Fitting In on the Barrier Island

Unlike most of the folks who live on our barrier island, I did not have the advantage of being born in Long Beach.  Although I’ve been living here for quite a while now, I still feel like I live on the outer edges of something that is beyond my comprehension.  Maybe the difference is just a matter of cultural or psychological nuance, maybe a slight difference of attitude or goals—maybe it’s all in my head.  But I feel there’s a difference.  I try to blend in as best I can, but I know that I stick out like a homeless Bum who has wandered into a sweet sixteen party in somebody’s backyard garden.  I totter from conversation to conversation oblivious to what’s being said and the names that are being dropped.  People wince as I drink from the punch bowl using my cupped hands.  I stuff cupcakes and cocktail franks in my pockets in the hope of making several meals out of whatever I can steal.  I’m a Bum at the party. 

Like I said, I try to blend in, to pass myself off as an islander—I found a secondhand Cortland State T-Shirt that I wear when I go to the boardwalk, I file applications to get a “job with the city” as often as I can, and when I visit one of the bars in the west end I try drink my beer with a look of hopeful optimism in my eyes—but I still feel illegitimate.   You would think that this feeling would pass over time, but it hasn’t.  You would think that as the years have washed out to sea, and so many changes have happened to shape life here on the barrier island, that the differences would smooth themselves out and I would become part of the scenery; someone or something that belongs. 

When I first moved to Long Beach, the boardwalk was lined with barely functioning mental health facilities, some abandoned storefronts, and some religiously themed senior care housing that was clearly based on designs from a Soviet era slaughterhouse.  At night, the lost and lonely and unwanted shambled up and down the coastline, the old boards creaking beneath their feet, their body odor tamped down a bit by the salty fog that rolled in off the ocean.  Some nights, I would take a walk from Neptune to maybe National or so, and I would enjoy the nightmarish quality of the monsters as they shuffled towards me in the smoky yellow darkness.  A middle aged women with no teeth mumbling about finding food for the ragdoll she cradles in her arms.  A homeless couple and a limping child silently transporting their cardboard bedroom to another part of the boardwalk.  An old bum.  Then two young bums.  Then a man who is just plain crazy.  But the boardwalk is different now; Hurricane Sandy saw to that. 

Now when I take a walk, I just see the folks that belong in the daylight of our seaside town.  I see professionals maintaining their business edge with early morning jogging, biking, or furious running.  I see single mothers getting in shape for a second marriage, determinedly pushing their upscale baby sleds.  I see the steady plodding of the senior power walkers, plugged into their digital creative visualization exercises or books on tape.  Now, if you want to see a real bum, you’d probably have to wander along the train tracks up north in Island Park, or hang out by the few facilities left in town where you can cash in empty cans and bottles for booze money.  But even there, the folks that cart their gigantic bags of refuse in exchange for cash have a certain twenty first-century respectability about them.  Many of them appear to be folks that we know, just stopping by to get rid of all the empties left over from the Polar Bear party or the Chili Cook-Off or the Confirmation or the Sweet Sixteen.  Nope.  No bums here.  They don’t belong.  They’ve been banished by the sunlight to a twilight limbo of fog and salty night air.  A place where they limp towards one another in the mist, where details are so obscured by the heavy atmosphere, that it’s almost impossible to tell who someone is until you’re standing toe to toe with them.