Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

When our parents came out that weekend — this was when Elena was in charge during the week — our father told us to get in the car and show him where it happened. We were scared until Reggie pointed out that the dog couldn't get us through the car. We kept the windows rolled up and locked the doors just in case.

“You see that there,” he said.

“What?” I waited for the Doberman to come loping out.

“That.” We hadn't seen the lawn jockey the first time. The little midget stood in the middle of the lawn holding a gold ring, grinning in his bright red getup. Shining, well-polished.

“That's how they train it to attack black people,” he explained.

“That cracker in there tosses raw meat by the lawn jockey, the dog eats there every day and then when it sees black people it thinks, Food. You're lucky it didn't tear you apart.”

I looked at Reggie and Reggie looked at me. Dag.

“It's not the dog's fault. It's how it was trained.” He stepped on the gas. “I want you to stay away from that house,” he said. “I don't want you coming here again.”

The Road Warrior's score thundered now that the yelling was over. I turned down the volume.

“Look at this,” he said, holding up the first batch. “I love it!” He transferred the chicken into a glass bowl. “I'd grill on the moon if I could,” he said wistfully. And Mars and Saturn and beyond. Is there grilling in Heaven? Who knows what angels eat. But I know there's barbecuing in hell, and its your very guts and inner stuff blackening before your eyes.

“You ready for some good chicken?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

We were a made-for-TV family and when he called “Action!” we hit our marks and delivered our lines like pros. The scripts were all the same. We had the formula down.

Mrs. Gardner returned to use the facilities. “Where's Gail?” she asked, knocking the sand off her feet before she stepped inside.

He didn't answer so I said, “She had to run to the store. She'll be right back.”

She nodded and went into the bathroom. When she came out, he stopped her. “Girl, you best take a wing if you know what's good for you,” he said.

“Mmmm,” she said. “I was hoping to get a piece of that barbecue.” She grabbed a wing and topped off her white wine before rejoining the ladies on the beach.

For all his fear that people were watching all the time, that people will talk about you unless you're vigilant about what they see, no one was watching at all. No one cares about what goes on in other people's houses. The grubby dramas. It was just us. The soundstage was empty, the production lot scheduled for demolition. They'd turned off the electricity long ago. We delivered our lines in the darkness.

“Here you go,” he said, handing me a quadruple-reinforced paper plate of chicken wings.

You have a fucked-up haircut and everyone knows you have a fucked-up haircut. But no one says anything. You don't know you have a fucked-up haircut, or know it and can't admit it. Until one day you face the fact that you have a fucked-up haircut and you get a new one and everyone says, Good job, as if they'd been waiting for it. As if they cared.

“How is it?” he asked. He held the next tray of chicken in his hand, one foot inside the house and the other on the deck.

I took a bite. It was like biting into sand. The juices had boiled away or splattered the coals, leaving these dried-up shreds sticking to bone. I looked at the other wings on the plate in my lap. They were charred and shrunken, the lot of them, crumbling into black specks. I chewed up the sand and swallowed.

“It's great,” I said.

THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE SUMMER WAS THE U.T.F.O. — Lisa Lisa concert at Bayside. Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam headlined, thanks to their crossover hit “I Wonder if I Take You Home,” but U.T.F.O. was the real draw in our neck of the woods. They'd ruled the winter with “Roxanne, Roxanne,” a lamentation about a fly girl who wouldn't give them the time of day. In the tradition of the Village People, they employed theme personalities. The Educated Rapper boasted of his capacious intellect (“She needs a guy like me, with a High IQ”), Doctor Ice wooed her with his knowledge of the medical world (“Dermatology is treatment of the skin … There's anesthesiology ophthalmology, internal medicine and plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery and pathology”), while the Kangol Kid put his faith in … his Kangol, though frankly one should never underestimate the power of accessories to help one stand out in the crowd. Mix Master Ice, their DJ, kept silent, preferring “to speak with his hands,” as they said in his milieu.

A young lady calling herself Roxanne Shanté released an answer record called The Real Roxanne , a Rashomon-style revision of her dealings with “dictionary breath” and his friends. Answer records to answer records escalated matters, with Roxanne's “parents” chiming in, her big “brothers,” far-flung second cousins, and the occasional bystander, culminating in “Roxanne's a Man,” which, like a hip-hop Hiroshima, stunned all involved and effectively ended the conflict. In revisiting the Roxanne Wars of the mid-'8os, I know I run the risk of stirring the deep and fierce emotions associated with that unfortunate episode, but I feel the background is necessary to explain our excitement. U.T.F.O. (Un Touchable Force Organization) represented teenage striving, youthful perseverance against the odds, and goofball personas that made our own stabs at reinvention look like genius. Bayside advertised the concert in Dan's Papers all summer, so by August we were in a bit of a froth.

You had to be eighteen to get into the club. It was a former roller rink, a kinda sketchy operation where the skates squished unwholesomely moist on your feet and the squirrelly DJ often disappeared, putting Off the Wall on repeat and slipping out the back. Since the revamp, we'd been barred. The more adventurous among us tried all summer to breach the walls in a string of legendary failures involving strategic facial hair, studied nonchalance, and some inspired business about the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It was sad to see Clive and Nick get into character and shuffle up to the velvet rope only to twist back to Earth with melted-off feathers. If they got in, it was like all of us getting in. When they failed, we accepted our portion of shame.

By the time the big day rolled around, the only person with a real shot was NP, who'd been bribing Marlon the Bouncer for weeks with the Long Wharf's top currency — ice cream. Marlon came into Jonni Waffle a couple of times a night, NP ducking supervisors as he fixed him a cup with a conspiratorial nod. Marlon resumed his post, slowly eating his Banana Mint as a gaggle of preening Hamptonites queued up for inspection. He sucked on the tiny spoon with a pensive air while appraising those before him, some nice theater that lent his judgments the air of demented caprice.

“I know I'm getting in — I set him up !” NP told us.

“Better hope Freddie isn't on that night,” Marcus pointed out. “He'd be like, Nigger, please, Nigger Please.”

Freddie was this big bruiser from Bridgehampton, known for his martial-arts expertise. In addition to working Bayside, he bounced some nights at the Reef, a club on 27 where Marcus had worked earlier in the summer during one of his short-lived gigs. (“The barback said I stole two bottles of peach schnapps, but I was framed.”) “He has this case in his trunk where he keeps his nunchucks and sai and throwing stars,” Marcus warned us. “One night Freddie was working the door and this redneck got up in his face so he busted out his sai like boom-bip! and sent that bitch into traction.” Adding, “High all the time on coke, too.” All I knew about him was that when he ordered his Orange Sherbet, he never tipped, avoiding the sight of the tip cup as if it contained pictures of his pre-dumbbell, ninety-nine-pound weakling self.