Part Ten

I’ve been trying to come up with an apt analogy for having Haywood as a roommate.

Imagine that you are taking a sculpture class. You really, really want to be a sculptor. You sit in your room night after night for an entire semester working on your sculpture project. You work and slave and agonize. Your roommate is there behind you every step of the way, offering support, encouragement, positive feedback, constructive criticism. After pouring your heart and soul into the work for the semester, you finally finish something you’re proud of. And your roommate is filled with praise for your great accomplishment. His support is sincere, heartfelt, and enthusiastic. So you carry your sculpture to the studio to submit for the class. And there sitting off to one side of the room is a full-sized marble figure that makes Michelangelo’s David look like something your kid made out of Play-Doh. It’s your roommate's. He knocked it off in twenty minutes, back in the beginning of the semester.

That’s what it was like being Haywood’s roommate. And the thing is he didn’t even realize it. He was quite guileless. There was nothing forced or artificial about his support. It truly never occurred to him to compare himself to anyone else, or vice versa. He liked you on your own terms.

It could be incredibly irritating.

So we made it into Ocean City just a day after the semester ended. We needed money – at least I did – because we had, with one other guy, made arrangements to rent a house and live off-campus the next academic year. The problem with most resort jobs, though, is that they’re break-even propositions. You bust your ass waiting tables or selling T-shirts for a pittance, and every dime goes into overpriced resort housing expenses. But Preacher swore he’d found a way to work there all summer and have a lot of money in the bank at the end of the season. He kept repeating: it’s the best job in Ocean City.

But he wouldn’t tell me what it was. You’ll say no instinctively, he said, and I’m trying to save you from your own worst instincts. But it pays well, the hours are great, and you’ll be able to spend every day hanging on the beach.

He did tell me how he solved the cost-of-living problem. It was the way he solved most problems, actually: he knew a guy. (I’m the wop from Jersey. But he was always the one who knew a guy.) Actually, I sort of knew the guy too. His name was Mark Fischer. Some of what’s in this little reminiscence I got from interviewing him for the archive.

Fischer’s parents were silent partners in what was then one of the hottest spots on the boardwalk, a bar and restaurant called Sea Monkeys. They had a house on 89th Street and the bay. Preacher was friends with Fischer (he was a senior) and Fischer was going to be working at the bar all summer before heading to Wharton in the fall and he invited Preacher (and, by extension, me) to live at this house all summer in return for a third of the groceries and utilities.

Fischer was the sort of person – we all know somebody like this – whose first name never seemed to be used. He was not “Mark.” He was always “Fischer.” When I tried to track him down to do these interviews I had to look at an alumni directory to remember his first name.

Over the course of three months (and two weeks) it cost me about $250 in food and electricity. Like I said, standing next to Preacher tended to bring good luck in its own right.

But the job…he was right, I would have said no. And, damn it, he was right again: it was the best job in Ocean City.

From October through April, Ocean City is a tiny Eastern Shore town of maybe 10,000. Maybe. But starting in mid-May and lasting until mid-September the population swells to a few hundred thousand. Crammed into hotels and condos strung along about two miles of beach. On a barrier island, meaning it’s all one good hurricane away from being a shipping hazard. This creates an unusual strain on the infrastructure… which required some unusual solutions.

After we dropped out stuff at Fischer’s house Preacher herded me back into the Jeep and drove me downtown. It was the Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend and the city was already starting to fill up. He took me to the Town Hall (which was not, then, where it is now) and into the basement of Town Hall and past some filing cabinets and storerooms and knocked on an unmarked door and tried his best to be charming to a secretary who was not at all impressed by his twinkling eyes and easy grin.

But eventually she deigned to tell her boss that we were there. Her boss was a man named Peter Washington and since she was a withered old Eastern Shore battle-axe and her boss was an ebullient black guy from Philadelphia I’m not sure how much of her shitty attitude was her regular personality and how much was native racism. The Eastern Shore, at least in the ‘80s, served as a reminder that Maryland was indeed part of the South.

At any rate, Peter greeted Preacher like his long-lost son, shook his hand, shook mine, told Preacher how glad he was there, and gave us some papers to sign.

