"The Bungalows of Rockaway"

There was a movie premiere in Rockaway last night: the final cut of the documentary “The Bungalows of Rockaway” was shown at Fort Tilden. It rained torrentially, and I was late, so I didn’t stop at the cash machine, and to make the price of admission ($20, to benefit the Rockaway Music and Arts Council) I had to borrow ten dollars from the film’s director, Jennifer Callahan.

I’d seen two earlier cuts of the documentary, and I liked what they did with the final version. It has green-and-yellow illustrations that loosely impose the structure of a storybook, and lighthearted music that celebrates the word “bungalow.” (It means “in the Bengal style”; a bungalow has a pitched roof and a porch.) In addition to archival footage (including Uncle Julius, a.k.a. Groucho Marx, on the beach) and interviews with historians and residents, the movie has a villain (Robert Moses). What brought the audience to the point of hissing, though, was the announcement in mid-film that the management of the Breezy Point cooperative had refused to admit the filmmakers.

Jennifer and the producer, Elizabeth Logan Harris, came to my bungalow a few years ago with a cameraman. As a newcomer to Rockaway, I had no stories of olden days to tell, but I’ve never altered the appearance of the bungalow, so they shot some of its architectural details. Naturally, I watched for my home, which appeared for about three seconds: a shot of the auxiliary kitchen, panning from refrigerator to cathedral ceiling and down to the sink with the mirror over it that is too high for me to see anything in (it’s for tall guests). The narration at that point was about the simplicity of the bungalows.

There was a reception afterward, during which I tore off to the bank in the rain so I could repay the ten dollars I’d borrowed from Jennifer. The filmmakers are hoping that “The Bungalows of Rockaway” will be shown on Channel 13 on September 16th.

Ferry Tales

I have been commuting from Rockaway to Manhattan by ferry for the past few weeks, and between getting up early to catch the 7:45 in the morning and rushing downtown to get the 5:30 at night, lately I’ve been feeling as if I lived on this boat. My desk in Times Square sways back and forth like a ship's deck all day. The commute costs almost four times as much as the A train—the ferry is six dollars, plus another $2.25 for the subway from Wall Street to Times Square (not counting any celebratory beverages)—but to me it’s worth it, this twice-daily eyeful of New York Harbor.

Last week, the skipper of the American Princess announced two public meetings that might help New York Water Taxi get another boat put on the run—maybe one that left a little later in the morning and returned a little later at the end of the day. Last night, I went to the meeting at Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn. The college is at the eastern tip of a peninsula that forms the southern shore of Sheepshead Bay. Its major landmark, conspicuous from the water, is a rotunda, like an extra-thick silo, topped with a squat cone of green beams. It doubles as a lighthouse. The campus has its own tiny beach, Oriental Beach, an extension of Manhattan Beach, to the west. Manhattan Beach itself is a sweet little enclave, with a footbridge over Sheepshead Bay to Emmons Avenue, which is lined with restaurants and party boats for fishermen. I had been worried about where to park, but a guard at the campus gate told me I could park anywhere that wasn’t restricted.

The meeting was part of a Comprehensive Citywide Ferry Study to identify locations in Brooklyn that could be developed for ferry service. Although politicians from Rockaway were there to praise the ferry, and suggest that more runs be added and that passengers ought to be able to transfer for free to a bus or train, the agenda was soon hijacked by locals.

“Why would I pay six dollars on a freezing December morning when I can walk one block and get a train for two-twenty-five?” one woman said. (“You’re not riding a raft,” someone behind me muttered.) A woman from Coney Island seconded her, bragging that from Coney Island “we’ve got a one-seat ride.”

Mostly, locals were worried that a ferry landing in Manhattan Beach or Sheepshead Bay would mean more cars parked on their streets. “People who live in Manhattan Beach have a major problem with parking,” a well-groomed woman said. “This is a very small peninsula. . . . We have to preserve this wonderful community.”

Taking the other side, an administrator from Kingsborough said that his college is surrounded on three sides by water, and to get from Far Rockaway to Manhattan Beach by public transportation can take more than two hours. He joked that students not only get a diploma when they graduate but a certificate of survival. He would like a ferry landing at the college for students. The local ladies jumped all over him. “We have people with houses on the beach that need parking!” one woman exclaimed.

There were only a handful of people at the meeting who actually rode the ferry. A regular on the 5:30 Rockaway-bound who lives in Breezy Point had left his car that morning at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, where the ferry makes a stop, and driven from there to Manhattan Beach. “The schedule is always a problem,” he told the public. A ferry can’t run every fifteen minutes, like a subway. But he conceded that there does need to be “plenty of parking—that’s a key factor. If you don’t have it, you might as well forget it.” And he added, “If the trip is longer than an hour, it’s not worth it.”

