street to Ocean Ave. Twelve to twenty people in a house built for a single family – father, mother, two children – if they are lucky a guest room too. Cars parked on the street from here to the Garden State Parkway. They hang in the streets and make car traffic difficult. You play miss-the-moving-drunk every weekend after 7 PM.
Tink gets on my case, because she went to Bar Anticipation <http://bar-a.com/>, and watched the NFL when she was 18 and 19, playing wing girl for her less pretty friends. Guys with nose hair that blended with their mustaches, or chest hair that needed a lawnmower leaned over her and asked, “Babe, you want a drink or something else. I can give you whatever you want.” Ew.
“Hey, Einstein, there are already three mugs of Bud in front of me, and a guy on each side.” She’d never say that because she is a lady. Her response was “Like sure, totally awesome dude.” Then she’d give the Bud to a girlfriend or buddy next to her. The guy got the message. She liked watching the Jets and Ken O’Brien; today she likes watching the Jets and Mark Sanchez. I’m still explaining how four downs works, so I don’t think she’s a rabid fan.
She didn’t have time for boyfriends then. She was going to school and working at the same time. X-ray tech school is difficult, lots of math and science. It needs focus and Tink focuses well. She did the same thing when she worked for me, while going to computer school at DeVry. She writes programs now, and sometimes researches on the invisible web for me, when mysteries require information the average person can’t find.
She believes in the Star Track credo “To go where no one has gone before” in a virtual – hacking – sense.
She is a good resource for a detective.
Good reason to lock her up to a long-term contract with that diamond ring. Saves a lot on salary too. Cynics that we both are.
To answer any questions about Tink’s past, she does have five earrings in her right ear, but no tats and no other piercings. At least that I have found yet, and I think I’ve done a thorough inspection.
One eye is blue-green and the other is green-blue, but she was born that way. It is not contact lenses, a fashion or cultural statement. Although one boy friend was a very bad choice, reference The Fatal Blow, she hasn’t had anyone burn her out of her home lately.
That’s fine since she lives with me, and I have nowhere else to go. I’d have to live with Lew P but he says his wife wouldn’t deal well with another couple living in their house. She can barely live with that couple occupying Lew P’s head.
Tink laughs when I get on my, “that’s not the way things were when I was that age” rant, as we walk the boards on a Saturday night after a meal out, at Brindl http://www.brandlrestaurant.com/ or maybe Vivas http://www.vivaslatincuisine.com/ or Ragin’ Cagin’ http://ragincajunnj.com/ . She reminds me that the hitching posts were meter free back then. And you had to clean up after your vehicle. In my youth every father had and knew how to use a shotgun so his family could eat. They didn’t have food stores only tents and hunting, following the herds of Buffalo – in New Jersey?
She claims the whole era had a less boisterous life-style, no television or radio, only books read by the light of candles. That type of talk makes my joints creak. The whippersnapper should respect her elder. She and Pam keep reminding me that I am her elder, much elder, but when we’re alone at home she forgets my age, and so do I. You’re as young as you feel. I’m 37 by that standard.
Speaking about age, I admit that when you’re three years older than your college classmates and been to war and back, studying on the GI plan, that being a frat boy has lost its luster. Something in my stomach churns like the generator in a turbine when confronted by someone pissing away time and opportunity.
Getting fall-down drunk and pissing in the gutter seems less romantic after picking up human body parts in the street outside of an American Bar in Saigon. The aftermath of anti-personnel devices strapped to a busboy that wanted to be a hero for his nation, blowing up his countrymen with us.
The MPI work in Southeast Asia involved protecting our boys and finding out who wished to harm them, but it also involved harvesting the crops of guerilla warfare. Every time some drunken bastard plays dodge the traffic in Belmar, I think of that humid night of broken bodies, bloody gutters and the smell of burnt sulfur, and skin. If I drove a hummer under a wailing siren, the nightmare would be complete.
The second holiday is Labor Day, and it signals the exit of the summer renters, the islanders go home. All the New Yorkers come from islands – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long, even Staten – so they are the islanders.
When the islanders leave, then the beaches are empty and the pace is slower and walking the boards is not an Olympic slalom event. Even the waves and the ocean seem to relax, with fewer rip tides. The people walking the shore say hello to each other, because we know the other can’t be a foreigner.
