An Old Man dreams of Youth... The Days of Late August - 30 years on

 The beauty of the lounge is it doesn't fucking matter... i can write and rewrite the history of El Kono as the memories ebb and flow from one year to the next... to mix the past and present... working in a dying platform in dying medium, those of us still out here doing this shit are doing it out of some weird compulsion to document things, to tell stories... i once read somewhere that we learn more from the common man than we do from the captains of industry... Elon, Mark, Jeff? they can fuck right off really, there's not much one can learn from them other than how to be a horrible bastard, fixated on their own privilege and believing they are god... they are not... and here i sit pecking away at stories worked and reworked for nothing other than the pleasure of doing it, my own personal art project tapped out and posted online for no one to see... the internet may be a vast wasteland of opinionated idiots but it also gives one a chance to do this... write it all down... there are a few of us still out here spinning stories but as time marches on we find ourselves more and more on that list of endangered species... 

Life's a fucking trip innit? i was actually sitting at the dinner table, listening to a record, gazing out the back door as Fat Paco excitedly watched Jed the Groundhog shuffle around the hill behind our house, munching clover and honeysuckle, Paco had no way to get to his new friend and so he sat, tail twitching, eyes wide, a feline's favorite show... it suddenly struck me that it was now thirty years since the glorious summer of 93... christ i'm old... a young maniac fresh off his first stint selling weed, having just graduated from college, having turned down jobs in advertising, preferring to surf (poorly) and write poetry (equally as poorly) instead of pursuing some "career"... easily one of the better decisions i've ever made... moving to Ocean City and living life without a net, having built up a decent bit of coin for a 22yr old wastoid and having the foresight to show up at the beach with two ounces of weed, a vial and a half of hash oil, ten hits of acid and a half ounce of mushrooms... when it came to certain things i was always well organized... 

The beauty of hindsight... the beauty of now 52 summers come and gone, how each one brings back different memories, those hot city summers from my mid-twenties to my early forties, the serene and strange summers of the last dozen years exiled in the suburbs... and then those summers of my youth, strange to think that of the four summers i spent in Ocean City three came after i had graduated from college, granted i went back to fuck about in grad school for a year, go all Raskolnikov (see old posts) but for the most part, by certain societal standards, i was supposed to be on my way to being a productive citizen... instead i was working shit jobs and selling weed... fuckin gorgeous...

And so as i watched Paco and Jed and listened to the breeze in the August leaves it took me back, suddenly, to those days of late summer... there were points of demarcation in the OC years, if you made July 4th you'd made it halfway through the season, a season sectioned off by Memorial Day, the Fourth and Labor Day... but by mid to late August things began to thin out... most of the summer help started packing up and heading back to school, the boardwalk wasn't nearly as crowded, the stores began to shut a little earlier, the help wanted signs began to go up in every place of business, things were slowing down and for those who either lived in the backwaters of the Eastern Shore or were like me, migrant retail/restaurant workers with no place to go, it was the most beautiful part of the season... 

In the old whorehouse where i lived, of the eight rooms half were empty... as August crept towards September all those years ago the landlord informed us that the last day we could stay in the place was September 23... the whorehouse didn't have a heating system so state law meant we had to get out... my room, on ostensibly the third floor (there were two apartment units on the first floor), was finally starting to cool off after having been a fucking oven for most of the summer, as the pace slowed and roommates left i was heading towards my fourth job of the summer, washing dishes at a breakfast restaurant a block off the boardwalk... the dishwasher is the lowest rung on the ladder but oddly the most important grunt one can find in any restaurant... we keep the shit going... washing the plates and the pots and pans tossed at us by the cooks, each day i was covered in sweat, soaked by the water, sneakers soggy from standing on a wet floor, it was fast and physical work and we (the good Doctor and i) were always the last ones to leave the place... but we did get a free breakfast (or two) and i spent my breaks, some authorized some not, in the walk-in cooler smoking weed and doing nitrous hits out of the whipped cream cannisters with one of the waiters who was tight with the owner... 

The one day when the waiter and i had pretty much decimated the whipped cream stock and the waitresses were complaining to the owner i stood at my post scrubbing pans while the owner, a woman in her early 30s who basically took over the family business, was irate over the situation, Cary the waiter pulled her aside and with a sly grin and glance towards me stated that someone was probably sucking the nitrous out to catch a buzz... the owner was like what? he explained and she being a bit of a partier herself then told him to show her... she had brought a few cases of whipped cream to replace the dead stock and so they went to the cooler and came back ten minutes later as she laughed and laughed, Cary now giving me a big shit-eating grin as he walked in behind her... basically letting me know we had nothing to worry about... 

If the mornings were spent busting my ass, the afternoons it was usually time for a nap, then rising in late afternoon, grabbing dinner, though now with my friends at the pizza shop across the street gone my free grub was gone too, and then of course the most important decision of the day, to go to the bar or sit on the porch and drink... the porch was like a hub that summer, there always seemed to be someone out there drinking and people would stop by to see what was happening, to relay info about other parties going on, to discuss various bars to go to... now with the summer winding down it was relaxed, people would still stop up and we'd bullshit about the debauchery that had taken place here all summer, drinking forties and smoking cigarettes, heading up to my room for a toke, it was laid back and about the only thing we really lacked was female companionship... Elise had gone back to school... Audrey, the girl who i was supposed to take acid with and get married , had gone back home heartbroken by our hero's action, there were still women around but there was some strange thing going on, having hung out all summer the one's still around were more friends... maybe we knew that time was short and we were tired from a summer of working and partying with minimal sleeping... 

The local pub was markedly less crowded though they still had all the summer specials going and each Wednesday the good Doctor and i would saunter down to play foosball and drink $1 imports, not a bad way to spend an evening...and speaking of the evenings... they were getting cooler, one usually needed a sweatshirt as the ocean breeze blew in off the water, it was that strange late August early September nights, humid yet cool at the same time, the boardwalk now
practically barren by midnight, there were drinks on the house from summer bartenders as farewells were said, the "see next summer" goodbyes with most of us knowing all too well we'd never see each other again... it was like the big comedown off a great high, the end of the summer and the slowed pace after a few months of nothing but hustle and grind, of drinking and drugging and screwing, where sleep was a luxury and someone was always ready for a trip to the bar or a hit of acid to waste an afternoon off work... those halcyon days as they say... and now thirty years on looking back it's a strange feeling, it feels like it wasn't that long ago and yet it was lifetime... but the beauty is and was in the doing... of having trod upon the terra firma and lived (at least for now) to tell about it... in a dying medium, in a dying platform...