Old Friend from Atlantic City

         This past June I climbed into my car armed with a camera and a black satchel filled with notes that I had complied over the past year, memories really.
 
         At the end of the Atlantic City Expressway, an hour later, fog had crept in and I felt I was driving through a dream, maybe back in time. I couldn’t see the city in front of me, though I had taken this trip enough times to be able to picture it in my head.
 
         Drivers passed me in the early gray of morning, their cars appearing from the haze like ghosts, desperate to have their money removed from them in clockless rooms filled with ringing bells and flashing lights. I hummed to the music on the radio.
 
         At Pacific Avenue, where most of them turned right, I turned left.
 
         Soon I was passing small stores with black windows and stuttering neon signs; brick-faced drug stores and corner sandwich stops, check-cashing places with gray-eyed people who meandered behind smudged windows. A small, tired hardware store stood with its door open wide in an endless yawn.
 
         I continued and the stores gave way to emptiness; a few standing buildings which only reach a couple of stories into the air. The pavements became cracked and splintered as if something had burrowed under the very earth and taken entire blocks, leaving only weed-strewn lots and ashy, brown dust behind. Gaps separated houses along the street like broken teeth in an old mouth. What houses were still standing had lumpy and warped porches, fumbling staircases and quiet doorways. Children played in one of the empty squares where houses used to stand, kicking a ball that was sorely in need of air.
 
         I took it all in: the slow decay, the sun-bleached lots of crumbled brick and the stark contrast it wore against the violent blue sky above, peppered with the forms of seagulls flying on wings that seemed made of liquid.
 
         I turned on Seaside Avenue, which was no different, really, from any of the other desolate avenues in this part of town, the area known as the Inlet. The only difference it might have boasted was that it was one of the few not named after a state.
 
         My car rolled down the black asphalt and I saw at the end of the street the ramp to the boardwalk; beyond that, one could easily be fooled into thinking it was the edge of the world - only sky and boards, nothing more.
 
         On the right side of the street there were only two houses left on the entire block. I had walked past them thousands of times when I was younger and blonder, usually on my way to the beach with my best friend, Mike Ellis. The bottom windows of the one nearest were covered with plywood.
 
         Only one house remained on the opposite side of the street. It was now painted a battleship gray and the blinds were drawn crookedly over the porch windows. I looked up and saw that the second floor deck had no railing left and was probably not being used anymore. I climbed out of the car and thought it looked alien now that it officially wasn’t ours anymore, even though we had owned it for twenty five years.
 
         I felt a bit intrusive approaching it, as if it would rebuff me like a scorned lover, but my feet carried me to the pavement in front. I looked down.
 
         “Julius ‘77”
 
         I remembered the white hot sky and the shadow of Mike falling over me as I bent down and carved the words into the fresh cement with a broken clam shell. He then patted me on the shoulder and his brown lips pulled back into a smile, and we trotted off to the beach. Again.
 
         I turned around and looked to where Michael’s house used to be. Where was he now? Where was his sister, Kelly, who had given me my very first real kiss one warm night?
 
         It seemed back then, during the slow, wide open days of summer, there were only a handful of things to do with our time: go swimming, go fishing, hit the boards. Each left lasting memories.
 
         I walked around the side, into another dry, empty lot mottled with scratchy weeds that brushed against my legs. I tried to look up into my old bedroom window but could see only the drab, white ceiling. I remembered the wallpaper that was a tight pattern of red flowers. In fact, all four bedrooms that made up the second floor of the house all had the same wallpaper but in different colors: red, blue, yellow and orange. It made it easier to tell one from the other. All were the same shape as well, with one twin bed, a closet and a rickety bureau or dresser. Perfect.
 
         “I got the orange room!” a visiting friend might say, claiming the only room with a door to the upstairs porch.
 
         “I call yellow!”
 
         “Red room!”
 
         Blue was always my grandmother’s room. When we didn’t have guests over I would glide from room to room like the richest person in the world, sleeping in whatever color room matched my mood at the time.
 
         I craned my neck and saw a man moving some boards in the backyard. He hadn’t noticed me yet and I hesitated. I didn’t recognize him but that meant nothing, I hardly recognized anything in the neighborhood anymore. I walked over, unsure of what to say.
 
         “Um, hi,” I said in a low, safe voice.
 
         He looked at me through thick lenses, under the shadow of his worn baseball cap. The light revealed soft cheeks and he wore his buttoned shirt open to show a strong body that had been darkened by many hours under the sun.
 
