The City is thick hot. It is the space between you and the stranger’s body standing next to you. The wind has steamed and is a canopy over Rockaway Beach Boulevard today. Hipsters are pouring off the train and spilling onto the boulevard. I’m with Pretty Boy and we are eating fried plantains out of a Styrofoam container with our backs to The Wave. I like to watch the boulevard though I don’t want it to notice me. It is all good though as I am with a loud-mouthed twenty something and he likes to talk back to the bums and the drunks: he is my spokesperson.
A woman is rolling our way and she looks like she stinks. Sick and dead hair tied into what girls call a ponytail. She getting close now and we can hear her talking to herself. She bumps into a patron of a corner saloon—this is a place that the only the true rogue drinks. He is an old man and he is mean drunk with a face like a balled up fist. They fight and the old hag screams for retribution and evokes Jesus down on the old mean drunk. Pretty Boy and I decide to move along. We walk past the gangstas coming, going, lingering, and fleeing the corners we pass. We are in a walking mood but decide we had enough of this boulevard of nightmares and take a quick left around the deli and towards the beach.
We find ourselves on a friendly street and our pace slows with every block we put behind us. On our right, the revival tabernacle jesuschrist of all saints including god church hung out a new banner on its flagship building: a broken down house with a caved in porch. We take note—and we look with our best stare.
We pass by the Captain’s house and he is leaning over his gate talking to Flanagan. We stop and chat for a few: they are talking coke but we are talking drinks. Flanagan never wears shoes and Capt. Jack never wears shirts and this hippie stuff drives us nuts. Flanagan is going uptown in a few but we don’t want to go besides his route is not direct and we prefer express. Pretty Boy is the new man in town and his childish face attracts more drunk girls than Flanagan’s former protégé Mulroney. Flanagan eyes to bring him into the fold but Pretty Boy stands off too far for him to reach.
We are persuaded to come back to Captain Jack’s that evening to attend a birthday party for the Musician—he is turning who the hell cares. Flanagan jumps onto his skateboard and with toes gripped leaves us standing with Captain Jack. We all watch as he rolls up the street with a hand outstretched toward the sky until his lithe form disappears around Holland Avenue.
We take leave of the Captain and walk a little quicker to get back to the bungalow. Pretty Boy is almost sprinting because now we have something to do and we have to at least smoke before we swim. The Victorian houses on each side of the street sag and are broken; the people who built them are gone and now the owners are the slumlords, the elderly, and us. There are houses with many different windows and balconies, with wide open porches that stretch around the entire home—they are Escher drawn dwellings—and all with surf boards or boxed up garbage in the yard.
We are close now to Pretty Boy’s place and I smell the violet candy locust trees so late in June. Mulroney has a new neighbor and he is sitting on the porch, we wave but there are things to accomplish and we have wasted too much time. Down the alley of bungalows, we sidle up to the apartment and I make plans to meet up later. We are going to that party tonight and I will bring the tequila. Tonight the Musician will play and begin the summer properly-before he drags his cello out to the sand to perform under the boardwalk.
-- Lady Gravesend
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