I navigated southern Jersey easily; I’d been doing it all my life. When you’re from there, you’re entire youth and much or your teen years are absorbed by the draw of the Atlantic Ocean.

Families take week long trips down the shore when you’re little, and when you get older you go to the same place to smoke pot with your friends. When you’re small, you go on all the rides, later you spend money by the hundreds trying to win a “free” TV, or a Judas Priest mirror, or a carton of cigarettes. The boardwalks of the Jersey shoreline echo with a bygone time that will never die as long as people live there. The shaping of many a teenager’s life has taken place contemplating sex, drugs, cars, ambition, girlfriends, boyfriends, nearly anything, over a soda and a tray of clams on the half-shell. This magnificent country of ours should have more Jersey shores.

* * * *

26

I pulled along the side of the road past the restaurant, they didn’t really have a parking lot. I glanced over at Janine, who was happily looking around like a puppy seeing new and interesting scenery.

“You said you had a craving for seafood. I’ve brought you to some of the best seafood you can get on the East coast. I would have brought it to you, but that would have entailed leaving you.”

She smiled and said, “Should we indulge before dinner?”

She patted her jean pocket where the remainder of the coke was stashed.

“Why not?” I replied.

In truth it didn’t matter to me. I enjoyed my high and didn’t mind another. This is both the beauty and ugliness of cocaine.

It’s a short high, so you come down cool instead of crashing. Yet, because it’s so short, you get a short high again and again until suddenly there isn’t any more, and then all you want is to go out and score more. Not a financially sound drug of choice if you asked me. But this coke was free, for me anyway, and, I felt that Janine could afford it otherwise she wouldn’t have it. When it was gone it was gone, I had hours planned that would long outlive the depletion of the amphetamine supply. I preferred it that way. Although I wanted Janine, whether she was clean and sober or falling down wasted, her reactions to me could only be validated if she were on the straight and narrow. If every woman that loved me when they were on something suddenly decided to drop by and see me on the same day, I’d have to get a bigger apartment to accommodate them all.

We walked into the Sandbar and I let Janine look around for a while. This place had been in business as long as anyone I’d ever talked to could remember. It had been owned by the same family for at least three generations, some real history.

Covering the walls were yellowed photographs of locally

“famous” fishermen, landscape shots of the sun setting over the ocean, before and after pictures of the boardwalk during its first few prosperous years. I watched her touch the buoys and run her fingers over the lobster netting. Some places try to recreate 27

restaurants like this one: making them “rustic” with stained wood or dolphin statues, made in China no doubt. The Sandbar was real, and I knew Janine could tell the difference. It wasn’t in my nature to take her to a place where someone had tried to invent someone else’s memories with plywood and plastic.

A waitress popped her head in from the main dining room,

“Know where you want to sit?” she asked.

“Yeah, we’re going to grab a table outside. You know, if there’s room.”

The place was deserted. My humor was lost on her; she just shrugged and trotted away. Oh well, I heard Janine snicker as she came up behind me, and hers was the only person’s laughter I needed.

“I assume there’s a story here, otherwise you wouldn’t have brought me.”

“Call me Ishmael,” I said and took her hand. I led her through the empty dining room to the deck beyond. Soon the place would be filled to the brim with more residents returning from weekending elsewhere; Cape May, Atlantic City, Long Branch. I wanted at least a few moments alone, to hear the sound of her voice without straining over a crowd, to gaze upon her face without being joined by the eyes of others. We chose a table near the pier where, if you so desired, you could stroll out and gaze at the scenery while waiting for the chef to drown your lobster in cheap sherry before boiling it to death so as not to leave the look of horror and shock on its face.

Another bopping waitress came over to take our drink order. Janine ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks, as she had when we met. Why break tradition? I thought. “Tanqueray and tonic, with lime please.”

“You’re a purist, aren’t you?”

“When it comes to that, yes. Although I’ve been known to indulge in chick drinks under circumstances of extreme duress.”

“A good Rum Runner on the rocks is hard to come by.

You should have one of those. Although, I assume you would seek out a bartender whose experience ranged beyond that of a sixteen year old.” She nodded in the direction of our waitress 28

who would someday make stewardess.

“So, tell me a story.” She lit a cigarette and leaned forward on her elbows, took a drag and handed it to me. I took a drag and thought about what I should say. There was a story there, in that place. It carried with it both wonderful and horrific connotations. I was such a creature of habit. I was already well on my way to baring my soul a bit further, but didn’t know if she wanted to know how fucked up I really was when it came to women.

“Maggie, I have no delusions about your past,” she said.

There she was doing it again.

“Okay.” I was a writer, after all. I figured I’d tell a story, embellish here and there, and she might not even think it was true; she wouldn’t have been the first. Just then the sixteen year old came, bearing drinks and a tray of a dozen raw oysters on ice. The Sandbar was infamous for their oysters. It wasn’t even necessary to have them on the menu. You were automatically given a dozen as an appetizer unless you requested otherwise.

“An aphrodisiac,” Janine said matter-of-factly and quite intentionally while the waitress was still within earshot.