The length of the trip was another hot-button issue. A young businessman acknowledged the need for alternatives to the Belt Parkway (which, incidentally, is sinking), but he said the ferry was too slow and that he was going to drive. A guy named Joe Hartigan, in cap, shorts, and sneakers, began his spiel by saying, “I’m not a big fan of Weiner,” meaning Anthony Weiner, the congressman who gets most of the credit for bringing ferry service to Rockaway (and who will never be mayor because of his funny name). Joe had hoped that a high-speed boat would be put on the route. He had made test runs in high-speed boats that got to Manhattan in twenty-eight minutes. He was outraged that New York Water Taxi had assigned a brand-new boat to the Yonkers run—Yonkers!—and given to Rockaway a boat that was used for whale-watching.

A well-spoken, well-prepared woman from Red Hook named Carolina Salguero was especially exercised about the fact that there was no ferry service between Red Hook and Governors Island. A ferry has been taking people from Manhattan to Governors Island for free, but they’ve done nothing for Red Hook, which is desperate for parks and ferry service and is right across Buttermilk Channel from Governors Island. When the moderator started to respond, Carolina said, “Enough already, Phoenicia, enough already.”

I found myself wanting to defend the ferry. The crew of the American Princess is friendly, and service has been remarkably reliable. Only once, in my experience, has it been late, and that was last Thursday, when Obama was in town to give his speech at the NAACP. In the afternoon, he flew from the downtown heliport to a fund-raiser for Governor Corzine in New Jersey, and the harbor was closed, so the boat could not come through. The man in front of me in line had a pinched nerve, and was extremely annoyed at Obama. But my feeling, as I waited, was that our lives were being touched by greatness—or at least delayed by greatness for twenty minutes.

Foretaste

I went out to Rockaway last weekend for the first time in months. The bungalow had not burned down, and in fact I had left it fairly neat. I said hello to the dog across the way, Sam, and to the cat down the walk, Buster, and visited with a few neighbors, and raked and bagged leaves. I got there just in time for the first forsythia blossom. The forsythia is going to be amazing this year.

I was also delighted to see that my favorite gossip columnist, Dorothy Dunne, is back in the Wave, and that she is in good form. On St. Patrick's Day, she went to see Cherish the Ladies, "an astonishing array of virtuosity, instrumental, vocals and stunning step dancing," she writes. "It was an interesting and enjoyable program, a little long."

I have been cleaning my links, and added a new one: Cook the Wolf, a food blog by the highly entertaining Emily Nunn, who lives and eats turnips in Chicago.

Return to Cadman Plaza

“Dear [Alternate Side Parker]:

“We received your request for a hearing by mail on the summons shown below.

“Based on the violation described, we are offering you the opportunity to pay a reduced fine in the amount shown. If you accept this reduction offer, RETURN THE COUPON with your payment by the due date above. If you pay the fine, a judge will not review your case.

“Alternatively, if you do not wish to accept this reduction offer and want an Administrative Law Judge to review your case, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DO ANYTHING. You will either be found guilty and you will have to pay the full balance or the summons will be dismissed and you will not have to pay anything. The Administrative Law Judge will not be able to offer you a reduction. A decision will be mailed to you after a judge decides your case.”

This really happens: Whenever you contest a summons, the Parking Violations Bureau automatically offers to settle for a lower rate. I contested this summons, on the ground that I had never seen it, and later discovered that it was issued while my car was at the mechanic’s (see below, November 30th, Parker's Digest). I am in a bit of a quandary over it. I have still not seen a copy of the summons, and unless there is something wrong with it, in which case it will ultimately be dismissed, the Parking Violations Bureau will hold me responsible for the actions of my mechanic. The reduced fee is $90, down $125, for parking in a No Standing zone. As long as I hold out, clinging to the theory of irrational numbers, I enjoy the illusion of having made $35.

There is also the question of how to deal with the mechanic. I like my mechanic, and though apparently I shouldn't trust him, I don’t want to lose him. Am I stuck in a dysfunctional relationship? Or is it possible to say, in an unheated moment, “Mr. Bulloch, sir, I paid a parking ticket that I think—no, I know—the car got while it was in your care,” and have him give me a free oil change? Or might he fall back on the many times he has let me leave my car in his lot, without charge, for a week at a time, plus ten more minutes while I run across the street to the deli for mortadella on a hard roll with a trace of mustard? And there was also that time that I took the liberty of stealing my car out of his lot when he was closed (though I did come back to pay at the first opportunity).

