Time & Tide

by Frank Conroy

  In fact it became an institution of sorts (albeit short-lived) for islanders and eventually for a rather select group of summer people. Recently Partner B wrote a note for a vanity CD of the band, “. . . musicians of blossoming eminence crystallized a unique time and place, a few years in a roadside joint that will never repeat. Our lives are dated by before the Roadhouse, the Roadhouse, and since the Roadhouse. [There are] countless unrecorded stories we all have to tell.”

  Too many to tell here, certainly, but I’ll share a few. Typically the place did not fill until about 10 P.M. for several reasons: There was no air-conditioning, a lot of the audience didn’t get off work till then, it was isolated and out of town so you had to drive or get a ride (no public transportation then), and perhaps its history as an “after hours” place was part of it. The cops gave us maybe half an hour longer than the bars in town, but still we had to make the day’s money in three and a half hours. A cover charge or a minimum was, we all agreed, impossible, given the spirit of the place. We could not charge more for drinks than other places for the same reason. It seemed to me that all we could do was encourage our customers to drink “top shelf” where our profit margin was slightly higher. Consequently I placed an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne in full view beside me at the piano. After every tune I’d pour myself a glass. The theory was, as I explained to my partners, that some customers would think if the piano player can drink champagne instead of beer then why the hell can’t I?

  It might not have worked in an ordinary club, but the Roadhouse had a special atmosphere, a celebratory mood because it was “our” place, where the champagne was indeed champagne, but also a kind of in joke among working people, a sort of parody of the Toffs drinking Veuve Cliquot at the Chanticleer or the Opera House. (Those years were perhaps the last years when the young year-rounders had a sense of themselves as an entity, a discrete group constituting a half-hidden subculture within the population.) Of course it didn’t hurt that a lot of people felt fairly loose and impulsive by the time they got out to the club, where they knew they would end the evening. The wine wholesalers told us that in our second and third years of operation we sold more champagne than any other bar/restaurant on the island.

  Boy, was it a “happening” place, and boy did we have fun! The audience was completely with us, the same couple of hundred people coming night after night, week after week. I remember looking up after a particularly hot tune to see people standing on chairs against the walls, smiling, shouting, urging us on, every table filled with truly happy people. The consensus among the musicians in the band, and the growing number of players coming over from Boston to hear us (and sometimes sit in), was that it was the ultimate “dream gig.”

  As it turned out we were the victims of our own success, our lack of business experience, and our naive belief in the basic honesty of people. The Roadhouse certainly looked like it was doing well. So many customers wanted to get in the fire marshal made us hire a door person, a nice-guy bouncer, so as not to exceed the legal limit of 225 persons. On any given night there would be fifty or more people out in the parking lot or gathered around the windows, listening, hoping to get in. Customers stood three deep at the bars in both rooms and we were forced to hire bartenders we didn’t know very well, waitresses we didn’t know very well, and things just got too big and too fast.

  It took us a long time to realize how much money was slipping away each night. We had all agreed to split the “skim” (the 10 percent off the top the state more or less expected would be taken) and give the rest to that partner who’d put up most of the money in the first place (after payroll, of course). The partner was getting practically nothing, but he was having so much fun, along with the rest of us, that he was loath to blow the whistle. The skim was enough to get by on, and we let things slide.

  Roadhouse band.

  Someone, or some people, were stealing, and we did not know how to stop it. We hadn’t a clue. We were working very hard for what turned out to be an enterprise we agreed to remember as some kind of weird cooperative, in what was the longest, best party anyone could ever hope to attend. There was sadness all around when we finally threw in the towel.

  When I remember the Roadhouse it isn’t just the club that comes to mind. Yes, lots of stories, weddings, friendships, and so forth, but I’ll just tell my favorite. Let’s call him Nick. He came to Nantucket as a young man, working as a roustabout for the moderately cheesy traveling carnival that came every year. He liked the island and decided to stay. Partner B hired him to do the kitchen—to draw up a simple menu and do the cooking. Simple was definitely the concept, since even back then the Nantucket restaurant scene was as competitive and cutthroat as New York’s. Just burgers and the like—a gastronomic low profile. We were not trying to make a statement with the food, but Nick wasn’t bothered by our lack of courage. He needed to be left alone in his mise with his pots and pans and his ancient stove. We were very busy and forgot all about him until people started talking about the chili. “Where’d you get this guy? That’s the best chili I’ve ever had in my life.” Nick turned out to be a natural. He was fast, smart, incapable of panic, with good hands—all the basics—but also the owner of a sensitive palate, an innate love of food and the pleasures of food, and an almost religious obsession with the importance of presentation. He was very, very careful in his work.

  Clever, too. The menu looked simple. Burgers, fries, chili, salad, the accoutrements, the little side dishes of thin french-fried onions, the cornichons, crab cakes, and the like. Customers discovered his food gradually, as he slipped in a changing series of goodies, special surprises every now and then, making the diner feel special.

