ShareRoom to Breathe
Recent college grads crammed into a shore house. Sleep a little, drink a lot. Develop a crush, get crushed. Sound familiar?
Room to Breathe
Recent college grads crammed into a shore house. Sleep a little, drink a lot. Develop a crush, get crushed. Sound familiar?
Labor Day weekend, 1997: I walk back into our section of the shore house a changed man. I had just spent the last few minutes in the driveway making out with one of the girls from upstairs. This was not just any girl. I’d been eyeing her since we moved into the house Memorial Day weekend; the Rutgers undergrad with the perfect tan, the flat belly, the curly hair, the skimpy bikinis.
She was the object of my summer stares, the Sandy Dumbrowski to my Danny Zuko.
Summer Lovin’/
Happened so fa-aaa-ast...
I can’t remember her name.
I likewise can’t believe that a decade has passed since I was part of a crew inhabiting a tiny section of a thrice-split, split-level, full-summer Beach Haven rental. The coed I loved was ensconced in another section of the house. Privacy was impossible, but I went to bed that night certain that a blissful future had just begun. Besides, it wasn’t all about hooking up. She was better than that.
So ten years later I summoned my housemates for a round of “what happened when,” the game that allows you to remember days when mortgages, preschools, and lawn care were for old people who’d forgotten that real success was the Ketch bartender knowing your name. But they’re plenty leery about talking to a writer, even one they once saw in an orange bikini (more on that later). Some are parents and some are newlyweds, but all have careers and grudgingly admit that no bartender knows their names anymore. No last names, they tell me.
Looking back, it’s all Rob’s fault. He, Matt, and I went to high school and college together, and he knew Lauren, Kim, and Kelly from college.
“I was close with the girls, and a bunch of them asked me to be in the shore house,” he tells me, “so I asked you and Matt.”
“I miss it,” Lauren says. “But then again, I still miss college. That said, I know there’s no way my body could handle it today. ”
“Alcohol abuse. That sums up the whole thing. A lot of painful hangovers,” Kelly says.
We needed the hangovers to cope with conditions. There were fourteen of us with shares in that small house. Our section of the house included a living area, a small bedroom with two single beds, a smaller bedroom with two bunk beds, and a kitchen. Four girls, including the one I targeted as the future Mrs. Edelstein, lived upstairs in a space no bigger than a one-bedroom apartment; another group shared equally cramped quarters. We all shared the four-car driveway and grassless postage stamp of a backyard, which backed up against a seafood place called the M&M Steam Bar. As a result, ocean breezes were preferable to bay breezes.
Anyway, those who had full shares in our house—the ones who’d studied and gotten jobs right out of school—got beds. The rest either slept where they dropped or improvised. Most mornings, it looked like a post-punch Jonestown.
“I remember somebody would sleep in the fireplace,” Lauren says.
“I brought that orange futon down,” Matt says. “But some nights I would end up sleeping in my Blazer. It was so crowded in the house. I was more comfortable in there.”
Looking back, perhaps I should’ve offered the back of Matt’s truck as a little nighttime getaway to what’s-her-name. After all, I’d already figured out the post-summer scenario. I’d go back to Morristown, she’d finish school, we’d see each other on weekends, holidays at the parents’, and since I’m 90 percent certain that she was Italian, we’d find a liberal rabbi who’d marry us one day. Yup. I had big plans.
In retrospect, I was an idiot. What happened to my pre-Memorial Day plan? The one with the whole laid-back, summer-down-the-shore vibe, cutting a swath through the women of LBI? I blew it, intermingling my carnal and matrimonial urges before I’d even unpacked my duffle bag.
“I could tell you were seriously into her,” Kelly says. “You were totally freaking out after you kissed her that night. All I could think was, Why isn’t he upstairs with her?”
Back then, I could put the onus squarely on the narrow, sequined shoulders of Barry Manilow. More on that later, too.
To jog our foggy memories, Matt recounts our typical day. “Wake up hung over, go to the Wawa for a coffee and newspaper, catch up on the baseball scores,” he says. “Do the beach thing all day, have some beers, take your outside shower, then begin the real drinking. After that, have an early party, eat some dinner from Wawa, party some more, go to a bar, party until 4 am, and sleep—if you’re lucky—for four hours.” Then we’d do it all again.
“We’d go to the happy hour at the Sea Shell once in a while,” Rob says. “I remember they had a good crab-legs deal.”
“Yeah, but we spent most of our time at the Ketch or the Shell,” Kelly says.
“I remember walking back from the Ketch with a bunch of the girls,” Lauren says. “We were drunk, very drunk, and a few of us would just stop every few steps to lie down on the sidewalk. Poor Rob, you were out there driving around looking for us.”
“There was more than that one occasion,” Rob says. “I would always be out there, picking them up.”
“I don’t remember the details, Jeff,” Lauren says, “but I definitely remember you in an orange bikini one night.”
