virginia beach

I sat on a bench on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach early Wednesday morning and talked to a man at the next bench who had a sign tucked into his backpack. I could see the words “food” and “work” and “less,” this last one I assumed was the second half of “home.” I asked if he was a vet and he was, and I asked if he was from the Beach, and he wasn’t—he’s from Pennsylvania originally, but he stayed in the area after leaving the military since he had received care here at the clinic off of Shore Drive along the Bay. Until he didn’t. He managed a HVAC company for a while, but his bills outpaced his contracts, his medical conditions outpaced his insurance and money, and his constant stumbling got the best of him. He borrowed from family, from friends, he took jobs until he couldn’t concentrate and had to leave, he sold whatever he could to try and keep it going. No one wanted to help him anymore. But I get that, he said. Just look at me. At some point they said they’ve helped me all they can. I’d have stopped too, he said. He hadn’t shaved in a while, but he had clean clothes and had showered. He told me the church at 19^th Street helped him out. He said he’s really running out of options. He added that several friends of his he served with in Afghanistan had killed themselves and they weren’t even homeless, as if they missed a step—they should have had to go through homelessness to get to death was his implication.

I asked what keeps him going. Something good might happen to me, he said. Not today, though, he added and laughed. But something good gonna happen. I got a friend with an apartment gets my mail for me. I keep hoping someone will send me some money, get me back on my feet. I asked what happened all the other times they sent him money; why didn’t that get him back on his feet, thinking about the times I’ve stumbled, thinking about the times I felt lost.

He shrugged. People don’t know what it costs to get out of a foxhole, man. I don’t know what it costs. I wish I did; then I could have said I need this amount and I’ll be fine. But I don’t know. More than what I got. More than what I had. Maybe this week I’ll have enough to get my ass straight again. Probably not. Anyway, that’s why I’m not dead. Something good will happen. Not today though.

I told him I was on my way to meet a friend of mine who received some bad news recently. We were quiet for a few minutes, I said something about how calm the water was. He nodded but stayed in his head.

Friend of mine…I said, and I told him what was going on. See, he said, this is what I’m talking about. Things ain’t so bad for me. You and me sitting here watching how calm the water is. Things ain’t so bad really. I could use a little more help, but not really. You know?

I knew exactly what he meant. I only had five dollars with me but I gave it to him, which he refused at first but then took. He didn’t do it hesitantly. He took it the second time and said, Yeah, thanks, I really could use it. I hate begging.

I asked if he ever hears from family. They stopped answering him. And this year he’ll be thirty, he said. He looked mid-forties at least. Thirty. I asked what he thought it would take to get things right again.

I just gotta decide to do it, he said. You know? I knew.

I told him I’d see him again, but I won’t, and I left wondering exactly who helped who.

Really incredible how calm the water was. Like glass. Like a mirror.

It’s the “Open for Season” signs on ice cream joints and t-shirt shops. It’s the tossing of the football at the surf break, the running back on the boardwalk in bare feet to buy more drinks for everyone, the smell of coconut oil, the sound of a distant whistle of a guard in red shorts standing up, cupping his mouth, waving in some kid caught in the current.

It’s the first table full of tomatoes at Merryvale Market in the village, the pick-them-yourself marigolds still growing, but the corn is ready, and the cucumbers, and someone filled a cooler with ice and containers of crabmeat. This is where I shop; this is my local store.

It’s not simply that summer has arrived, with all the normal excitement of closed schools, warm sun, surf, gardening, hot hikes in the hills, canoeing, barbeques, and breakfast on the porch. Long days, days that run well into the evening hours so that someone might say, “Geez, it’s almost nine-thirty and the sky is still light.”

Those things, of course, but it’s more than that. I’ve spent more than half of my life in tourist towns, so that the non-summer months are punctuated by a sort of abandonment. As such, it is difficult to deny like most people I’ve known who lived and worked on the strip at a beach or in a drinking town with a bad boating problem as I do now, that it is relaxing come fall, when, as Jimmy Buffett points out, “They close down the tourist traps; the kids are back in school.” The “Coast is Clear” to say the least in those months, and some hotels and restaurants are boarded up, some simply open only on weekends, and others, well, they shut down completely and something new will rise from the sand come next summer.

Locals love that; the going back home part of tourism. I spent all of high school and my summers during college working on the strip in Virginia Beach, and I quickly became absorbed in the culture, where dressing up meant putting your shirt back on to enter a store.

But I like the arrival as well. I like the crowds, the murmuring of inlanders heading to the “coast” or the “shore” or the “beach.” Summer itself has an almost “opening” date quality about it, and those of us with depressive tendencies in the winter months come back to life, find that hope again that comes from radios playing on blankets and the sound of the surf, and the Cessna pulling an ad for some local restaurant, a boat hauling some paragliders, a few jet skis, a few kids playing frisbee, a few months of never quite getting the sand out of your hair or the salt off of your lips.

When I was a child, my family would pile in the car and head to Point Lookout, Long Island, where my grandparents had a house and I can recall like it was this morning walking single file down the center of Freeport Avenue, pushing my toes into the strip of soft tar which separated the two sides of the street, and headed around the dune fence onto the beach, and cousins would come and we’d play. Or later, my dearest friend Eddie and I would wade down the beach, knee deep, in the Great South Bay at Heckscher State Park, and we’d talk of boating across the reach to Fire Island, and further, down the coast to who knows where.

And my family moved to that who knows where, and that first summer when I couldn’t drive and didn’t know a soul, I biked that boardwalk every single day, and body surfed, and hauled strangers’ suitcases to their rooms, and made peace with heat and humidity.

There’s salt in my blood, but it only seems to season my life when the “Open for Season” signs appear.

And I know I love fall, and I like the fireplace ablaze come December, and I pull out oversized sweatshirts which anyway are more comfortable than semi-saltwater wet t-shirts with sand in the armpits.

I’m fifty years past that move south, forty years from working on the strip, thirty years from becoming a father, and there’s still something about some clerk hosing down a sidewalk in one of the eastern Long Island villages, or some high school kid rolling bikes to rent out near the boardwalk, or the guy selling snow cones, that is that constant in my life.

I’m a cancer, missing the Fourth of July by hours, so I really was, as has been written, “Born in the sign of water.” And it really is there that I’m at my best.