Chapter XII: Life in A Northern Town

Chapter Twelve: Life in A Northern Town

FYI: Bone Harbor is on the Chickanoosuc River, but not on the Atlantic ocean. Sure, real estate folks will tell you Bone Harbor is a seacoast community, but don't believe 'em; Bone Harbor is a riverfront community, and that's fine for most of us who live here. Thing is, the river empties into the ocean two miles to the east letting us to get away with attaching ourselves to the “seacoast.”

Now, if you already live in Bone Harbor then I suppose it won't kill my story if you skipped over this part. You already know about the coastal towns and where to buy pot on the beach, and where the best place to steal lobster is. You already know about the loose women and looser men of Whaleswood Beach, and you've probably heard about my private costume party on the boardwalk and how Michael Jackson was involved. You've already heard the good jokes about Riversook, Massachusetts. You've tasted Langdonville coffee and you've read the police blotter describing the trials of the youth of these towns. You might have snacked on a Moe's sub out at Ordione's Point during a summer picnic, so you'll know all about the graffiti hidden in the old fort written with the coals of 1986. If that's the case, then skip a few pages. Why not? It's only my life I'm talking about here. That's all. While you're at it, why don't you just close the book and go get yourself another beer, because obviously you're that much better than me. Go on. What can a bootblack like me teach a Prince like you?

Still here? OK. If you aren't familiar with my neck of the woods, then here is what you have to look forward to next time you visit:

So, New Hampshire claims three towns on its chunk of Atlantic coast: Break Island, Whaleswood and Langdonville. These three towns formed the larger triangle around the smaller triangle connecting the three public schools I attended. Somewhere in the borders of these two triangles, I lost my way. Where I lost my way was no longer important as I watched Toddy Bonigan steer his car into the winter sea fog; the important thing was to find someone to blame.

Break Island is a Dwight Evans home run east of Bone Harbor and a slingshot's distance away from Maine across the Chickanoosuc River. Break Island is connected to Bone Harbor by two bridges and a causeway built on granite blocks. Just to show you how old Break Island is, a generation of Break Island residents had lived on the island before the Strawberry Banke candy store at Prescott Park opened its doors. Break Island is also the home of Fort Stark, a fort used in one way or another for every war from the American Revolution to my capture the flag games and a site spared from the Youthfires because of its memory-rich soil. See, you learned something already!

The Wealthy live on Break Island, or are rumored to live there. Families who can afford to live in uncomfortable, box like houses with creaky staircases and drive on roads that can fit one and a half cars or two horses, set up shop in Break Island. There is status in their suffering, and the bay view windows actually look out on a bay! One grade school educates the tykes of Break Island, but I never met a child who admitted to going to school there. I doubt a rich parent would not allow his daughter to attend Bone Harbor High, the closest high school to Break Island. Instead, she was destined for Appleham Academy or Berwick Academy in Maine. They were not part of my Tribe. We'll get a closer look at Break Island later on.

The summer resort town of Whaleswood, New Hampshire, just North of the radioactive town of Riversook, Massachusetts is an hour by bike from Break Island. You'd have to bike through Langdonville, but I want to save Langdonville for last because it is so delicious.

Whaleswood has its own school system, separate from Bone Harbor. A child graduating from Whaleswood High School might be able to spell his name well enough to write it on the beach front cement wall. If he is very lucky he will be able to get a janitor job at the nearby nuclear power plant and support the two children he managed to have with two different girls (both of whom dropped out of Whaleswood High). If his luck fails, and it always does, he will spend time in Whaleswood Penitentiary giving himself picture tattoos of his school mascot, The Trailers. Tattoo 1A is now a industrial arts elective at Whaleswood High along with Advanced Graffiti design and College Prep Carjacking.

An average Whaleswood blighter might spend his work-release days driving up and down in front of the whitewashed arcades, admiring new tattoo designs and spitting on the sidewalk. He will pass stores selling tanning lotion and beach chairs and 3 pairs of defective sunglasses for two (1986) dollars, He will walk up the boardwalk in his tape-mended flip-flops, by the henna tattoo shops and 99-cent stores. He will eye the undulating breasts of the oily women who wear “Shark Attack” style jeans and tasseled beach shirts with swear words on the front. On Whaleswood's best days, a casual visitor will smell the odor of a thousand brands of tanning lotion and body spray mixed with a thousand sweaty armpits.

