Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

Randy shook sand out of his T-shirt. “I'm ready to head back,” he announced. He was the driver. That was that. We packed up our stuff.

We walked up the dune in single file, end-of-the-afternoon weary, casting our familiar silhouettes. Five o'clock June light, wrung out by the sun, sanded and damp — this day was one in a long series. We had been doing this for years, making adjustments at the beginning of the summer, fine-tuning, to get used to each other again after nine months stuck in our different corners of the city. Figuring out the next version of each other. Somebody was coming with the stuff from their neighborhood, the other guy was bringing the stuff from his neighborhood, and they collided. By the end of the summer we were all on the same page. I was already saying def and fresh at quadruple my off-season rate.

We didn't change all that much year to year, we just became more of ourselves. Where were we the next summer? A few inches closer to it. Bobby returned with a more refined version of his misguided Black Panther — ness, as interpreted by a privileged West-chester kid who hadn't read that much. NP reappeared with a more durable clown persona, getting the gestures and punch lines down, understanding the pauses and various cues that trained your friends and family into being your audience. Everybody on their own trajectory although we sometimes intersected. And me? Keeping my eyes open, gathering data, more and more facts, because if I had enough information I might know how to be. Listening and watching, taking notes for something that might one day be a diagram for an invention, a working self with moving parts.

Until then fumbling, trying to get a sure grip. Hoping no one noticed.

“Get all the sand off your feet before you get in,” Randy ordered. “I don't want you messing up my car. You know you're some sand-gettin'-in motherfuckers.”

We rolled our eyes and clubbed our feet with our towels. We slammed the doors shut. I looked out the back window to watch Marcus disappear around the bend. We became more of ourselves, but what did that mean in Marcus's case? He had a long ride ahead.

Ten minutes later we were still sitting there. The car wouldn't start. There was a pay phone over at the town beach, which we could use to call a tow truck, but not at Left Left. We went to Left Left to be left to ourselves.

Randy tried the engine one more time. Nothing happened. I pictured rust sprinkling down into a pile underneath the motor each time he turned the key.

We sat for a minute.

“Dag.”

IT WILL HIT ME WHEN I LEAST EXPECT IT, CARRIEDon the gusts of a restaurant's ventilation system or smothering me at the threshold of a friend's apartment as I'm greeted and told of the goings-on in the kitchenette — the tale of the handed-down recipe relayed over the telephone by an aged relative, the botched first batches. It is the smell of dessert, the smell of chocolate and sustenance shared, the aroma of waiting treasures, anticipation itself. The smell of normalcy. It is dessert, and the sugar-delivery system in all its guises — cookies, pies, cakes, the elaborate confections that are tribute to the creativity of the human mind. It reminds me of ice cream. It makes me gag. It makes me want to puke. After all this time.

That summer was my first tour of duty at Jonni Waffle and the beginning of my exile from the world of decent people. Not that I knew the ultimate ramifications of taking a job there, I just knew I had to make some money. A comedian once said that minimum wage is your boss's way of telling you, If I could pay you less, I would. Certainly, when I first started working there, Martine, the owner of Jonni Waffle, paid me the lowest amount allowed by law. In other words, and I feel I should stress this point, it would have been illegal for him to pay me less . If you lasted, every four weeks he doled out five-or ten-cent raises. How much you got was determined not by competence but by charisma, how much he valued your company. You can guess which schedule I was on.

The nickels added up, but it cannot be said that cash was our true compensation, especially if one considers with a cold and sober eye the hazards of the job. No, our actual reward came in the form of a much more ephemeral tender: we ate ice cream. As much as we wanted. Every shift. Whatever we could cram down our gullets. Chocolate ice cream for breakfast and lunch if I had a day shift, chocolate ice cream for lunch and dinner if I had a night shift. Whatever flavor we desired, washed down with as much soda as we could stand. The soda machine was stingy with the carbonation, making everything into a kind of syrup, but this was only appropriate, in keeping with the consistency of everything else we sold. We were apprentices of ooze, specializing in things that melted out of a solid state into a sticky liquid or otherwise flowed slowly, like the soft ice cream we lever-dispensed from a humming metal box, and the chocolate fudge and strawberry sauce we ladled on with gusto. There was all this candy stacked up in the back of the store — Heath bars, Reese's Pieces, Gummi Bear knockoffs that perspired rainbows on hot afternoons — that we jabbed into the ice cream as toppings. This was fair game as well. If we sold it at Jonni Waffle, you could eat it. In theory, if you had a fetish for wafer cones, this was your chance at wafer-cone-eating nirvana, and you were free to chomp your way through whole boxes, stack after stack, when the compulsion seized.

But wafer cones are not central to this chronicle. It was all about the waffle in there, the new-fangled Belgian waffle cone. There was no escaping it. The dust of the waffle mixture swirled in the air like asbestos in the guts of a condemned factory, roosted in the soft warrens of the lungs, clung to hair like sweet dandruff, commingled with sweat and congealed into salty concoctions unreckoned by the makers of the secret recipe. When you worked the waffle grills, the steam of the cooking cones became a localized atmosphere, the tar-pit exhalations of an ancient, stunted planet. You learned not to pick at the soft stuff if you noticed it on your arm — sometimes it was a drop of batter, sure, but sometimes what appeared to be batter was actually your melted skin, accidentally burned while trying to maintain the crazy hustle of the irons, and what you were actually peeling off was a bit of yourself.

ONE AFTERNOON, not long after I joined the Jonni Waffle family, I was practically cocooned in the stuff. The electricity in the house was out, so we didn't have any hot water, which meant I hadn't taken a shower and my every pore was still plugged up and battered down from the previous night's shift. I'd forgotten to wash my spare Jonni Waffle shirt (Martine, with some ceremony, presented you with two Jonni Waffle T-shirts on the day of your first shift) so I had to wear it even though it was soiled, covered with batter and befudged from a sundae mishap. I dabbed at Peanut Butter Chunk stains with a wet sock and crossed my fingers that by the time I got to work they'd dry into invisibility. It was going to be a smelly couple of hours. I prayed that my waffle musk would be camouflaged by the greater, wafflized environment of the store.

Reggie came in and told me about the electricity that morning. It was my turn in our parents' bed — we switched off sleeping in our parents' room when they were in the city. As soon as they pulled out of the driveway, whoever's turn it was blurted out, “I got their bed,” to lay claim, to head off any argument over who had dibs.

Which was ridiculous. Dibs was dibs, we didn't have to call it. Ever since we were born, we'd lived according to the rough frontier justice of even Stephen, and even Stephen had a perfect memory. Whose turn was it to drag the garbage bags out to the curb, whose turn to decide what channel to watch, whose turn to pick the first piece of chicken — that freshly carved chunk of breast posing on top of the serving platter with a crisp piece of skin coyly slipping off it, obviously the best piece of all, the meal-maker. It was all recorded in even Stephen's immortal ledger, and we obeyed. As former twins, Reggie and I were driven by the fear of being shortchanged, that the other might get a bigger portion of the available resources in our household, whether they be emotional, material, or entirely imagined. Your brother, your de facto opponent in a hundred battles a day, big and small, must not receive more than his share because that meant that you were receiving less than your share. We were terrified of proof of what we understood to be true.