Barracuda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda

Me and my "Irish Twin" couldn't wait for our big Mexican vacation in Cozumel, because we love the ocean. We'd spend every summer swimming in as many pools, ponds, lakes, rivers and oceans as we could possibly convince adults to do with us. We love the sea; the pounding surf, the oceans' salt spray, the sandy beaches, so much so that my bro is a Jersey resident. Me and my bro spent hours in the water growing up, and it didn't go unnoticed by the adults around us. We swam expertly like fish; first as toddlers, and then as kids earning Scouting swim badges. We loved it, even when it was rainy and cold during summer trips to Maine and Nova Scotia.

Like any Acadian, our father dared us to go into the cold oceans of his youth. No problem! We couldn't wait to cool off from the summer sun, wading into the frigid waters like we were born to it, and we are. We giggled and shivered as we splashed each other into goosebumps, egging each other on to go all the way in, which we did. It was a contest that proved our sea-worthiness to ourselves; a necessary rite of passage that any self-respecting Acadian should be able to do, like fishing and canoeing. We'd learned swamping out a canoe to breath the air trapped beneath well enough to earn colorful Scout badges that we sewed on ourselves to earn that badge, too.

Bernie and I avidly checked out snorkeling gear from the hotel our first day at the beach, running back and forth quickly, keen in our desire to hit the waves. So blue! Cozumel's water is some of the most gorgeous we have here on Earth: a crystal clear, bright turquoise blue that took our breath away. With those first tentative mask views done treading water near the shore, we were instantly hooked. We dove for angelfish and coral and anything else our pre-teen brains could soak up with the clarity of our deep abiding passion for life and the sea. We "pruned" our fingers every single day, just like our baby bath-times together, taking gradually deeper and deeper dives, like we did with all those public pool trips that astonished our parents with our steadfastly devout longevity in the water. So much fun!

We pool-hopped occasionally, but it was filled with ugly pale American tourists sitting on pool stools under a giant beach cabana. Blech! They're just the people we wanted to ditch! So boring, sitting around doing nothing but drink stupid fruity drinks and babbling on and on and on, just like they did at home. Yuck! Who cares? There's so much else to do! The last day we hit the beach hard was indeed memorable to us. We'd be going further and further into the ocean, and that day was no different. We wet our masks like we'd been taught, to create a seal around our eyes that was airtight. So far so good. 

Then, Bernie made his first mask check under the water to beat me to it (of course: boys!), with disastrously different results. He came up gasping and panicked: "I just saw something!" I took my mask to look, and one quick peek at two rows of razor sharp teeth inches from me was more than enough to send me packing, running for the sand quickly. Ahh! What the...?! What was that? We'd just seen our very first barracuda, and it is one scary looking fish. There'd been a whole school of them, too. We ran to our parents sitting on beach chairs under the palm trees, scared and shaken up. For the rest of the trip, we stuck to the pool. That ocean isn't just for us. It's for the predators who live there with every other life form in the sea. Understood, and very clearly so. We have our home, and they have theirs. It's nature.

Long Island Ice Tea

A street in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island.

Like most people from around the way, families either went to the Jersey Shore for the summer or out to Long Island, which I knew nothing about. I never really met anyone from Long Island until freshman year at my SUNY school, and it was rough. I had no idea where people that horrible came from, except maybe the town of New City here in Rockland, infamous for nasty, vicious, desperate housewives with their scary long-clawed manicures and overly coiffed hair. My best friend was my first roommate ever, and she did no better with them, even with her family summers at Montauk fishing. We were adrift in a sea of some of the worst human behavior we'd ever seen, but I'll tell that story on another day.

Me and my family made the long drive to LBI* almost every summer, with the occasional stop in Cape May to see family, but mostly we went to a rental house in the town of Shipbottom, and we loved it. Long Beach Island doesn't have a boardwalk, or cheesy strip malls or (back in the early 80s and late 70s) much of anything besides mini golf, surf shops, seafood joints, bike rentals stalls, saltwater taffy/ice cream/fudge stores that also sold seashell magnets, and a few depressing old man Irish bars thrown into the mix.

But we didn't care. We weren't there for the human ambiance. We were there to soak up some sun, play in the sand, and body-surf, because the ocean side of the island is one big beach that seems to never end. When we were kids, we tried walking the length of the island when we got bored, but we never actually made it, because it's 18 miles long, which was way too far for us to go. It was magical, and it was family-oriented, for at least for my childhood and preteen years, until my family broke apart through divorce; a sudden stop with a horrible soap opera ending that included one very short, skinny, thick-glassed, and bucktoothed barely-legal secretary, which was excruciating to tell people, so I mostly didn't unless I was talking to a schoolmate.

My family tried to stumble along with our summer traditions, like the times when my grandparents or my aunt (who had money from her late husband) rented a house, but it wasn't the same. They weren't ocean people or active swimmers, so some of the fun was lost. In any case, in the summer of '87, it all blew up anyway. I already finished high school with Regents college credits by my junior year at age 16, while my mom held me hostage in her house by denying me most of the obvious suburban teenage supports, like rides to work or a cheap used car, so that her and her ugly Italian boyfriend from the house next door could find time be alone (which was so creepy because I grew up with their household as neighbors), after his wife died of cancer. 

