I could get the bike to move by letting up on the clutch. That much I could handle. But what came next—the left hand slowly releases the clutch, the right hand provides the throttle, the left foot gets ready to shift gears—was like learning how to dance, except that if you screw it up, you would careen headfirst into a tree or off an overpass. A few weeks earlier, I couldn’t park a Geo Metro in a spot nearly double its size. Now I was expected to operate a motor vehicle that required the dexterity and coordination of a hockey goalie.
Despite my dad’s efforts and best intentions, this was just not going to happen. I think it was better that way. What could have been a long, painful process of dad repeatedly trying to teach and son repeatedly failing was nipped in the bud. There was no hope that maybe it’d all suddenly click for me or that maybe, with enough practice, I’d figure it out. It only took a few lessons at the pier of me starting, stalling, nearly falling over, then starting all over again to realize that there was simply no chance that I’d learn to drive it. My father and I both knew that this was less of a “sorry that I disappointed you, Dad” situation and more of a “Dad, what in the world were you thinking?” situation. Yes, I could ride a bike and had just learned to drive a car. But asking me to translate that knowledge and experience into riding a motorcycle was like asking a freshman astronomy major to save the planet from a giant incoming asteroid.
There was only one thing to do: sell the motorcycle. I certainly couldn’t keep it, and my dad didn’t want it either. He said it was because it was a little small for his taste. I also assumed its presence would be a daily reminder that his first-born son was a total wuss. (He didn’t say this, but I assumed it.)
My friends were bummed that it didn’t work out, but not entirely surprised. Really, how could they be? Me driving a motorcycle from party to party and make-out session to make-out session was a fantasy. I put the word out around school that I was selling my motorcycle. The very next day, my buddy Mike told me his older brother, Kevin, was interested. Could he come take a look?
I liked Mike. He was first-generation American, the son of Irish parents, and one of seven kids who was growing up in a modest home in Northeast Philly. He was a funny guy and a bit of a lunatic. I said that sure, his brother Kevin, who had just turned eighteen, could come to see the bike whenever he wanted.
A few days later, Kevin and his buddy Tim stood at the pier with me and my dad, checking out the bike. Kevin looked like Mike, with his long, scraggy hair and easy smile. As my dad told him the bike’s specs, Kevin walked around the motorcycle, looking it over studiously, grunting to himself, and occasionally touching parts of it.
When my dad was finished, Kevin looked at us and said, “I gotta be honest. I’ve never ridden a motorcycle before.” He added, “But I really want to.”
My dad beamed at the chance to show off his knowledge of the art of motorcycling once again. He gave Kevin a quick lesson, teaching him in about seven minutes everything he tried to teach me over many afternoons and evenings.
The lesson over, Kevin hopped on the bike and turned it on. He got a little run going, making slow, cautious turns around the garage. Then he sped up a little bit, making faster, less cautious turns around the garage. He wobbled a little bit here and there, but he stayed on. He brought the bike to a stop in front of us. “I’ll take it,” he said.
He handed my dad three hundred bucks and we all shook hands. Kevin’s friend Tim got in his car and Kevin waved him along and then goodbye to us. Kevin revved up the bike and off he went, driving back to Northeast Philly. It was about a seventeen-mile trip and would require him to drive on the highway. And he was on a motorcycle for the first time. Without a helmet. And he didn’t seem to be too concerned about either.
As Kevin pulled away on the motorcycle, I thought I saw a tear in my father’s eye. Not so much for the bike that he’d worked to restore to working condition, but for the son that he’d never had, driving away and out of his life.
But the good news was that at least I could still legally drive a car.
the summer of magical drinking
North Wildwood, New Jersey, was the most magical place on earth. An island beach town about ninety miles southeast of Philadelphia, it was where, for two weeks each summer, once in June and once in August, my family would spend our vacation. And when I say “my family,” I include a number of people outside of my immediate family; my grandmom and mom’s sisters, Anne and Maureen, and their families would usually join us. We’d get two adjoining rooms at a motel with a pool (and hopefully a waterslide) and cram ourselves in, kids sharing beds with parents, siblings sharing beds with each other, and, inevitably, my brother and I sleeping on the pullout couch. Dennis and I would get very little sleep on the couch, however; our Aunt Maureen was a serial sleepwalker, and her occasional ghostly nighttime walkabouts scared the shit out of us and kept us on edge all night long.