The beaches of Whaleswood are littered with the broken condoms and empty bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 wine that comprise the essential ingredients for beach and back seat procreation. The observant Whaleswood mongrel might notice these details if he is not too drunk or stoned. He might notice that behind the peeling paint of the fried dough shops and the Fortune Tellers and crowded bars are salt marshes that breed hungry hordes of mosquitoes who feast on the drunken Whaleswood brood..

Ugly people try to look pretty in Whaleswood. That may be the motto of the High School. “Try to look pretty.” Even the fat cops roll their short sleeves up above their deltoids to intimidate the mob. This performance is the most important part of their day unless they can bust someone for smoking joints on the beach.

The beach. The grand Whaleswood Beach where ten dollars will give you a place to park your car for the day after you drive up from Boston. Play volleyball, drink beer, swim in the glacial water, listen to the Beatles Tribute band playing at the half-shell near the boardwalk. Go see Great White play at the Club Casino and after you can play some arcade games at the Fun-O-Rama downstairs. Get your black and white picture taken with your honey, three shots at immortality. Buy some Blinks fried dough, splurge on two toppings, eat some tasty fried onion rings and a slice of sausage pizza. Try your hand at the shooting gallery and if you ask the distracted attendant for some “Kind Bud” and grease his hand with forty dollars, you might just walk out with some of the Bay State's finest. Or else return to the beach and bake your back until you have to lie in a bathtub of ice cubes for two days and your skin peels off in transparent sheets. That's when the pot will come in handy so make sure to hit the head shop behind the boardwalk for all the latest glass bongs and one-hitters and shooters and poppers and magic crystal hookahs.

Like High School or Church, it is the nature of Whaleswood to corrupt all who enter it. When I was fifteen, I visited Whaleswood with one ribbed condom in my wallet. I was dressed for casual sex in white cotton slacks and a too small lavender T-shirt. These “Night Lover” clothes were normally only worn in my room as I prepared into seduce a pair of silk stockings, but on this 1986 summer night I felt better than George Michael on speed because I had just lost my stupid job at the industrial park, Rose McCorley was rubbing her pretty breasts against me when I saw her at the mall, and the Sox were in first place. Roger Clemens was throwing the ball like Don Larsen. Dewey was hitting the shit out of the ball. Life was fahking Smurfy, and I was going to show the world what it was missing.

I spiked my hair with cream and put my father’s aged cologne on my penis in case Darcy or some other easy slut decided to come to her senses and give me a hand job in the photo booth. I wore a pair of white elastic suspenders that hiked my pants up my ass and pulled the pant legs above my ankles. I wore cheap gray cotton shoes from Chess King and no socks so my bony white ankles could be admired by all. I topped this neo-dandy ensemble off with a white cotton sports jacket with shoulder pads. I wanted to look like Don Johnson on Miami Vice, so even though JoJo drove south through Langdonville in near darkness, I wore scratched plastic sunglasses, Black, just like Don's.

I expected to have sex in the sand with Cindy Phillips and live on a boat in the Break Island Marina with an alligator as a pet. I wanted, in short, to be nothing I was. I wanted to fit in on the boardwalk in Whaleswood where the house of mirrors illuminated all the hidden corners of my shame. Naturally, I wasn't the only one. The beastly multitude was dressed up like clowns for the sake of the performance, swaggering with inflated confidence, looking like they wanted to fight but not prepared to, hoping a television camera might catch them flexing their biceps, mouthing the words to the street songs.

Sixteen-year-old JoJo “Stretch” Locke had recently received his driver's license and picked me up in his brother's 1981 Monte Carlo with a hood as long as my bedroom. JoJo lived in Plumsook, Maine at that point, but because I biked out to see him and we still got together to play basketball and Whiffle Ball, he felt obliged to pick me up for a night on the Whaleswood Boardwalk.

We drove in circles for an hour listening to Run DMC and Kurtis Blow loud enough to rattle the change in my pocket. Then we parked two miles away and swaggered down the cement boardwalk, swearing while JoJo said, “Hey, baby, wanna' hump?” to any female not in a stroller. Supremely confident, I put my hands in my pockets, like a vice cop, so the jacket would swing behind me and expose the gun I imagined in a leather shoulder holster. I felt good and pretended not to notice the fat girls in frayed stone washed jeans and tasseled cut off t-shirts walk by. They could masturbate later in their filthy mobile home and think of the pleasure I could have given them. I pretended not to look at the spandex covered asses of the Great White groupies waiting for tickets outside Club Casino. I refused to acknowledge the cars blasting Quiet Riot from their specialized stereo amplifiers. I was above everyone in Whaleswood, obviously superior, and pretended I was a movie star on the town or a prince visiting a township of common peasants to check up on the barley crop. I even resisted the urge to enter Fun-O-Rama where I could get free quarters from Jeff “Mutt” Mullray and Skipper “Skip” Sully to play the latest arcade games like “Gorf”, “Stocker”, “Commando”, or my favorite “Star Castles.” I was as aloof as Holden Caulfield behind my dark glasses until someone called out, “Hey Sonny Crockett! San Francisco's the other way, fahkin’ cocksuckah.” Followed by multiple guffaws.