They made my mom's house unbearable for me on purpose to have some privacy from their kids, secure that they had the upper hand over me while my older brothers were away at school. One night when my bro was on break, he pulled me quietly onto the staircase so we could hear them downstairs gossiping about money. The old boyfriend from next door actually suggested to her that I could be a hooker ("Maybe she's 'whoring'!"), or selling drugs, and that she should check my purse regularly for items related to those work pursuits. Meanwhile, his daughter had barely made it through high school, and not one of his kids ever went to college. She told me one time at the top of our lane, while waiting for the morning bus to school, that she thought she had a miscarriage. She was just 15 at the time, and I was a late bloomer who'd barely been kissed, and someone who'd also been taught to pinch every damn penny like it was my last, from my thrifty Acadian father and all of my Depression-Era grandparents; which was totally unlike my pampered, white-gloved, private-school mom, with her tea parties and petty, vicious sisters used to getting their way. I made $20 last a long long time, just like I do now.

But everything I did, wore, or said was open to suspicion and scrutiny in my mother's house. I became accustomed to their unfounded fears and wild paranoia about me, and like any good teenager, I eventually caved into their hated suggestions to become the wild rebel they wanted me to be deliberately (so they could tear me apart), and not without a certain amount of style. I couldn't wait to leave home. Senior year was a wash for me and my mom knew it, but letting me stretch my wings towards serious academia would break her "College at 16" family record, and like any evil mother from a fairy tale gone wrong, she couldn't let me get away with beating her, which is as far from parenting as you could get, but both of my highly insecure and very disordered parents were always more childish than mature.

Under this hateful cloud, I took an invite to join my mom and her younger sister at the shore for the 4th of July weekend, but this time I was more experienced. I'd been accepted into every SUNY school I applied to, and my "bestie" would be bunking down with me at Oneonta, so I thought I was set. What could my mom and her vile family do to me? I was naive about powers of destruction, and foolishly optimistic. It was the let-down in my guard that my teenage spirit needed to run free. After a giggly night on the beach with wine and fireworks, I put my mom and her sister "to bed" back at the house (they can't handle adult drinks), and then I went in search of a good time. I didn't have to walk far. I had found my confidence with men (which would lead to a late summer downfall later on, but I didn't know that, yet), learned by watching a pushy Jewish frenemy with lots of time, absolutely no parental supervision, a free car, no after-school jobs, and lots of money. She does PR for fashion in the city today. Yeah.

So, leaving my mom and her sister at the shore shack eating chips at the kitchen counter, I put on a white half-shirt with shorts and a funky hat from a thrift store in Nyack, in true 80s style, and I walked into a house party that was a block away uninvited. I just walked into the house, quickly scanned the place, picked out the best looking guy there, walked up to him at the keg in the kitchen talking to a group of girls who surrounded him as they laughed at his story, blew through the ring of them, and then picked him up over a beer that he poured for me. I left the party with his name and phone number in my pocket. It was the house phone number to his swank downtown Nyack pad with a wrought-iron spiral staircase and exposed brick walls, with a cool city job as an sound guy at MSG. Nice...but I was just getting started.

The next night, my mom was feeling good for once, a little tipsy because she actually convinced her pukey little sister to drink one of her dumb little kid drinks, like Coke and Root Beer Schapps; disgustingly sweet drinks to match her sugar tooth, with its' raging soda and caffeine addiction, one that continues unabated to this day. She was feeling loose, so my mom let me order Long Island Iced Teas at our table, the strongest drink known to man. She didn't know that, which was rare for her, so I took advantage of this opening to order with impunity. I'd been warned that they snuck up on you silently, but by the third one, it was already too late. I was knock-out, pass-out drunk.

We were at one of the few nightclubs in town, because my mom's latently gay sister had decided to showcase her rarely seen heterosexuality by openly gawking at male strippers, boldly proclaiming her lame status as a "cougar" (a term sadly not yet in existence in 1987) by hanging a Chippendale's air freshener in her car, when her and her gay friend went to a club in Manhattan on one of their rare hetero-themed larks. It didn't last long (thank G-d), but she was in the middle of her 30s, and this was the last gasp her immature sexuality had before it died forever, helped along by junk food and Valium. She and my mom were also getting along, which was rare, too, because they don't have much in common besides family.

I don't remember much about the show at the time, except that I made eye contact with the cutest guy on stage, while my mom and her stupid sister encouraged me to put money in his pocket so he would come over to our spot where they could look at him. He wasn't my type at all; he had a cheesy pencil-thin and very gay mustache, with tightly-coiled curls that were shaped into the mini mullet of the day, with a tan that was classic guinea at the seaside. Anyway, I really hadn't wanted to see anymore of him than I already did, but I got bored with my mom and her dumb kid sister, so I turned my attention to the dance floor.

"Macho Man" was now in his street clothes, dancing with some girls and waiting for me to make eye contact, which I then did, and WHAM! that was it. He came over to talk to us, asked me to dance, and then we did. My mom went back to her sister, barely noticing me until later on, when the dancing got tighter and closer, and the lights blinked on and off. Uh oh. This was a highly public display for me, something I didn't often do in front of family, because the bitchy repercussions weren't worth the few minutes of attention I got. My mom had sobered up a bit for the drive home, and then she was on us like a harpy, eyes flashing with anger, her nails dragging along my arm and digging in, because she loved scratching me as warning signs to more aggression.

"Do you now how old she is?!!" My mom spat out the words into his face while she pulled me away him. "Uh, no. She told me she was 19!" He looked really young then, too, and startled at this New York mom outburst, which was probably a lot like the spiteful guinea mutha he had at home, waiting for his tip money to put into the family till. "Well she's only 17 years old!!" She screamed it out, and by then, we had made a scene. With the house lights on, he and I looked very young, like the teenagers at the beach that we were, caught red-handed at having a good time. It was all for the best; he wanted to go further with me, and that I couldn't do. I probably would have thrown up in the sand, just like "The Uker" rep I had earned at that summer's first trip to the beach with my friends in lieu of senior prom, and I was just getting started. It was the summer of 1987. Anything was possible.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Beach_Island