Whoa, maybe we ought to get back to my nearly betrothed. “Don’t forget the Tyson fight,” Matt says. “That was a disaster…”
Maybe I did have more fun than I remember. Rather than risk further discussion of the orange bikini, I redirect the conversation to the second disaster. The party for the Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight involved about 30 of our closest friends—and probably another ten people who just wandered in off the street. Packed into the, if you’ll excuse the term, “living room,” everything was going swimmingly until Tyson bit off a chunk of his opponent’s ear. We yelled loudly enough for even Holyfield to hear.
Then a cop walked in—literally just walked right in—and wrote us a $250 noise-violation ticket. I was drunk and surly enough to insist that the cop put my name on the ticket, which he was more than happy to do. That fall, I came back to fight it in municipal court. I insisted on a trial and even put the cop on the stand. Acting as my own attorney, I got him to admit under cross-examination that, in the same circumstances, he’d have yelled just as loudly as we did. The judge was unsympathetic. Guilty; $250. Plus court costs.
And I still didn’t have what’s-her-name.
At my summer job—as a research assistant at New Jersey Monthly—the work week ended at lunchtime on Fridays. I was always at the house by 2:30 pm. One of my fondest memories of that summer—and quite honestly, of my entire life—was of walking a few blocks to the beach with an Elmore Leonard paperback and four Budweisers in my red backpack. Couldn’t get the smile off my face, then or now, at the thought of it. My friends had “best moments,” too.
“I loved getting there on Fridays,” Rob says. “We’d leave early, and the drive down was the best. You’d be so pumped, checking out everyone on the Garden State Parkway. Nothing like a convertible full of girls.… Then we’d go to the beach and play some Wiffle ball before it got too crowded.”
Matt had a sales gig. He’d sneak out Friday without telling the boss and return any calls when he got to the house. “I put my job at risk, but I was more worried about beating the traffic,” he says.
“It was the simple stuff I loved the most,” Kim says. “Being able to wake up, put on my bikini, and head straight for the beach was great. It was like live theater. Comedy and drama under one roof.”
“For the life of me, I can’t remember eating. Or going to the liquor store,” Lauren adds.
“I do remember egg-and-cheese sandwiches in the morning,” Kelly says. “Someone would get them. It wasn’t me. I know that,” she says with a laugh.
Kelly and Kim were sensitive to the Sunday morning game the guys would try to play. “I hated that Parkway bumper-to-bumper traffic,” Matt says. “I’d wake up early to get the hell out of there.” But Kelly and Kim created a cleaning chart meant to restore some semblance of order to a house that got as trashed as we did each weekend.
“We didn’t want to be like moms,” Kim says, “but let’s just say we had a different standard of clean than you boys did. What’s funny is that we never thought to hire a cleaning lady. That would’ve been the simple solution. It didn’t even dawn on us that we could spend money on something like that. I guess that’s because we were all just starting out a new phase in all our lives and didn’t think we should spend money on anything that didn’t involve alcohol or food.”
“It was the best last time you could have,” Matt says.
Speaking of last times…
Earlier that night, what’s-her-name had told me she was meeting her dad the next day in Atlantic City for a Barry Manilow concert. She had to work until 2 pm, and then she was driving down. At 3 pm, I get back from the beach and notice her car is still there. So I go upstairs and knock. No answer. Fifteen minutes pass, I do the same thing with the same result. I do this a few more times. She eventually screams, “WHAT!” I ask through the door if everything’s okay. She tells me to leave her alone.
Did I mention that I was an idiot?
It never even occurred to me to respect her wishes, so I open the door. To check on her. Make sure she’s all right. After all, she was to be my bride. Surely, she’d appreciate my chivalry. In retrospect, perhaps I was being a tad clingy.
“You got a little psychotic there for a minute,” Rob says. “I mean, you kind of were sticking your nose in...”
“Well, why not,” I say. “She was my latest future bride. I mean, I’d already imagined how we’d tell our kids and grandkids about the night we met down the Shore.”
I ask her about the concert or something. She tells me she isn’t going or something. Then there is nothing. I can tell she has a thing about breaking and entering. But she doesn’t have a thing for me.
I didn’t see her for the rest of the summer. Not in that tiny house. Not at the Ketch. And certainly not in the driveway.
“That whole summer was an extension of college for all of us,” Rob says. “We had been out for two years and were all working, but no one was married or anything. We’d be turning the clock back on weekends. In that respect, it wasn’t something ultra-new, getting a summer shore house. It was more like an extension of something old.”
“I’m so overscheduled now,” Kelly says. “I couldn’t imagine having three months of weekends just to go to the Shore.”
Now I go down the Shore with a woman who loves me unconditionally. We share a house. And a dog. She hates Barry Manilow.
And every once in a while, I wonder if what’s-her-name remembers my name.