  The restaurant people of the island—the chefs, sous-chefs, dishwashers, waiters, maître d’s, and bartenders—were an important part of our clientele. When the Roadhouse closed, Nick had no problem getting a job and beginning serious study of what he now knew would be his life’s work. Over the years he rose through the ranks in several fine restaurants and became the sous-chef at the Club Car, where the marvelously talented Michael Shannon taught him everything he needed to know. And then some.

  Nick had lived sensibly on Nantucket, staying away from the expensive fads of recreational drugs or the heavy drinking so often to be found on islands. He was a steady, easygoing guy who planned, waited patiently for years, and finally bought a small restaurant in which he proceeded to make five- and six-course dinners good enough to bring tears to one’s eyes.

  The restaurant is still there, flourishing despite the intensity of the competition, because Nick knew exactly the niche he wanted and precisely how to control it. Nothing like this could happen now, of course. For a man to arrive with nothing but character, talent, patience, and a work ethic—for such a man to arrive, grow, get his restaurant, and build a comfortable home for himself and his wife is no longer possible. Today he’d have to step out of the airplane with two or three million dollars, a lot of powerful contacts, and a phenomenal amount of luck. Probably even Nick couldn’t do it today.

  It isn’t that kind of place anymore.

  PLEASE TAKE A look at a map of Nantucket. Run your finger from Madaket down the coast to the south shore, and then along the bottom of the island and up to ’Sconset. As Nancy Chase explains in We Are Nantucket:

  The south shore . . . all the way from Madaket to ’Sconset . . . that’s the south shore. Very few houses were built there because . . . the next time you went there, it wasn’t there. Somebody stole it! Took the wood and stu f because of scarcity of wood on the Island. Nobody was there. Nobody to see you take it.

  It is unclear exactly what time period Nancy Chase is referring to. She was born on the island in 1931, so she could be talking about just about any time up to, say, the fifties. Nowadays there are hundreds of houses along the same stretch. And thousands of squirrels of course.

  BUMPER STICKERS are displayed by year-rounders on the back of their pick-ups or old cars as a kind of self-affirmation, as wel
l as a way to communicate with each other while differentiating themselves from the summer people.

  IT’S NICER ON NANTUCKET

  was followed many years later by:

  IT USED TO BE NICER ON NANTUCKET

  A favorite of fishermen, scallopers, and pilots:

  FOG HAPPENS

  In protest against a development plan that was eventually shot down by the town:

  NO MOOR HOUSES

  In protest of another proposed mid-island development which would have included a large new supermarket:

  BAG THE MARKET

  The plan failed.

  Third World Softball

  LAST SUMMER A FRIEND CAME BY FOR ICED tea on the deck, a woman my wife and I think of as one of our old crowd. “We had the best,” she said. “The seventies were the best.” Each generation seems to remember a time when things were best. For Robert Mooney it is perhaps the forties, when people sang songs on Main Street and everybody went home at ten, when there were no tourists or day-trippers, just some townspeople and the summer people. Some remember the sixties and a bar at the foot of Main Street called the Bosun’s Locker, a hangout that spilled outside to the cobblestones where the marijuana smoke drifted freely and people laughed and danced.

  A special memory of my own involves the evolution of what came to be known as Third World Softball. Like any small town, Nantucket had a league of sorts—the oil company, Yates welders, First National, Don Allen Ford, and others, all fielded teams and played on the high school diamond. A fairly insular bunch of big strong guys who took the game seriously. No room, really, for unaffiliated people.

  How old were my boys then? Eight and ten, perhaps? (Grown now with boys of their own.) My few friends, a carpenter/inventor, a sommelier, an actor, the camera shop owner with the braid down his back, were all unaffiliated. Waiters, waitresses, bartenders, friends of my wife’s—these were the people we raised a glass with at the Ship’s Inn or Cy’s Green Coffee Pot. It started one Sunday afternoon when a few of us took the boys out to the deserted, mildly overgrown softball field next to the water company shack in ’Sconset. We hit a few soft ground balls, shagged flies, played catch with the boys, and sat on the old benches chewing the fat.

  Over time enough people heard about it, or saw it from the road and stopped to join in, that we realized we could make up sides, which changed every week except for the captains, myself and the camera shop guy, whose name was Gene. We were also the pitchers. Slow pitches, so that my kids could play with a minimum of fear.

  Rules emerged through a semi-democratic process. For some reason it was particularly satisfying as the rules were realized.

  Starting time, 2 P.M. every Sunday

  Women and children welcomed and guaranteed a

  spot (even if right field)

  No aluminum bats

  No beer

  No radios

  High standards of sportsmanship

  Eventually, it became a tradition, each year of play marked by its own T-shirt.

  Nothing was ever formalized beyond these rules. No records were kept. Whoever showed up showed up (“Where’s Freddie?” Pause. “Hung over.”), and there were always more than enough players. As time went on, and my sons got through their growth and began to be picked first, there were even spectators on the benches. It was a completely spontaneous happening, and it lasted thirteen years. Thirteen years! But we’d never registered anywhere, or even thought of reserving the field, which we’d taken for granted for so long—and when the island grew and the “First World” league grew also, they took the field away from us. Nantucket was changing, we all knew, but the loss of Third World Softball was particularly painful.

  Third World Softball.

