21st Century Bogatyr: December 2020

"On the Boardwalk in Atlantic city, We will walk in a dream, On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City Life will be peaches and cream."

Joseph Myrow/Mack Gordon

[This is a fictional work in progress. Links to the rest are at the bottom of this page.]

by Zvi Baranoff

So, we were in a holding pattern. The remaining books were out on a front and there was nothing for us to do but wait. I couldn't head homeward until at least most of the currency came in and there was nothing we could do that would speed up that return.

For a couple of days we hung around the apartment fussing and fretting, getting on each other's nerves and pacing. Bob and I really needed a break and we decided on a day trip to the Jersey Shore.

We took the Skyway, the high speed high rise highway which in Philly most people call the Zip Line. We barreled through the low hanging clouds and the Skyscrapers of Center City. We crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey via the Ben Franklin Bridge. Then, we jumped onto the Lenni Lenape Causeway heading towards Atlantic City.

About halfway to the coast we took a short detour to the cemetery where my parents and my old running partner Greg are buried. It's a nice place, as far as cemeteries go. I used the GPS to locate the graves.

I put a small stone on each of the headstones of both Mom and Dad and muttered something that would have to pass for a berakhah, or as close as I could get. Bob stood a few feet away, reciting some sort of Latin incantation that he vaguely remembered from his childhood. We both somehow finished with "Amen" somewhat simultaneously.

At Greg's internment spot I cracked opened a fifth of whiskey. I poured off some on the ground - respect - and we each had a snort. Bob crossed himself. I recapped the bottle and placed it on the grave, leaving it leaning against his modest marker. I figured that Greg would appreciate that.

We got back on the Lenni Lenape Causeway and cruised the rest of the way to the shabby remains of the once mythic shore town of Atlantic City.

The Boardwalk once ran for miles and miles with a wide stretch of beach between the Boardwalk and the ocean on one side and it ran north and south along Atlantic City as well as Ventnor and Margate. All the beaches had been lost to erosion and all but a tiny bit of Atlantic City had long since been destroyed by one catastrophe or another. All that really remained was the infrastructure to support the fishing fleet and the Coast Guard base.

We found our way to the remnants of the Boardwalk which now was mostly a pier, sticking out into the ocean. A few fishing boats now use the Boardwalk as a dock. We found a shabby takeout joint, one of the few remaining restaurants where local seafood is still served. The food was dispensed through a window by an actual human server, a pimply teenager, and we carried the food to a beat-up table on the boardwalk with an ocean view.

We sat there and snacked on calamari and fries and nursed some cold but otherwise unimpressive and weak beer while watching the fishing boats floating about and the waves pounding and the Coast Guard helicopters patrolling the Eastern Seaboard.

Visiting Atlantic City is an inherently nostalgic experience. The Boardwalk had always been the heart and soul of Atlantic City and everything about the Boardwalk was always illusory manifestations of cheap trickery. And now, all the former magic is gone.

My parents and their contemporaries would reflect on the Golden Era of an earlier and long gone Atlantic City that only really existed in their own distorted memories. The Atlantic City that I knew growing up was the shadow of their illusions. The Atlantic City that we were visiting was barely a wisp of a reflection of that shadow of my childhood memories. Mostly it has all been washed away. Literally, washed away.

My earliest conscious recollections concerning Atlantic City were the long trips on the White Horse Pike in the back of my parents' Studebaker. The car had an AM radio with tinny sound and we could tune in to Philly stations for about half of the trip and pick up a couple of Atlantic City stations for some of the rest of the trip.

It was a long trip in those days. Arrival in Atlantic City was announced with the sighting of the Copertone billboard, the image of a small dog pulling at the bathing suit of a young, suntanned girl, exposing where her bottom was still white.

The Studebaker was equipped with what my Dad called "Two and Forty air conditioning". That is, if we opened two windows and drove forty miles an hour we could somewhat cool the inside of that car. Mostly this just let in the hot and muggy summer air and road dirt of South Jersey.

Atlantic City, when I was young, was defined by the "Season" by which everyone understood to be the time sandwiched between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The rest of the year it was a gritty town with little to offer of interest to anyone, even those that lived there year round.