I’m thinking of calling Car Talk. Once I wrote to Dear Abby to ask for advice when my landlord in Astoria blamed me for a flood in the basement after I left a skylight window open in the bathroom during a storm; after that, whenever it rained he would stand in the street and look up at my second-floor windows to make sure they were closed, even if the rain was coming from the opposite direction. As I composed the letter, in the sweltering heat of my apartment in summer, with the windows closed against rain that wasn’t coming in (have I ever mentioned that I have a touch of claustrophobia?), it occurred to me that Dear Abby didn’t even have to answer, because the mere act of writing the letter had told me what to do: Move.

In this case, simply contemplating a call to Click & Clack clarifies my course of action. I have a feeling they would say: Pay. Don't drag this into the New Year. By never mentioning it to the mechanic, you will bind him to you forever, the louse.

Parker's Digest

There has been a lot to digest this Thanksgiving, foremost a humongous article on parking tickets in Friday’s Times. It had so many charts and graphs, and a map of the city with blocks color-coded by number of tickets handed out … I didn’t know whether to avert my eyes or get out my magnifying glass. Was my street one of the dark-blue high-volume ticket blocks?

My own relationship with the Parking Violations Bureau has come to the point where I now recognize their return address in the mail: Cadman Plaza Station. That same day, I received from the Parking Violations Bureau a “Notice of Outstanding Parking Violation.” It surprised me that I had an outstanding ticket, because I hate getting tickets, and my way of dealing with them is to pay—or, actually, contest—them promptly, in the hope that the pain will recede that much sooner into the past.

A few hours earlier, I’d made a special trip out to Rockaway to start up the car and take it to the mechanic's to have it winterized. The Éclair was in the driveway of my friend MQ, its former owner. She had given me a key to her house, so that I can use her bathroom when the water is turned off at my place, and I was on my way up her back stairs to avail myself of the facilities, wondering if I should knock just in case she was there, when she popped out the door and screamed at the sight of me. Suddenly I didn’t need to use the bathroom at all anymore.

The first thing she said to me, after recovering from the shock, was “I can’t come to dinner.” I had recently invited her to dinner in Manhattan (we are neighbors there, too), as a way of thanking her for letting me park in her driveway. She won't let me pay her (I've offered), though she has occasionally allowed me to buy her a Bloody Mary. Anyway, she had accepted my invitation and we had set a date. But MQ is incredibly stubborn, and when she says she doesn’t want to get paid, she doesn’t want to get paid, not in cash or in vodka or in dinner invitations, and she had figured out that I was trying to reciprocate. I was disappointed that my scheme would not work. “Is it just me?” she asked. She wanted to know if I was trying to fold her into a general dinner party. "Yes," I said. “Well, nothing elaborate. Make it simple,” she told me. I didn’t have anything in mind up to that point, but now I’m thinking one of those expensive ten-minute frozen pasta dishes with shrimp and asparagus might satisfy her.

When I approached the car to back it out of the driveway, MQ said, “When you bring the car back, would you pull it up a little closer to the garage?” “Here?” I asked, standing at the latitude of the drain, about three feet in front of the garage door. “No, not there—step back a little.” I took up a position about three feet on the opposite side of the drain. “There,” she said. I don’t know why she is so particular about where I park—maybe something to do with being able to see the car from inside? Being able to walk around it comfortably outside? Keeping a shovel's distance between the car and the drain? I desperately want to please my parking benefactor, but I’m starting to feel as if the Éclair and I have been miscast in an episode of the Princess and the Pea.

Anyway, I go to the gas station, where things are jumping. Both Bullochs are in the office, the older (Big Bulloch) and the younger (Baby Bulloch). Big Bulloch finishes taking a lady’s money and greets me. “I want to get the car winterized,” I tell him. “You know, tires, battery, antifreeze.” “You don’t need nothin,” he says. “You got the oil changed the last time you were in here. To tell you the truth, I’d just be taking your money. You don’t need nothin.” And he sends me away.

Gosh. On the surface, it seemed kind and fatherly of Big Bulloch. The lady whose money he had just taken was impressed. But I couldn't help but suspect that he just didn’t want to be bothered. I went to the Wharf, which Bulloch also owns, had a quesadilla and a beer while the lights of Manhattan popped on in the dusk across Jamaica Bay, and read the Wave. The Wave is the opposite of the Times. The lead story was about how the M.T.A., in casting around for ways to save money, is considering rolling back the free ride that Rockaway residents get over the toll bridge from Broad Channel. The man who first got the city to give Rockaway residents this special status is Dan Tubridy, a local hero. At the time, in 1996, he lived in Broad Channel and his wife worked in Rockaway, so, to make his point and avoid the toll, he would sit in his car on the Broad Channel side of the Cross Bay Bridge while his wife walked over it. He has since moved to Arverne-by-the-Sea and warns that it might not be possible now for Rockaway to keep its exception.