Despite the lack of a decent night’s sleep, it was always a week of decadence, kid-style. We’d run the air conditioners twenty-four hours a day, something that was verboten at home, where my mom’s desire to conserve electricity meant we were allowed to open doors just enough to slither in or out of a room, lest all the cold air immediately seep out. We’d spend entire days swimming in the pool, diving in when it opened first thing in the morning and getting yanked out by our parents when it closed in the evening. And we’d eat ice cream every single night. That wasn’t much different from our life back in Philly, but down the shore we went out to ice cream parlors for our treats instead of eating them at home. That is how you vacationed in our family, baby.
Furthermore, everyone in our part of Philly went to North Wildwood, making it more or less Second Street-by-the-Shore. I don’t know how everyone in our neighborhood came to spend their summer vacations in the same New Jersey shore town. After all, there were dozens of shore towns within easy driving distance of South Philly, a number of them even closer than North Wildwood. But going back generations, North Wildwood was the beach destination for Second Streeters.
This made going down the shore even more fun. It was not the type of vacation during which you were trapped with your family, the one week per year when your siblings had to be your friends because there were simply no other kids around. Half of my friends spent their entire summer down the shore, and the other half, like me, usually went down for a week or two each season. So going down the shore meant being reunited with those buddies who spent their summers in North Wildwood and whom I hadn’t seen since school had ended.
My favorite part of our summer vacation was the boardwalk. The Wildwood boardwalk was as close to paradise that someone between the ages of three and twelve could possibly come. There were the multitude of games that bankrupted parents for the sake of winning a stuffed animal. There were the rides like the log flume or the Condor (which lifted you up four stories high, spun you around, and then dropped you down) and the Sea Serpent, the marquee roller coaster. There were the arcades with rows and rows of video games and skee-ball. And, of course, the food. Funnel cake and french fries and frozen yogurt and pizza . . . paradise, I tell ya.
Down the shore with (you guessed it) a few cousins (see if you can pick them all out). Also, this is the last known picture of me shirtless, as things got heavy once I hit age seven.
While it sounds like a Kids First! vacation, North Wildwood was just as charming a place for teenagers. The pool and the beach were viable and fun options regardless of age, but there was a new allure to this Jersey Shore town once kids got too old for boardwalk rides and games: new girls (and guys). While North Wildwood was Second Street-by-the-Shore, it was not filled exclusively with people from our South Philly neighborhood: there were families from the rest of New Jersey, other parts of Pennsylvania, and New York who summered there. Then there were the locals who made their homes in North Wildwood year-round, as well as the Europeans, mostly Irish and Polish, who worked in the town’s service industries during the busy summer season. Add it all up and
the opportunities for meeting someone for a little summer lovin’ were almost limitless. Maybe your friends in the neighborhood knew you as the local miscreant, but the girl from Krakow working in the arcade had no idea you liked to start fires in neighbors’ trash cans, and the guy from Larchmont who did Tuesday through Thursday nights at the ice cream shop was unaware that you’d peed your pants in gym class in fifth grade.
And if, over those high school summers, a teen from Second Street was unable to succeed in initiating a summer romance, there was a light at the end of the tunnel: the post-graduation shore house.