That’s how I found out I was going to be a garbage man.

And, goddamn it, Preacher was right. It was the best job in Ocean City.

Look, the waiters worked their asses off for tips, and unless you got into one of the few high-end restaurants, the tips weren’t much. Plus you worked every night, just about. The lifeguards? So many people wanted the job that the tryouts were modeled after Navy SEAL tests just to winnow the applicants down to manageable numbers. The work was long, hot, and boring. The pay was shit. The t-shirt stands and other retail jobs were even worse – long hours, day AND night, for minimum wage.

But garbage man…

You got paid per route. Paid well, I should add, at least for a college kid – I couldn’t support a family on $120 a day, but – at least in 1986 dollars – it was a great summer job. We worked six days a week, but here was the best part: when you finished your route, you were done. We got started between five and five thirty in the morning and after the first couple of weeks we could get the day’s route finished by ten. Sometimes earlier. Back to the house, wash up, and then a nap on the beach… sometimes we just stayed out until three, slept for two hours in the parking lot (yes, two guys can sleep in a Jeep CJ) and went to work.

We were assigned to a driver named Merv Hodges, who was a local and who despised us and every other “tourist.” Notwithstanding the fact that virtually everything in his life was dependent upon our existence – Worcester County, Maryland, was essentially devoid of meaningful economic activity outside of the beach resort. Merv much preferred the winter, when the DPW staff was one-third the size and the trashcans not nearly so full.

It must be said that by the end of June, when we had proven to him that we would always be on time, busting our asses, and getting him to the neighborhood bar by one, he lightened up a little. Peacher’s nickname was changed from “dickhead” to “faggot,” and I was upgraded from “dumbfuck” to “other faggot.” At least we considered them upgrades. I think Hodges did, too.

As had been the case in Annapolis, Preacher was soon one of those people who always knew where the good party was. Except in Ocean City there was a good party every night.

Early on Preacher took a second job. An unofficial one. A sort of… Chamber of Commerce job. Apparently, some women considered getting schtupped by a tanned, green-eyed beachgod to be as integral to their OC trip as a box of saltwater taffy and caramel popcorn. And so Preacher took it upon himself to make sure that during the next winter some nursing assistant or paralegal or hairdresser would think about what to do for her vacation, and recall the previous summer, and get a faraway look in her eyes, and decide: I’m going back to Ocean City.

I don’t want to oversell this. He spent most nights as alone as me. But we didn’t have routes on Sundays which meant he rarely spent Saturday nights in an empty bed. And he was certainly not above disappearing into someone’s condo for a few hours mid-day.

He mostly avoided the locals and other seasonal workers that he would run into again and again. He didn’t ENTIRELY avoid them. But he was emphatically not looking for a girlfriend and he was too nice a guy to, as Fischer so poetically put it, “hump ‘em and dump ‘em.”

Outside of me and Fischer Preacher had one other close friend that summer, and her name was Monica Williams. And to understand Monica you need to understand another slightly unusual Ocean City summer job.

Every bar in town sponsored some variation of the weekly Wet T-shirt/Bikini/Best-Body-On-The-Beach competition. Because most tourists are only in town for a week or two, at the most, and because even the most sexist and depraved tourist rarely attends more than one or two of these events, most people don’t realize that the “contestants” in these lecherous farandoles are mostly the same women each night.

Monica was one of them. She was a year-round resident and worked as a teacher’s assistant in a Snow Hill kindergarten during the cold months (kindergarteners are utterly unconcerned with my rack, she explained) and sometime in mid-May she would drop a significant amount of money on a bathing suit. During the summer months she would strut around various bars and clubs in Ocean City and earn more in three months of exhibitionism than she earned in nine months of child care.

I could not find her to interview her. Sorry. She quit the booby circuit (her expression) a few years later at the ripe old age of 26. The next year she got fired because the school board found out she was a lesbian. I only learned that by looking at newspaper archives.

She used to call Preacher "the most affable misogynist I've ever met." To her credit, by the end of the summer, Preacher had started to understand why that was true.