But the real story was what wasn’t in the Wave. I noticed it when I got the paper the week of the election, and by now the phenomenon has had time to sink in and generate letters to the editor, which were in this week’s edition: The Wave covered its local political races, but there was no mention of the win by Obama. I had come to realize that Rockaway was McCain country: I couldn’t talk politics with anyone at the boatyard, unless maybe I wanted to get thrown in the water, and my friend MQ had told me she was voting for Sarah Palin. The editors of the Wave might point out, in their defense, that there are bigger newspapers covering politics at the national level, and they are but a humble local weekly. Still, not to acknowledge the historic nature of Obama’s victory is bizarre and a little scary.

I reparked in the suburban driveway, checking to make sure I had hit my mark, and returned to Manhattan through Brooklyn by bus and train. Home again, I examined the cryptic details of my mysterious unpaid summons. I’ve wondered, on seeing tickets lying in the street, what people do when they are held responsible for a ticket they’ve never seen. Was it possible that the cop who can write two tickets at the same time (featured in that Times article) had been on my block? The offense was parking in a No Standing zone, the fee a whopping $125 (including a $10 late penalty). Issue date: 10/07/08. Location: "133 Other—See Comme” There is a place you can check to request a copy of the original summons, and I will certainly do that. Meanwhile, I racked my brain to remember where I was on Tuesday, October 7th. Then I remembered—Hah!—I don’t have to rack my brain: I can look in my blog archives (blorchives?). Scrolling backward through October ... stupid stuff about the New York Waterfalls ... yack yack yack ... Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if after all this parking blogging I had no record of where the car was parked on the Tuesday in question? Aha! My car was in Rockaway that week, at the mechanic’s, getting its leaky transmission fixed—and apparently being road-tested, or test-parked, on Beach 133rd Street, four blocks from the garage. That explains why they wouldn’t take my money: they already had.

Jamaica Bay Photo Gallery

Here is Broad Channel. Any resemblance to Venice is in the reflections. Note the swans, dead center. (I knew there was a reason I took this picture.)


The Cow Path, meandering into the open bay. Those two knobs sticking up behind the marsh grass must be Bay Towers. (Not the reason I took this picture.)



Ah! Even the A train has its golden hour!

Moon Tide

Last Friday, I took the ferry home and enjoyed a hazy view of the Verrazano, the light almost Aegean in its quality, transforming the hills of Staten Island into the Dodecanese. Maybe it was the Budweiser. The boat was more festive than ever, and when it pulled into Riis Landing, the big plastic garbage can behind the wheelhouse was overflowing with empties. On board, there was a table of people that seemed like royalty. They shared a pack of wine coolers and a bag of Milano cookies and were given a very attentive sendoff from the crew. I think it was their car that I was stuck behind in the parking lot, waiting for the light to turn: a retired Coast Guard with a home in Breezy Point.

Zodiacs were flashing their lights at the dock and sirens were wailing on land when the ferry came in. Several fire engines and emergency vehicles, one hauling a dinghy, came over the bridge from Brooklyn and up from Far Rockaway, heading in the direction of Breezy Point.

I came home to a call from the Catwoman, saying she and the Master Plumber were walking to Connolly’s and did I want to join them. I am way behind in my revels this year, what with traipsing around in the Azores and all, so I said I’d meet them there. But first I wanted to go down to the deli and buy a copy of the Wave, so it would be there to enjoy when I got home. And I remembered that it was my last chance to set my tide clock if it was going to be any use this summer.

You have to set the tide clock, with a fresh battery, at high tide during the full moon. The full moon was on Friday, July 18, at 3 A.M. High tide on Friday morning was at 10:50 A.M. in the Verrazano Narrows, according to the Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book for 2008. I buy this book every year, and every year I have to start over again, learning about the tide, and see if anything has stuck from the year before and if I can absorb anything new. People who have spent their lives in Rockaway know things like: High tide occurs in midday at the full moon in August. How do they know that? How does it work? It doesn’t make sense that high tide arrives at the head of the bay before it arrives at the Rockway Inlet, but I guess the basin fills and starts to go out … I don’t know. I did determine that to find the time of Current Change (not to be confused with High Water) at the Rockway Inlet you have to subtract one hour and forty-five minutes from the time at the Verrazano Narrows.

To set the clock in the morning would have required carrying the clock in a canvas bag with a solid bottom, so as not to interfere with its hands. This was inconvenient, and besides, I forgot. On Friday evening, high tide, or, rather, change of current, occurred at the Verrazano Narrows at 11 PM. So I did the math: 11:00 minus 1:45 is 9:15, right? That seemed awfully late for me to be arriving at Connolly’s. So I checked another source.

