In 1975 my grandparents pop and grammy, my folks Karen and Don, and my godparents Uncle Tim and Aunt Mary bought a three bedroom house some five miles outside Ocean City, Maryland. The house was one of three on the street, the street one of several hundred just like it. It was the barely-there community of Ocean Pines: mostly saltwater canals fluxing in and out from Assawoman Bay, tall tall pines quiet and peaceful, second-growth softwoods and saltgrass and every so often the dotting of a new wood-sided home. Ocean City didn't go beyond 60th street then, it was still natural dunes even after 30th. My grandparents were retired, my godparents teachers who were off in the summer, my dad well on his way to the material success implicit of
the American Dream. Today there are no empty lots on our shaded street, the bike trails through the woods and the secret bayfront beaches all us kids used to know are gone. The "Dream" quite literally has come home.
My dad is the oldest of seven brothers and sisters, a Catholic working-class family from South Baltimore. He was 28 and just married to my mom when my retired grandad, a Colonel in the army, a fierce liberal and a carpenter by trade, discovered the wooded community that boasted a new golfcourse where he and his two oldest sons could play. Then men in dad's family define themselves in relation to sports. Either played, coached or fans of, this is their common language, a bond that themes them together throughout life and subsequent communion at family gatherings that have occurred since long before my childhood days of listening to the weighted air between the intermittent static of the O's game on the transistor radio on the backporch at Ocean Pines. We didn't have a television here in the summer when I was a kid, and what I remember is the importance, the feeling of anticipation, hoping for the success of the home team.
I was the first grandkid to come along and I came to be at the end of a generation unconsciously dictated to be the change: to bridge a gap between what was and what will be. Fate has a funny way of working out evolution, the consciousness of a people shaped at once by the stakes they claim as well as by the circumstances that initially created the need to claim them. I come from the memory of immigrants, thus in my genes exists the struggle and the ethics of what it means to need to survive: The father of dad's dad an Irish-born immigrant who worked the coal mines in Western Pennsylvania; the mother of dad's mom a WASP from Massachusettes who refused to speak to her daughter when she decided to marry the pigshit Irish-Catholic soldier that she met in France during the war. We hold tight to these stories, my family and I, tight to this history and how it makes us brave.
In 1996 in June I was 19-years-old. I lived in a single-room apartment on 2cnd street and St. Louis in Ocean City with a guy named Kareem. All my boys, the homies from Ocean Pines, lived there, too. We called it the Drifthood. It's since been torn down. My room had a set of bunkbeds, a mirror, dresser and a sink. It was dingy and dark and always freezing: Kareem liked it kept at 55 degrees so there was a bolt of ice that hung perpetually off the AC-unit from the only window in the room. It smelled frozen, of mildew and dust. We had a communal bathroom at the end of the hall that no one ever used because the the tub was filled with piss and the discarded ruins of cigars, or what we called blunts. That's the summer that I first knew I was addicted to drugs, or that something was going on that I didn't have words for, just a gutfull of dread: when I took the first hit of anything I lost control...I didn't know where even the first puff of a joint or pull on a blunt would lead me, good or bad. Just about all our apartments were run through with the guys from Snow Hill who brought with them what in my eyes were mounds of cocaine. They were notoriously bad mutherfuckers, and cool and tough as I tried to be it scared me. Kevin, my boyfriend the year before and a long time late night flirtatious summer love, had one of the good apartments in the Hood: his had two bedrooms and a kitchen and bathroom on the ground level and it opened up to a courtyard with cement and dead grass and a brick grill we filled with bottles ahses and cigarette butts. He was dating a new girl now also named Kelly who later would get popped for running prostitution out of the Hooters restaurant uptown. At night though downtown I worked at a pizzashop on the boards near the skateshop where Kevin and his boys all worked and partied and hung, he would occasionally when drunk before getting dusted or smacked out come lingering around and tell me of his eternal love... We had a number of under the moon beside the sea kisses that summer and they are the last memories of him tender and sweet...The table in Kev's apartment was covered with marker tags and slick with the grease of old and dirty and one day I went in to his pad to pee and there was a syringe and long piece of rubber on top. And this dude Randy a real soulfull Rasta dude who always put me at ease was sitting there and I remember looking at him and thinking I can not keep faking like I am too cool to care.
I finally got kicked out of there for not paying the rent. I ran back to Ocean Pines, to Tim and Mary and my very sick Gram and my cousins and cuddles on the couch in front of whatever movie was playing in the VCR. I remember afternoons stepping in to the Pines house terrified, sure the life I'd left behind in town had followed me, only to find the house quiet: Gram on the back porch in the middle of a nap that must've smelled to her like honeysuckle and old wood; Uncle Tim smiling quiet over his glasses in his hands a good book. The cool calm, the consistency. What would I have done if it weren't for Ocean Pines?
About 20 or so years ago they put an addition on the house here: two new rooms; one for my brother Sean and I and one for Tim and Mary's kids yet to come. And they lengthened the backporch. Every summer, right around the Solstice, my family, all 7 of my aunts and uncles and all those cousins, come to the Pines for a reunion. We kick it off with a crab feast on the back porch. The back porch that is decorated with sports memorabilia and long enough to sit all 35 of us comfortably. On Sunday we go to the park, where dad's cousins, the sons and daughters of the brothers and sisters of that Pigshit Irish Catholic boy from the coalmines of PA, all bring their sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, too.
I think about this driving up Philadelphia Street yesterday, the Junebug beachweekers everywhere music and energy and little bikinis, tattoos and muscle shirts and drunk kids screaming. All this delicious energy, I was so happy
to be home. People hate it here, dirty downtown OC. It's so loud and upfront: life unhidden, humanity in your face. I reclaimed my room here this past spring: the stuff from my move off the farm that didn't fit in to Chop wound up in the attic or on the walls here at the Pines. My mom lives here now, my grandparents have been gone over ten years now, my dad funnily enough lives with Tim and Mary in their house in the county outta Bmore and they all make it down on the weekends. This, Ocean Pines, is what is left of a place I can still go to and call home. My cousins Erin and Tim, Tim and Mary's kids, live here with my mom and bartend at the big local restaurant. My dad's youngest sister Sue, also a teacher, lives a street over from us and her son Collin is a lifeguard at the local pool.
All those years of loudcalling wild fun in OC. All those years of mess and destruction. So much peace, so much longing. Hours and hours of sea. It's funny, home. Tom Waits says if you kill your demons your angels go, too. Is it supersappy then to say that getting to know your demons might be the best way to invite your angels to just stay, stay stay....?
