GINA NEVER CALLED ME BACK, and by the time Friday morning rolls around I am already out in the Hamptons. Allen and I have driven out from Accabonac to Ditch Plain in Montauk to surf. Allen surfs now, for the past couple of years, when he shared a house near the beach with a younger crowd. I am not a surfer, but am giving it a try. Donning truncated scuba suits, we got up early, eight, propped two of Allen’s boards to his 1966 Mercedes convertible and strapped them down with bungy cords. We’re relatively clear headed. The cool air blows through our heads on the drive, giving lift to the surfboards lashed to the windshield which starts to rattle uncomfortably, but we ignore it and just stick our faces into the cool morning wind. Ditch Plain is one of the best surfing beaches, and gets crowded early. We found a parking spot on the second of three lots. The scene is already in progress: bodies tanned through June, male and female, hedonistic, heads everything from closely trimmed crew cuts to ratty shoulder length blond streaked hair to densely matted virtual blond dreadlocks, the bodies are milling around hulking sport utility vehicles, smooth, muscular swimmer bodies, pumped up in the gym, stoner eyes, naked kids tanned brown getting into swim suits, hippie vans, Volvo station wagons, Long Island accents.
Grabbing our boards, we walk on to the beach. Allen looks around. “I wonder if George and Peter are here?” They usually are by now. Oh well. Let’s go.” I am wearing plastic prescription swim goggles and feel like a geek. My body isn’t nearly as built up as those around me; even Allen, I notice, looks pumped up, superhuman. We jump into still cold water in June, early, not yet in to the heat of the summer, froth sliding on the surface of clear water revealing the tan and brown and golden rubble on the bed, smooth and slippery to the weight of foot. The heat of the day is just rising now, the sun already blinding, throwing glare off the undulating shifting glass sheen of the sea.
“Follow me,” said Allen. “We’ll paddle out to the rip, there.” He pointed to a slot of foam flowing outwards from the beach back into the distance of ocean. Once there, our boards flowed out too, as if sucked out on a conveyer belt. Swells breast the beach. The sun is up and hanging now, sky severe clear. Swells roll beneath us. Foam hisses around. Air masses pushed by the waves lift us and pressure us with cool caresses. Back behind us, water pounds the rocks near shore.
“It’s simple, Mark. Just watch me. If you think you can get on a wave, jump up and do it.” It is quiet four hundred feet out, the thin crowd of early beach goers miniaturized, insignificant. Rocking over swells, looking back and around for waves, surfers nearby left and right mount their boards and hit or miss the opportune moment.
“I’m taking the next one. I hope you’re ready.”
“Go ahead. I’ll be fine.” I’m not quite, not knowing what the hell I am doing. It looks easy enough, and I figure, already out here, I might as well go ahead and try to ride one in. I mean, how else do I expect to get back?”
“I’m taking this one,” Allen repeats himself. He hops upright on his surfboard—a gymnastic trick, as you must push yourself up from a face down prone position. Allen catches the crest gracefully and skirts down the foaming face of what looks to me a 12 or 13-foot wave, angling left to stay high on the wall of water. The air cools as the wave pushes in, under then upwards to the beach. You lose sight of a surfer as he crests the face of the wave while you descend its backside. Alone now, I figure I’d better do it before I lose my nerve. Allen says there is no way to prepare for your first wave other than doing it. That’s how he has learned from George and Peter, “locals” out here, Manhattanites who put their jobs in the city on hold for the summer to live the surfer’s life in Montauk.
I don’t want to ride a big wave, so I look back for what I think I can handle. I take the next one. Stumblingly, I press myself upright, wavering, wobbling the surfboard with my quivering triceps as it begins to slide down the front of the wave, zipping and zagging. Through luck and instinct I get up and point the board down the wave and am suddenly in it, a much larger wave than I expected. I lean instinctively and guide myself slightly up and around to avoid crashing straight down at what looks like shockingly shallow water, the trough of the moving wave. I can see the interspersed rock and sand bottom where the wave has drawn in all the water at its foot. I try to straighten my body, thinking of what I look like, as if that matters. Unsteadily, I am now riding the crest of the wave and close to sliding down the backside when I catch sight of Allen waving his arm and pointing, signaling me to turn back down into the front. That’s when I rush into what is later described to me as a beautiful curve down and across, like a skittering bug across the face of a 20 foot wave. I feel the spray, warm in the sun, but the air I breathe is wonderfully pure and quiet and cool. Water surrounds me, as if security.
