Because it had been hers all along, hadn’t it?
“Yeah.” She settled back down on the stool. “It’s still better than checking at EvilMart. Just relax, for now. We’ll have to think up a name for you, they say. And they say we can go wherever we want, that you’ve got a vacation you didn’t go on.”
My throat refused to work right for a few seconds. Then I got the words out.
“How do you feel about Bermuda?”
The Demon in the Dunes
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN
Chris Grabenstein did improvisational comedy in New York City with Bruce Willis before James Patterson hired him to write advertising copy. He is the Anthony and Agatha award-winning author of the John Ceepak/ Jersey Shore mysteries, Tilt-A-Whirl, Mad Mouse, Whack-A-Mole, Hell Hole, Mind Scrambler, and Rolling Thunder; the thrillers Slay Ride and Hell for the Holidays; and the middle-grades chillers The Crossroads and The Hanging Hill. His dog Fred has even better credits: Fred starred on Broadway in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. With five brothers, most of his summer vacations growing up were pretty scary, but the only paranormal creatures Chris encountered were the mermaids at Webb’s City Drug Store in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the whole family went every August to visit his grandparents. The humidity was pretty monstrous, too. You can visit Chris (and Fred) on the Web at www.chrisgrabenstein.com.
I don’t know why I’m lying here dreaming about 1975 and the demon in the dunes.
It’s summer. Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Saturday. August sixteenth. 1975. The night I first saw the demon lurking in the shadows at the dark edge of the sand.
Kevin Corman and I are running down a moonlit street away from the Royal Flamingo Motel and our families.
“You score?” Kevin asked.
“Yeah.” I held up two warm beer cans. “Schlitz.”
“Your old man won’t notice?”
“I don’t think so,” I answered—nervously as I recall. I wasn’t a big rule breaker when I was a teenager. I usually stayed quiet. Stayed out of trouble.
“Far out,” said Kevin, taking my two Schlitz cans and stuffing them up underneath the flapping coat of his leisure suit. He was dressed to score that night. Dressed like John Travolta would dress a few years later when he had the same sort of Saturday night fever.
Kevin and I were on our annual two-week family vacations down the shore. We were neighbors back home in Verona, New Jersey, went to the same high school.
“Uhm, were you able to get any, you know, booze?” I stammered as we tried not to look too conspicuous: two teens—one nervous, the other cocky—skulking down Ocean Avenue at 9:30 at night. When we were younger and on vacation, this is the time of night when we would’ve badgered our parents into taking us up to the boulevard for swirled soft-serve ice cream cones. Now, our mothers and fathers stayed by the motel pool to play cards, smoke cigarettes, and drink highballs out of indestructible plastic cocktail glasses while we lied about heading over to Funtown Pier so we could go out drinking ourselves.
“My parents drink whiskey, Dave,” said Kevin. “Extremely hard to rip off, man. Doesn’t come in a can.”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes, my dad snags miniature bottles off airplanes. Doesn’t bring ’em on vacation, though.”
“Cool.”
“Hey, you ever even drink whiskey?”
“No. Not really.”
“Word to the wise: Beer and wine, mighty fine. Beer and whiskey? Mighty risky.”
I nodded as if I knew.
“So, where’s Jerry?” I asked.
“Said to meet him over on K Street.”
“Cool.” We had two more blocks to go. “What about, you know—the girls?”
“Relax, dude. They’re college girls. Means they’ll have their own wheels.”
“Yeah.”
“And Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“Chicks this hot? They definitely know how to find the dunes, bro. Probably been going down there to make out since we were like in junior high.”
I shuddered to think about all the things the curvy college freshmen we had met eight hours earlier might know. They were both nineteen. Kevin and I were infants: sixteen-year-olds with pimples when we ate too much pizza. Our buddy Jerry McMillan was a little older. Seventeen. He’d been “held back” a year. Always said he liked second grade so much, he took it twice.
We reached K Street.
“I did score these.” Kevin flashed me a half-empty pack of Kent cigarettes he had undoubtedly stolen out of his old man’s Windbreaker. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“You ever try one?”
“Nope.”
He shook the pack. “More taste, fine tobacco.”
