Fear… and air.

The guy swayed towards me with a dim pair of eyes and a serious line drawn across his face. He was looking past me, through me, at nothing at all. “There are only two things stopping you right now.” He graveled. “Fear… and air.”

… I laughed so hard I think I nearly cried. I suppose at the time he considered it terrifically insightful. I know he did in fact. He said it six more times before the end of the night. He said it with the pride that someone feels when they’re spawning an original idea, but it wasn’t his. He’d heard it before had then thought it inspiring and was just repeating it. Two cocktails, twin shots, and a pina colada are not natural predicates to spontaneous insight.

I think back now… I imagine he probably heard it from Dominique by the way everyone talked about him.

“Dominique is…” Rick leaned back in the wooden stool stroking the straw with his index finger. I watched the straw knock the ice around gently. “Dominique is the guy you don’t want to mess with I mean he’s a big guy, way big and he looks like he knows how to hurt people. He does know how in fact he used to be paid to do that… kind of a long story and he’s trying to get out of that now. Wish you could have met him but he’s working tonight.”

Dominique is an overnight bouncer.

“I live in an intellectual desert.” The captain confided. “A desert… you you’re smart you know? Got some… you know? Got some smarts. I like that.”

I parked my car in Mastic Beach just after noon Saturday, June 7^th, stepped out, and in the exercise I am the absolute most familiar with- began walking confidently towards the absolute unknown.

Two weeks ago I was browsing craigslist for free stuff, computer parts (Steve’s looking for a laptop, I didn’t do badly finding Jess one, figured I’d give it a shot.), and trying to get someone to buy my clarinet. (No bites yet, apparently it’s not worth a darn as a musical instrument. That or everyone on Long Island that wants one has got one and they’re all probably made of gold or something you know? Rich people out here. All over the island all I see is money.) I stumbled onto an ad the exact text of which I do not have but the essential premise involved pandering for shipmates on an upcoming trawl to Fire Island and a place the author affectionately referred to as “The Cove.”

I’m at the house alone, bored, an apparent workaholic, the weather has been nice, way nice lately, I like the shores and the sea and beaches, I swim like a dolphin and need to meet some new people anyway so… sure, I answered the ad. I heard later that I was one of nearly twenty initial responses, ten or so of which were involved in a follow-up, three of which were invited, and the only one who actually showed up. Yay me! I’m an individual! … again!

This guy Rick and I talked back and forth through the email for about a week about the boat and when he thought he’d take it out and what would be involved and so on. Somewhere in there he started calling himself captain. I lol’d. And I never lol. At anything. Short story long I called him up Friday night just as I was getting off of work and determined that we would in fact set sail with a meager crew, a worthy destination, and like… a dozen cases of beer.

It was killer hot outside but a little breeze followed us down the bay so the weather was not completely intolerable. And there was of course: lots of cold beer. I’m not one for beer really so I drank soda to the chagrin of my shipmates. Somewhere early in the trip we trawled past a man in a sailboat who obviously had no idea how idea how to sail. It was a friend of Rick. We took ‘Shane’ aboard and tied his sailboat to the back of the ship, towing it along gently as it seemed that Shane wasn’t going to be able to get it back to where he was going and didn’t have anything else to do for the day. He’d apparently already made his wife upset, and on the success of that venture, took to the seas to see what he could make of them. Now he was on his way to the Grove with us. Rick offered him a beer, Shane had one, and then another, and then a few more.

And then the sailboat unhooked itself from the trawler and wafted away. It was noticed fairly quickly, early enough that it was more than a dot on the horizon when we turned back, just after the suspension bridge that had lifted for us to pass through. When we circled around it was making for the shore so Shane ripped off his clothes and dove in after it. This escapade proved to us all, including Shane, that he was quite not in the best shape of his life. He caught up to the boat after it had been ashore for several minutes, the boat, sails down and drifting was easily moving faster than our friend even at his hardest swimming. We reattached the boat, Shane had another beer, and passed out in the lower cabin.

