Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The End Of The Pier


Blaine was sad. He sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of his family's 32-room mansion, an impressive structure with a lawn rolling out to a private beach on the South Shore of Long Island. Imelda had cleared the breakfast dishes; there was nothing left but a few errant waffle crumbs and a pulpy ring from Blaine's orange juice glass. These, too, would soon be gone, wiped from existence by Imelda's sponge like so many unread texts deleted from a lost love's IPhone.

Blaine checked his phone again, just in case. Nothing.

Summer was over. Sure, there were a couple of weeks left before Blaine would start his senior year at Buckley but, really, who gave a shit. He was already into Harvard; early acceptance or early infusion to the endowment from his father, he did not know or care. This was how things worked.

To the West, the city was waiting for him, as it always would be. Limo, helicopter, train, Jitney... sure, let's smoke a fatty/pop two Adderall's/get a bag of chips and hit that thing... You could go back whenever. It would only change so much. Blaine's New York was far more stagnant than most people's. 99.876% of the city's population were beating down doors every day, looking for a way up, gakking on the friction of the streets, jostling in the subways, seething in coffee lines: Et Cetera. Blaine had been born above all that. His people had been doing the same fucking thing in a twenty square-block radius of the Upper East Side for, like, hundreds of years, probably.

Awesome new app, you say? Cool. Tell you what... how about I just buy the company that made that piece of shit. Then I'll buy you. I'm from New York, motherfucker: that's why. Now tell me something interesting.

Sometimes Blaine felt like he could see the end of his life right in front of him, no further than the end of the pier that extended off the mansion's lawn into Shinnecock Bay, just outside his breakfast window. Shinnecock, Shinnecock. Blaine wrote the word on the glass table top with the grease from his fingertip. It was all so obvious.

His phone vibrated and shimmied a few inches across the glass. Blaine tilted it towards him with his pinky finger. A text message cut across his screen saver, a picture of Eleanor in a purple bikini taken only a week ago.

I don't forgive you.

The phone vibrated again. A new text appeared under the last, the combination of the two now obscuring Eleanor's tanned face, reducing her to a pair of anonymous B-cups, belly and crotch.

I never will.

Another vibration. Eleanor, my love. Your bottom half.

You disgust me.

And now the phone began vibrating so furiously Blaine thought it might jump right out of his hand.

I don't ever want to...

Blaine turned the phone face-down and watched as it slowly shimmied itself right off the edge of the table and fell to the travertine tiles below. Rising from his chair he noticed its glass face had cracked and that Eleanor was now completely obscured by incoming texts, none of which Blaine could read but all of which, more or less, he got the gist of.

The grass on the back lawn was freshly mowed and raked and Blaine remembered playing golf with his father once on a trip to California when he was nine, or maybe ten. He paused at the steps to the pier and wondered how many years they had been preserved this way, the wood drying and cracking just so, you know, like you were some goddamn fisherman in 1915 about to walk out to your beat-up boat on your beat-up pier to accomplish things. The warp and curve of the planking pressed right through his flip flops and he moved towards the ocean. People always mentioned the smell of the ocean, the fresh air and words like restorative, peaceful and aromatherapy. The lines were blurry between this world and the next.

Reaching the end of the pier, Blaine placed his palm on top of the last piling and rotated it against the grain of the wood.

There was a huge sky and a sparkling chop on the Bay. Sailboats in the distance, angled against an unseeable wind. Beyond them a pale white cruise ship sat still at the edge of the world but would soon shift to the left side of Blaine's vision, then on to storybook ports: Bar Harbor, Halifax. Et Cetera. Shifting his weight to the hand on the piling, Blaine kicked one flip-flop into the water, then the other. Then he pulled off his boxer shorts, the last item of apparel keeping him from the end of the pier.

THE SUN'S NEVER GONNA GO DOWN (Vitamin D)








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