Beach Bum
We were sweaty boys in that rare American summer between wars, searching for low-hanging American dreams we could make come true—with minimal effort. Lazy boys, with the world dangling before us like a shiny diamond.
Those long summer weeks when the sun gave up on the day about 8:30 p.m., and it stayed light out ’til well past nine, and it was warm enough to swim naked in the surf until well after midnight. Then we’d stumble and fall to find our cars. We’d sleep in them, or anywhere we could find.
Wasted days and weeks, huddled and hidden, spent in a dead-fish-smelling, abandoned beach house, trying to entice the pretty bikini girls—who smelled of coconut sunscreen oil soaked deep into every pore from days lying under the cloudless summer sky—to soothe my ugly needs.
Illegally squatting for weeks down at the shore near Barnegat Bay. A steamy, damp place where the outlaw mind was born and grew unfettered and well nourished.
Living like the kings and queens of nowhere until our accumulated wealth from a winter of packing grocery store bags was gone, and we had to go home and face the unthinkable again. With a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, I could live forever—existing on Pittsburgh Iron City beer, Jersey piss clams, and cheap Mexican weed.
Small-block Chevys and Fords and Springsteen records on the radio, and oh, so many colorful and fancy pills. Trying to write love songs to the bikini-clad girls from the Catholic school and impress them with my mastery of three guitar chords—and failing miserably.
I think of sunburned and salt-sore skin being soothed under the boardwalk, hiding out in places that had never seen the sun.
When was my last trip to that abandoned beach? What day did we decide—down to our last ten bucks, enough for a pack of Marlboros and gas home—that we’d find another job and never come back?
A smart friend says we age and change a day at a time. There is no profound sea change, no moment of wisdom or stupidity where we say, Enough of this—let us go forth and be responsible citizens who vote and get real jobs and never again live the high life of those Ipswich clams and the worst beer to ever pass my lips.
Sacrifice and hard work and dedication and ownership and respectability were never part of the equation in that innocent age, before the time of agendas.
It’s not so much the lack of responsibility I miss, but that clown cast of precious idiots who lived it with me.
When I hear an old friend has died now, I’m told along with the news: he was a lawyer, or a professor, or a truck driver.
When I die, I’d hope at least one who remains will say, “Yeah, he was nothing but an unmotivated beach bum…”