This was an epic monologue for someone from Whaleswood, and was probably made by someone from Lowell, Massachusetts in town to buy some seedy pot, but it still cut me to my skidmarked undies. JoJo tried to make me feel better by saying I belonged in Miami Vice, that I was too sophisticated for Whaleswood, but as we drove North on Highway 1 through the late night ocean fog I was feeling left behind; WHEB played songs from the U.S.A. for Africa album, but where were my songs? Where was my album? I was hungry too. Sure the Red Sox were going to win the World Series, but would that be enough?

JoJo suggested that I should have kicked some ass with the ninja moves I had learned in Ninja magazine; or else pull a King-Kong Bundy on them and body slam those illiterate tools. I acted like I didn't care. A Ninja wouldn't fight when there was chance to get caught, I told JoJo. Like Luke Skywalker, I would plot my revenge in silence. As we passed over the singing bridge from Langdonville into Bone Harbor I thought I saw a fire blazing through the trees at Ogden's Point. Even three Gillies hamburgers, the news the Sox had beaten Toronto 9-7 for their 6^th straight win, and an encounter with the sexy Rose McCorley didn't make me feel much better.

In my sanctuary, I put my Thriller record on the turntable and did push-ups on the floor wearing only my suspenders and pants. I flexed my sinewy arm muscles in the mirror and pumped my chest muscles up until they bounced. I squinted through my sunglasses and nodded my head. “Are you talking to me?” I asked. I practiced with a pair of wooden Nunchucks and felt just like Bruce Lee. My body had never been and will never be as strong. Those Whaleswood fags didn't know what they were talking about. I wasn't a queer. I could kick their pussy asses up and down Whaleswood Beach. What would Don Johnson do? Be pretty? Be cool? I stashed my nunchucks and quietly executed the nine Ninja hand signals, the Kuji Kiri, symbolizing the essential shadow warrior ethics and centering my power. I wouldn't possess that treasure, Darcy's sock, for another few months so once in my room I exhumed a pair of my father's girlfriend's stockings that I kept under my Return of the Jedi sheets. To tie them around my neck and beat off like a Brazilian howler monkey was for me the work of but an instant. I imagined the nylon stockings were the sweat soaked, hot pink glitter spandex of a sexy Whaleswood whore. She, the whore, liked it when I humped her and she moaned my name through the night. Oh, Don. Don. Don. Do me nasty, Big boy. My prostate throbbed and my skinny ass flexed in pleasure. I asked my Yoda pillow if it liked it loved me. It moaned yes. Yes. Yes. I shuddered as I drooled on my pillow. Jim Rice and Dwight Evans and Rich Gedman looked down on me without judgement. They understood that the young can only be young.

In the morning, I found wads of sticky gum and tar on the plastic soles of my cotton shoes, Whaleswood waste that was out of place in my Bone Harbor bedroom. It was like Whaleswood had to export their trash on the shoes of unsuspecting, disappointed tourists. Having no time to waste, I tossed the gum in my Sox garbage can next to the defiled stockings and Ninja magazines. I was meeting Cristo and JoJo and Gordy at the JFK center to continue our three day Whiffle ball tournament.

At best, Whaleswood's only impression on me was one of garbage absently disposed. Whaleswood was not my home because in my dreams the parade to celebrate my game winning World Series home run was held in Market Square, not the Whaleswood boardwalk, and fireworks exploded over Leary Field, not the Whaleswood Beach.

If you've been to Whaleswood Beach, then you probably have an almost identical story.

Between the town of Break Island and the sprawl of Whaleswood sits Langdonville, New Hampshire. Langdonville is a town of fishermen and mechanics and closet queers. Dirty clothes hang on lines in a backyard covered with weeds and junk cars. Langdonville offers gray sand dunes and parking lots covered with sea gull shit and clam shops with retired lobster traps on slanted roofs.