Just before Memorial Day, the city woke up, put on a fresh coat of paint and replaced burnt out lightbulbs. The town doled itself up - like putting lipstick on a pig - and presented itself as the place to be. For those of us of modest means living in South Jersey or Greater Philadelphia, Atlantic City was the cat's pajamas, the shiznit, the pinnacle of excitement. Atlantic City was the best summertime escape we could possibly imagine on our tight budgets and with our limited imaginations.

My grandparents owned a small hotel just off the Boardwalk near the Steel Pier. Of course, that was a very long time ago. And then, there were the riots and the fires. And then the real estate manipulators and the mobsters and the plans for casinos and revitalization, followed by more fires and insurance payouts. This was before the hurricanes and the floods and the tidal waves, the attempts to build seawalls and the washing away of most of the barrier islands of the Jersey Shore.

Summer in Atlantic City was what I lived for when I was growing up. Atlantic City was my turf from the time that I transcended being an ankle biter in diapers. As soon as I was stable enough on my own legs, the beaches and Boardwalk was where I ran feral and unsupervised all summer long and ran with other feral youth. We soaked up the sun and got gritty in the sand.

Everything about Atlantic City involved some process of shaking money loose from the tourists. Everything was entertaining with flashing lights and various degrees of sleight of hand. It wasn't all Three Card Monty but neither was any of it quite up and up.

Up and down the Boardwalk, there was one spectacle after another. The show never stopped and up and down the Boardwalk I found ways to be entertained.

There were the rolling chairs, the diving horse, the dancing chickens, Mr Peanut. There was the Woolworth's Five & Dime full of knicknacks. There was tri-colored ice cream waffle sandwiches. American Bandstand broadcast live from the Steel Pier. The Miss America contest paraded young women in bathing suits riding in Cadillac convertibles to wave at the crowds standing along the Boardwalk. There was Lucy the Elephant which doubled as a gaudy hotel. There were the amusement rides and the House of Mirrors.

Nothing about Atlantic City was quite real. Us kids had a blast and we learned a lot from top to bottom, on the beaches, on the piers and both on and under the Boardwalk.

It was my tween years when I worked at the family hotel pushing a broom and making beds and such when I met Susie who was a year or two older than me. Her family had rented a studio apartment for the season. I was infatuated with her and we walked and talked and swam and joked together all that summer.

The day before her family was set to leave, we ran along the beach until we were out of breath. Then, she took me by the hand and led me to a spot under the Boardwalk and we laid about in the sand and told each other knock knock jokes, one joke dumber than the next.

The beach is gone. The Boardwalk is gone. The city is gone. Susie is gone and pretty much everyone and everything I have ever known in my life is also gone. All my reasons to come to Atlantic City by that point had totally evaporated.

I was sitting there, watching the waves and feeling washed away by time. Bob was enjoying the fish and the beer. I was feeling melancholy, nostalgic and lost. It seems that I keep going back to look for what's no longer there. Whatever. I was tired of being on the broken remains of the Boardwalk and was in no mood to be crying in my beer. If fact, by that point I was tired of the beer as well and I was ready to roll out of there.

We piled back in the car but for some reason beyond logic I was not quite ready to head back to Philly yet so we tooled around a bit aimlessly and ended up in Egg Harbor.

It would not be an unreasonable assumption to believe that Egg Harbor derived the name from the sulfur-like odors similar to rotten eggs that are so prevalent, particularly during low tides.

It is swampy and mucky and had always been so, even long before the increased flooding. The pungent odor that we encountered that afternoon, however, made us nostalgic for the far less disturbing scent of rotten eggs or decaying seaweed.

The stench emanated from the wreckage of a go-fast hydrofoil speed boat, washed up and partially submerged against the shoreline.

Above the boat were hundreds, perhaps thousands of seagulls squawking, circling and diving. In addition to that cacophony was the intense buzzing of flies. Between the flies and the seagulls, we could not immediately see what was below, but we knew that it could not be pleasant.

