The dark side was part of a schoolyard of a local high school. The school was fenced all around and took up most of a city block, but the school itself was shaped like a U. There was a schoolyard on each side, and a third one in the middle at the dip in the U. This was what we called the dark side, because (you guessed it) it was darker than the other two schoolyards. We could drink there in relative peace and quiet. We were not as undisturbed in the dark side as we were under the bridge—police cars were much more likely to ride through the dark side with their lights flashing to scare us away if we were too noisy—but the dark side was closer to civilization and less scary. (Though unsubstantiated, we had a fear of homicidal hobos attacking us under the bridge.) The dark side also offered easier access to bars and alcohol.
Though most of us were underage by a half dozen or so years, buying booze was as easy as buying soda. Not all the neighborhood bars were as upscale as Mick-Daniel’s. There were numerous dive bars at which we could get served. I don’t mean dive bars that serve the “cowboy special”—a PBR and a shot—for five dollars and have multiple Iggy Pop albums on the jukebox and a few Boston terriers hanging around. I’m talking about dive bars at which even if you were a regular you didn’t go into the bathroom because you feared a sexual assault, regardless of your gender. Some people had fake IDs from their older siblings or cousins, but they were rarely needed. A few of the girls had, um, developed quickly, and it was those girls who would be our “runners,” as in, “Jamie’s gonna run for some beer. Who’s in?” The girl would walk to the bar with some others and buy as many beers as she could carry, and as soon as she walked out, the rest of the crew would appear from behind parked cars to help carry the beers back to the dark side or under the bridge.
The biggest problem with buying alcohol was that old Second Street provinciality. You might not have a family member or family friend in one of the dive bars, but there might be a friend of a friend of a friend of your family’s, or someone who recognized you as a Mulgrew or a Collins or a Brown. So we often had to walk out of the neighborhood to find bars at which we could get served. It was an inconvenience, but it meant little more than a longer walk back.
Our last resort for purchasing alcohol was asking kids older than us, but still not twenty-one, to do it. They were generally willing, as long as we bought them a quart or a forty for their troubles (quarts and forties being our quantity of choice).
Why did we drink? I can’t say. Why does one climb a mountain? Because it’s there and it’s dangerous, and though there’s a chance climbing it might kill you, you will almost certainly increase your chances of getting laid after you’ve done it. We were teenagers and we were bored, and we saw all our parents and our older friends do it; so we did it, too.
While in the city we drank outside, at the new shore house we could drink inside. We didn’t have to worry about frostbite from holding a forty in a paper bag. Or about our moms catching us in the act while walking to Wawa. Or about having to pee outdoors on the side of a school or an overpass pillar. Or about the cops rolling up, blasting their sirens, and scaring the shit out of us. We now could sit down, talk, listen to music, watch TV, and pee in a toilet while we drank, just like the grownups.
This, as you might guess, made our shore house—and, for the first time, Steve, Big Rob, and me—immensely popular. Starting that Memorial Day weekend, our house was the destination spot in North Wildwood for our friends (and their friends). Many of the older kids who had just graduated high school had their shore houses, but these were exclusive and off-limits to anyone not enjoying their special graduation summer. But no one our age—high school sophomores and juniors—had their own house. We had cornered the market. It was like being the only 18-plus club in a town full of 21-plus bars.
Though we tried to control the crowds, we more or less had an open door policy, with people coming in and out all hours of the day and night. The place started getting busy during the post-beach hours, when friends would come by for a smoke or a beer before heading back to their parents’ houses for dinner. Then there might be a lull. But by evening we filled up once again, our guests going through Marlboro Lights and various and sundry cheap canned domestic beer at a rapid pace. It was that first weekend that we hit our first snag of the summer: where and how to get alcohol.
It was more difficult to buy booze in North Wildwood than on Second Street. There was no chance of buying beer at the bars and carrying it out like we did in Philly. There were fewer bars, they were farther apart, and they were very strict on IDs. To buy alcohol, you had to go to the only beer distributor on the whole island. It was just around the corner from our place, but they, too, were strict when it came to IDs.
Salvation came from an unlikely place: the older kids. The same kids who had tormented us or treated us with indifference all fall, winter, and spring now looked at Steve, Big Rob, and I in a different light. When they learned that the three of us had our own party house at which the “young heads” congregated to drink, they thought it was kind of cute. So they helped us out. Whenever they went to the beer distributor, only five hundred or so feet from our place, they’d usually pop in and ask if we wanted anything. And because these guys and girls were hitting up that beer distributor nearly every single day, as long as we had enough money on hand, we had a constant supply of alcohol.
Lots of fourteen-to seventeen-year-old visitors and an unending stream of alcohol meant we had to go out of our way to be respectful of our landlords. We had no choice but to be, since we lived in Jerry’s family’s backyard. There were two entrances to the house: one in the front just off the porch, and one in the back, through the kitchen. The back of our bungalow faced a house that was undergoing construction, so we used that as our main entrance/chain smokers’ alley. We kept the front windows and door closed and the shades drawn, and we didn’t allow any loitering out front. Still, people coming in and out all day long made us look a bit like a higher-class crack house. Did we succeed in covering up all of the underage drinking going on in our home? Of course not. It didn’t take Kojak to know that a lot of young kids were getting drunk on the premises. But we figured that as long as we were decent about it, we just might be able to get away with it.
