Worn out, the worse for wear, working for The Star and longshoring on the side in the sweet summertime, it has really, finally become apparent: I’m not a young man.
Tuesday was my seventh anniversary at The Star, and last week, when compiling “The Way It Was,” seen elsewhere in this section, an item from Montauk appeared. It will be of interest to no one but me and a small handful of others, but as the feature’s compiler I made the call to include it.
“The Montauk Fire Department put out a fire last Wednesday at the home of Kenneth Walsh on Hudson Drive. The fire began in an oil burner in the cellar. The smoke damage was extensive.”
I was 2 — did I mention that I am not a young man? — and do not recall the fire, but others did. “Dad had Charles and Brian (who happened to be there) shovel dirt in through the cellar window,” my brother Jonathan wrote. “I don’t remember even smelling smoke or anything, except lots of firemen walking up the cellar steps, across the living room, and out the front door in muddy boots, each saying ‘Sorry about your floor’ to Mom at the door; finally she said ‘Better than letting the house burn down!’ to the last.”
“I was there and remember it,” Brian McKernan confirmed. “Your dad yelled ‘Call the fire department!’ immediately upon discovering it. He had me stand at the corner in front of Nat Hiken’s house and point toward your house so the fire engine would know where to turn. M.F.D. arrived promptly and quickly got it under control before it could spread.”
“Ironic because Chuck and I had been talking about what we wanted to do that day, and one of us said, ‘Looks like another boring day.’ ”
Brian and my half brother are the same age, and he was along for many adventures at Shagwong Point, then “undiscovered and unspoiled by the masses in their Barnum & Bailey campers,” he wrote. “Your parents’ Nissan Patrol was the only jeep on the beach.”
“The future stretched out ahead in endless frontiers of possibility.”
“Chuck and I snorkeled and rafted for hours, then helped your dad fill a plastic container with mussels, which we’d drive over to Gosman’s to sell to Senior.”
That would be John Gosman Sr., who I saw not long ago during a Sunday evening concert at Gosman’s Dock, where a friend and I enjoyed clams on the half shell before the show, and more of the Deep’s bounty afterward, at Topside. John, whose late wife, Rita, was Brian’s sister and my godmother, has been very much a second father to me — he and my father were close friends — and throughout my life has freely offered all good things from employment to housing to food and drink, and I owe him everything.
Five-fifteen a.m. is not the time I want to be doing anything not closely connected with blissful slumber, but last weekend saw me staggering bleary-eyed to my car and the dock at Montauk on successive pre-dawns to help unload boats and pack orders for delivery across the North and South Forks. It’s not at all easy work, but the setting is to die for: the mouth of the harbor, Block Island Sound, and, above all, the ever-changing hues and cloud formations of the vast sky, as though the handiwork of an endlessly playful deity.
A change is in the air, though. Gosman’s Dock, with its many restaurants and shops and features, has been a constant in my life, and I’m sure I will hate to bear witness to that change, whatever it may be. But all things must pass, as the man said.
On change and passing: Mad magazine will soon cease publication. When I was 6, my family visited Maria and Michael Sidoroff and their children, who owned a house near Ditch Plain Beach, at their residence in Ramsey, N.J. Last fall, I was lucky to see Maria, an indefatigable archaeologist who is every bit as hip as she was 50 years ago and still uncovers the evidence of our past lives, at the old house, where the laughter still echoes.
To keep us occupied in Ramsey, our parents bought my brother and me Mad’s “Super Special Number Eleven.” Maria, having noted our enthusiasm for the satirical and subversive magazine that was then at its creative and relevant zenith, gave us a subscription at Christmas. Mad helped me learn to read, and through its gonzo lens I learned so much about the world. Thank you, Maria.
Remember that “Relay” in which I theorized that in my past incarnation I was Nina Harter, life partner of my childhood piano teacher, Tsuya Matsuki, late of Miankoma Hall, Amagansett? A confluence of causes, conditions, and connections had led to that understanding, and last month this message arrived: “Nina was my great-aunt. I was 3 or 4 when she died so I have no memory of her (my sister might) but I enjoyed the story. We have talked about driving past the house but nobody alive remembers where it is.”
I remember the house, if not Nina. My mother drove me there after school every week, and I still wonder if Miss Matsuki saw something, or someone, in me.
It was during those formative years that I took ill with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the cause an infected tick’s bite, after dashing into the brush to retrieve the baseball struck from a makeshift home plate on our Hudson Drive property one time too many. As I told Hugh King a year or two ago, it was the worst I have ever felt, and I could barely get dressed and into the car for the drive to East Hampton and Dr. Doris Zenger, who “saw more than a generation of local children and their sometimes anxious parents through the usual fevers, respiratory ailments, measles, rashes, and summer ear infections, along with more serious ailments during a 28-year practice here,” as The Star wrote on her passing in 1981.
And I thought of that moment last week, when I sensed something in the voice of my physician in Manhattan, who had called with the conclusions of an annual physical conducted days earlier. “Everything is normal, except,” he said, pausing as if for theatrical impact, “you tested positive for Lyme.”
Ah, I thought. My time has finally come, and Lyme, be its explosion throughout the region a manifestation of climate chaos, a secret government-directed bio-weapon project run amok, or some other condition, could very well render me unable to work, certainly at the dock in Montauk, perhaps anywhere at all.
But there is a high incidence of false-positive diagnoses, said the doctor, who to no small relief informed me two days later that further study confirmed mine among them.
And so the epic tale goes on, beginnings and endings, creation and destruction. The house on Hudson Drive was demolished a couple of years ago, and what has risen in its place has infuriated a neighbor on one of the many nearby parcels that lay undisturbed in my youth. Nina’s grand-niece, who was to travel to Long Island this month, experienced a quandary, as she put it, and the visit was postponed. The hedonistic hipsters party on in Montauk, collapsing in exhaustion, perhaps, at the very moment in which I stagger bleary-eyed to my car and the dock, pushing onward through the pain of a meniscal tear and too little sleep.
I try, without attachment but rather with the nonplused-yet-amused expression of Mad’s Alfred E. Neuman, to observe the big-picture maelstrom of samsara, “the outward play of Maya or delusion with the long cycle of birth, death, and rebirth,” as defined in The Yogic Encyclopedia. “The forms with which we identify and the emotions which bind us to those forms constitute the cosmic dream. Samsara is the dream world as opposed to the realm of spirit.”
All one need do is observe the dream lucidly and see through the birth, death, and tragicomic daily grind; realize the blissful awareness of Now that underlies the space-time bubble; be in the world, but not of the world.
Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.