Bleeding Fiction

The Jersey shore in the peak season is a marvelous thing. I love to hang out on the beach and suck in the salt of the air. I love to listen to the sound of the surf, to see the low waves of the Atlantic coming in from afar and forget, for a time, that the sea is vast and powerful and older by far than mere humanity. I love to walk the boardwalk and ride the simple, spinning rides, to play impossible-to-win games and eat greasy, fatty things that, in other times and places, wouldn't even be fed to dogs.

The Jersey shore in the off-season is a frightening prospect. Once the happy families and escaping teens have gone home for the year the more than mile-long stretch of boardwalk, with the beach in front and the houses behind, becomes a ghost-town. All that remains are the misfits and malcontents. They are the sedentary relatives of the traveling carny-folk, who call out to the few, scattered passers-by with desperate fervor, their barker's lines the only human speech they can mimic. They are the lost and weak, drawn to the ocean as to the memory of a drowned love, waiting, beyond hope, for life to fill his chest again.

The sea doesn't call to me, as it does to others. I've always been deeply suspicious of anything that vast, which offers no shade or refuge, which gives a man nowhere to rest his back. But all the same I love the tide, the endless remapping of the shore line, measured in grains of sand at a time, the ebb and flow of noise. And the ebb and flow of people.

Ogre, Erik and I drove to Seaside Heights Saturday. There's no easy way to say this, but I did a Thing while I was there; the three of us did. It sickens me even now to think of it, but I must tell you in the hopes that you may yet save yourselves my fate.

I ate a fried oreo. Two, in fact.

Fried oreos are a strange hybrid of cookie and zeppoli; oreo cookies, deep-fried in rich batter and dusted liberally with powdered sugar. They taste familiar, in the way that the taste of blood is familiar, and they satisfy. But they leave behind pain and regret the like of which no man should know. Yet even now I crave more.

I'll go back to the Jersey shore this summer, I know, when the weather turns warmer and the crowds of middle America dilute, just a bit, the aura of decay that lingers in the sagging water slides. The sea may not call to me, but the fried oreos do.