Your Celebrated Summer

Memorial Day, the unofficial beginning of Summer 2010, arrives on Monday, so we asked our contributors to reflect on the season. We'll be sharing their thoughts all week. Here comes summer!

I worked at my father's industrial safety-equipment business on an assembly line manufacturing safety glasses. While the job was as monotonous as you might imagine, particularly for a high school student trying to enjoy summer vacation-try screwing 10,000 eyeglass temples onto half as many frames with an electric screwdriver and you'll get the idea-it introduced me to a visceral tedium I would later understand to be a foundation of modern life. It also taught me to relate to the other freaks and social misfits my father tended to hire. It was not uncommon for the guys in the shipping department (wearing welding helmets) to launch rubber-band attacks against the assembly-line crew. (I'm not sure why more workplaces don't have this now: it really breaks up the day!)

This job was also my primary exposure to the aural tedium of album-oriented-rock radio (in Pittsburgh, best represented by the timeless WDVE). To repeatedly hear the same bands — The Who, The Stones, Sabbath, Zep, Rush, Hendrix, Lynyrd Skynyrd — was the aesthetic corollary to the assembly line, and had I not experienced it first-hand, I never would have understood the appeal of such an extreme, much less the desire to destroy it.

But during my first college summer, in 1987, I rented a house for the summer on Long Beach Island (a barrier island about halfway down the New Jersey coast) with a group of buddies from high school. The house, a bungalow in Ship Bottom, cost $5000 for the season, which split eight ways — we had two and sometimes three kids per bedroom, because why not? — meant that we could expect to make more than enough money to pay for the house and have a nice chunk leftover for the ensuing school year.

My first job at the beach was at an upscale deli and restaurant in Harvey Cedars called The Seaport, or, as I later heard my fellow employees refer to it, The Sea Scum. I wore a green apron and spent an eternity each day taking orders from well-heeled vacationers, who I quickly learned were very particular about their lunchmeats and cheeses (and potato salads and coleslaws and pickles). I overcame my terror of the circular slicing machine, despite my sense that losing a finger was inevitable (and possibly desirable). I got yelled at for not knowing that a "regular" coffee included cream, or in any case wasn't black, which is how I initially served it.

When there were no customers, the boss made us sweep the floor, polish the glass cabinets, and otherwise stay busy, which struck me as only slightly less barbaric than say, breaking rocks in a Siberian gulag. Regrettably, there were no rubber-band wars at this job, and not even a radio, to break up the hours. I started at seven in the morning and got off at four in the afternoon, with a one-hour lunch break, which I spent at the end of the street, wondering what the point of life was if it meant working for so many hours, even if you were at the beach, with the sound of the waves breaking just over the dunes. Was I spoiled? Undoubtedly.

Back at the house things were mostly a lot more fun. As you might expect from a group of 19-year-old kids who straddled the nerd/jock/brain axes (think cross-county running team) and who were living completely on our own for the first time, we amused ourselves in many different ways: we played poker and hearts, we made fun of U2 ("Joshua Tree" was big that summer) by singing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" in the fake British accents of the Spinal Tap guys faux-harmonizing "Since My Baby Left Me" at Elvis's gravesite; we hatched business plans involving tie-dyed shirts and a pair of "mountain roller blades" (see photograph); we spent hours recording a message on the answering machine designed to simulate a real person: "Hello?….Oh, I'm not sure, let me check (insert noise of person checking)…I'm sorry, he's not here can I take a message? BEEEEEEEP." A bunch of us bought used surfboards and were surprised to learn that surfing is a lot harder than it looks, even for those of us who grew up body surfing. Perhaps more inevitably, some of us started smoking weed ALL THE TIME, we met other kids on the island and went to parties, where drinking and hooking up ensued (as well as more genuine summer romances).

I remained aloof to the prospect of girls that summer-and for the moment, drinking and smoking-because I was deeeeeep in the closet. In retrospect, it was probably possible to maintain this charade because my friends, while all non-homosexuals, tended to be a little gay (in the elementary school sense of the term, as you've probably ascertained from the above) or at least quirky, in comparison to those we were meeting, and thus they did not pressure me to commit to anything beyond the usual bloated talk. To put in possibly dated pop-culture terms, it was "'Sixteen Candles' (specifically the dweebs, although a slightly older and less exaggerated version of Anthony Michael Hall and his friends) meets 'Jersey Shore.'" Regarding which, confession: I've never seen "Jersey Shore."

I quit the Sea Scum the second I got my first paycheck, because in the meantime my friend Taylor got hired as a short-order cook at a bar about two-thirds of the way toward the southern end of the island. As luck had it, they needed someone else and I was more than available, so Taylor and I ran the kitchen, splitting the shifts, seven nights from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. Working in a bar, or at least this bar — whose clientele seemed to consist mostly of vacationing, exceedingly drunk, rowdy, white middle-aged cops — was undoubtedly a stretch for me, given that 1) I had never drunk more than a few sips of beer in my life (a high percentage of my family were alcoholics, and I was paranoid about joining their ranks), and 2) thanks to my private boarding school and college education, I exuded the kind of naïve, pampered and judgmental aura of privilege that set off the bullshit meters of many who were fortunate or misfortunate enough to meet me. I remember how the owner, a short, stocky Italian guy, often seemed to regard me with a bemused, skeptical expression, as though wondering exactly what planet I was from, and what possible circumstances had contrived to bring us together.