It really has been. Drizzles, downpours, big fat drops. My company's new office has an expansive southern view of Park Avenue, wunderkammer Manhattan skyline against a background that turns a dark matte gray when it's rainin' time.
Sarah was turning thirty. Coincedentally, she'd been offered the Rectory of St. Andrew's on Fire Island as hers to do with as she pleased, more or less, for a week, if only she'd deliver several sermons at the Episcopal Church in Saltaire. So she invited us up for a sleepover and birthday party. We'd also been invited to use the remains of a full kilogram of Spanish chorizo we'd bought at La Boqueria to grill pizza at Aanie and Brooke's place in Patchogue. Tight schedule: we (I) agonized over how to make the transportation work, and then flung ourselves onto the LIRR, chorizo in hand, six-pack of Budweiser in hand, bags of Doritos Party Mix plus other semi-edibles in a bulging sack. It takes two transfers to get all the way out there. How do people do that every day? A & B met us at the station. On the way to their house, we paused at a dog-sitter friend of theirs to say goodbye to their dog (ferried off to compete in a show) and meet a petting zoo complement of friendly goats and ducks. We fed slices of white bread to both contingents. A goat climbed into Nina's lap. Another one nibbled holes in my t-shirt. They pressed their bony, lightly furred heads up against us, their puzzle-piece eyes staring outwards seemingly at nothing. The poop just falls out of their butts. We left and drove to the house, where I got quickly drunk on some kind of lemonade. And then I got back in the car with Brooke and drove down the road to the supermarket, where I grabbed a bunch of pizza fixings in a boozy haze: Jalapeño? Check. Cilantro? Check. Gruyère? Check, for some reason. Red onions? Yeah, I don't know, but yeah.
Back to the house. Aanie mixed the dough, asked me and Nina to punch it a few times. Back in the car, this time to The Steam Room in Port Jeff, where we ate hush puppies and I had my first steamer clams, Aanie showing me how to kind of, uh, deglove them before dousing them in lemon and some kind of cayenne sauce. We were pushing up against our scheduled ferry departure by the time we started making the pizzas -- the propane grill in the driveway, like it was an emergency. Aanie spread the dough into rectangles, toasted it firm, and then we'd dress it with a combination of weird ingredients before subjecting it to the full heat of the grill. We took the results inside and sat down at the kitchen table to eat them. Holy shit it was the best pizza I think I may have ever had, ever. More cilantro on pizza, world. Aanie and Brooke were nice enough to drop us off at the ferry terminal in Bay Shore. Too late we realized that our ferry was actually leaving from a much further dock, and so we had to run across two parking lots. "I don't think you can make it," said the teenager in the ticket booth, helpfully. But we did make it, and soon we were knifing across the water of, what -- Long Island Sound? Nina says no, but I'm saying that's what it was.
Saltaire is one of the "straight" parts of Fire Island, which among other things, means the houses are a little less fancy. But there still were plenty of drunk revelers, Kennedy cousins with gin blossomed faces and half-unbuttoned Oxford shirts waiting to meet us on the dock, along with the dulcet (read: non-dulcet) sounds of something called The Cravin' Band. Mosquitoes swarmed us as we walked the U-shaped route from the ferry dock to the Rectory, and we realized why: All the rain had turned the sand and dry grasses growing under and around the boardwalk into a swamp. We hustled over the planks, slapping and cursing. We passed an iPhone, half-buried in the sand and with a sequined cross glued to the back. At last we came to the Rectory at the far end of the street, and rattled the windows and doorknobs until Chris let us in. We were just in time for dinner, so we contributed our remaining grilled pizza and our Doritos things, and ate some veggie burgers thoughtfully provisioned and cooked for us by Sarah. We drank and talked for a while, and stuffed our pockets with Budweiser cans and walked down Marine Way to the beach. It was a little before midnight, but we were the only ones out (straight part of the island). Chris and Jessie waded right into the darkness of the ocean, the supermoon painting the water with a big fat crossing lane.