The line at Hoffman’s < http://www.hoffmansicecream.net/> becomes shorter although with the lowered heat, the urge to break my diet becomes less. Maybe not the urge, but the excuse I can give the BWC agent is weaker. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and it is the best ice cream on the Jersey shore, at least in my opinion.
So Labor Day will pass, and getting a reservation on the weekend for a restaurant of average quality will not be an effort in Mission Impossible.
I will finally be able to take Jayson to Surf Taco and not worry that his activities will aggravate the Dude at the next table who’s trying to talk a teeny-bopper into hero worship with his prowess at hangin’ ten. The closest any Dude from Jersey has come to surfin’ is when they get on the web late at night. And then they aren’t looking for that big wave. Hangin’ ten is a measurement of their delusion.
Jersey isn’t for water surfin’. It’s for sun bathin’ chicks with bikinis eyeing that tattooed buck while he dashes between blankets playing Frisbee kicking sand everywhere. When people complain, he says, “Fugetta-bout-it. Catchin’ mah Fris-bee.” Then he adjusts himself and with a shrug flings the plastic plate back to his friend.
The skateboardin’ Dude with their pants down far enough to see half his boxer’s, making him waddle rather than walk. He slides down the black metal railing of concrete public stairs, landing with a crash at the feet of a gray panther lady whose walker stops his forward roll. Then laughing, he pulls his pants up to half-mast and waddles off, limping with his board under his arm, his right knee bleeding.
I saw some dumb ass trying to wind surf from a boat at Spring Lake Heights this summer. Might as well try that over Secaucus for all the fun it is at the Jersey shore. What’s the view, the Long Branch train line, the 7-11 in Belmar, or maybe the scenic Tire Farms of Farmingdale, like this is the Mexican Riviera?
No this is Jersey “fougettaboutit.” We eat meat and we drink beer, NJPAC my ass. We’re the culture of landfill and toxic dumps, but we’re happy, so leave us alone.
All you cultured islanders go home and let us enjoy the quiet of the ocean as it rolls in with high tide and wipes the beaches clean. Let us sail our boats out of the inlets of the Raritan and the other bays along the coastal water way. We like our fish caught fresh and delivered to our plate hours after it left the sea. We like to go and watch our children play traveling sports like soccer, softball, basketball, baseball and football. We like our pleasure simple, and without fancy polishes that don’t let you see through to what is actually underneath.
We like to be honest. So fougettaboutit, and go home to your islands.
Lastly I want to comment on the small brew contest held at Monmouth Race track on Sept 6th. It follows in the long line of local contest and festivals, the Belmar Seafood festival, the Jazz festival in Long Branch, and all those other festivals that smell of fried grease and stale drafts.
They represent all that is bad about the Jersey shore before Labor Day. 2,000, 3,000, 10,000 people stuffed in a space meant for half that many. Food, beverage, and the music are always generic, like eating the cardboard burgers at McDonalds. When is the last time a culinary contest that mattered was held within fifty miles of the Jersey shore, exclude A.C. and the set of results is void.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s just an excuse to pack in people and sell cheap food before the islanders go home. Food that real New Jersey people won’t touch with a ten-foot kielbasa. Yes, the trouble with New Jersey from Memorial Day to Labor Day is the foreigners and our catering to them, trying to support ourselves through the winter on the profits of the summer, that we garnered from the sophisticated rubes that populate the shore on week long rentals. We need immigration rules like Mexico has and then our shore would be safe.
I have never been to the beer festival, because I don’t think I want to drive out of a parking lot with 5,000 inebriated drivers. It’s bad enough driving against the purple-gray haired ladies in the parking lot at Shop-rite. Driving in New Jersey is a competition as surely as NASCAR is. They drive as if god hadn’t invented lanes or yellow lines or turn signals. Maybe it’s the gray panthers that are defending our shores for us.
And you can take all those micro-brews and throw them in the trash. I’ll pay extra for a cool Murphy’s Stout, and a totally secluded back yard that is quiet, a pool to sit around, and Tink in a bikini, better yet a mono-kini serving the Murphy’s with that impish smile.
Today I sign the Mad, but not insane, Mutt.
No comments:
Post a Comment