Me and my friends instantly hated "Baywatch" the very first time we saw it, even though David Hasselhoff was the "King of Cheese" back in the day for this crazy show about his talking police car (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series), and his status as a "rock star" in Germany (http://chicagolampoon.blogspot.com/2011/10/germanys-perplexing-love-affair-with.html), but it gained cult status in our 80s-era dorm rooms filled with horny teenagers who played drinking games every time there was a run on the beach filmed in slow motion with a girl in a tight red bathing suit. It sucked, but so did most of pop culture. Who fucking cares?
We humped a grind over every summer like any other east coast kid trying to make a buck for school and living expenses, and to get out of our mother's collective hairs. The kids from Long Island did clam-digging over the summers for work, plus surfing, boarding, and skate-boarding that became rollerblading with the next "fitness" craze. My family had long aborted our annual trips to LBI as too expensive, though occasionally a relative might rent a house, but with our clash in cultures, it wasn't worth going to yet another house full of crazy people.
My Brooklyn friends did what any other kid from the 'hood does: they took the train out to the beach. After I graduated, started my career, and transitioned to my own work full-time, I found myself in a similar situation: broke, alone, and wanting to hit the beach. I lived in the fourth floor of a 120 year-old walk-up in the Slope, and after I ordered a boogie-board for cheap online, I hooked up with some of my training partners in BJJ at the Far Rockaways boarder's beach, no swimmers allowed. It was a good fit for us, because we could use our mandatory rash guard shirts that we used for no-gi classes to surf with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_wrestling), which gave us more exercise that was different from our main sport. Well, not mine.
They were blown away by some "white" middle-aged female rolling with the boys as a part of my MMA training, then hitting the beach like a native, and it was easy to see why. The beaches of Brooklyn and Queens had been home to hardcore ghettos for a hundred years, despite the kitschy faded glory of Coney Island that attracted dykes, misfits, and trendy hipsters looking for retro "art fag" design spaces on the cheap, but they learned. White kids from out-of-town always do. After dark, our beaches became some of the worst neighborhoods in all of the five boroughs, definitely not some fake SoCal paradise from t.v., not that I believed any of the hype I saw on t.v. anymore.
You see, in response to a "tidy whitey" Manhattan that catered to rich foreign diplomats and the local ethnic population serving them, we were supposed to retain a foothold in our culture on our teacher/social worker/publishing salaries that mandated we live as far away from our now over-priced native homes as possible. Makes sense, no? No, it didn't. But, rich white men hate looking at "depressing" project people who are passed out on a subway grating. It's, also, like, really hard on your shoes, too! So, the "powers that be" ruined our fair city in a few short years through some of the worst, most corrupt urban-planning to ever happen on planet earth, changing the landscape of our city from a great trading center with gorgeous waterways to a depressing hellhole that you couldn't walk through without an escort.
Coney became infamous for murders under the boardwalk and floating bodies washed up on the beach, as Jersey spiraled down into dysfunction with an annual epidemic of dirty hypodermic needles dumped carelessly into our waters, some of them infected with HIV and AIDS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_Tide), through the evil immorality of "healthcare" businesses looking to make a quick buck off the backs of a downtrodden and exhausted sick people. It was doubly worse for an elderly population that still remembered with great fondness Steeplechase rides at the beach during sunset, cotton candy with their loved ones, and the novelty of an electric Ferris Wheel that lit up at night to illuminate the sand with its many colors, as fireworks exploded in the background of another day in a public urban paradise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steeplechase_Park).
Sure, it was hard working the daily grind in a city of strangers, but so what? We had everything we needed in a quick bus ride or train stop away, but then it changed drastically. A disenfranchised people who never had any real comfort with swimming in our rougher waters were pushed out to the beaches, as a cruel reminder of a place they knew they didn't belong. My Filipino training partner was horrified by the early murkiness of our summer Atlantic Ocean, because he grew up in the tropics. Uh, this ain't that, homeboy. Ditto for my sparring partner from Korea. Are there animals under the surface? Uh, yeah, girlfriend. She preferred to stay on the beach while I body-surfed the waves like an otter fishing in its home waters, because I am.
Slowly, we came back after many years away, and so did our town. We brought to it all of our experienced know-how about social justice and real public change, just like we said we would to each other all those years ago, as we sat in spare, dirty, broken-down rooms; drunk, high, scared, and often alone. Never again. That's what we thought then, and that's what happened, as I fought my own battles in middle-age through the corrupt court systems of the city and country.
I see you, muthafuckas. I take pictures, and I document, document, document. You can, too, because it works. That's how we bring back the world, people: one beach at a time, block-by-block—or lot-by-lot, like my good folks of the "Stop Anellotech" movement in Rockland County fighting Big Pharma and Big Corporate Petrochemical—because this city and this land is ours by our collective birth rights, and not yours, so give it back. Now is the time.
