Bruce’s Beach Club

July 12, 2004

Sunday, I was in New Jersey visiting my friend Reflux, his charming wife, and their two adorable young kids. Their friend Lilly came too, but she got a later start than I did, so while Mrs. Reflux and the kids waited at the house for Lilly to arrive, Reflux and I headed to the ritzy beach club without them.

Bruce Springsteen belongs to the same beach club, and Reflux told me that he runs into him from time to time. Then, Reflux did a dead-on impression of Bruce by sticking his chin out and mumbling some stuff about New Jersey.

"He actually seems like a totally cool, down-to-earth guy," Reflux said. "He's really good with his kid."

“In public, at least,” I said.

From what I could tell, the rest of the club was full of snotty New Jersey beach club pricks. "I get stopped at the front desk every time I come here," Reflux said, and then recounted a typical scene for me: "Excuse me, sir, but you have to be a member. Do you belong?” He says it’s always an impossibly tan college kid on summer break doing the asking. "Do I look like I don't belong?" Reflux responds.

"Oh. Are you a member?"

"Yes, I'm a member."

They make him prove it before finally letting him pass. I didn't get to witness any of this when I went, because since I was a guest, we had to stop at the front desk anyway. After an hour of checking out the sexy moms and their bikini-clad daughters, Lilly and the rest of the Reflux clan showed up.

The kids played in the sand, and the grown-ups talked about the medical waste that had recently washed up on shore, not too far away.

"So," Reflux laughed, "who's ready for a swim?"

Reflux was the only one of us who hadn't grown up in New Jersey, and Lilly pointed out that the rest of us had been absorbing toxic waste through our skin for decades. No big deal. "The cockroach principle," Mrs. Reflux declared. Meaning, of course, that if you keep eating the poison, it only makes you harder to kill. A nice theory — in theory.

It turns out that Lilly is a massage therapist, and at the end of the day, as we packed up our towels and things, I heard talk of free massages. "I have the massage table in my car," Lilly said to Mrs. Reflux. "When we get back to the house, I'll work on you."

Reflux told Lilly about my fucked up shoulder — something I wasn’t likely to do on my own — and Lilly said she could help me out too. But it would have to wait, because Reflux and I weren't heading straight to the house. We were going to take his boat out into Sandy Hook Bay to do some fishing.

Reflux has been threatening to take me out on his boat for over a year, and I’d been starting to wonder if he even had a boat, or if it was something he made up to fit in at the beach club. But, sure enough, the boat was real. We got the fishing gear together, pulled out of the marina, and headed down the river to the bay. We got flipped off by some yahoos on a passing boat for something too stupid to explain. But Reflux was used to it. He told me a story of getting pulled over by a police boat for not having his registration numbers on his hull. It was a brand new boat, and he hadn't gotten to it yet. The cop was very cool, however, and when he let Reflux go, he said: "Be careful. There are a lot of assholes out there." And, boy, were there!

We stayed out until the sun began to turn pink, and I began to turn purple. "How ya feeling?" Reflux asked. "You wanna head back?"

"Yeah, maybe we should," I said. "I mean, I'm okay, but I feel like if we stay out here much longer, I won't be."

The sun was big and round and turned from pink to magenta as it dropped below the distant Manhattan skyline. The gulls that had been hovering around us followed as we turned toward the marina. But when Reflux opened up the two outboard motors, the birds fell away, and we skimmed along the water without them. Did we catch anything? Of course not. But it sure was nice on the water.

When we got back to the house, Mrs. Reflux and Lilly were stoned and relaxed. Lilly took a look at my shoulder. "Oh, you poor thing," she said as she felt the mess of tight muscles and swollen tendons. "We can work on this." She never actually did give me a massage, but I did get a diagnosis. She explained the physiology of the syndrome I was suffering from and said, "The Eastern belief would be that your digestive tract is congested."— She pulled at my arm, stretching it down toward the floor, and felt the knot in my forearm. — "But in the West, we'd just say that you spend too much time on the computer."

Since the two aren’t mutually exclusive, I’m going to assume both.