I waved him off.
Kevin shrugged and lit up. He smacked down a long drag and let it out in a series of billowing smoke rings. I remember I was impressed.
“We are looo-king goooood,” Kevin said between deep tokes, doing a pretty good Chico from Chico and the Man. A lot of guys did the same imitation back in the seventies, but Kevin had the shaggy Freddy Prinze hairdo to go with it.
We waited. Kevin smoked. He looked pretty damn cool doing it, and that made me wonder if I could ever look cool enough for the night’s coming attraction: my first blind date.
The two girls we had met on the beach had a friend.
That’s why I had splashed on some of my father’s Hai Karate cologne. Found it in his Dopp kit along with some foil-wrapped condoms. My parents having sex. That was something I definitely didn’t want to think about when I was sixteen and being fixed up with a college coed who probably had sex several times a day between classes.
“Where the hell is Jerry?” Kevin said as he ground out his cigarette butt in the sand at the crackled edge of the asphalt. “College chicks this hot won’t wait forever. They’re from Philly, man!”
My heart beat faster.
We’d first met the two Philly girls when they were half naked on the beach and Jerry McMillan had had the balls to stroll over to their blanket and talk like a letter straight out of Penthouse magazine: “Is it hot out here or is it just you two?”
They should’ve laughed or groaned or even puked at Jerry’s lame pickup line. But, no. They both thought our somewhat older friend was cute. Most girls did. Jerry McMillan was lean and lanky with droopy eyes that made it look like he was half asleep at all times. He kept his shiny helmet of hair sleekly combed over his ears, its slanting divide always parked directly over an ironically arched eyebrow.
As it turned out, the girls Jerry had randomly decided to hit on were looking to get down and boogie. They eagerly volunteered their names (Donna and Kimberly) and local phone numbers. They were staying at the Bay Breeze Motel with another friend, Brenda. Three college girls in a single room. No parents. They were all probably on the pill. A lot of girls were popping birth control pills in 1975 because “makin’ love with you is all I wanna do,” at least according to Minnie Riperton’s big hit single on the radio. Everybody who was sixteen or over that summer had already lost their virginity.
Everybody except me.
“We’ve already done the Boardwalk,” sighed the girl named Donna, arching her back, stretching her double- D cups to the max. If Jerry McMillan was a Penthouse Forum letter, this Donna was the Pet of the Month without the staples.
“So,” said Jerry, “I take it you two are bored with the Boardwalk?”
Incredibly, the girls laughed at that lousy line, too!
“Yeah,” said Donna, who had Farrah Fawcett’s winged hairstyle from the pinup poster. “We want to have some real fun, you know? We are ready to feel the funk and party hearty!”
“Then, ladies, you came to the right beach,” said Kevin, who had been pumping iron on a bench in his garage all winter and spring so his chest and stomach would be ready for just this moment. I hung in the background. When you’re a timid teen, it pays to have brazen friends like Kevin and Jerry.
“So, Sunshi
ne,” said Jerry, crouching down so the girls could gaze dreamily at his droopy eyes. “You ever heard about the dunes down south? In the state park?”
“Sure,” said the other girl, Kimberly, as she rolled over to tan her back. She was wearing a very small bikini spotted with Wonder- Bread-wrapper-colored polka dots. The bottom was actually two tiny triangles held together by white plastic rings at her hips. She reached around to unsnap the hook holding her skimpy top in place so she wouldn’t have an unsightly tan line racing across her back to add to the white doughnuts the sun-blocking circles would definitely be leaving on her flanks.
“Meet us down there,” said Kevin. “Ten P.M. We’ll bring the liquid refreshments.”
“We’ll find some driftwood, too,” added Jerry. “Rub a couple stiff sticks together and see if we can start a fire.” Every cheesy thing the guy said made these girls giggle.
I said nothing.
When I was sixteen, girls terrified me.
“Can we bring Brenda?” asked Donna, whose bikini was full of burnt-orange and harvest-gold flowers. Reminded me of the coffee percolator back in our motel kitchenette. “Brenda’s different. Likes to read books and junk.”
“No problemo. She can hang with Dave. He reads books, too. Finished the summer reading list like back in June.”
