Page 44 of On Fire Island
“Banana?” he offered the guys.
They looked at him blankly.
“I couldn’t do it. Maybe a drink will help. Let’s go to Housers.”
Housers sat just around the bend from the Ocean Beach market and mostly attracted locals on a weeknight. We had spentmany an evening there drinking tequila, playing darts or pool, and dancing to eighties songs on their old jukebox. Tonight felt different. For starters, I didn’t recognize anyone except for the staff, and there seemed to be a shady element hanging around.
The three of them slid into one of the few booths as a familiar salty face came over to take their order. The conversation between the waiter and Shep was priceless.
“What can I get you?”
“Three shots of tequila.”
“Not for him.”
“What, he’s eighteen.”
“He’s not eighteen,andthe drinking age is twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one? When did that happen?”
“1984.” The waiter tickled Matty under his chin, adding, “Decades before his mother wheeled her cute little baby boy off the Bay Harbor ferry.”
Ben smiled, as did Shep and the waiter. Matty did not.
“I remember that day.” Shep beamed. “You were such a cute baby, Matty. Caroline would push you up and down the block in your pram like you were her grandchild.”
Matty buried his head as Ben took control.
“Bring us two each and a cola for him.”
When the drinks arrived, Shep held one up to toast. “To young love!”
“It’s not really like that,” Matty explained. “And besides, look at my parents. I don’t even believe in that crazy-in-love shit anymore.”
“You may be better off,” Ben piped in, in a voice more similar to Eeyore’s than his own.
Shep wasn’t having it. “You don’t really mean that, Ben.”
“Well, I never want to feel like this again.”
“You may want to rethink that, because your life is gonna suckwith that attitude. I’m just passing time till I can be with Caroline again, but you have a ways to go. You can’t just pass forty-odd years of time.”
As the drinks were placed on the table, Shep ordered another round.
The waiter looked at him skeptically but nodded in agreement as Ben pronounced, “All that better-to-have-loved-and-lost nonsense feels like a crock.”
He dramatically drank his shot and headed for the dartboard.
“Don’t listen to him, son.” Shep discreetly passed a shot to Matty and took one himself. “Even your scorned mother has gotten back on the horse.” He held up his shot glass hopefully.
“I’m not drinking to that,” Matty lamented.
“Go ahead and drink yours to misery, but I’m drinking mine to your mother banging the drummer.” Shep drank his shot, slammed it on the table, and got up.
Matty mumbled and drank his as well. He winced at the taste and placed the empty glass back across the table. As time passed, the shot glasses increased by threes to a dozen, plus a couple of bottles of beer, and I wondered how they would make it home. Especially Matty, who was now asleep with his head flat on the table. Ben and Shep were playing darts with some equally liquored-up, bad-ass day-trippers sporting an abundance of tattoos and seventies-style facial hair. Shep, who needed to steady one hand with the other to even hit the board, somehow managed a bull’s-eye. He and Ben reacted like they had defeated Russia for Olympic gold. On Shep’s way down from his victory jump, he reached up to his big bad-ass opponent and swiped the red baseball hat off his half-bald head. It was a big mistake—HUGE, I would say. The bald day-tripper went nuts, grabbed Shep’s arm and blasted him. He did not seem to care that he was getting into it with an old man.
“You can fuck with my friends, you can fuck with my wife, but never, ever, fuck with my hat.”