The Rockaway Point News has a column headed Local Tides, with all kinds of excellent information about sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset, and percentage of the moon visible (it’s never a hundred). On Friday night, it gave high tide as 8:52. That was a little better. Perhaps it is earlier because they are farther out the peninsula and are measuring on the ocean side, or from the Breezy Point Surf Club or the boccie court.

The Wave gave high tide at 8:49 P.M. at Rockaway Inlet. That was the most convenient. I lined the battery up with the clock on the table, found things to do until 8:49, put the battery in the tide clock, and went to Connolly’s.

My friends were having a friendly game of darts when I arrived, and I was shanghaied into action as teammate of our neighbor D., known as Skid Row. I’m no good at darts, but the Master Plumber said, “Don’t worry, he’ll carry you.” Skid Row taught me to put my right foot forward (I'm right-handed), and the Catwoman told me to keep my eye on the wedge of the board that I needed to hit. I learned how to keep score (it’s not all about bull’s-eyes, though it does come down to that). It turned out I play better without my glasses. Some of my darts actually hit the dartboard. I learned to put my back into it, to hurl those suckers like I was mad at someone, though it was through sheer luck that I scored any points. And I did not build any muscle memory in my arm. We won, thanks to the Master Plumber's not examining more closely my partner's near-bull's-eye. By the time he confessed, the Catwoman had erased the scoreboard.

At one point, after our game, the Catwoman and I were both in the ladies’ room when the flush on one of the toilets broke. While the Catwoman fiddled with it, I ran out and got the Master Plumber. He rose to the occasion. He is Connolly’s official plumber, and has fixed the toilet in the ladies’ room on crowded nights with girls peeing in the stall next to him. “Hi, Ed,” they’d say when they came to the john and saw him in there. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.” Tonight it was just his wife and I who were in there while he fixed the toilet. Then Skid Row, tired of sitting alone in the booth, stuck his head in, too. “It’s stifling in here,” he said, and found a window at the back of the other stall and opened it. The Master Plumber grumbled about the age of the little chain he had to reattach, and pointed out the black residue on the inside of the lid, which he said was ancient mold. Then we went back to the booth and had another round.

We walked home along the boardwalk. The moon was still full. I read most of the Wave before going to bed, at around midnight.

The next day, I mentioned the emergency in Breezy Point and heard that a teenager had drowned: she and a friend were in the ocean at 116th Street, and they got caught in a rip tide. One girl was saved. She had tried to save her friend, but by the time the lifeguards rescued the one girl the other was gone, carried under and out. At first I didn't understand: the drowning was at 116th Street at three or four in the afternoon, I heard. So why were the ambulances going out to Breezy Point at seven? But it had to be the same incident; it would have been at low tide, and the current must have been running west.

Sea Legs

I infiltrated the men's table on the five-thirty ferry last night, and was a little disappointed. They talked about golf, a violent movie that I didn't catch the name of, the market (one guy said the market is going to crash on Friday—that's tomorrow—yet he didn't seem terribly concerned and was even about to go on vacation), real estate, and a Chinese restaurant in Flatlands, Brooklyn, called Tasty Tavern. One drank a Bud, one a Bud Lite, and one a Heineken. They kidded each other about an article in Tuesday's Times which reported that Breezy Point, in Rockaway, is the zip code with the highest consumption of Budweiser in the country. The occasion for the article (here's the link) was the news that Budweiser is being bought by the Belgian brewers of Stella Artois. This can only be good news for Budweiser, and bad news for the fabled beers of Belgium.

I believe it about Breezy Point, by the way. Drinking alcohol in public is a crime in New York City, thanks to Rudy Giuliani. In Rockaway, the cops patrol the beach from the boardwalk, using binoculars to peak inside people's coolers and then descending on them if their coolers contain beer, and making them pour out the beer in the sand. Of course, Rockawegians know enough to drink out of opaque plastic cups and avoid this tragedy. In Breezy Point, it's just the opposite. You feel conspicuous walking around WITHOUT a beer in your hand. I went to a party there one Labor Day and saw people pulling big plastic wagons piled high with cases of beer. Of course, drinking in public is not an issue in Breezy Point because it is private property, a co-op, populated, incidentally, largely by police officers.

The men noted that we were way out in the water (usually the ferry hugs the shore), and we all gloated at the sight of a massive traffic jam heading east on the Belt Parkway in Bay Ridge. I am always one of the last to get off the ferry at Riis Landing. There were three skimmers, whistling black birds with extra-long orange beaks that they use, in flight, to skim bugs (or whatever) off the surface of the water. They were leaving little short-lived threads of wakes.

