A Long-ish Entry
Jul. 26th, 2008 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogIt's funny how a single place can come at you from several directions all at once. In recent days, it's been a place that I barely know, that I know of not much more, but that still holds a place in the time and space of my memories, which others have recently added to.
Long Beach, tautologically enough, is a beach on Long Island. Yet it is not the beach most associated with it (which would have to be Jones Beach to its east), or even the beach I most remember visiting in my childhood (that would be the Town Beach at Point Lookout, between Jones and Long). Other than knowing that it existed as a summer tourist destination, it was decidedly off the beaten path of the parkways and rail lines of my South Shore circle of life in the 60s and 70s; it actually lies on a barrier island off the southern coast of the Nassau County mainland, reachable by car only by going over a bridge, or by rail via its own spur of the Long Island Rail Rot.
Most people know it as the place Sonny got shot in The Godfather; that link is pretty graphic, but I always laugh through it by remembering the joke about it from the MAD parody ("That's what happens when you try to pay a 10-cent toll with a 20-dollar bill.") We were always more partial to the closer beaches, so I remember very little about going there, except for two memories from between my 15th and 25th years. One was as part of a touring troupe from my high school, which I think did a nursing home gig there around 1976; we lip-synched to old Bing Crosby records and told jokes none of the patients had the hearing or coherence to "get." The other was in my college/law school era, when the Beach's Malibu Night Club became THE place on the Island to hear up-and-comers from the punk and new age genres. I spent a New Years Eve there sometime in the early 80s with some equally geeky friends and four guys with the last name of Ramone. We may have been the only three guys in the club who didn't get laid that night.
Years went by, though, and Long Beach passed into the recesses of my growing-up consciousness, no more or less special than RockvilleCentreBaldwinFreeportMerrick BellmoreWantaghSeaford MassapequaMassapequaPark AmityvilleCopaigueLindenhoist&Babylon (from innumerable callouts of those stops on my LIRR trips back to the South Shore).
Until the past few weeks, anyway.
----
First came a fellow Met blogger. He now lives between Rockville Centre (home of Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine and my very own birthplace) and Merrick (home of Amy Fisher and where I used to go to get Carvel), but his entries often recall his growing up in The City By The Sea. His place of worship, his places for baseball cards, his supermarkets- they were my growing-up experience as well, six towns removed and slightly different in name, if not faith. Greg was the first to identify the place as someplace off the beaten Nausea County path and as, indeed, someplace special.
Next came a client. As Buffalo as beef on weck, she left this area a couple of years ago after she was beset by a number of issues. Of all the beaches on all the shores of all the landmass known as Long Island, somehow she had to walk into this one. So all my communications, and all references to her address in the matters I'm handling for her, have taken me back to this seaside paradise I've maybe visited three times in my life.
Then, this week, the connections really picked up. Eleanor used her Barnes and Noble money on a boatload of clearance books- a veritable shelf of them improvised atop one of our living room bookcases. Several were memoirs, and one was this:
I've never been that much of a Billy fan, although his Harry was as good a foil for Sally as anyone was gonna be after that Deli scene, and his Met hat in City Slickers forgives a multitude of movie sins. Even so, until I began my purloined read of his memoir last night, I'd never realized that he, too, was a Long Beacher. The 549 in that picture is the front of a house on East Park Avenue in said city, and it, along with the 700 Sundays he got to share with his prematurely deceased dad, later moved to Broadway for a revue he made out of the memoirs in 2004.
And just now, one of my dearest correspondents revealed- no, nothing of herself, but perhaps too much of some deserving soul (Speedos, like Spandex, are a privilege, not a right.)- that she spent the day today on, what else?, that beach. (If her entries aren't appearing on your Flist anymore, you need to add![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
mayiwritedotcom to it so your page will pick up the RSS feed of her entries from Wordpress.)
I haven't been on that beach, or any South Shore shore, anytime this century. Yet after all these reading experiences, I feel, somehow, that I have.
Long Beach, tautologically enough, is a beach on Long Island. Yet it is not the beach most associated with it (which would have to be Jones Beach to its east), or even the beach I most remember visiting in my childhood (that would be the Town Beach at Point Lookout, between Jones and Long). Other than knowing that it existed as a summer tourist destination, it was decidedly off the beaten path of the parkways and rail lines of my South Shore circle of life in the 60s and 70s; it actually lies on a barrier island off the southern coast of the Nassau County mainland, reachable by car only by going over a bridge, or by rail via its own spur of the Long Island Rail Rot.
Most people know it as the place Sonny got shot in The Godfather; that link is pretty graphic, but I always laugh through it by remembering the joke about it from the MAD parody ("That's what happens when you try to pay a 10-cent toll with a 20-dollar bill.") We were always more partial to the closer beaches, so I remember very little about going there, except for two memories from between my 15th and 25th years. One was as part of a touring troupe from my high school, which I think did a nursing home gig there around 1976; we lip-synched to old Bing Crosby records and told jokes none of the patients had the hearing or coherence to "get." The other was in my college/law school era, when the Beach's Malibu Night Club became THE place on the Island to hear up-and-comers from the punk and new age genres. I spent a New Years Eve there sometime in the early 80s with some equally geeky friends and four guys with the last name of Ramone. We may have been the only three guys in the club who didn't get laid that night.
Years went by, though, and Long Beach passed into the recesses of my growing-up consciousness, no more or less special than RockvilleCentreBaldwinFreeportMerrick BellmoreWantaghSeaford MassapequaMassapequaPark AmityvilleCopaigueLindenhoist&Babylon (from innumerable callouts of those stops on my LIRR trips back to the South Shore).
Until the past few weeks, anyway.
----
First came a fellow Met blogger. He now lives between Rockville Centre (home of Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine and my very own birthplace) and Merrick (home of Amy Fisher and where I used to go to get Carvel), but his entries often recall his growing up in The City By The Sea. His place of worship, his places for baseball cards, his supermarkets- they were my growing-up experience as well, six towns removed and slightly different in name, if not faith. Greg was the first to identify the place as someplace off the beaten Nausea County path and as, indeed, someplace special.
Next came a client. As Buffalo as beef on weck, she left this area a couple of years ago after she was beset by a number of issues. Of all the beaches on all the shores of all the landmass known as Long Island, somehow she had to walk into this one. So all my communications, and all references to her address in the matters I'm handling for her, have taken me back to this seaside paradise I've maybe visited three times in my life.
Then, this week, the connections really picked up. Eleanor used her Barnes and Noble money on a boatload of clearance books- a veritable shelf of them improvised atop one of our living room bookcases. Several were memoirs, and one was this:
I've never been that much of a Billy fan, although his Harry was as good a foil for Sally as anyone was gonna be after that Deli scene, and his Met hat in City Slickers forgives a multitude of movie sins. Even so, until I began my purloined read of his memoir last night, I'd never realized that he, too, was a Long Beacher. The 549 in that picture is the front of a house on East Park Avenue in said city, and it, along with the 700 Sundays he got to share with his prematurely deceased dad, later moved to Broadway for a revue he made out of the memoirs in 2004.
And just now, one of my dearest correspondents revealed- no, nothing of herself, but perhaps too much of some deserving soul (Speedos, like Spandex, are a privilege, not a right.)- that she spent the day today on, what else?, that beach. (If her entries aren't appearing on your Flist anymore, you need to add
mayiwritedotcom to it so your page will pick up the RSS feed of her entries from Wordpress.)I haven't been on that beach, or any South Shore shore, anytime this century. Yet after all these reading experiences, I feel, somehow, that I have.