Langdonville streets are lined with potholes and frost heaves near scuba diving supply stores and corner coffee shops. These coffee shops are where people drink tasteless industrial coffee made in giant pots and talk about the first rain or the last snow comparing them to a storm that happened fifteen years ago. Everyone remembers the storm because everyone was there, but this doesn't prevent someone from paying tribute to it with a rambling song of Nostalgia. Customers say, “Ayuh.” and leave it at that. The toilet leaks and the wash basin is rust-stained. The water tastes slightly salty and polluted and as honest as a whore's kiss. Kids eat a grilled cheese sandwiches with bacon, feeling luxurious and drink their flat soda. At Pirate's Cove Beach sits the Galley Hatch restaurant serving ice cream cones and hamburgers wrapped in wax paper and crisp French Fries. Skipper worked there and supplied free onion rings to Cristo and me in the summer of 1988. A Cumberland Farms used to be over by the Langdonville Junior High School and was the only chain convenience store in Langdonville, before the moved away. Langdonville hosts no McDonalds and no Taco Bell as there would be no place to put these monuments in the narrow space between lumberyards and pastures. There is no downtown in Langdonville. You keep looking for it, and keep waiting, and suddenly you are in Whaleswood, which is all downtown.

Langdonville has no X-marts but the people who live there belong to some place they can buy bulk pork sausages and 64-ounces of canned cheese spray. They need a place they can get a free set of plastic plates with each purchase of a pair of pants. Yes, the people of Langdonville belong in these bulk good stores but do not have them so they must drive to Bone Harbor or Greenfields to find mass quantities of frozen pizza.

People born in Langdonville stay in Langdonville, grow old in Langdonville, collect cheap plastic crap in Langdonville, and watch weeds grow over it in their back yard.

Langdonville: home to the Sully family and the Carters and the Connellys and the Grouts and the Bonigans and the capital of the Kingdom of the Timewraiths.

The ghost guns of Ordione’s Point state park sit in Langdonville west beyond the beaches of Pirates Cove and Wallis Sands. These tourist attractions and altars of virgin sacrifice are the historical places for more than just the visitors to the coast. Thousands migrate to these beaches and park bumper to bumper along the side of the road to walk on the thin beach in July's sticky heat. Ghostwealthy Ordione's point was one of the sites of my Tribe's Youthfires, one of the last sites where the songs were sung without shame before 1986. Bathed in smoke, I first drank half a bottle of whiskey and burned the hair off my hands in a fire at Ordione’s Point. Impassioned couples had first sex in the tangled bramble bushes near the giant cement bunkers as crickets and frogs sang beside them. A close examination of the bushes will turn up the used condoms and diaphragms discarded once the ashes of passion had cooled.

An attack on Langdonville was about as likely in 1942 as Martians landing at Leary Field, but the big guns were brought in anyway and placed in giant cement housings. These concrete bunkers still remain from the World War II forts. They crouch in the jungle like Aztec ruins covered with ivy and hieroglyph fragments: “T+J 4 ever” “Langdonville sux!” “Jesse loves Amanda” “Hamtun Rules” “Bubba J” “Fuk You!” “Red Sox #1”. These bunkers, where our Tribe paid tribute to the deeds of our heroes and the tribal memory, where we gathered near the fire in winter shadow, where we sang our songs and wrote our poems, were the cold stone bunkers in which I spawned the Timewraiths.

Break Island, Whaleswood, Langdonville and Bone Harbor. Welcome to the world of Ogden Bleacher.

Headlines from the Bone Harbor Herald Police Blotter might read something like this:

Bone Harbor-A teen was arrested Saturday night for driving under the influence, without a license, and resisting an officer. His name has been withheld.

Langdonville-Piles of household garbage were discovered early Saturday morning dumped in the woods behind the old wood mill on Sagamore Drive. A reward of $250 dollars is being offered for information leading the arrest and conviction of the individuals responsible.

Break Island-The Bone Harbor Yacht Club was vandalized late Friday night. Two juvenile suspects from Langdonville were apprehended. Their names are being withheld and one suspect, Cuffy Broot 21, from Whaleswood is being held on an unrelated warrant.

Whaleswood-Businesses reopened today after last night's nuclear power plant crisis in neighboring Riversook. Apparently a safeguard was accidentally tripped causing the fallout alarms to activate. Officials have declared the plant fully operational. To the residents and seasonal tourists who were annoyed by the inconvenience, Riversook has promised a “Ride for free” night at the Riversook amusement park in the near future.