This morning, to keep an appointment, I caught the early ferry, at 5:45, a feat worth recording because I may not be able to accomplish it again this year. A heron was hunched on the dock, fishing. The sun was two inches above the horizon, and as we turned out of the dock and pulled away, at 5:49, it looked like a big orange ball rolling north over the Marine Parkway Bridge. At the Wall Street Pier, I transferred to the East River line, which, I learned, costs only a dollar if you tell them you just got off the American Princess. (Both boats are operated by New York Water Taxi.) This is a speedy yellow catamaran that zips over to Schaefer Landing, in Williamsburg, which is new, and then up to Hunters Point, in Long Island City, before crossing back to East 35th Street, where I got off.

What with all this boating, when I finally get to work, I find myself wanting to grip the edges of my desk as if I were still on the boat and it was pitching.

So Far

What I did on my summer vacation, so far.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would have made up about my summer vacation when I was in third or fourth grade and never did anything except play jacks and watch quiz shows on daytime TV. It was stultifying. I had to lie every year on my Summer Vacation essay and say I'd been to a farm in Canada, or to Amsterdam, where I saw people in wooden shoes, or that I lived in a trailer (this seemed to me the height of exoticism), or went to New York, where I rode the subway, which I imagined was like a roller coaster, and ate in an automat. I liked the idea of those little windows full of food.

All last week I commuted to work by ferry from Rockaway. Monday, I drove to the ferry dock, which is about three and a half miles from home and takes about seven minutes. I took the A train home. Tuesday, I rode my bike to the ferry, which took a solid half hour. I arrived parched, and the man who I think is the first mate gave me a bottle of cool water. I have my favorite seat on the ferry: top deck, along the portside rail, as close to the wheelhouse as possible. I brought my chart of New York Harbor along and successfully identified such sights as a water-treatment plant in Brooklyn ("Sewer" on the chart). I got sprung from work in time to catch the last ferry home, at 5:30, and was reunited with both my vehicles. I stuck the bike (or half of it) in the car and drove home.

Wednesday I drove to the ferry dock again. It was a gorgeous day. The beach at Coney Island is Felliniesque in the morning: locals carrying parasols, plump old ladies in bathing caps and one-piece suits dipping a toe in the water. Just west of the amusement park is Seagate, the gated community, set off by a jetty and a group of pink and yellow and baby-blue cabanas. Then come big Victorian houses and a lighthouse. The next landmark is the Verrazano Bridge. The boat stops at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and among the regulars who get on here are a hardboiled blonde and two guys who look like undertakers or railroad executives. They come directly up to the top deck and put their briefcases and Duane-Reade shopping bags on the chests containing the life jackets, behind the wheelhouse.

The Queen Mary 2 was docked in Red Hook. It is HUGE. The Statue of Liberty is tiny and green. The ferry offers a great view of the synthetic waterfalls of the Danish artist. A guy in a yellow golf shirt got up and came over to the rail to look at them. "I don't get the waterfalls," he said.

Thursday I rode my bike to the ferry again, shaving almost ten minutes off my time by taking the direct route instead of cruising the boardwalk. It was another gorgeous day. "And not humid," said the guy who marked my ticket on the ferry. (He pronounced it the way my father did: "you-mid.") I stayed in the city late and took the A train home again, so on Friday morning I would either have to walk or take the bus to the ferry. I fell back on the A train, crossing Jamaica Bay at slack tide. There was a pattern of chevrons on the water, like a wake, but no boat had made one.

Friday night I got to take the ferry home. The Wave, Rockaway's weekly paper, reported that the Friday night ferry has turned into a party boat. Actually, every night the ferry is a party boat. I found myself longing to be a man and sit with other men at a long table, wearing shoes and no socks (the Mediterranean look) and a shirt with a subtle stripe, drinking beer and laughing, having sandy hair and blue eyes. I purchased a can of Budweiser for the trip home. Oh, all right, two cans of Budweiser (it's a two-beer trip). The finances of the ferry are fairly ruinous: Six dollars a trip (I bought a forty-trip ticket for $216, which gives me four free trips or a ten-cent per trip discount), plus $2 to get the subway up to midtown, and another $6 for beer if I get the ferry home—that's $14, or seven times the price of the A train. But it's heaven, and a small price to pay for it. Also, Friday, though I didn't morph into a man and get to sit at their table, a neighbor whom I know from Connolly's, the best bar in Rockaway, recognized me, and so I had all of New York Harbor and a drinking buddy, too. He helped me put the bike in the car and I gave him a ride home.

