There’s also this idea that the Alpha caused all the weird racism and xenophobia, too, but whatever. This part of town was always a hotbed of racial sludge, and the various groups never played nice. The Chinese hated the Japanese, and the Jamaicans hated the Koreans, and the Mexicans hated the African Americans, and the Russians hated the Orthodox Jews, and the white people hated all of them. And sometimes, on very hot days, someone got stabbed because of the flag on his car. If America is a melting pot, Coney Island is the overcooked crusty stuff on the bottom of the pan.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that our memories of the place are a little distorted. Back when I had time for books, I read a poem that described memories as being like clay—malleable and squishy and easily molded into whatever you needed. Over time, people sculpt their miserable experiences into something more aesthetically pleasing, stretching the interesting moments and kneading the uncomfortable facts. What they end up with is no longer a memory but a story, and the two rarely resemble one another. The story of the Alpha’s arrival is just as sculpted. Some still call it an invasion, an act of war, even a sign of the end of days. I can’t say that my story is any less convoluted, but I was there when it happened. I saw it firsthand, not on television and not on some Internet site. And I think my version has more merit than most, because I know something that most people do not: the Alpha actually arrived the night before the world went crazy.
It was the first night of the summer break between my eighth and ninth grade year, the night when the wild things ran loose. That’s what Bex used to call us, and that night was our Wild Rumpus, only a lot less innocent than in that children’s book. We drank. We hooked up. We launched bottle rockets into the sky, motored down streets, assaulting the neighborhood with bone-rattling bass lines. Anyone who disapproved could go to hell.
I ran with Bex and Shadow, the centers of my known universe even back then, and we had twenty kids following our every step. We crashed parties and chugged beers in parking lots, and I flirted with boy after boy after boy. Anything we missed was reported to us in texts, tiny bite-size dispatches from the front lines of stupidity. Someone threw up on a cop, so-and-so made out with so-and-so, and this person got into a fight with that person. By midnight we had hundreds of texts, each a blossoming legend of teenage debauchery we knew we’d talk about for years to come. I remember that a sophmore named Jessie Combs woke up under the boardwalk spooning a hobo. Jessie was a wild thing.
I drank up the hot June night, endless spectacle, and noise until my brain rebelled and a migraine showed up around midnight to spoil my fun.
“Bad head?” Bex asked when I sat down on a vacant stoop.
“Bad head.” The steady pounding had started hours earlier, but I’d shoved it down and hoped it would wither from lack of attention. Unfortunately this headache had a tenacious rhythm that grew and grew.
“C’mon, we’ll take you home,” Shadow said.
The hangers-on groaned with complaints. Bex and Shadow should have been pissed at me too; after all, I had ruined lots of good times with my “condition,” but Bex turned on the others, firing off insults and demanding their allegiance to me. Bex = besty.
“Drop me at the beach,” I said.
“Will she be there?” Bex asked.
I nodded. She was always there.
Bex grabbed one hand, Shadow the other, and we ran toward Surf Avenue, dodging the livery cabs that sped past at all hours of the night and zigzagging through the pervy drunks who milled in and out of the seedy bars. At the old wooden boardwalk ramp near the Wonder Wheel, we ignored the Park Closed sign and rushed to greet the Atlantic Ocean. I took in a greedy breath of salty air and anticipated the relief. The beach would fix everything.
As I predicted, we found my mother sitting cross-legged on the sand, her flip-flops tossed nearby and her hair tied back with a band. She was a beautiful Buddha, hypnotically gorgeous with olive skin, full lips, and eyes both blue and smoky. Her body, like mine, was tall, long-legged, and hippy like a belly dancer’s, but she didn’t have an ounce of the insecurities that plagued me. She loved her body and it showed. Another’s perceived flaw was her dazzling asset, and thus she was the cause of much rubbernecking in our neighborhood. People fell in love with her at first sight. Even her walk, a danceable jig that made small children giggle, transcended goofy into oddly seductive.
“Can you sign for this package?” Shadow asked.
My mother frowned. “Your father would have a contraption if he knew you were out this late,” she said.
“It’s a conniption, Mom,” I said.
The group chuckled.
“I’m always messing up words,” she apologized. “Migraine?”
I nodded. “Probably an F3.”
“Oh. Well, sit down.”
My mom looked to Bex. “Can you all get home safely?”
“We could if that was where we were going,” Bex replied with a wink. She pulled her phone from her pocket and sorted through texts, stopping on one that produced a mischievous grin. “There’s a party at Samuel Lir’s house. His parents are in the city at a play. You game?”
“I am,” Shadow said dutifully.
“Don’t wreck his house!” my mother called after them. “His dad is a friend!”
Bex blew me a kiss. “Feel better.”
Shadow reached into his pocket and waved his phone. “We’ll post pics.”
When they were gone, I plopped down next to my mother and leaned back, allowing the water’s roar to blow through my hair. The sky was clear, the ocean an inky black canvas brush-stroked with yellow moonlight.