Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

“Marlon's working that night,” NP said, “I already checked. I'm not worried.”

I NEVER TRIED TO GET IN. My daily routine already generated plenty of embarrassment — why get greedy? But as August got closer, I fixated on the concert, drawing up plans for one, determined sortie. Not being particularly tall, and possessing a prepubescent mien I found impossible to shake, my idea was to wear some preppie camouflage to help me fit in with the stream of East End swells — no mummy-bandage Chuck Taylors or Flipper T-shirt — and hold my advance-purchase ticket as if it were identity papers at a border crossing. Since I'd come over time to believe that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say, I tended to mumble or talk fast in an attempt to help people more easily ignore me, so I practiced adamant phrasings of facts like “I bought this ticket” and “I paid money for this ticket.” I also crossed my fingers that the no-doubt-complicated refund process represented a bureaucratic hassle the bouncer didn't want to get involved in. That's all I had going.

The night before the concert, I walked up to Bobby's to begin the hunt. A normal person would've picked me up at my house, but Bobby, like so many before him, was lost in the moral fog of first-car ownership. Apparently I have issues in this area — why did a change in circumstance mean a change in character? It seemed a brand of weakness. His recent promotion probably had something to do with it. He'd been kicked upstairs, from Little Bobby to just Bobby. Given the strict hierarchy of age classes out in Sag, nomenclature problems arose from time to time. If kids in two different age groups had the same name then, logically, one was Little and one was Big. Big Bobby was in my sister's group, a few years older than us. Since his day of birth, our Bobby had been saddled with the Little sign hanging around his neck.

There was one easy rule: if there was a Big X, and a Little X, they had to have night-and-day personalities. Big Bobby was a jerk, no dispute. He cut in line at the video games in town, whet the sadistic aspects of his personality on Marcus with cool diligence, and was known to rip the heads off Han Solo action figures and eat them. I had actually witnessed this last despicable act, and it haunts me still. But Big Bobby had stopped coming out, you see. Working in the city, whatever, so Bobby was unqualified, just Bobby, and free to unfetter his character. Bygone Little Bobby, he was like me — a nice kid, conveniently invisible, beloved by aunts and uncles, perpetually pre-wince in anticipation of having his plump and inviting cheeks pinched by some elderly relative with boundary issues. Now, he could be a jerk. It wouldn't have surprised me if there was another Bobby playing in the sand of the Sag beach, thus crowning our Bobby Big Bobby, and this hypothetical tyke donning the nice-kid mantle. Nature abhors a vacuum.

As I passed the Sag Harbor Hills beach, the stragglers were folding their beach chairs and whipping the sand from their blankets. The gnats gathered in bobbing clouds and in the long grass the chittering insects saluted twilight. It was getting dark earlier, the endless summer days no longer so patient with our attempts to cram it all in.

I climbed the steps up to Bobby's house. His grandfather let me in. He hadn't shaved, a thin white fur covering his cheeks, and he looked harrowed in his faded blue Morgan Stanley T-shirt, a souvenir from his daughter's job. I didn't know he'd returned — two weeks earlier, he'd had some kind of “health scare” and gone back to the city to get checked out. He slid the screen door wide, smiling, but I noticed a new, gingerly quality in his movements, like he had broken glass in his slippers.

He told me Bobby would be right down. He asked after my parents, and Reggie, and then said, “Been doing any fishing?”

“Not this summer, no.” Six years ago, he'd taken me and Reggie and Bobby out to the Long Wharf to fish for snapper and porgies, calling a huddle to share his method for threading the bait securely through the hooks. “If the eye pops out, you know it's good and tight.” Except for night bluefishing off Montauk, which was an excuse to stay up until 4 am and drink seven-ounce Millers, I hadn't fished since that day.

“Your grandfather loved to fish out here. We used to go out all the time on that little boat he had back then.”

I nodded.

“It's nice to see the young people following in the tradition. I know he would have liked to see you out there, dropping a line like we used to.”

“I like fishing,” I said. I heard Bobby thumping around upstairs so I sent a telepathic blast to make him hurry. My grandparents died before I was born and I didn't know how to feel when people talked about them. I had this thing in my head where they sat me down and laid it all out, the way things work, how to move, what to be, but I'd never get that information now. Except the hard way. I picked a burr off my socks, but didn't know where to put it, so I just held it in my hand.

“That's the beauty of coming out here,” Bobby's grandfather said. “Having this place. People like your grandfather working hard to make something for his family, and passing it down to your generation.” He suddenly realized how the dark had crept in around us and he groped under the lampshades. “You're lucky, you know that?”

“Yes.”

“To have all of this.”

“Yes.”

When Bobby and I got in the car, we tried to come up with a plan. Everybody was working that night except for us and Nick, but Nick had gone to the city to buy records. (Sounds, the East Hampton music store, didn't cater to us unless we wanted something Top 40.) We needed beer. The quest for beer, with its daily intrigues, reversals, and cliff-hangers, had become our favorite subplot. How to get it, who to buy it, where to drink it, starting all over again the next day. Our tall friends weren't around. We'd drunk a few of my father's beers already that week, and I didn't want to push it. It was a long shot, but we finally decided to hit town, and then the other key places, like the 7-Eleven in South Hampton, to see if any amenable parties materialized. Like one of my sister's group, or Orrin. Orrin was this older white hippie guy who oozed around the towns, perpetually en route to or in between odd jobs and escapades, and he'd buy a six-pack for you if you listened to his latest sad story of “I was just minding my own business when.” He smelled like a backed-up sewer, but it was worth it.

“They have these place mats at the Corner Bar,” Bobby told me as we broke out of Ninevah, “that have the history of the Hamptons written on them and they said that Sagaponac is an Indian word meaning ‘the land of the big brown nuts.’ I was eating a hamburger and just busted out laughing.”

“That's funny.”

“I was like, ‘I got your big brown nuts right here.’”

“Your sacadiliac,” I said.

He looked over at me. I told him, “Like in ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, when Melle Mel raps”—I tried to get it right—“‘Neon King Kong standin' on my back, Can't turn around, broke my sacadiliac.’ His nut sack. He's saying everything's so tough, it's like getting kicked in the balls.”

“I never knew what he was talking about there.”

“Yeah, well.”

Bobby turned into Azurest and informed me that he was going to drive by Devon's house to see if she was back from her family outing. “If she's there, I gotta give you the boot, dude.” I'd just dragged myself to his house. I thought: Chaotic Evil. I hadn't done that in a while, tripping down the alignments. During my big D&D phase (October 1981–April 1983), I'd taken the game's classification system to heart, doling out alignments to the world. See, according to The Player's Handbook , people and monsters can be broken down by their inner natures, with Good, Evil, and Neutral on one axis, and Lawful and Chaotic on the other. Lawful Good, for example, described a knight's dutiful temperament, and Lawful Evil the personality of a dictator or evil king — they had an order they obeyed, sticking by their rules whether it called for them to save people's asses or cut off their heads. Neutrals bent toward Good or Evil depending on whether they dabbled in the occasional altruistic act or had a penchant for stabbing people in the back. Robin Hood was a Chaotic Good type, lawless and unpredictable but lending a helping hand, and Chaotic Evil was the banner of twisted prankster, like the Joker in Batman comics. Or guys with their first cars.