It was true. In books, I could be cool like Jerry and Kevin.
“You sure?” giggled Kimberly. “What if Brenda is like a total dog?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Kevin. “Dave will bring his leash and walk her while the rest of us get down and get funky!”
SO at nine thirty that night, Kevin Corman and I stood underneath a hazy street lamp waiting for Jerry McMillan, more booze, the two horny college chicks, and my blind date with the bookish Brenda.
Like I said, Jerry was seventeen but looked even older, so he was always the one in charge of procuring the adult beverages for any party, be it a kegger or a spontaneous bonfire on the beach in Island State Park. He had headed over to Barnegat Bay Bottles, the scuzziest package store in all of Seaside Heights, maybe New Jersey, to procure a couple cases of beer and several bottles of Boone’s Farm wine: Apple and Strawberry. Both flavors tasted like Kool-Aid laced with malt liquor. Maybe gasoline.
It’s amazing how much I’m remembering now about that summer night in 1975. How vivid it all seems—especially when I realize I haven’t thought about any of this for decades. I grew up. Went to college. Became rich and famous. Locked my summers down the Jersey Shore inside a mental shoebox with the rest of my long-forgotten memories.
But tonight, as I lie in bed, fitfully drifting in and out of sleep, crisp details fill my head.
The swimming pool at the Royal Flamingo Motel with a curving slide lubricated with a trickle of water so you slid down even faster.
The Funtown Pier, home to all sorts of rickety thrill rides—including Dr. Shallowgrave’s Haunted Manor.
The swarm of suntanned bodies bopping up the beach with their radios on. All of them, in my memory, swaying to the blare of a Tijuana Brass soundtrack, the theme from The Dating Game.
But, most of all, I remember Brenda Narramore.
Please don’t tell my wife, who is snuggled up beside me now, cradled against my back, but I am dreaming about a girl I met one summer nearly three and a half decades ago.
Brenda Narramore.
My first summer love.
My muse and inspiration.
How many times have I redrawn her body, first as a leather- clad warrior in my comic books, then as an indestructible street fighter in a ripped and slashed flight suit as the heroine in my graphic novels? How many hours have I spent retracing her curves and lines? In fact, I made my fortune transforming my memories of Brenda Narramore into pen-and-ink drawings of Belinda Nightingale, superheroine of the postapocalyptic world.
The critics always label my impossibly busty Amazon in her tight, revealing costume as “nothing more than an adolescent sexual fantasy.”
They’re right.
She is.
She is Brenda Narramore.
The girl I once feared I’d let the cloaked demon snatch away.
JERRY’S car finally crunched across the seashells on the shoulder of the road.
I could hear “Love Will Keep Us Together” leaking out of his car stereo. Captain and Tennille. It had to be on the radio. No way would Jerry buy a cassette that bogus.
Jerry—who actually possessed a legal New Jersey driver’s license in addition to his fake one from New York State that made him officially eighteen and therefore old enough to buy booze—had his own car. A Starsky and Hutch Gran Torino with a modified V-8 and a Cruise-O-Matic transmission. I can still see the scooped manifold jutting up over the hood. His “ex-dad” had given the car to Jerry just after the divorce.
“What it is, what it is,” he said as he scrolled down his window. “You bring your bread?”
I dug into my shorts. “Five bucks, right?”
Jerry snatched the wrinkled bill out of my fist. “Funkadelic. You steal it from your old man?”
“Nah. I mowed lawns last month.”
“Dyno-mite.” He turned to Kevin. “Don’t leave me hangin’, bro!”
Kevin passed off his cash with a slap to Jerry’s palm.
“What it is, what it is,” said Jerry. I forget why. We all said that in 1975, I guess. “Hop in, brothas!”
Kevin called shotgun. I climbed into the backseat with the two cardboard flats filled with beer cans—one slightly refrigerated case of Schlitz, another of Falstaff. A wrinkled grocery sack stuffed with twist-cap bottles of what Boone’s Farm called wine clattered every time Jerry hit a pothole.
“Didn’t even need to hire Squeegie tonight,” Jerry bragged. “The blind doofus with the Coke-bottle glasses was working behind the counter.”