Every society has its rites for the transition from childhood to adulthood. Aborigine boys spend months alone living in the wilderness. In Turkmenistan, young boys and girls are expected to successfully wrestle and pin a wild pony before being considered an adult. In certain parts of Chile, sixteenth birthdays involve intense wine-drinking competitions between the birthday boy or girl and the local village wino that sometimes last for weeks.* For generations, one of our neighborhood’s coming-of-age rituals was the Getting of the Shore House after High School Graduation. A half dozen to a dozen friends would chip in a few bucks each and rent one of the giant Victorians in North Wildwood for the whole summer. Everyone did this. Throughout North Wildwood there would be a rotating set of parties. The freshly minted graduates would spend the summer after their senior year working as bartenders or waitresses or lifeguards and drifting from one party to another, night after night, living the stories that would be told in bars and at parties twenty, thirty, and forty years later. The potential for summer lovin’ was now off the charts; no longer were teens living with and under the terms and conditions of their parents. Many people who started dating during this special summer eventually got married (it was down the shore that my parents first “properly” met).*
The shore house upon graduation was a reward for the successful completion of high school. But it was also both a first time and a last moment. For most, this was the first time living away from their parents, and the freedom and opportunities it presented were exhilarating. Many of them would not be going to college and, if they did, they would not be living away at school and in a dorm. So this was a special summer to enjoy the freedom of living with friends before moving back in with family and either getting a grown-up job or taking college classes. Eighteen years old, a dozen-plus years of school over with: it was time to party.
But I didn’t have to wait that long. My friends Trusko, Big Rob, and I got a shore house after my sophomore year of high school. I was fifteen.
There are certain benefits to being good. That is, when you don’t get in trouble and get decent grades year after year after year, you can use this unblemished record and stockpiled karma to your advantage one day.
That day came in the winter of my sophomore year of high school. By then, Steve Trusko had become one of my best friends. Known in the neighborhood as “Coast to Coast” Steve Trusko for his penchant for going coast to coast (read: never passing) on the basketball court, Steve was a rare bird like me. He had grown up on Second Street but also went to the Prep. Prior to high school, I didn’t know Steve very well because he was a year older than me. But we bonded quickly on those morning commutes on the yellow Prep bus that made a loop around South Philly, hitting Second Street and a few of the Italian neighborhoods.
A bit of a troublemaker, Steve was a good guy who could win you over with his combination of charm and pure volume. If he was in the room, you couldn’t help but notice it—you could hear him telling jokes and cracking up from about five hundred yards away.
It was Steve’s idea to get the shore house. He knew that I loved going to North Wildwood. He also knew that by now, sharing a pullout couch with my little brother and having a dozen family members jammed into two small motel rooms was getting a little old. And since I loved those two weeks each summer, I’d really love being there for an entire season, as Steve pitched it. Steve already had a place to stay down the shore, as his parents rented a place each year for the whole summer. But he, like me, was tired of sharing the place with his family.
He also knew that I worked and had a little bit of cash on hand. Steve, too, had a job during the school year and was able to contribute. Still, we would need a third roommate, as two dudes do not a party house make. Our third would preferably be someone whose company we enjoyed and who had money to spend on the rental. We looked to our friend Big Rob.
Like Steve, I didn’t really know Big Rob until high school. He was the same age as Steve, and those two, like me and Floody, went back to when they were in first grade. Big Rob got his nickname because by the time he was ten or eleven, he was almost six feet tall and just under two hundred pounds. Now, a few weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday, he was almost six feet tall and just under two hundred pounds. Though the nickname didn’t really fit—he wasn’t big enough to be called “big,” but he also wasn’t so small that it was ironic—it stuck.
Big Rob would make an ideal roommate because in addition to being our good friend, he got almost anything he wanted. He had a car. He had the newest video games. He had the latest curfew. He was spoiled, but he’d admit it. Selling a shore house to his parents would be a piece of cake, something he agreed with when we revealed our grand plan.
And really, it wasn’t hard for any of us to get our parents’ permission to get the house. I don’t think Big Rob asked so much as told, and Steve and I both pulled the “but I work so hard all year long, both in school and at work” routine. My mom was reluctant, but really, what was she going to do? I never got in trouble, I did well in school, I had a job and was paying for the shore house myself, and, I argued, that meant one less person crammed into the motel room come June and August. So, despite the fact that I was only a sophomore and not yet sixteen, my mom agreed and let me get the shore house. I barely had pubes, but for three months I’d live with two friends without any adult supervision.