         “Hi,” he answered with a bit of caution and then, turning his back, placed the armful of wood onto a growing pile. I hadn’t seen the backyard in years, twelve to be exact, and I paused, letting more memories drift through the open window of my thoughts. He turned back to me and brought me back from visions of the swing set that used to be there and my mom standing at the top of the stairs watching me and smiling.
 
         “I, uh,” I started. I wasn’t sure how to say anything without sounding a little crazy. Why was I here? What did I expect to gain or see? “I, um, I used to live here,” I finally blurted.
 
         He went away again, now for his tool box and began rooting through it. “You don’t say,” he said, rather dismissively. “Tell ya what, I’ll let the owner know and if you want, you can live here again.”
 
         He obviously thought I was a loon, wandering through old, decrepit neighborhoods, like a lost ghost, looking for houses that I could connect myself to, someone who had no identity. I thought to walk away but didn’t.
 
         “No, I mean my family used to own this house,” I said a little more solidly. It felt good to get it out and it added a bit of authority to my words. I relaxed despite myself and put my hands against the gate that kept me and the rest of the world out.
 
         The man walked up with a curious look in his eyes, which I now saw blended quite a bit of intelligence with the initial caution. In the eyes, the curve of the mouth, the broadness of his brow when he removed his cap, his face became warmer. The shadowed face I first saw was a costume.
 
         He said nothing, so I continued. “Yeah, we owned this place for, oh, God, twenty five years.” I looked into the yard again and saw that he had been working on building a new back staircase. Fresh, bright wood climbed up to the door in the back of the house. It might have been the only building going on in the Inlet in the last twenty years. Things never got built here anymore, only torn down.
 
         “No doubt, she’s a beauty,” he agreed. “This is my favorite house to work on, bar none.” He introduced himself as Justin and I liked the way he talked. “And I’ve worked on a lot of houses, my friend.”
 
         I used my words to take him through the house, up the front stairs, through the L-shaped porch, into the living room with all that dark wood. I was still trying to prove to him that I still carried a piece of the house with me.
 
         “Man, I think I could still go through it blind-folded and not hit a thing, you know?” I said.
 
         He smiled and nodded and then went back to his tool box. I took another sweep of the place with my eyes and remembered the voices, the laughter and crying that had been done in there. I felt that those voices were still there, absorbed into the rich wood, like a new stain. I imagined the house releasing them when it was lonely.
 
         Justin came back with a set of keys and held them up to me. “You want to take a walk back inside?”
 
         I wanted to say yes but I stopped, looking stupid with my mouth open. I had been wondering about the house for years; what had changed, who was in here now, but when it got down to it, did I really want to find out?
 
         “C’mon,” he said, waving me around the gate, “it’ll probably do you good.”
 
         I argued no more and went up the front steps and took another look at my mark on the steps, using it as a mental key to let me in the house. My family used to own this place, there’s my name. I belong here.
 
         He opened the front door and without waiting, I entered the somber, shadowed porch. It seemed naked without the furniture I was accustomed to: the round, fake marble table that served as a wonderful place to play cards while the sun cut lines across the floor through the windows. There were always a couple of bikes leaning in the back, their tires ready for the early morning rides to the end of the boardwalk.
 
         I went into the living room, which I always picture in my head as being dark, and see a set of eyes staring back at me. A girl and a boy, probably in their early twenties, are sitting on a sofa and each is cradling a laptop. They smile pleasantly and Justin tells me that they are working in one of the casinos and he introduces me to them. We shake hands quietly and they go back to their blue screens and it lights up their faces in the dark-wood paneled room.
 
         I see that the fireplace is still there, still unlit and the mantle above, made from rich, blackish wood, is empty. My mother used to make small clay figures and display them on it. They were quite good.
 
         There are stairs leading up to the second floor but I turn to the kitchen and dining room. A door stands where there used to be an unobstructed view, clear through to the back of the house, right out the rear windows. The door darkens the house and I am amazed that such a small thing can have such power.
 
         I turn to Justin, puzzled and quiet, as if I hadn’t authorized it, and he says, “They made that into a bedroom.” I nod slowly and we move over to the kitchen.
 
         It hasn’t changed. The only thing missing is the large wooden kitchen table and I wonder whatever happened to it. My cousin and I once sat there, drinking glass after glass of water under the supervision of my mother and Aunt because we had eaten a whole bottle of Flintstones vitamins. How could we resist? They were so colorful and tasty!
 
