We were yelling, just yelling, yelling because of the F train clattering, yelling because of the Cyclone rattling, yelling because of the sea breeze, yelling just because it felt alive and good.



We know how to rock a sunny day at the beach, me and Jeff, and it involves very little actual sitting on said beach. We walked on the sand, soft and smooth, to the water, then we put our feet into the blue because, Jeff said, that’s what one does at the beach. It was cold, icy cold, and refresca, and it wasn’t till later that I realized this was the capital O Ocean.

We kept saying we were going to eat boardwalk food till we made ourselves sick, but all it took for me was half a bagel, part of a small bag of crinkly Nathan’s fries, and some cold, sweet lemonade. The smell of fried was everywhere, I wish I coulda brung it, but I had to call it quits. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to ask for a banana-chocolate twisty cone.



We rode on the Wonder Wheel in a bright red swinging car, and lemme tell ya, you think the Wonder Wheel is for kids, well, we screamed when the swinging car swung us over the edge and into the open way above the merry-go-round.



We changed dollars into quarters, so many quarters, and this is what you can accomplish with two fistfuls of quarters:

Jeff can teach you how to play Skee-Ball. His instructions will include the phrase: “You have to Skee-Ball it.” You will win nothing, not even one ticket, but Jeff will win so many, like twenty-four. You will both feel victorious—you are happy to share in his triumph—until you go to the redemption booth to find out a Proctor-Silex toaster is 8000 tickets. The Mount Rushmore-esque memorabilia item in the shape of the band KISS is unmarked and placed on the highest shelf, it is worth so unspeakably many tickets. Twenty-four tickets will get you a plastic spider ring or an American flag keyring or a small rubber ball with a smiley face printed on it.

You can have your picture taken in a photobooth. You will drop in your quarters, and then wonder, aloud, whether you have to press a button or something, and while you are wondering, the machine will go flash! and take a picture. Three more flashes later, you will fidget impatiently for four and a half minutes for the results, still wet with streaks of photo-developing chemicals. This is twelve quarters well spent.

You can take the Dating Game compatibility test. If you are us, your results, printed out zreek-zreek-zreek on a dot-matrix printer hidden in a plastic box, will read: She’d like the honeymoon to last forever. His color is orange.



At Brighton Beach, the crowd had aged considerably. Boardwalk cafés advertised food in a language I couldn’t read. All of a sudden transported elsewhere. And then elsewhere still. And I remembered being in Nice with Pranj, early fall 1997, in Paris it was maybe starting to feel like autumn but down south it was still warmish, and we walked past the beachfront cafés with their colorful awnings flapping in the wind, and I popped into a phone booth to call a hello home.



On Brighton Beach Avenue, the Russians looked like Russians. By the time we got to the Ocean Parkway platform for the train home, my bag of tricks held a hunk of fresh pistachio halva and a poppy-seed baked good from a white-haired-granny sort on the street.