It lasts seconds, then I topple out of the wave in five feet of water and the ocean crashes on top of me, and the surfboard waffles, shakes. Thousands of gallons crush me, swirl about in jets, and shoot the surfboard at an angle like a rocket or a watermelon seed pressed between your fingers. The line tethered to my ankle grips and pulls. Body and board fold round one another and we are whisked on the sand, twisted. My body tumbles laterally in the foam. The tethered anklet snaps off and I am released from the oblong surfboard and I shoot away and through the surf, hit the bottom with my right shoulder and crumple. Stumbling, I struggle to stand up, spitting and swallowing and inhaling salt water, which stings the back of my throat.
Allen cruises by and sweeps down off his board to grab the other. I drop amid the rocks some hundred yards from where we entered and blow snot and saltwater out of my nostrils. Before Allen can say, “Dude, that was hot,” I mutter, “ I need … a moment.” Hoarse, coughing and stuttering, heart banging in my chest. Allen laughs and drops back into the water.
Later we meet George and Peter. George has long frizzy hair and a surf honed triangular body. Peter was skinny, with short dark hair. George works part time as a model in Manhattan during the rest of the year. Peter is an independent film director who works for advertising agencies and film production companies. George with the long blond hair says, “These waves are pretty tame, really. You should see it here in October when hurricane season is really humming, heaving four hundred feet of white water, ten feet deep along the beach. Novices go home. Only the hard core then.”
“When I first started,” Peter says, “I wouldn’t go near the water on those days. I’d rather go wind surfing at Napeague instead. That’s a rush. But now, there’s no comparison to the open ocean during a fall blow. Within reason. Sometimes a real Nor’easter still scares me. You could be blown away literally and washed out and shattered in those rocks.”
“What are you guys doing tonight?”
“Maybe going to the Tiki Bar or the sushi restaurant. “
“Come back at sunset. We’re having a bonfire and Joe is bringing somne mushrooms from the west coast.”
Sunset, orange sky. We’re there with 20 other people, all good-looking, or at least passable on closer inspection. The chicks bare their midriffs, all tawn and down, to the cooling eve, chat about whatever. Allen is talking to Jill, a woman with smoked sun-bleached hair and baked skin. She's petite and chirpy, a slightly raspy voice. I like her. She’s older, sculpted body, smokes, and drinks a vodka and citrus drink. She’s not interested in me though. She is interested in Allen. But I can tell he is indifferent. George, the surfer, long yellow hair flowing, holds court amid a gaggle of novices. He is a veteran, it appears, and the girls really like him.
Peter and I sit by the ice chest full of Budweiser and Bass and other ales. The fire is going strong as the wind blows it up. We are grooving on mushrooms and John Coltrane out of the boom box. Joe has brought some ecstasy in his stash and has been giving it out. I’m tripping on mushrooms and ecstasy. I can hear Allen who is tripping on mushrooms and talking to Jill who may or may not be tripping. Allen, standing about fifteen feet away, is talking about me.
