Rippers

Nina and I went to Rockaway Beach. She'd been out there last summer for Colleen's bachelorette party but I hadn't been in forever, and I'd been reading invites for shows at Rippers and getting curious what all the fuss was about. We considered riding our bikes there, but it seemed like too daunting a trip (25 miles each way!) for junior bikers such as us. To read on the train, I brought along Chris' reviewer's copy of The Savage Detectives, which he'd loaned me the last time I stopped by his apartment. The prose swept me along half charmed by the solipsism of young poets -- familiar from Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog (I borrowed it from Christopher more than a decade ago) and The Rachel Papers -- half queasy apprehensive at the prospect of Cesárea Tinajero and her prophecy of things to come. The A was running in two parts, and the first part terminated at Howard Beach. We waited in the warm sun for the other train to come pick us up. The second leg of our journey on the A took us across Jamaica Bay. The MTA's map makes it look like you're traveling over Cross Bay Blvd., but it's actually a narrow strip of track that's a bit east of that, and if in turn you look out the eastern windows of the train, it's just the Bay out there. That image -- the shining metal interior of the subway car, the view through the window dominated by the sky and water -- was simultaneously so unexpected and so familiar that I was sure I'd seen it before in a dream. Because I haven't been out to Rockaway Beach since, well, I don't know when. At Broad Channel we transferred to the S shuttle, which took us the rest of the way to Beach 98th St.

We stopped on Rockaway Beach Blvd. at Rockaway Taco (known to many, I hear, as Rock-A-Taco) for tacos. The place is a wooden shack, the posts covered with photocopied paper flyers for events (surfer movies on the beach) clearly beyond the slick machinations of the inner-borough fun promotion machine. Which sounds like I'm calling it provincial (bicycle repair classes) but I think that's what a beach-front community is like. In concert with all the two-story houses with white stucco exteriors it reminded me of Randy's neighborhood in San Francisco. The tacos were quite good. They do them that way where the filling has a blanket of shredded cabbage arranged on top of it. I had a fish taco and a tofu taco -- heresy, I've been told by everybody, over and over again. But I gotta try it whenever it's on the menu, just to see if they do it okay.

It was late afternoon by the time we put our blanket down on the beach. We found a spot in the sand roughly in front of a bunker-like boardwalk bar with a scuzzy blues rock band playing out front on the concrete. At first I thought it was Rippers, but it was actually Low Tide Bar. I don't know what the difference is. A group of middle-aged Latino dudes next to us were drinking Coronas out of a plastic cooler. Nina'd worn her bathing suit under her clothes, and so she was able to strip down and wade into the ocean, at least until the Parks Dept. buggy patrol drove by to tell her that the lifeguard was off duty. I just wanted to read my book, though. I was too caught up in the world of the visceral realists to do swimming. And my reluctance to disrobe proved canny: The beach was home to a multitude of these little biting flies that looked like your average garbage moscas but which bit like horseflies. They bit me on the arms. They bit Nina everywhere. She stuck it out long enough to build a sandcastle, a sort of dome with a squared-off gatehouse.

We walked down Shore Front Parkway to Beach 84th St., surveying the old and new housing developments. Nina showed me a concrete bus shelter, solid concrete and curved like a wave, featuring a mural of fish with human faces. The faces were lumpy and complacent, like the faces of cats in Edward Gorey drawings. We realized we'd walked down to the actual location of Rippers, and we stopped and got beers. We sat near a plywood face cut-out board where you could pretend to be a hot dog or a hamburger.

It was chilly. We reversed our steps and headed home: Shuttle, A train, A train. A big black cricket was parked on the platform next to where we were standing at the Howard Beach station, chirping obliviously in full danger of being stepped on. I thought about shooing it into a gap in the concrete wall behind us, but decided to leave it be. When the subway came, the car that stopped in front of us happened to be the party car, meaning there was a loud dude with a radio (batteries failing) enlisting his fellow passengers in noisy sing-alongs and celebrity impressions. This included the boy-girl couple sitting across from us, the girl so drunk she was mostly asleep, rousing occasionally to puke quietly into a plastic bag.