We immediately established certain house rules to maintain order, including but not limited to:
You are welcome to crash if you are too drunk to go anywhere else, but no sleeping in either of the bedrooms, which are reserved for Steve, Big Rob, and me. We later amended this rule to: You are welcome to crash if you are too drunk to go anywhere else as long as you alert a parent of your whereabouts. This was after a night in early June when Laurie, one of my mom’s good friends and a waitress I worked with at Mick-Daniel’s, stormed into our place looking for her son, our friend Ryan, who had passed out on our couch after drinking a half a bottle of After Shock and eating a whole box of Cap’n Crunch.
If you are presented with a once-in-a-lifetime make-out opportunity, you can use the smaller bedroom as a venue. “Once-in-a-lifetime” did not include making out with one’s girlfriend or boyfriend, but did include one of our friends making a connection with a stunning member of the opposite sex at one of our parties. No one took advantage of this rule.
To gain entry to the house, you must contribute something. Anything. Ideally, this would be in the form of alcohol, but it was understood that was difficult to pull off. Any food—ramen noodles, soda, cereal—was welcome. Failing that, we kept an empty water jug by the door so that people could contribute pocket change or a dollar here and there.
Any yelling after being told to keep one’s voice down or blatant disrespect for the property and/or its occupants would result in immediate expulsion and possible banishment for the entire summer, no questions asked.
Our rules were simple but effective. Maybe we didn’t enforce them as much with some guests as with others—we weren’t exactly ladies’ men, but we knew not to demand pocket change from a girl for shore house entry—but it all went smoothly.
And from that first weekend, we settled into our roles. Steve was the bouncer, enforcer, and de facto leader. Big Rob was the sidekick/ strong, silent type. And me? I was the sober guy.
When I moved into the shore house, I hadn’t drunk very much at all. When “we” drank under the bridge or the dark side, my friends usually did the consuming and I did the hanging around. I’d had a shot here and there, and maybe a sip of beer or a swig of a forty, but I had never gotten myself a drink and consumed the whole thing. There were many reasons for my sobriety. The generally accepted reason among my friends was that I was a pussy. (I respectfully disagreed.)
The first reason that I did not drink was that, despite the buzz about drinking beers and let’s get drunk and oh my god getting drunk is awesome, it didn’t seem that cool. When you’re fifteen and you get drunk, 90 percent of the time you’re going to end up getting in trouble with your parents, getting in a fight with a friend, or puking or peeing on yourself. (Actually, it’s probably closer to 95 percent of the time.) Based on this, I was not in a rush to try drinking. Weighing the risks (listed above) versus the rewards (a drowsy feeling and social acceptance), it seemed like an easy pass.
This fed into the second reason why I didn’t drink. I liked being a nonconformist. Everybody was drinking. Usually, to a teenager, the thing that everybody is doing is lame. At the start of the summer, I didn’t realize that there were exceptions to this rule: that sometimes, the thing that everyone is doing really is cool, and that drinking was most definitely one of them. This would take me a few weeks to figure out.
My parents could not have cared less if I drank. My mom and dad agreed on maybe eleven things in the entire time they’d known each other (and I’m including things like “French dressing is the best salad dressing” and “Today is a nice day”), but they were both totally cool with me drinking, as long as I did so responsibly. Never drive. Be sure to call if you get too drunk. And that’s it. Otherwise, I could have all the cheap beer I wanted.
Their attitude made me even less interested in drinking. A big part of my friends’ motivation to drink was to break rules and to piss off their parents. If I drank, I wouldn’t be breaking any rules or pissing off my parents. I would be doing what everyone else was doing. And I’d probably just get drunk and do something stupid.
And then there was the last and, for me, most important reason for my teetotalism: I didn’t like the taste. All of the one-off shots I had taken over the years—gin, vodka, whiskey, rum—tasted so offensive that I didn’t understand how anyone, anywhere, could enjoy them. Why not just drink rubbing alcohol, which was cheaper and could be bought anywhere? Beer was even worse. Everyone had already claimed a favorite beer by fifteen, calling themselves Bud guys or MGD fans or Coors Light* drinkers. But to me, they all tasted like bread soda.
By the end of June summer was in full swing, and our place developed more into a mission for wayward teens addicted to “ice”-named beers, wine coolers, and light cigarettes than a summertime rental. And it was awesome. People—girls!—were coming up to me at our parties, introducing themselves, commenting on how cool it was that we had our shore house, and how great the parties were. I felt like goddamn Puff Daddy. But inevitably, there would be an awkward moment in our conversation when a guest asked if I wanted a beer and I responded, “No, thanks. I don’t drink.” For the reactions I got when I said this, I might as well have said, “No, thanks. I’d like to murder you and skull fuck you in a closet instead.”
