Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Deborah, showing off her birthday present: a purple crystal Swarovski ring

"Your father and I got engaged in Atlantic City," my mother informed us over dinner, when Deborah and I stopped at my parents' house on our way to America's Favorite Playground. I guess you could say that if it weren't for Atlantic City, I might not be here.

We pulled into town at noon, but since we couldn't check into our hotel until 4 PM, we decided to drive around and explore the city. Boarded-up buildings, crumbling facades, houses for sale, vacant lots where little kids played on mounds of sand dotted with broken glass like sprinkles on a melting ice cream cone. I pulled over at a pharmacy so Deborah could buy some sunblock. I waited in the parking lot, sweating my balls off in the car, waving off one guy after another as they wandered up to my window asking for spare change. It took Deborah nearly half an hour to emerge from the store.

"What took so long?" I asked.

But she didn't get a chance to answer me. "Ugh, this stuff smells awful. Smell it," she said, waving the bottle of sunblock under my nose. "I've bought this brand before. I don't remember it ever smelling like this. I think it's bad."

It smelled like liquid plastic, as if one bottle had been melted down and poured into another. We were on the outskirts of town, away from the casinos and resorts, where, judging from all the weather-worn faces, no one used much sunblock. "I'm sure it's really old," I said. "But it beats paying 20 dollars for a bottle of the stuff on the boardwalk." That might've been true if Deborah hadn't thrown the bottle away after slathering a handful on her shoulder and getting ill from the smell. She smelled like a cheap plastic chachka from one of the boardwalk casinos for the rest of the day. Or at least until we checked into the hotel and hit the pool.

We relaxed poolside for the rest of the afternoon until it was time for our dinner reservation -- the first of three restaurants Deborah chose for her weekend birthday celebrations. We stuffed ourselves to oblivion with a multi-course tasting menu at a delicious, if somewhat hokey, Cuban chain restaurant on the second floor of the Tropicana called Cuba Libre. We got so stuffed that we cancelled our reservation for seafood the following night because our stomachs still felt like ripe watermelons 24 hours later.

The following night, instead of eating at another fancy restaurant, we ate at a cheap-o-depot called Country Kitchen or something like that. We sat next to a table of five women, each heavier than the next, including one in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube running up her nose who easily weighed four hundred pounds. Most of our fellow tourists — the ones we passed on the boardwalk, or saw camped out in front of slot machines — were card carrying members of the current obesity epidemic, so I might not have paid these women any attention if, as they were finishing their dinner, the one in the wheelchair hadn't said, "I want to get wings later." She hadn't even finished swallowing her last bite, let alone digesting it, and she was already planning her next meal. "Mmm, yes," the lady next to her said, while the others slurped their Cokes and grunted in agreement.

"I'm done," I said, and pushed away my plate of half-eaten hamburger.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Atlantic City boardwalk

We passed the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, which was made to look like a building that had been struck by a giant model of Earth. The globe was stuck in the facade, and the entire building was frozen mid-collapse. "That might be funny," I said, "If we didn't see buildings all around town that actually look like that."

The entire Boardwalk is roughly five miles long, and the next morning we rented bicycles and rode to the southernmost end -- the high falootin' side of town, where buildings that look like people might actually live in them are located. We would've turned around and ridden to the north end, too, except that we were being charged 8 dollars an hour for the bikes.

There was a group of homeless guys sitting on a bench near where we returned the bicycles after our ride. Two white guys and a black guy. The two white guys looked exactly alike, like twin hobo surfers with long sun-bleached blonde hair and leathery skin. Both quite handsome, honestly. I wouldn't have guessed it, but judging from their conversation, one of the guys was considerably older than the other. "I'm an ugly old man," one said to the other, "But you, you're lucky, you still got your looks going for you."

We hung poolside, lay on the beach, ate crappy seaside resort food, rode beach cruisers down the boardwalk, and gambled away our spare pennies, so what else was there to do but check out the amusements on historic Steel Pier?

Back in the day, my mother's cousin used to ride a diving horse into a pool of water on Steel Pier. These days, the famed amusement pier isn't nearly as amusing. Other than a helipad at the end of the pier where you can rent helicopter rides up and down the shoreline for forty bucks per person, the only other thing for adults to do was a small Ferris wheel, and a thing called "The Rocket." A bungee contraption where two people sat side by side in a round cage. We waited and watched two young women get flung skyward at a million miles an hour. 20 bucks per person for that thrill. As the women were hurled into the sky and twirled head over heels several times, I said to Deborah that if we did that, "Everything would fall out of my pockets."

"Never mind that," said Deborah. "Everything would fall out of my stomach...And my bladder...And my ass."

There seem to be a lot of Russians working in Atlantic City — waitresses, sales clerks, etc. — so it was funny that when we went to a place called "Red Square" for Deborah's second birthday dinner, we didn't have a Russian waiter. Instead, we were served by a classic Jersey Boy. "Howyazdoin' tonight? Can I start yuz out with some Vodka?"

After looking over the menu and hearing about the specials — sixty-five dollars for this, seventy dollars for that — the seven-course tasting menu sounded like a bargain for fifty-five bucks each. But we got snookered. Although the tasting menu came with a "wine pairing" that included four glasses of wine, nowhere on the menu did it warn us that the wine pairing was extra. Eight glasses of wine between us cost more than the food. Hello credit card, howzyadoin?

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Queens Chapter

Where the Locals Go