If Jerry couldn’t score our adult beverages with his fake ID, Squeegie was always his fallback plan: a burned-out World War II vet who slept in the Dumpster out back behind the liquor store. Squeegie would do just about anything for two bucks. Of course, back in 1975 gas cost forty-four cents a gallon, a stamp ten, and a whole pack of cigarettes only thirty-five.
The last time someone sneaked me a pack here in New York City, it cost him nine dollars, and I only got to smoke one before my wife caught me, started crying, and flushed about eight dollars and fifty-five cents’ worth of tobacco down the toilet.
I had told her I’d quit.
I had lied.
WE met the Philly girls at the state park.
Brenda Narramore was beautiful.
A dark pyramid of wavy hair tumbled over her shoulders in a cascade of kinky corkscrews. Her body was perfectly proportioned, up top and down below. She even wore sexy librarian glasses before they became fashionable. That’s why Belinda Nightingale always accents her skintight leather breastplate with horn-rimmed reading glasses.
That first night, however, the real Brenda was not costumed as an Amazon princess. I remember she wore an embroidered peasant blouse tied off with a sash, the shirttails barely covering her bikini bottom. It looked like she was wearing the tiniest miniskirt ever sewn. She also carried a canvas flower-power beach bag.
“Hi, guys,” said Donna. “This is Brenda.”
Donna more or less said that to me, officially pairing us up for the evening.
“Hey,” I said.
Brenda Narramore smirked. Her raven-black eyes sized me up. I don’t think they liked what they saw.
“Shall we?” said Jerry, who was lugging the clinking bag of Boone’s Farm bottles under his arm. He held out his free hand and Kimberly, the lanky girl who tottered like she was already wasted on cheap wine, took it.
“Need a hand?” Donna said to Kevin, who carried the case of Schlitz.
“I’m good.”
She squeezed his bulging upper arm. “Strong, too.”
He shrugged. “I work out a little.”
“A little?” She was kneading his arm like some Italian women work
over cantaloupes in the produce aisle.
“C’mon,” said Kevin with a well-practiced shake of his shaggy hair. “Let’s boogie.”
They headed down to the beach.
Brenda Narramore looked at me. I never felt so scrawny or childish, standing there soaked in Hai Karate, wearing my best Orange Sunkist “Good Vibrations” T-shirt and denim cut-offs, straining to hold on to that case of Schlitz without all the cans tumbling out because, somehow, maybe from the condensation dripping down the sides of the aluminum tallboys, the cardboard bottom had become sopping wet.
Brenda pulled a pack of Doral Menthol cigarettes out of her beach bag. Stuck one between her plump lips. Flicked her Bic and lit up.
I guess I was gawking at her.
“Dream on,” she sneered on the exhale.
She ambled down to the beach.
I followed. A safe distance behind her.
WE scraped up some driftwood and used the brown paper wine bag to start a small beach fire.
Not a raging bonfire, just enough extra warmth to help the beer and wine make everybody feel good ’n’ toasty. Intoxicated after chugging three tepid cans of Falstaff (the beer that promised “man size pleasure”), I became hypnotized by the fire. I saw chattering mouths and contorted faces dancing in the flickering flames, not to mention a flock of shadowy witch doctors leaping across the sand, furiously stretching out their twitching limbs to reach the not-too-distant dunes where, it seemed to me, more nefarious shadow friends might lie in wait.
Remembering Kevin’s sage words about beer and wine being considered mighty fine, I unscrewed the cap off a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and started guzzling.
It’s no wonder, not much later, I started seeing real phantoms. The demon in the dunes.
I gulped the wine, because I was nervous, sitting scant inches from Brenda Narramore, who kept lighting up Doral Menthol cigarettes while exhaling her own hazy cloud of specters, adding them to the mustering swarm of ghosts sent swirling skyward by our smoky campfire. One time, when I shifted in the sand, our thighs actually brushed. I don’t think Brenda Narramore felt it, but I was extremely glad I had worn the tight cotton cutoffs instead of my J.C. Penney polyester shorts, which would not have done a very good job concealing that night’s rising adolescent fantasies.
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