A Brief Reprise

When I graduated college nearly everyone I knew and loved was on a plane to Europe, and they left behind a core group of depressed single white guys in their early twenties who had nothing to do but drown each other in loneliness and study philosophy. Kierkegaard had a quote about the student of philosophy, “Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth spent in these deliberations. Life has not acquired any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy.”

There was Dave, who was leaving at the end of the summer to go to grad school, who was spending the summer reading Heidegger and asking girls if he could make them dinner, in an attempt to get over both the girl who disappeared from his life that spring and the general sense of total isolation that a good student of Heidegger so often has when he finds himself alone at night.

There was Phil, who had spent the early part of spring laying out of class and generally slacking off to be with the girl he loved, and who had spent the latter part of spring standing in the rain in front of the loft, smoking a cigarette and staring miserably across the street at that one light coming from her bedroom window.

Then there was me; a bright, fresh young college graduate ready to take on the world and make it my bitch. I had been president of everything, lived off a scholarship and had plenty of references to get a job. Except I had a degree in philosophy and the economy had crashed the October past. I spent the summer sending out my resume, regretting watching Carolyn board a plane for the last time, and waiting for her or any of those companies to acknowledge my existence. None of them did. I even gave a speech for a group of donors to the school and made it all about the difficulties of finding a job. I started having strange Tom Stoppard dreams about dead cows dressed as London Yard inspectors.

The three of us struggled through by making every attempt to be at every party through the summer. Out of money, we would walk to the nearest gas station, buy a forty or a bottle of cheap wine, and walk on to the party, where we would ultimately stand in a group amongst ourselves and loathe those fucking people with their dancing and talking and hugging and sex before ducking out early. We, or I, would make the long, drunk walk home all the longer with the occasional public urination stop filled with the usual “I’m better than these people!” rants.

In June the loft had a visitor. A bird came in through the front windows, but the apartment was so big he got lost and when he found a new set of windows in my room that were too high to open, he got stuck. He would fly as far away as possible, before building up speed and ramming into the window. When it wouldn’t work, he’d do it again, and every time he did it, it knocked chips of wood down into my bed. One day when he was flying through the living room, we led him into the extra bathroom and closed the door. We found him two days later, starved, dead on the shower rug. We left him there for rigor mortise.

At the end of June, the halfway point of our friends’ rumpus in Europe, I walked out of the bathroom and said to Dave and Phil, absent-mindedly, “Well, let’s go, then.”

“Where we going?”
“The beach,” I say. Of course, we live five hours from the beach.
“We could do that. Where would we go?”
“I wasn’t serious...”

So ten minutes later, I was in the shower. I should have known better. Over spring break Phil had walked into the kitchen while I was making my lunch. “Go to New Mexico with me,” he’d said, “I’ll buy the gas and we’ll take turns driving, let’s just go right now.” A few minutes later we’d been on our way on a forty-four hour, twenty-seven hundred mile trip to the western desert.

We pulled into the public parking at Tybee around 11:30 that night and realized we needed a ticket for the overnight parking, but that none of us had cash. Then a family came off the beach. There were four children, all young, and an overweight mother, her weave damaged in the swim. Seeing us there, the mother offered us their ticket, which was good until 9:30 the next morning. We sat up our site; we lay out a blanket, opened the first bottle of cheap wine, sat up the travel grill and got down to our shorts.

It took thirty minutes to start the fire because the wind off the ocean was against us. Then we grilled massive burgers, loaded them up with all the good stuff, and bit in. They were crunchy. The wind hitting the grill was full of sand, and now the burgers and our mouths were filled with sand. But the wine washed it away.

The wine washed everything away, inhibitions included, and soon the three of us were running bare-assed towards the ocean. Occasional passers-by would walk through, hear us out in the ocean, see the grill fire and notice the boxers scattered from the fire to the water, but even if they were looking for company, it wasn’t us.

After the swim, we figured we were too close to the dock and would have more privacy if we moved down the beach a little more, so we packed up our stuff and started walking down the beach, still no clothes. On the way to the new spot we ran into some teenage kids who, not seeming to notice the dangling dicks, used subversive code in an attempt to sell us some sort of illicit drug. They would have had a shot, but we couldn’t understand what they were trying to sell us, so we kept on towards the new spot, where we would stay the night on the blanket.

We sat up the new site and took to more drinking and naked dancing until around 3:00 am when we knew the sun would rise too soon and we needed to sleep in the space between. When we lay down, though, we realized our second great folly. The sand was wet, which meant the blanket was wet, which meant we were wet. Shortly after that, we saw our third gaffe. We didn’t bring a big enough blanket for all of us. It wasn’t the temperature that was going to make our attempts to sleep so futile, it was the sand bugs.

A few hours later the sun started its ascent over the ocean and we gave up pretending and walked our tattered, red bump-clad bodies down to the water for our morning constitutionals. While we were in the water the first worker on the beach that morning drove past. When he spotted our site he slowed down to a fat retired woman’s pace. That didn’t stop him from driving over our blanket, though. We watched him periodically, not wanting to stare. He clearly seemed to suspect us of spending the night, and possibly even drinking and cooking out, but we had moved sites after that, so there was no evidence of anything except that we were early risers. He had no option but to drive on.

Soon we were hungry. We hadn’t planned ahead far enough to consider today, and we didn’t have food or money and we were hours from home. Our mission was clear.

We lugged our stuff back to the car and moseyed over to the hotel. We came in through the front, just three young patrons of a fine establishment back in from their morning swim. We said good morning to the concierge and walked into the breakfast buffet.

Here was a room filled with decent people, middle-aged couples in Wal-mart sandals and bathing suits under XXL t-shirts, fresh and awake to start the last morning of the weekend getaway they took in place of a week’s vacation, looking to take advantage of the complimentary continental breakfast. And here were three guys, wet and sandy, with young bodies and wallets protruding from Banana Republic shorts, filling plates with sausage, eggs, biscuits, gravy and bacon, glasses with milk and orange juice, and bowls with individual cereal boxes. We owned the place. The gravy was too cold for us, the milk too warm. Ours was the conversation of the room. We were the inheritors of all the continental breakfasts.

Three hours later, long after our parking ticket had expired, Phil at rest, Dave at the helm, me with no pants, we were pulling out onto the road home; the road back to people who didn’t know we had left, the road back to careless people, the road back to sweeping up stiffened bodies of dead birds from stained rugs.