Gulls tooled the air watching the invaders, the beach people with their easy food and tempers. Screaming to each other, plaintive wails above the Jersey surf, they alight to scrap over what you’d thrown into the sand.

Beach hamburgers laced with grit, washed down with gasps of ocean air became the strength that flowed into your sickly body, now turning gold and healthy beneath the July sun.

There might be magic in the sand, the junk food, perhaps even in the cries of the gulls. Surely there is magic in the salt: Throwing yourself into the waves, it is possible to absorb enough to scrub off the years your heart has learned to carry.

At night, on the island in the man-made river across from your home, teenagers fuck in the bushes, quenching their thirst with bottles of Crazy Horse and each other. Junkies crouch under the bridge like trolls, listening and making love to their needles. In the mornings, Mike, AJ and you went there to break the empty bottles against the steps, climb the trees and laugh at the used condoms, the ripped panties, and spatters of dried blood.

Mike stole a rubber Halloween skull from a street vender and presented it like buried treasure. AJ used to shave half his head and clean his cheap K-Mart sneakers by licking his fingers and wiping away the dust. Mike’s father was a plumber and kept a collection of soft-core pornography, AJ’s father was a cop and kept a collection of weapons.

You balanced on the railroad tracks under the empty watching windows of the abandoned warehouses and snuck around the ivy-coated back yard of an elderly woman, one of the gentle lunatics. 

She wore rubber gloves on a quest without end. “Where is the Post Office?” Years of searching had worn her thin, turned the letter yellow like the gloves.

Your family pulled out of that town too fast for goodbye, steps ahead of the gnashing teeth of the bank while you watched from the back seat of the beat-up Ford Taurus. Watched as a world you loved was chewed to dust.