As we approached, we saw dozens of crabs scurrying about. The submerged part of the boat was filled with a myriad of fish. All of these were feasting on what remained of what was once two human beings.

None of the wildlife was bothered in the least by the stench. Speaking strictly for myself, my stomach was most seriously disturbed by the odor and the sight was quite ghastly as well.

The bodies, or what was left of bodies, had been shredded by high-powered, large munitions, as was the boat as well as some of the cargo.

A reasonable assumption is that the Coast Guard took out these runners somewhere further out at sea at least several days prior, and the Federales had assumed that the boat had sunk. The wreckage came in on the tide. The remains of the wreckage jammed up on the rocks and it sat there when the tide went out again. That's where we found it.

Bob crossed himself and I spit, each of us hoping to ward off bad luck and evil spirits. Then, we covered our faces with bandanas to minimize the stench. We pulled our hats down to try to keep the flies off us. We came in closer to get a better look at the situation.

The faces were a mess. The features had been destroyed by birds and flies and crabs. The lower extremities were submerged and being nibbled away by fish.

If these two had friends or families, there was no way to know. The corpses were flailed out on the cargo, as were much of their blood and, I suppose, some of their guts. We rolled the half-eaten bodies into the water and waved off gulls and flies.

As quickly as two old men could, we unloaded the cargo, stacking crates on the water edge. When we had that boat unloaded, we shoved the wreckage off of the rocks and back into the water. Hopefully the receding tide would take all of that far away. It was certainly not useful for us any more, and we sure as hell were not interested in being found in the vicinity of a smuggler's boat.

Some of the crates were damaged and water had seeped in, significantly damaging the product. Other crates were mostly or completely intact and undamaged. We began by grabbing the boxes that seemed to be in the best shape and we loaded my vehicle. We dragged the rest of the crates to a less visible spot, covered them with a tarp and covered the tarp with branches and rocks.

Back up the road a bit, I found a No Tell Motel and we rented a bungalow for a couple of nights. We unloaded the crates from the car into the bungalow and went back to where we had stashed the rest of that cargo. We worked like that into the night and towards morning we had salvaged the whole of it and had the whole kaboodle at that No Tell Motel bungalow.

This was, perhaps, a score of a lifetime. The load was European. These were well printed volumes from professional print houses, not crappy replications from fly by night operations in the Mexican borderlands. They were nearly all in pristine condition. There was a wide variety. It looked like a little over half the books were in English.

We were, perhaps out of our league and over our heads, to mix metaphors. We needed to find the right markets for all of them, and we needed to get them sold or moved to a more secure location in very short order. The No Tell Motel was a most temporary transit point.

We were going to need some help to break down and move this load. Finding trustworthy and reliable criminals is not such an easy thing. It takes a lifetime to build those sorts of relationships. We were a couple of old men. Most everyone that we trusted is already dead.

This was going to need talent and stamina and brass balls. I called Frank, gave him the coordinates of the No Tell Motel. I asked him to scoop up Spider, rustle up a truck and some muscle, slide on out and meet us at the Motel.

It was already morning. We bought some nondescript sandwiches from a vending machine in the "courtyard" of that dump of a motel. We couldn't decide if the food was fish or fowl or some other sort of meat or quasi-meat, no matter how much we sniffed and poked at it and the labelling was so worn that it didn't even offer us a clue to answer that riddle.

We ate that crap anyway and then we crawled off to get some sleep while we had a chance. We knew it would be several hours before Frank, Spider and the crew would make it and one sleeps when one can.

Links to the other posted parts of this story, Chapters 1 - 26.

Part 1: Grace and Mercy If Luck Holds

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/05/grace-and-mercy-if-luck-holds.html?m=1

Part 2: Everything Was Fine Until It All Went Sideways

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/everything-was-fine-until-it-all-went.html

Part 3: I Blink In & Out and Awakened In the Zone

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/i-blink-in-out-and-awakened-in-zone.html

Part 4: Out Of Time

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/out-of-time.html

Part 5: Even Without Clocks

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/even-without-clocks.html

Part 6: Cerveza & Barbecue Before I Go