  A very, very rich man who lived on the other side of the island in a sprawling compound of many houses, an artificial lake, a small golf course, and an officially correct, perfectly groomed softball field complete with dugouts, bleachers, etc., built on a whim, heard about our eviction and offered his own “field of dreams.” And it was like something out of a dream. A beautiful, virgin field. We started playing again with enthusiasm, which mysteriously and unsettlingly began to wane. Each Sunday a few more people couldn’t make it. The vibe changed. It became something of a duty. No one bothered us, or watched us, and yet it lost its spirit. It became artificial, somehow, which perhaps had something to do with the obscene amount of money poured into the setting. The poshness, the very perfection of the field overwhelmed the games we played on it. More people dropped. When Gene was given a box of legal releases, one to be signed by each player before each game, Third World Softball lost its soul entirely and stopped. It was over. Generosity had killed it and after thirteen years it was gone forever.

  SOME YEARS AGO an eccentric British mathematician, whose name I have forgotten, played around with Einstein’s equations and came up with a model of the universe in which time is accelerating, infinitely. In other words, the reason it seems time is going faster as we get older is because it is going faster. (Einstein was polite, but unimpressed.) So one’s perception would be marked by when one got on the train, so to speak. Where you got on is normal, and then things speed up.

  Something like that goes on in people’s thoughts and feelings about Nantucket. What was normal for Mooney’s people was changed by the time my college friends and I showed up in the late fifties. Most of the people who have arrived on the island, or have discovered the island in, say, the past ten years, are convinced that it is something close to perfect. The physical beauty of the moors, the deep beaches, the salt marshes, the splendid harbor, the light, the salt air, the freshness are unique and precious. It is only later that the question of critical mass might come up. How much humanity can the island hold? Is it possible that Nantucket could become a sort of aircraft carrier of expensive homes? A kind of platform out at sea? How real is the danger? Can anything be done? These are truly difficult questions, and I certainly can’t answer them.

  How About Manners?

  THE MARKETPLACE IS ALWAYS OF SPECIAL interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and the like. I suppose the idea is that what goes on in the markets reveals the society itself to some extent. That is certainly true for the “Gray Lady of the Sea.”

  The Cumberland Farm store on the east side of town is a convenience store now—cigarettes, Twinkies, canned soup, Wonder bread, and so on—but it started out a long time ago as a sort of cooperative, organized by some local moms who were fed up with the high price of milk at the supermarket and decided to do something about it. It was true then, and it is true now, that almost everything is marked up in Nantucket. Gasoline, for instance, is quite a lot higher than on the Cape. There is more competition now— more markets (lots of boutique markets, specialty meat markets, a couple of farmer’s markets, one of them huge), but prices are still high—no longer due to what you might call captive customers (not so long ago there was only that one place to get the Sunday New York Times, The Hub, smack in the middle of downtown at the corner of Main and Federal), but because of the generally “up” market of people who don’t have to worry what a quart of milk might cost. Of course, it is a seasonal economy, and retailers have to survive in February as well as August.

  The general priciness perhaps reaches its extremes at the ’Sconset Market, the only grocery store in the village at the eastern end of the island, where the prices of ordinary items like a bag of Oreos or a box of cereal are so astronomical it takes one’s breath away. (They do bake some very fine baguettes, in their defense.) But no one does major shopping there. For that one goes to the supermarket—either the rather modestly sized Grand Union built as part of the downtown wharf development project, or most important the huge Stop and Shop at the edge of town. It was once a Finast, and before that something else, but it has always been the dominant market, and increasingly so as the island has grown to the point where there are more people living out of town (in season, at least) than in town. The Stop and Shop is it, and they
must be commended for an honest effort to keep their prices reasonable, not too much more than in their stores on the mainland.

  My ex-wife, who lives out west, was struck by the change in atmosphere at the market when she visited the island a couple of summers ago. She remembered a kind of community spirit—high school kids or working college kids at the checkouts, people chatting with friends in the aisles, a certain social cohesiveness—that wasn’t there anymore. From the insanely crowded parking lot, with everyone honking horns, jostling for spaces, bumping bumpers, to the jam-packed aisles of people racing inside, eager to get back to the beach or the barbecue, it has a frantic, almost desperate feel in the high season. One rarely recognizes anyone now— to come upon a friend or acquaintance at the deli section is rare indeed, and invariably creates a certain nostalgia for the old days. The checkout staff, the baggers, and the like are mostly Jamaicans now, speaking a bewildering patois, unconnected, like migrant workers (which they are), from the culture around them. It is a pressured atmosphere, and not comfortable or enjoyable. It’s a pain in the ass, in fact, for a lot of us.

  Four or five years ago my wife was witness to a scene in the supermarket that may be emblematic of the transformation of Nantucket from a small town into something else altogether. A prominent family on the island whom I will call the Smiths—summer people for generations—were involved in various local businesses at a high level. Bob Smith is a big, handsome guy with a thousand-watt smile, a lot of charm, and a lot of smarts. His image on the island was carefully cultivated—an honest, thoughtful, family man with good values and a heightened sense of community. And all of this was, and no doubt still is, true. Which makes what my wife saw all the more astonishing.