By not drinking, I was preventing myself from taking full advantage of the incredible situation that had fallen into my lap. At best I looked like the uptight guy at the party, making sure no one breaks anything or puts their cigarettes out on the furniture, and at worst like the priest who runs the mission and tends to the flock. So I decided to throw myself into the scene and make myself a drinker.
I started experimenting with beer, as it was the most readily available. The first beer was gross. The second beer was gross. And the third beer was grossest of all. And worse, you had to keep going, as it took at least two or three more to really do the trick. No thanks.
Then I tried vodka on ice. This got me drunk quickly, but it was also cool: while the guests enjoyed beer out of cans, I drank my vodka on the rocks like it was no thang, even though the vodka came from a large plastic bottle that cost seven dollars. But the vodka rocks was even worse than the beer. Adding ice did not make it any better: it was like a long, slow shot.
Vodka and orange juice was a bit closer to my wheelhouse. But the prospect of drinking a half gallon of orange juice a night was neither tempting nor cost-effective, not to mention that I’d have diabetes by Labor Day weekend. So I remained without a go-to drink.
There was much joking among Steve, Big Rob, and me—mostly ball-busting directed at me—about always having a gallon of whole milk in the fridge, which was otherwise packed with beer and maybe some cheese and lunchmeat. I loved whole milk (never that watery skim stuff), and every morning for breakfast I’d have a big glass and a Tastykake. Then at night, I’d have a glass before bed to help me fall asleep.
It was Steve and Big Rob who creatively solved my not-drinking problem with a gift. Steve was now drinking Schmidt’s, his dad’s favorite beer, so frequently that a can of beer became a permanent extension of Steve’s body. Big Rob stuck with Bud Ice because he “liked the can” and because it was our unofficial house beer, as it was strong and cheap. After one of the booze runs by the older kids, Steve plopped down a new bottle on the table to add to our collection, saying this one was all mine. It was Kahlúa.
He explained that the only thing that goes with whole milk is Kahlúa. And that it’s delicious. He would know, because, he said, it was his grandmother’s favorite drink, and she’d sneak him a sip when he was a little kid. “It tastes like a milkshake,” he said.
The bottle was familiar to me, as I’d seen it in the bar. But I didn’t recall anyone ever ordering anything with Kahlúa in it. But milkshakes? I liked milkshakes.
Steve made the first one for me: a little ice, some milk, and a bit of Kahlúa dribbled in. It did indeed taste like a milkshake. But it was booze: technically, I was drinking alcohol. I finished the first and had another, adding a little more Kahlúa this time. It made my magic milkshake taste even better.
The Kahlúa—and the Mug—were mine. I’m assuming I was holding the whole milk when this picture was taken.
From that point forward, Kahlúa and Cream (whole milk), or K & C, as I called it, became my drink of choice. It wasn’t perfect. I couldn’t really get drunk because my stomach started to hurt from consuming mass quantities of whole milk before the alcohol took effect, but I could get a nice buzz going. Though I had nothing to compare it to, the next-day feeling was generally terrible, as my head pounded and my stomach roared. And it was summer. We had no air conditioning, and a whole milk– based drink was not the most appropriate choice for the season.
Yet, inconveniences aside, K & C’s were perfect for me. I was drinking alcohol. I was still being nonconformist, because no one else was drinking milk and booze. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I liked how they tasted.
I spent the rest of that summer as a proprietor of one of the busiest party houses in North Wildwood. I entertained dozens of friends and guests. The older kids knew my name. Girls came into my home and sat on my couch. And I drank alcohol. It was a magical summer, just a few years early.
the first six loves of my life *
Sandy Olsson
(Ingénue/Vixen, Grease)
Some young children are obsessed with trains or with Disney characters. I was obsessed with the complicated love story of Danny and Sandy and the wonderful world of Rydell High. As a kid, I watched Grease on a near-constant loop. I knew all the lines by heart, I could sing the songs word for word, and I had (most of) the dance routines down cold.
If this obsession was, um, cause for concern for my Irish Catholic “gay people, family problems, alcoholism, and anything that
involves an open discussion of feelings do not exist” family, they did not let on. In hindsight, I have my doubts that my dad, uncles, and grandfathers, tolerant though they were, were able to watch without prejudice the oldest male grandchild in the family prance around, thrusting his hips, and pointing—with his hair slicked back with water from the kitchen sink—while performing “Greased Lightning.”
Fourth-grade talent show. Only one loser actually dyed his hair black and got the curl going. Probably the one obsessed with Grease.
But if there were concerns that my obsession with Grease was the manifestation of the nascent stages of homosexuality, any homo-fearing males in my circle had nothing to worry about. For though I enjoyed the music and the story (and the camp), there was one reason above all others that I watched Grease over and over and over again: Sandy.
Before I knew anything about sex or kissing or the romantic dynamic between boys and girls, I knew that Sandy made me feel something that no one ever had before. It was the “Hopelessly Devoted to You” scene that really got me: Sandy, lovelorn and alone, stood outside in her nightgown, away from the slumber party, singing about the struggle between the heart and the head, conceding defeat, and resigning herself to her overwhelming feelings. I may have been four years old, but something somewhere in my belly said that I should go up to Sandy and give her a hug. She was too pretty to be sad.
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