JUST ANOTHER STORY
The Carousel ride was coming to an end. The operator, seeing that Reggie wasn’t trying for the golden ring, slowed the ride down considerably.
Reggie pulled out some pink lip gloss from a secret compartment inside the army jacket she had donned near the shoreline. She very deliberately began applying the gloss, using her pinkie finger; mirrors were superfluous. The lip gloss piqued Richie’s interest because it was so understated compared to the fire engine red Reggie wore all through high school. After she finished a generous application, she pouted, uncurling her lower lip. Richie chuckled. With this application, she mirrored Wendy Strummer. Now Reggie too was ready to battle environment trashers and murder burger manufacturers all over the world. She puckered up at Richie, blowing him a kiss.
“You’d better not make yourself look too good, darlin’. They’ll auction you off next.”
“Not me,” Reggie said. “I’m not for sale.”
“I don’t know that you have a choice. Seems like everything ’round here was born to be sold. Look at what’s happened to the Carousel. It may have taken 100 years but sooner or later, they’re gonna get ya,” Richie said, teasing her.
“Not me,” Reggie said, seriously. “I can’t be bought. Besides, they can’t sell me if they can’t catch me,” she taunted, deftly hopping off the Carousel. Without saying a word, she sprinted towards the Carousel House exit and the boardwalk.
“Aren’t you at least gonna stay and cuddle?” the operator yelled after Richie, who was already in hot pursuit.
They reached the boardwalk in seconds. The immediate area was deserted, although down towards the other end of the strip, there were a few individuals milling about. A shirtless young man doused the boardwalk area outside the Starlight Lanes Bowling Alley with some fast-acting chemicals, while on the other side of the fence, an elderly woman blessed the beach with a metal detector, her eyes shaded by a green visor; her precise sweeping movements making her appear robotic. In the vicinity, two gypsy women packed up their belongings and rounded up their children.
Richie caught up with Reggie at a frozen custard and ice cream stand they both remembered from when they were kids. The stand’s overhead, neon sign was lying at their feet at the base of the boarded-up storefront. Choosing from thirty-five different flavors of homemade custard and ice cream and drinking freshly squeezed orangeade (with pulp floating on top) through a candy cane-colored, paper straw were special treats every kid who visited Sea Breeze with their parents anticipated with joy.
Richie looked at the sign slumped down on the ground and thought of mint chocolate chip ice cream in an oversized waffle cone. “Remember when we were kids…” he began.
“Just another story,” Reggie said, interrupting him. “C’mon,” she said, sprinting up the boardwalk a few yards.
As they jogged, they observed the state of the boardwalk. Neither one could understand how it had gotten so bad, so fast. When they were kids, this boardwalk had been crowded with families on vacation, eating cotton candy and caramel apples, Taylor ham sandwiches, creamy fudge and salt water taffy. They had personally played harmless games of chance, like the ten cent betting wheels or the fishing pond, and had won worthless but coveted prizes such as key chains shaped like New Jersey, colorful combs the length of a ruler and the width of a wallet, or plastic back-scratchers, shaped like monkeys’ paws.
All of that had changed. Now, there was a biker bar by the forsaken tea cups ride. Young men with beepers stood guard outside the lone remaining arcade. The “Merchant of Venice” boat ride, which had taken would-be Venetians on a half-hour tour through man-made canals (that weaved in and out underneath the boardwalk and out to the piers over the ocean), was dry; replica gondolas were stacked on top of each other like poker chips waiting to be tossed onto the table during the next boardwalk redevelopment project bluff. Most, if not all, of the food stands were closed although the circle-shaped Howard Johnson’s restaurant at the far end of the boardwalk, the only one Richie had ever seen without the traditional orange roof, looked as if it might be open for business. Only a few of the kiddie rides remained, and if they functioned the way the young men who operated them looked, no parent would let their child on them anyway. The attractions for grown-ups had fared no better. For instance, it appeared to Richie that the “Leap of Faith” rollercoaster required precisely that from anyone who was brave enough to climb on board.