Rick and I talked on the top deck as he drove the boat, he even let me steer for a while. He pointed out the people sitting in their lawn chairs seemingly floating atop the water. The sand bars in the bay can be no more than two meet beneath the water at times, even miles out to sea, and you’ll see people having parked their boats, jumped off, walked through the water and sitting in what appears to be the middle of an ocean with their chairs and a picnic floating on an inflatable raft out in the bay.

We arrived at Cherry Grove, Fire Island, just a short ways from the Pines. The signature identity of this place has something to do with it being populated (almost exclusively) by homosexuals. Literally, I became a minority the moment I stepped off the boat. Fire Island is the long stripe of land beneath Long Island’s south shore. It is miles long but no more than a few hundred yards wide at its most bloated waistline. You can stand at the beach and watch the shore, turn one hundred and eighty degrees and march forward for three minutes and find the sea again. The string of houses, hotels, bars, and clubs is nearly endless, stretching from one end of the strip to another and linked only by the winding boardwalks that spider amongst the buildings. There are no roads, and no one drives. You reach it either by boat, or you walk from the far southwest end (would take days). The pocket called Cherry Grove is one of the nightlife hotspots for Fire Island. Rick explained to me once we arrived:

We were basically here to party our faces off.

As the sun went down the music started rising, the lights started coming on and people started pouring out of the cabanas, ordering drinks, pizza’s at the slice shop, and dancing… dancing as though no one could see them, as though no one cared, as though they were hardly attached to the ground they danced on. Smelling the sea and the drinks and the sugar in the air and the smiles on the faces and watching the lights and the movement and hearing the waves behind it all… It was the closest thing I’ve experienced in my life. Everyone was moving, everyone was alive. No one cared who you were, how old you were, how young you were, what orientation you were, whether or not you could dance, or sing, or move, or whether you were fat or thin or ugly or drinking or not. Everyone just cared about you having a good time. I was asked five times by five random people if I was having a good time. That’s all everyone cared about: Is the person next to me having a good time?

I didn’t dance. I couldn’t help but watch it. The center of the circle was throbbing and pulsing and the lights flashing and I was at perfect, holy peace just watching it all… Kevin, one of my shipmates, stumbled up to me holding his pina colada and asked if I was going to dance. I told him no, not the first time, not this first trip. I had to just watch. He said “C’mon! Have a good time! No one cares! Go have a good time!”

I laughed. He put his hand on my shoulder and confided, “There are only two things stopping you. Fear… and air.”

I laughed again and shook my head. “Next time!” I said.

“There are like… four straight girls in there who have no idea what they’re doing, they’re not with anyone what are you standing here for? They’re right there! Right there in the middle!”

I stayed.

Eventually he jived past me and into the crowd, bobbing up and down, back and forth, spilling his drink, finding a stranger, dancing with her. But it wasn’t like that. I’ve seen people dance with other people. And it was at this place that I discovered something completely new. No one this crowd was dancing with anyone. I watched Kevin in the rave next to whoever she was and he was dancing not with her, but to her. And she was dancing to him. As if the music were the rhythm but the person across from you is the tune. Everyone in this crowd was dancing to each other. Everyone became the music, everyone became the… the reason.

Someone moving past me stopped a second, saw me standing still and asked. “Are you having a good time?”

“I’m having an incredible time.”

“Good!” He said and moved into the fray.

There was a moment that I had to tell a guy that I was straight. He told me that it was a shame. You’d think that with everything going on about this island that there would be more awkward moments. But there wasn’t a single one.

More happened… the night went on. First after first queued up one right behind the other and I took them all in one at a time till the night was ending.

We partied till one in the morning and then I took the ferry back to Long Island and drove the long road home, I had work in the morning. I’m going back there though… I’m going back there soon and I’m dancing. I’m going to dance all over that beach. I’m going to carve myself into the sand.

It was like being in a different world over there. A completely different country. Like free.

22 Days.

Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized

Tags: bay, beach, boat, caleb, cherry, dance, dancing, fire, free, good, grove, island, long, monsterbox, music, new, NY, NYC, party, pines, roy, sail, ship, shore, the, time, trawler, york

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.