Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

It was Thursday night, but weekend traffic clotted the intersection of Bay and Main. One of the town cops chopped at the air to keep things going. They were already gathering, lining up outside and packed in little groups, waiting for the rest of their party to arrive, having a cigarette, sucking at the damp end of a roach. I scanned the crowd, assuming they'd gone in without me, but then I saw Bobby and them over by the windmill. From their body language, things were boiling over, with Bobby and NP angled into each other, and Devon and Erica patting each other's arms in support.

“You know he's not a practicing physician,” Bobby said.

“But he had to read all those medical books to come up with those rhymes, so that's where he got it from,” NP responded.

“I'm not paying you shit until I get some more proof.”

“You better give me my money, with your cheap ass.”

“You boys use some foul language,” Erica said.

I said, “Hey, guys.”

After a few remarks about my costume (“Spaz,” “Poindexter,” “Warren T. Higginbotham the Third”), we headed over to Bayside. “Where's Marlon?” Bobby asked.

The inside man was nowhere to be seen. Squatting on a red stool at the palace gate was Freddie the Fierce, just now grabbing an ID from a quivering anorexic who'd been in a terrible hair-spray accident. He shook his head dismissively These were his despised Boat People, disheveled travelers from the dead kingdom of boredom, with their desperate faces and Day-Glo attire.

“I thought you said you were going to get us in.” Devon pouted.

“He probably stepped away for a second,” NP said, rubbing Erica's back. “Plus, I'm on the list.”

“That's you,” Bobby said. “What about us?”

We got in line behind a coked-out couple. The guy had a Mercedes-Benz logo on his T-shirt, Ray-Bans covering his eyes, while his girlfriend wore Daisy Dukes and fishnets, one shoulder poking out of her sweatshirt. In those one-bared-shoulder days, it was easy to picture her hidden shoulder white and veined from lack of sun. I stood up straight and my back cracked, my lungs confused at this sudden roominess in my chest cavity. I felt like a giraffe, with my three extra inches of height, but I fit right in with the freakish menagerie around me. There were the standard-issue older guys wearing white jackets over monochrome T-shirts, Miami Vice —style, the white fabric giving their overtanned flesh a reptilian cast. Their arm candy tottered on the sidewalk with teased-out ostrich hair, in leather pants, snakeskin pants, motley-colored pantaloons, their blouses open to the navel and shoulder pads sticking out. The ubiquitous pastels reigned that year, and oversized jewelry, bracelets as big as inner tubes flopping on wrists and belt buckles like license plates sparkling in the streetlights. Looking back, there must have been some underlying theory to it all, an agreed-upon notion, but like I said, I wasn't getting those weekly updates, and in this case I wasn't missing out.

Devon and Erica checked the tails of their white shirts, flattening them against their matching pink corduroy skirts. “Get ready,” NP said. “Benji, why don't you stand behind us and, uh, let us go in first?”

I said to myself, I paid for this ticket with hard-earned money.

The four of them stepped up and Freddie scrutinized them as if mulling pressure points and nerve clusters to jujitsu.

“Where's Marlon?” NP asked, cozy. Bobby extended a manly head-bob.

“He got arrested,” Freddie drawled, looking at Devon and Erica.

“He was going to hook us up,” NP said, whispering. “I work next door and he always comes in.”

“I don't know anything about that.” He flicked his head at the girls. “What are they, thirteen?”

“We're on the list,” NP said. “U.T.F.O. put us on their list.”

Freddie roused a paw and consulted his sheets. Perhaps he'd had an earlier career in civil service. “They don't have anyone down here.”

“We have to be there,” NP said, a bit frantic now.

“Even if you were on the list, I can't let these little girls in. You two maybe, but these little girls? They'd shut us down.”

Another flameout at the gates of Bayside. We'd seen it before all summer, the broken faces and the inevitable stunned drifting-away. I followed. There was no use. We marched off to the grass.

Erica said, “He called us little girls.”

“We're not little girls,” her cousin said.

NP straightened. “Well, I'm going in.”

“What about us?”

“You heard him,” NP said. “They'd get shut down. I'm sorry, baby.” A soldier explaining the facts of war.

“You can't just leave us out here.”

“What do you expect me to do? Miss the concert?”

“Bobby,” Devon said, “I want you to take me home.”

“Me, too!”

Bobby looked like he'd swallowed a bucket of fishhooks.

“We're not going to walk, motherfucker,” Devon said.

• • •

THE GIRLS AND THEIR DRIVER LEFT. I'd like to say that NP and Erica's bond was strong enough to survive this little contretemps, but it was not to be. Shit was tense. In the following days, Bobby's refusal to honor his debt and NP's constant griping that he “need to get paid,” pitted the cousins against each other as they defended their boys. Throw in the girls' resentment over being ditched, which they probably egged on between themselves when they got bored, and it was all too much for the young lovers, untested as they were in this arena. A week later, Erica kicked NP to the curb, and Devon realized that it wasn't as fun dating by herself, so she broke up with Bobby as well.

As for my role in the breakup, I can only shrug over my misreading of “The Message.” In reconstructing my sacadiliac theory, I have to go back to when I first heard the song, when I was twelve. Melle Mel was on the mike unfurling his litany of urban disquiet—“Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge … It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under, ah huh huh huh”—and when he got to the part in question, I thought he was saying that getting kicked in the balls was on par with transit strikes and getting his car repoed. He added what sounded to me like “adiliac” to “sac,” in order to round out the rhyme, some nonsense syllables for rhythm, like “ah huh huh huh.” Then over time I forgot how I'd wrassled down that conclusion, and sacadiliac became an official medical term in my mind. On second thought, I take back my shrug. Mishearing song lyrics, making your specific travesty of the words, is the right of every human being. Getting socked in the nuts, the dungeon — these were metaphors that made a lot of sense to me. Blame society.

Every time the doors opened, the music came out in a great gust. “Super Freak” was the tipping point. What is there to say about “Super Freak”? Figure out a way to harness the essence of “Super Freak” and you'd put Exxon out of business. Flying cars, funky flying cities. That was it. I told NP I was going ahead with my plan. “I paid good money for this ticket,” I told him.

“Freddie,” NP reasoned, “I think I can talk to Freddie. ‘And this is our game plan.’”

It was over like that. We got back in line, and when we reached Freddie's stool, he barely glanced at my ticket and waved me through. He waved NP through, too, with a curt, “You better hook me up with some of that shit you sell over there.”

And so it came to pass that NP and me were the first of our crew to get into Bayside. That was my only excursion that summer, but NP milked his dual hookup until Labor Day. (Marlon got out on bail the next day.) That fall, in the city, I'd smuggle myself into the Peppermint Lounge and Area a few times, in my different costume of plaid New Wave jacket and combat boots, but they raised the drinking age to twenty-one that December and it was a long time before I got into a club again.