We didn’t need the standard grand shore house rental, with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms. All we were looking for was a small place, especially because two of us would be going back and forth from the shore to the city over the summer. I’d still work at Mick-Daniel’s from Wednesday night until Friday night, and Big Rob, who had a car, said he’d drive back and forth to spend a few nights a week in Philly because he thought he’d be “bored” down the shore full time, which Steve and I took to mean that he’d miss his mom’s cooking and her cleaning up after him. Steve would continue in his summer job as a dishwasher, which he’d had for a number of summers, at the local Elks club in North Wildwood, where his dad was a member.
We found the place through a friend. Our buddy Jerry’s family owned a home, and in the back there were three connected low-slung bungalows. His great uncle lived in one, a second was undergoing renovation, and a third was an unrented two-bedroom, one-bathroom place.
Though we were young to have our own shore house, because Jerry’s dad knew our families, he agreed to rent the place to us. This worked out for everyone. Our parents thought that because we weren’t renting from a management company or faceless landlord, we wouldn’t get ripped off. They also figured that the presence of Jerry’s family on the property would curtail any excessive partying or bad behavior. It was a fit on both sides, so we rented the place for the whole summer. We officially had a shore house.
Our first weekend was the unofficial start of summer: Memorial Day weekend. I had to work part of the weekend at Mick-Daniel’s, but I got a ride to North Wildwood, as I would every weekend that summer, from the bar’s DJ, DJ Ray, after the bar closed on Friday night. I finished my shift by 10 p.m., went home, and slept for a little bit, and then DJ Ray called after 4 a.m., after he’d cleaned up, put all his gear away, and was ready to start the drive down the shore.
Though our relationship would develop over the coming months, I didn’t know DJ Ray very well, and the rides were a little awkward. It was just the two of us in the middle of the night, the only car on the highway, b
oth of us tired and not especially in the mood to conduct scintillating conversation. But a ride was a ride, and I wanted to get to the shore as quickly as I could after my shift ended on Friday night.
We got into North Wildwood just as the sun was coming up on that first Saturday morning. DJ Ray dropped me off at the curb, waved, and pulled away. I walked back past the main house to the bungalow area. From the street, I could make out a figure sitting on our small porch, smoking a cigarette. I found this odd, because neither Steve nor Big Rob smoked. As I got closer, I could hear music playing softly, and I recognized the figure.
It was, in fact, Steve, with a cigarette in one hand and a can of Schmidt’s in the other. He was listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Down by the Seaside,” playing low on a boom box that sat in the window of the bungalow. Steve looked up at me, smiled broadly, and, with the cadence of someone who had just been hit with a tranquilizer dart, said, “Yo, cuz—welcome to our shore house.”
He took another swig off the Schmidt’s can and a drag of the cigarette, then stared off into space, making no further attempt to engage me—it seemed like he’d completely forgotten I was standing there. I walked into the bungalow and found Big Rob snoring on the living room floor, laid out like a homicide victim, with a can of Bud Ice within reach. The boom box and TV and every single light in the house was on, as was the whirring fan in the bathroom. The place looked like it had been ransacked.
I dropped my bag on the floor. Those first few minutes gave me a pretty good idea of what we’d spend most of the summer doing.
Neither Steve, Big Rob, nor I, nor any of our friends, were strangers to alcohol by the time we rented the shore house. By fifteen or sixteen, almost everyone was drinking. While our main hangout was the Park, we couldn’t drink there, as it was a playground in plain sight of the surrounding row houses. So we started hanging around places that offered more privacy: under the bridge or on the dark side. The former was not an actual bridge, but rather the area under the I-95 overpass, which cut through the easternmost part of the neighborhood. While the west side of the overpass was residential, the east side was littered with old factories that were now empty and decrepit. Thus this was prime real estate for us, and there were no adults around to bother us or stop us from drinking, publicly urinating, and making out (not all at once).
236 Pounds of Class Vice President Page 11