         I notice that the refrigerator is different, no longer a boxy olive green, it is now updated. The counters and cabinets, even the linoleum has remained the same and that both comforts and pulls at me at the same time. I walk out to the rear room, just off the kitchen, where we use to keep the heavy door open by using a concrete statue of a small cat that we bought at one of the farmers markets along route 30. Its tail was broken.
 
         The light still brightens this room and it feels familiar as if I can see out the back window and look down on my yard, before it was cemented in, when it had grass and vines that climbed up the back wall. When I was very young I once walked out and there were hundreds of dragonflies humming among the flowers. Forever I wondered if it was a dream or not.
 
         We walked back through the kitchen and out to where the blue glowing faces of the young casino workers are. They seemed to hover above the worn sofa that they are sitting on. As they watch us ascend the stairs I remembered I often leaped off them. One day I set up my lime green beanbag chair at the bottom and aimed myself well enough to land in it perfectly. It burst instantly, with a loud pop, and sprayed tiny, broom-shy pellets across the whole room. It took forever to clean up.
 
         We reached the second floor and all the doors to the bedrooms were closed. I looked down to the floor and the same scuffed white floor was beneath my feet. I wanted to take off my shoes and feel the specks of sand that I knew were there. The same grains that I would rub off my feet every night before I climbed into bed. I would then curl up near the bedside lamp and read until I could not longer say awake.
 
         I was glad that the four doors were closed. It allowed me to remember the rooms as they were, letting me keep something. We climbed the stairs to the top floor, where my parent’s room was. A lot of work was being done, with sawdust on the floor and exposed studs behind the crumbling drywall. It looked small to me, even without a queen size bed, end tables and a long dresser. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my mother.
 
         “Hey mom,” I said, as casually as possible.
 
         “Hey,” she said. The television was on in the background. I looked out the front window and saw a gull swoop in the distance.
 
         “Guess where I am?” She knew I was going to drive to the old neighborhood but that was all she knew.
 
         “Where?”
 
         “In your old bedroom,” I said. There was silence from her. I heard CNN blaring on the set. I could picture her reaching for the remote and lowering the volume.
 
         “On Seaside?”
 
         “Yep,” I said.
 
         “How is it?” She asked, her voice trembling a bit. She, like everyone in our family, adored the house. Selling it was like losing a member of the family.
 
         “Tired looking, but she’s still here. Some things are different and some aren’t.”
 
         We laughed over a couple of stories and then I said that I would see her soon and hung up. Justin let me wander a bit more and then we went downstairs. I stopped at the top step and looked at the back of the door. There, still on the old wood, was a large, ripped batman sticker that I had put there many, many years ago. I grinned and pointed it out to Justin, who smiled also.
 
         “You did that?”
 
         “Yeah,” I said, almost whispering. “My dad had bought me a whole page of super hero stickers; Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, The Flash and I went around the house and put a sticker on every door in the house. I caught real hell for it and tried to pull this one off but…no luck.” I touched my hand to the sticker before we went down to the living room.
 
         Justin and I talked out in the backyard for a while. He sawed as we both recalled the Atlantic City we remembered and it occurred to me that everyone’s Atlantic City was the best; mine, Justin’s, my mom’s, who worked here as a waitress before I was even born. Everybody older than you always says, “Yeah, but you should have seen Atlantic City back then!” and they are all right. Maybe it never really existed in the present, who knows?
 
         I spent every one of my young summer days here and while under the blaze of the sun or riding waves into the beach, maybe even I sensed that the city was in trouble. It was in the very air. It was in the wood of the Boardwalk and the sand. I don’t know how I could have missed it because it was in the black windows of the old hotels, standing like quiet giants along the shore. Maybe I chose not to let it bother me. Maybe I thought everything would always stay the same.
 
         I was born here and the very first place I called home was right down the street, in the Vermont Apartments. They’re gone now, too. I’ve tried to look up Mike but have had no luck. Mike Ellis is a pretty common name.
 
         As I said goodbye to Justin we both sensed that a hug was in order and it felt natural. I walked back out of the yard and, after thanking him and saying I’d be back, I climbed back into my car and back into 2006.
 
         I drove back through the neighborhood and I couldn’t shake that sense of the house being smaller than I remembered but I later figured that that it was probably because of all the memories I had carried inside with me.