Rockaway Ferry

The weather was fine yesterday, and a bungalow owner’s thoughts fondly turn to plumbing. I didn’t want to spend my first day at the beach plumbing, but by the end of it I certainly wanted the water turned on. So I got out my plumbing notes and my plugs and my wrenches and the stick with the PVC fitting for the underground valve, and my neighbor T., God bless him, did not run and hide when he saw me in my plumber’s garb (oldest bleach-stained T-shirt, baggiest pants, mismatched socks, ancient red sneakers) but came over to help. He is skinny and can crawl under the house, and knows what a compression joint is (I had forgotten that the plumber loosened that connection last fall). We got the job done in record time, and T. even fired up the hot-water heater. I spent a few hours cleaning the porch and the kitchen floor and making a list of all the things I have to do (fix shower door, buy light fixtures, paint porch floor) that I can’t expect anyone to feel sorry for me for having to do, because, after all, I do own a bungalow in Rockaway. Then I treated myself to a cheeseburger and a beer and went to bed.

It rained all night, and was still drizzling this morning, but neither this nor my recent experience sailing in the Azores deterred me from taking the first opportunity to ride the new Rockaway ferry to Manhattan. It came in right on schedule at Riis Landing, where there is free parking outside the defunct Coast Guard Headquarters (I don’t know if it’s long-term parking, but I hope the Éclair is still there when I go back). The boat is beautiful. She is called the American Princess, and has a saloon inside with long tables that seat six, and an upper deck with benches under an awning, and you can stand outside and see Coney Island and the Verrazzano Bridge and container ships in the shipping lane and downtown Manhattan, all shrouded in clouds. Imagine what it’s going to be like on a nice day!

For some reason, there were many more women than men on the boat, and the women spent their time yakking away and applying makeup; the American Princess is much better equipped for vanity than the A train. The fare is six dollars (compared with two dollars for the A train). The ads say it has a bar and café, but the smell of coffee was coming only from the takeout cups that everyone except me knew enough to bring on board. I put my bag and umbrella on a seat, but I just couldn’t see confining myself to one corner of the boat, hemmed in by a suit reading the Times and a nerd navigating a BlackBerry, when I could be on deck approaching New York Harbor. I not only want to take the ferry to work: I want to work on the ferry.

Winterizing

It was a dark and stormy day. I was at my car, for the reverse commute to Rockaway, at 7:30 A.M., just as a thread of pink appeared in the sky: Red sky at morning, sailors take warning? I was giving up, with some reluctance, the spot I’d regained after being relocated during the shooting of the “Sex and the City” movie on Halloween. (The check from the production company arrived, by the way, covering the cost of the parking tickets.) Something by Schubert, the overture to an unfinished opera called “Der Teufel als Hydraulicus,” was on the radio. “Devil in the Waterworks”? I was on my way to meet the plumber and turn off the water for the winter, and I hoped this was not a bad omen.

My list of things to do got longer the closer I got to Rockaway. The plumber wasn’t coming till one, so I had all morning to lay the ground for him. The sky over Jamaica Bay was one big platter of dark cloud with a pale rim all the way around it. I bustled around, doing dishes while I still had water, putting the recycling out for the garbagemen—last chance before spring—emptying out the refrigerator and defrosting the freezer (I learned years ago that it’s easier to let the ice melt, helping it along with a pan of boiling-hot water, than it is to hack at it with a butter knife). I plugged in the electric radiator to take the chill off the place, and I used the toilet whenever I felt the slightest call, because once the water is off and antifreeze is in the lines, the nearest facilities are at McDonald’s.

One urgent job was to do something with the tank of leftover gasoline from the boat. It’s shameful that I didn’t use it up puttering around on Jamaica Bay, but at least I never ran out of gas. My idea was to pour the gas into my car’s tank, but I didn’t have a funnel, much less one with a wide mouth or anyone to hold it in place for me while I hefted the three-gallon tank. Brainstorm: Get in the car and drive to the mechanic and ask nicely if someone will help you. The mechanic had a funnel, and in the trunk I had one of my homemade bailers—an empty bleach bottle with the cap still on and the bottom sawn off. So I held the bleach bottle, with the cap off, upside down over the funnel, and the mechanic tilted the tank very carefully and poured the gasoline into the car. We hardly wasted a drop.

Home again, I snuck out to the boardwalk for a walk before the rain set in, and had lunch and read the Wave (a great column by my favorite columnist, Dorothy Dunne). At twelve-thirty, I began preparing in earnest for my date with the plumber. I found the key-on-a-stick—the fitting used to turn the valve underground and cut off the water to the house—and pried the cap off the access-line pipe outside with the claw of a hammer. I bushwhacked my way between the bungalows (lots of new vines have established themselves) and moved aside the latticework so the plumber could get under the house to unscrew the two plugs in the water line. It was raining steadily now, and the ground was slippery with wet leaves. I brought the hose inside for draining the hot-water tanks, and filled a bucket with hot soapy water and a few big pots with cold water and a dishpan with lukewarm water. I filled the sprinkling can, too, in the hope that I will still get around to planting tulip bulbs.

