Down the Shoreline

I found myself on the wrong bus one cold rainy day last April. It was headed for a place I detest, a place I have now been to three times in my life, a place with a boardwalk that stretches alongside a sandy shoreline where you can buy salt water taffy and where people walk around in a happy trance from the chiming din of slot machines. Sitting on this bus, I was surrounded on three sides by old ladies in lime-green pantsuits and hairless geezers who believed themselves to be clones of Donald Trump but who were really just sad old tenants on fixed incomes blowing their monthly expendable cash on dreams of glitzy wealth and sexual potency. It occurred to me as the bus roared down the shore highway that I myself might become one of these characters, and not in the far-away future after another long slide down the razor blade of years and outrageous fortunes, but immediately, right here on this trip, that somehow when the bus arrived at the casino gates, I would find myself transmogrified into another hairless geezer clutching a tight roll of twenties and patting the girls on their fannies as I ride the escalator up into the clamorous halls of desperation and longing. But when I finally did descend from the bus and ran to the men’s room to check my hairline in the mirror, I was relieved to find it was intact and that I was still my former self, a discovery that left me with a feeling of joyous liberation, as if my life were beginning anew.

Suddenly I saw the whole place in a new light, and started to enjoy myself. For the entire rest of that day, I drank in the sounds and sights of schmaltzy commercialism and reveled in throwing my money away at the tables. I ate a huge steak dinner at the VIP buffet, with all the trimmings, and considered myself the equal of the richest man in town. I hired a rolling chair and glided gently along the length of the boardwalk behind a plastic film that protected me from the rain, and gorged myself on salt water taffy. Later, on the bus back home, I flirted with the girl sitting next to me, a mere child of seventy-six who was dressed in a particularly refreshing shade of green, and felt a faint stirring, a residual memory in the tissues inside my shorts. When I got home I fixed myself a little toddy to extend the day’s exotic sensations and to make up for the dinner that I would not be able to afford until the first of the month, then I put my teeth in the little cup by the bathroom sink, and hit the mattress.