“Mark’s problem is . . . in fact I like him a lot. He’s one of my best friends. Nice guy. Very smart, but he doesn’t try to lord it over you with his brains or anything, his education. Well maybe a little. I ask him a lot of questions because he usually knows the answers. And when he doesn’t, he let’s you know he’s not sure. He’s always saying, “at least that’s what I know,’ or ‘it might be,’ or ‘I don’t know for sure, but my guess is.’ We got the house on Accabonac because we are both single and date a lot of girls and are into partying, me probably more than Mark. And we feel comfortable with each other. Sometimes I wish he weren’t so critical all the time and negative about people he’s just met or about what’s trendy. He’s an intellectual. I am more like let’s just go with it and have a good time. Really, what else is there? Who cares about the bigger implications of some merger in the media industry? How does that really affect the quality of my life? Sure, I may make money on it, but come on! Relax, forget about it, live in the present. For instance, he scoffed when I talked about getting a Porsche or a BMW, even though he drive s a Bimmer, but when I found this 1960 convertible Mercedes, he loved it. Mark thinks he’s not trendy, but he’s really just as pretentious about all the usual things, cars, women, money. He will only date smart professional chicks, lawyers, MBAs, doctors, etc. Oh, he’ll fuck younger girls and he’ll date them for awhile, but if she doesn’t live up to his standards of brains and beauty, forget her. Plus, they usually end up dumping him or flirting with me. Younger chicks want to have a good time. Not that Mark doesn’t know how to have a good time. He’s done a lot of L.S.D. and ecstasy, more than anyone I know, well not quite, but just about. He drinks a lot of alcohol too, beer, wine, scotch. Funny, he’s a real snob when it comes to wine and scotch, but he drinks Bud like he’s some joe sixpack guy. Once we were tripping at someone’s penthouse in the city. There were about ten or twelve guys, ten or twelve girls, and more people showing up. I hadn’t tripped for a while, a year or more, this was between Christmas and New Years, and we were drinking acid punch. By the time we realized we were tripping, we knew it was going to be intense. Everyone was starting to sway pretty hard; a couple of people were on the verge of freaking out and were pissed off, not looking forward to having a good trip. What a night. I hadn’t tripped that hard ever. I was hanging out with this chick Valerie. Hendrix on the system. I had met this chick the previous season out here. She’s out here now too. She’s a friend of George's. Do you know her? She has a share at the beach. She’s supposed to be out here later tonight. But anyway, we really are tripping hard and I look around and see Mark who was as surprised as everyone else about the punch, and he had drunk a lot of it and I know he’s out there by this point, but he’s having this discussion or even argument with some guy in a suit. We’re hours into it at this point. I can barely stand, Valerie and I are pushed back into the cushions of the couch, immobile. I mean, it was under control. I knew we would be ok, but we were riding out those hours after peaking while you just sit there trying to relax, listening to music and drinking beer, smoking pot, whatever to keep you comfortable. I don’t really like acid. Anyway, I watched Mark with a girl whose head was thrown back. He was obviously fucked up. I watched him snake his arm in and around her skirt. I could tell he was fingering her. They were in the den on a couch with the TV on and music on. There were a bunch of other people in there too, but I couldn't see much. Mark, however, looked up and smiled. He looked very drugged out, but somehow completely sober. I couldn’t believe it. I could barely walk, and Mark is making it with this chick on a couch with a bunch of people sitting around. I have no idea what happened. I was lucky to get out of there and make it home that night. I slept for like two days after that.”
Jill stares at him and says nothing for a second. Then, “ Wow. I used to party a lot, but I’m into health now. I drink occasionally, but it kills my work out the next day. I should really quit smoking.”
“Yeah, I hate cigarettes. I work out too, as you can probably tell.”
Later that night, high on mushrooms and ecstasy, I meet Valerie, the girl Allen is now potentially in love with, and I see that she is, in fact, the girl in my memory from the New Year’s Eve Party at Jeff’s penthouse on Fifty-first street. She shows up at the beach party around eleven or eleven thirty in a bikini top and a light button up shirt and nylon shorts, waistband folded down over itself; I see her come up to Allen and say hi, kiss, he takes her under his arm and she stands there for a few minutes, then turns away to get a beer out of the cooler. Most people are fairly high at this point, the music is being blown by the wind and the bonfire is flaming, flickering orange moments against small white waves cresting. I have just gotten out from a swim in the ocean, trembling from the combination of psilocybin and ecstasy, dry in the throat, and I thought a dip would be clarifying, which it was. Allen and come up to me as I’m shaking off near the fire, the salt starting to get sticky as my skin dries and I put on my clothes.
“Hi.”