Like any regulation vacation property, the Rectory had a single jigsaw puzzle (racing yachts) sitting in a nook in the living room. Upon returning, we took it out and dismantled the previous solvers' work and then set about rebuilding it, as the radio played Billy Joel and John Cougar Mellencamp. It was after 2 AM when we all retired to our rooms. Nina and I made the mistake of not running the air conditioner in ours, which I guess offered the mosquitoes an open invitation to enter through its vents and attack us in our bed. Too late we realized that the hook above the bed was for. "Fuck," I hissed at 4 after waking up for the second time with a whining in my ear. The moon shone in brightly through the curtains and there was a chorus of frogs and insects outside the house. I switched the light on and went after the fuckers with a rolled up National Geographic, dispatching sixteen (!) while Nina used the bathroom.
The next morning, a little bit ragged around the edges (Nina'd got bit on the eyelid), we creaked downstairs and Chris made us coffee while Jessie slept and Billy and Sarah were at church. We finished the puzzle. A little later Chris and I took some of the Rectory's spare bikes for a ride down the rattling boardwalk streets to Fair Harbor, the next town over. There wasn't much town to speak of -- tellingly, the commercial storefronts are mostly real estate offices -- but we stopped at a small grocery store and bought cans of cream soda from the bored sunburned teenage girls working the register. Chris was resplendant in a Mets cap and WASP summer gear; I worried about sunburn on my exposed scalp. Fairskins both, we lathered on sunscreen back at the house and then returned to the beach. I made it all the way into the water this time and swam out to where I couldn't quite touch bottom, and let myself get rolled a few times by the rough surf. There were medium-sized purple jellyfish in the water, ominously bobbing into view and then disappearing before you'd safely plotted their course. But no one had to pee on me and I didn't have to pee on anyone else, so it was okay. Chris and Nina and I took an early afternoon ferry back to Bay Shore, dozing in the lower deck, wearing the roar of the engine like a blanket. Chris drove us all the way back to the city in Roger's antique Volvo, the entire thing the color of cigarette tar. It took hours, but we played the radio the whole way, speculating about the appearance of the jazz show DJs and trying to guess the Summer Jam -- Nina says it's Get Lucky for sure, but I like I Love It, or -- worst case -- Can't Hold Us.
I didn't really do Northside this year. Shows didn't grab me: everything seemed to be some variation on "synth" or "psych." Am I out of phase with The Scene? I'm probably at least out of phase with The L Magazine. The one show I went to was Shilpa Ray and Her Good Luck Girls (nee Happy Hookers) at The Gutter, the performance space of which I don't think I'd seen before. It's alright. Lazyeyes was wrapping up by the time I got there. They were quite good -- indie pop with a rough edge. I wondered if Bel Argosy could play a show with them. When Shilpa Ray started playing, the house lights dropped and someone turned on a disco ball effect that made the room swim like little fish in a sea of blood. You can tell the band is new -- the hooks aren't totally there yet, and the arrangements don't showcase their best asset. "More vocals!" someone in front of us hollered. "More vocals?" she asked, perhaps faux-incredulous. "I hate the way my voice sounds." Surely she understood that we'd all come to hear her sing. But the band is good, even if they're visually than musically satisfying. It's a menagerie of weird-lookin' dudes, like a something you'd see in an early Merry Melodies cartoon or, more like, a David Lynch movie: Sinister weirdos intensely focused on their instruments.
I went to 4Knots on Saturday, arriving in time to see Reigning Sound on stage, WFMU's DA the DJ playing the organ like Viv Savage. For a band that has -- visually -- a strong dirtbag vibe, they play an awful lot of moody songs about girls. I watched from a few different vantage points: in the crowd on wooden slats of the pier; up the ramp adjacent to the stage; I even went through the process of gaining entry to the cordoned-off beer zone (set up around some Sandy-vacated exterior storefronts from the Pier 17 mall) and obtaining a plastic pint cup of Bud Light. Bracelets, tickets, a twenty minute wait in line. Is 4Knots "over?" But I was there to see Kurt Vile. Not necessarily because I love the Violators' chilled-out sound, although I've come to really appreciate the signature nasal dissonance of the vocals, but because I like the character actor vibe he brings to rock performance. He reminds me a bit of some old video footage I'd seen of Joey Ramone on tour in Europe -- shy stringbean with a wall of hair and a too-big shirt. They played KV Crimes, the Scharpling-directed video for which impressed me with K. Vile's goony stage presence. Afterwards, Nina and I walked around the seaport, inspecting the See/Change shipping container city, the candy store selling comically enormous gummy candy. The fancy pizza place on Front St. looked appealing, but there was a steady flow of reeking human waste from the fancy Port-A-Pottys right across from it. The cobblestones shone with piss.