Eventually, at the end of what was considered to be Sea Breeze proper, where the smaller borough of Sea Breeze By-the-Sea began, they reached The Sand Dunes–the last of the old hotels built around the time of the 1939 World’s Fair. It was in this hotel’s elegant restaurant, The Rainbow Room, that their parents, and countless couples on their honeymoons from all over New York, New Jersey and New England, saw Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Xavier Cugar, Mario Lanza, and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons perform every summer. With those days long gone, The Sand Dunes was completely dark except for one faintly lit room on the top floor. As overcast clouds darkened the afternoon sky, the room began to glow.
“Look,” Richie said, pointing to the lighted room and the shadow he thought he saw, barely moving inside.
“What?” Reggie asked, preoccupied with her own thoughts.
“Nothing. I thought I saw someone up there,” Richie said, still pointing towards the top floor of the hotel.
“I doubt it,” Reggie said. “I think everyone has cleared out of this place.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Richie said, still looking towards the top floor, but afraid of what he might see. “Maybe we should too.”
“Agreed,” Reggie said, stealing a quick glance towards the top floor of The Sand Dunes.
Richie looked at Reggie and considered the changes in her appearance; gone was the high school girl. A striking young woman had emerged with a longer and leaner look. He considered her in light of their immediate surroundings and hypothesized that she was representative of a new breed of Kewpie Doll, unlike the traditional ones won on boardwalk concession stands. They weren’t freely handed over just for swinging a mallet and ringing a bell. These life-size Kewpie Dolls could not be so easily acquired because they were top-of-the-line; uncommonly strong; vulnerable–as all women are–but totally righteous, at all cost. After years of being surrendered as prizes, they refused to be exchanged for arcade tokens or brainless feats of valor. In fact, they had emerged to demand payment in-kind for all those years they spent languishing on amusement park concession stand shelves and inside pawn shop glass booths.
“What?” Reggie asked, noticing his fixed gaze.
“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s get outta here.”
Holding hands, they exited the boardwalk, making use of a nearby ramp. They proceeded around the back of a defunct souvenir shop to make their way back to the train station.
Turning the corner, they encountered a tiny Hispanic man, with slicked-back hair, urinating up against the shop’s back wall. Plastered all over the structure above him, along with similar types of poster-ads, were huge poster-ads of Tiranna. Six feet-tall and three feet-wide, they touted the release of a collection of her hit songs. Tiranna looked glamorous, with beautifully styled hair and intricate make-up. She wore a body-hugging, black mini-dress that accentuated every curve. She was bent forward and her mouth was wide open. She looked positively elated. Her body exuded confidence. The poster-ad’s teaser read: “THERE’S NO COMPARISON TO THIS CHILD’S BODY…OF WORK.”
As the Hispanic man craned his neck upward and moved in closer to the wall, he splattered urine on himself. He didn’t seem to mind. Swaying enthusiastically as he relieved himself, perhaps consciously imitating one of Tiranna’s dance moves, he crooned, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh-whoa-oo, sweet child of mine.”
They hurried by the man, who didn’t notice them passing behind. They walked up the street about one hundred yards, reaching a spot below some overgrown trees where the boardwalk was just about completely out of sight.
“Look,” Reggie said, pointing to a darkened Carousel House. “I guess the old man wasn’t kidding.”
“No. I didn’t think he was,” Richie said, surveying the shoreline.
“Everything looks so dark and deserted,” Reggie offered.
“Everything but that,” Richie said, pointing towards the room on the top floor of The Sand Dunes, where they both clearly saw a shadow moving about.
From where he was now standing, it occurred to Richie that the shadow had a pretty good view of every part of the boardwalk.
“What happened to this place?” Richie asked.
“C’mon. Let’s get moving,” Reggie stated, turning her back to The Sand Dunes. She took a few steps forward. Turning around and seeing that Richie was still entranced by the seaside sights before him, she grabbed him by his good shoulder and spun him around.
With some urgency, she wrapped her lips around his, effectively surrounding his cherished childhood memories in pink lip gloss and, at the count of three, exploded them into a million pieces.
END OF CHAPTER 22 OF ACROSS THE BORDERLINE, EDGEWISE