“Mark, Valerie. You two met at New Year’s.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I say.
“Hi.”
“The water feels great, really warm in the night.”
“Are you tripping yet?” asks Allen.
“Pretty substantially. Yes. But I feel great.”
“I’d like to get some x,” says then smiles a crooked grin, teeth peeking out.
“I don’t know what’s left. Do you Allen?”
“No, man. I took a tab of x a while ago, but I’m not feeling much yet. Let’s go talk to George.” They go over to George, who’s squatting on the beer cooler with an empty look in his eyes. I shiver a bit from across the party and move even closer to the fire. There are about twenty people around, murmuring in a kind of group high. I see Jill, the woman who Allen was talking to for awhile now hanging out with Peter. I see from across the bonfire scoring mushrooms and surprisingly x, but I don’t see any money changing hands.
“Did he charge you?” I ask her when they come back around.
“Nope,” she says and smiles and gives me a tough, puma stare in the dark, challenging for such a petite girl. Bob Marley live comes on the boom box, and Allen and Valerie shift over to hang with a couple of her roommates. After about forty-five minutes, I feel like leaving, but don’t quite think I can drive. Val walks me over to her house to get some water, we walk in sync side by side, the night above cavernous. When we finally get to her house, after walking through what felt like long dark streets but couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile from the beach, the dark trees towering around us and quivering in the breeze, lights glowing and rock music emanating from other houses, I fall into a soft white leather couch, it’s cool, and she hands me a cold beer half of which I swallow immediately. We smoke a joint which I don’t even feel and she turns down the lights and turns up some layered brass jazz pretty low and I lean my head back and close my eyes. I’m not sure how much time goes by, but on the occasions that I open my eyes and look around, I absorb the warmth of low lighted colors, shadows, more and more people from the beach moving around, quiet, the music getting progressively louder, rock and roll from the beach, sixties and seventies, hippie music, the thick aroma of marijuana drifting through and at times filling the room along with cigarette smoke, the quiet murmur of voices echoing around inside and out of my head. I look over and see Allen standing and swaying to the music near the stereo, his skin gleaming but his eyes bulging, holding a bottle of beer. At one point, Valerie is sitting close next to me, I can smell her sweat, she’s tripping heavily I sense, and then she’s pushing against my side as another person sits down on the couch. I look over at her and smile into her eyes and her eyes stare back at me for a second and then go blank. My head crashes into hers, knocks her hair down around her face like a curtain around us.
I don’t know how many hours later, people have left, the light is the color of watery urine, Allen, Valerie, her roommates Jane and Lucy and a guy named Vincent who seems to be making Jane, are there. We shut the lights down completely, someone lights a couple of large candles. Coltrane comes back on and I get up to move around a little and end up crashing in Valerie’s bed with Allen and Valerie, we’re all schlumped together but I think me and Valerie are the most tripped out on the combination of psilocybin and x, though Allen seems to be pretty far out there with us as well. I recall Allen going out leaving me and Valerie in bed, at times wrapped around each other and at other times curled away from each other as the drugs pushed us through waves, sweating then feeling chilled, unable to get up we just lay there and feel the chemistry surge through our bodies. I smell her sweat through the bed. Around five in the morning or so—I have no real idea what time it was—Valerie gets on top of me and starts rubbing her crotch against me, but I’m so high nothing’s happening and she pulls her face down on to mine, her hair hanging down around my head like a curtain and kisses me with her tongue which is all soft and warm which is interesting to me because I feel cold and dry and then my dick starts to get hard and she reaches down and pulls it out from my shorts, spreads her pussy and mounts me lightly and I feel myself go into her and she’s all soft and warm and wet and as we sway together she gets hotter and hotter and then she kisses me again and after an unknown amount of time I come inside of her and she collapses onto me sweating and we breath each other’s smell into ourselves.
