Hell Gate originally published this story on September 7, 2022.
I’ve basked on many beaches, near and far. But I was shaped by a crescent of sand on the Bronx side of the Long Island Sound. The beach where I summered as a teenager was mostly landfill. It had been built by the government, like the housing project where my family lived and the city college I would soon attend. This largesse allowed us to pretend that we were middle class.
Air conditioning wasn’t allowed in the projects when I grew up, and I was a fat kid, so heat waves had a dramatic effect on my body. I could sit home in a lagoon of sweat, cool off in a theater that showed a movie I didn’t want to see, or go to the beach. That’s where you would have found me in the 1950s, lazing away the afternoon with whatever literary classic I thought an aspiring writer (with a picture of Hemingway above his bed) should read.
There wasn’t much for a fat boy to do on the beach. I was too self-conscious to show off my body, and the water was less than beckoning. It was a sallow, brownish green, with clumps of seaweed and bits of jellyfish that grazed me when I swam. These impurities struck me as the likely reason why the place had such a bucolic name: Orchard Beach.