When
I Was Twenty-One . . .
PM
Kellermann
I spent the eve of my twenty-first birthday—November 1978—on the beach at Sandy Hook. A biting wind blew in off the Atlantic. A sleeping bag, a few bottles of wine, an abundance of psilocybin mushrooms, and a woman I barely knew helped to keep me warm.
We were there to shoot the sunrise for a film I was making, or at least that was our excuse. Earlier, a group of us had been out to a three-hour dinner, inhibitions evaporating with every glass of wine we drank. By the time the blushing waitress arrived with the check, our amorphous group was beginning to pair off.
Cindy was a friend of a friend of my roommate. Baby-faced with thin lips and a Buster Brown haircut, she was studying photography. I was a wannabe musician, taking up space at Rutgers University, earning three easy credits with an independent study in filmmaking. Before that night, we had never had a conversation that lasted more than a minute or two: hi . . . how are you . . . fine . . . what’s new?
Tripping on the beach sounded like a great idea to everyone at the restaurant. But back at my apartment, with Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town blaring in the background and the dim light of sobriety beginning to transgress everybody’s untamed judgment, potential participants backed out one-by-one, two-by-two. Cindy and I grew more enthused. Soon, it was apparent to everyone that there would only be room on the beach for the two of us.
We were still in the car, not halfway there, when the mushrooms kicked in. And while the ride may have taken forever, we didn’t notice; we were too busy laughing. Our laughter carried us to the end of the peninsula at the northern edge of the Jersey shore. We gazed skyward. There were no stars, no moon, only darkness and frigid blasts of ocean wind. We laid our sleeping bag in the middle of the cool white sharded sand, crawled inside and cuddled up.
Everything seemed so right that night, making love in the brisk salty air, until Cindy shouted, “Holy shit!” I poked my head out of the bag and discovered that the rising tide was almost upon us. We scampered further up the beach; and when we finally stopped laughing, three or four hours later, we closed our eyes.
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I’ve been thinking about that night a lot lately, thinking about many birthdays gone by. The big four-oh is looming, just the turn of a calendar page away. And yet, I feel younger in spirit than most of my colleagues who were barely out of diapers when Cindy and I drove down Highway 36 singing “Because the Night” along with Patti Smith. But I can’t help making the inevitable connections.
My sister Lynne died two weeks after her thirty-eighth birthday.
My brother Brian died a few months after his fortieth.
What have I done to deserve to live so long?
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I never thought I would reach twenty-one. From high school on, I used this James Dean illusion as an excuse to live life on the edge. I drank too much, took too many drugs, slept with too many friends, strangers, and casual acquaintances. These were the days before AIDS; we had little to worry about except the occasional pregnancy. Crabs were an annoyance, herpes a plague, making love on the beach couldn’t kill you unless the tide took you away.
Every night, that fall, I walked through a construction site to get from my apartment to Patti’s Bar. They were tearing down the slums to build a new world headquarters for Johnson & Johnson. That neighborhood had always felt safe to me when it was the neglected western edge of New Brunswick’s black ghetto, but the wrecking ball was turning it into a modern-day Dresden, battered and abandoned. Walking down the unlit stretch of Water Street—desolation to my left, the Raritan River to my right—ominous premonitions invaded my consciousness. I knew the exact spot where I’d be murdered, or hit by a car, or struck down by a falling meteor. As my twenty-first birthday approached, I kept waiting for the inevitable.
It seems perfectly apropos that I turned twenty-one never feeling more alive: in total darkness, at the edge of the Atlantic’s infinite possibilities, melting in the magic of mushrooms and Cindy’s mellifluous embrace.
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Recently, I told a friend that I didn’t expect to live to see my fortieth birthday. It was the wrong thing to say, and I didn’t really mean it. The truth is: I am not upset about turning forty. In the past ten years I’ve lost, in one way or another, almost everything and everyone I loved. Why wouldn’t I want to leave my thirties behind?
Death has become an inescapable aspect of my life, an all-too-frequent visitor lurking in the shadows, just waiting for me to find a moment of serenity so it can be disrupted. Yet, I still have the overwhelming desire to lie naked in pile of leaves with a close friend or a virtual stranger. And I still have the desire to stomp into every puddle I see. And I still have the desire to spend my birthday making love on the shoreline of possibilities.
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We didn’t see the sunrise on my twenty-first birthday; a mass of clouds obscured the sun. Cindy and I walked the beach filming seagulls and fishermen. Then we drove home. We never spent another night together, kissed only to say hello and good-bye. And while we never talked about that night, to each other or anyone else, we often flashed one another knowing smiles. The most precious memories are those kept private.
L’chaim.