When I wake up, it’s bright out already I can tell as the yellow light streams in to even Valerie’s cavernous room on the ground floor of her beach house and I smell her all around me, her stuff, light colors, strewn about, clothes, toiletries, a mirror draped with silk, a couple of paperback novels, literary fiction, a mini component stereo, compact discs laying around, but she’s not here. I can barely remember what actually happened. Eventually, I get up, straighten my clothes, put on my pants, look around for socks as my feet are cold but then I remember the beach party and that I don’t have any socks and I wonder where my sandals are and then I just say fuck it, button up my shirt and walk out. It’s cool and I find no one in the house, just burnt out candles, ash trays filled to the brim, empty beer cans, their stale smell clinging. I walk out of the house, down to the beach but there’s no one there either that I know. I see neither Allen’s car nor mine and honestly cannot remember where my car is. So I strip down to my swim shorts and jump into the water and swim out beyond the breakers and lie on my back floating until my eyes start to burn, and I feel as if I’m going blind and I can feel the sun roasting my chest, so I swim back to the beach, find my clothes, try to dry off and walk up on the bluffs. I guess it’s around ten by now—I don’t have my watch—and the beach is starting to fill up and I look down and see a few people I know, some people from the party last night, but my jaw hurts from the x and my stomach feels vacuous from the mushrooms, so I warm myself up walking on the bluff overlooking the beach, find a green path back to the street and after taking several wrong turns finally find my B.M.W. convertible parked in the other parking lot with the top down, scratch into my pocket and am surprised to find my keys after all. I start the engine, smooth comforting thrum, and drive back to Accabonac, the sun thankfully on the back of my head and I can see very precisely as the pupils in my eyes are still dilated from the drugs, and I breathe in the smell of Valerie the whole way even with the top down. I pat down my shirt and grab a piece of it and smell it. That’s where it’s coming from. When I get back to our beach house, Allen and Valerie are there, as I see from Allen’s white circa 1960s Mercedes convertible coupe. They are hanging out on the deck.
“Dude, what’s up?” says Allen. Valerie splits a crooked grin at me, brown hair stringy around her face.
“I was fucked up last night.” My head is an empty cave echoing the sound of my own voice coming out of the back of my throat. “Where did you go?”
“I hung out for a while but couldn’t sleep, so I went back to the beach, but there was nobody there, so I drove into town to have a Margarita. Then went over to George’s. By the time I got back you two were completely crashed out.”
“Yes,” says Valerie, “I was really peaking and I could not move. It must have been the mixture of the x and the mushrooms because I’m usually fine when I’m tripping.”
“Yeah,” says Allen, “I just left you two crashed out. I met George and Peter at the bar. They weren’t that high anymore. Then I went back to Peter’s and fell asleep on the couch.”
“You’re kidding.” I say. “I can’t find my sunglasses anywhere. Do you know where they are?”
“Did you try your car?”
“They’re not there. Shit. I hope I didn’t lose them. You know, I feel surprisingly okay now, but my head feels kind of hollowed out.”
“I know what you mean,” says Val, and laughs lightly. She’s wearing next to nothing and looks lighthearted, with a slight smile just breaking on her face, looking straight at me and I have to look away and palm my face and go inside to find another pair of sunglasses. Inside, I stumble on a pile of beach towels, then my briefcase with a cache of papers I was supposed to review this weekend, and think for a second about what I need to do but I know I won’t be able to look at them at all. I know I’m still fucked up because when I close my eyes, I see purple and red twirling around in paisley patterns.
“So, bud, how you feeling, Mark?” Val teases me when I get back out to the deck, puts her arm around my shoulder.
“Good. I guess. I feel pretty fucked out, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” she smiles. “You were really out of it.”
Now, Allen’s bustling around inside the house, talking about fixing some food and even though it’s not even noon, he’s making motions to cook some steaks on the grill, except we don’t have any steaks. The sea air fresh surrounds us.
“How are you feeling, Valerie?” I ask. “You were pretty tripped out, too, last night.”
“I sure was. I’m still recovering, Mark. I feel fine, though,” she says moving close to me.
“When did you get up?”
“I’m not sure. I guess around eight.”
“Did you sleep at all last night?”
“Not really. I mean, I passed out a couple of times.” She stares into me.
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