I remembered the five-inch red plug for the waste line and found it under the kitchen sink, wrapped reverently in a white paper towel. In there, too, was a gallon of antifreeze: got that out. Cleared the floor around the toilets and took the lids off. (Used the toilet again, while I was at it.) By one, I had everything in order. And the plumber didn’t come.

There was still plenty to do to fill the time. I finished defrosting the freezer, and packed some things to take back to the city. I drained and packed my bong, a sure sign that summer is over. I had already swept up around the toilets, but I went back in and scrubbed them with cleanser, which was an afterthought but a good one. (And, as long as I was in there, I used my nice clean toilet.) There was no point in mopping yet, because the plumber would be tromping around in wet boots—that is, if he came. Every once in a while I’d open the porch door and stare down the walk to the street. I kept telling myself that there was nothing to worry about. The wind was howling and the rain was pouring down, but surely plumbers have gotten wet in the rain before, and Jimmy has never let me down.

I thought of trying to get started myself—go and probe underground with the key-on-a-stick to see if I could turn the water off (allow forty minutes) and start draining the hot-water tanks. But if the plumber wasn’t going to show up I might just as well leave the water on. I like to stretch the season, till Thanksgiving, if possible. I watch the weather page of the Times, which features a little diagram showing how low the temperature is likely to sink each night for the next week, as well as the actual temperature range for the few days past. It had hit freezing the weekend before, when I was out of town, which was not in the forecast, and this gave me a scare. But often after that first freeze the temperature goes up again. I am a great believer in Indian summer.

I had just run out of things to do and put on some water for tea when Jimmy called my name from the front door. Whew! He was forty minutes late, but he was here. He was wearing a yellow slicker and carrying a bucket full of tools and his compressor, which looks like a gigantic oil can with a pump, a hose, and a pedal. He had an assistant named Gary, who brought in an electric pump to speed up the process of draining the hot-water tanks.

While Gary emptied the tanks and the toilets, Jimmy and I went outside to turn the water off. He got it on the first try. He removed the showerheads and handed them to me to take inside. He went out to the truck and got some cardboard to slide under the house. “I'm out of the rain once I’m under the house,” he said gamely, and wiggled under the bungalow to take out the plugs. "Do you remember that there are two?" I asked. He did. I stood by like an operating-room nurse to receive the plugs and put them in the silverware drawer till next year. Inside, Jimmy warmed his hands on the electric radiator, and then pumped the air out of the faucets in the kitchen sink. He attaches the hose on his compressor to the faucet, pumps the big oil-can thing full of air, then steps on the pedal to release the air into the pipe, forcing out any standing water. I had neglected to clear my toiletries out of the outdoor shower, so I did that before Jimmy brought the compressor outside and blew out the line to the shower. I was beginning to feel fantastic. Much as I hate to see the season end, having the bungalow’s pipes blown out is like having my own lines purged of anxiety.

I asked the plumber when he was going to Florida. He’s leaving next week on a two-week tour of China. It will be his third time there. I emboldened myself to ask him if his family was from China. (Jimmy looks Chinese but his speech is pure Bronx.) “My parents,” he said. “They were from Canton.” He pronounced it “Can-TAWN,” and for the first time I made the unlikely connection of Chinese food with Canton, Ohio, home of the Professional Football Hall of Fame. Then he is coming back for a month, to do his heating projects, and will go to Florida in early January. He usually returns to Rockaway around Mother’s Day, the hardest day of the year to find a plumber.

“This is about the last chance,” Jimmy said as we went about winterizing. I kept trying to focus on the main thing I didn’t want to forget: put that plug in the waste line. This involves sliding back a neoprene sleeve, like a tourniquet, on the pipe where it has been cut to allow insertion of a big red plug, which keeps sewage from backing up into the house in case there's a problem over the winter. My first mentor in the world of bungalow plumbing questioned the necessity for this step, but it has always seemed like a good idea to me. (He also told me that I could use the toilet in the winter if I flushed with antifreeze.) Gary was outside now helping, too. Jimmy got the plug in, then poured the last of the antifreeze into the trap, and we were done.

“What do I owe you?” I asked Jimmy.
“Same as last year,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
I didn’t remember exactly, either, but I believe he charged $75 for each side. I budgeted $200 for plumbing, so I gave him the whole amount, which he said was very generous. I don’t know what the etiquette is, but ever since the first year, when I failed to tip Jimmy and his assistant, a guy named Paulie, who really did not like going under the house (I repented later and sent a check), I always tip the plumber. He may be the only man in the world who has the know-how and the equipment to satisfy me completely.

We wished each other a Happy Thanksgiving and a good trip to China and a good winter, and Jimmy gathered his bucket of tools and his compressor, and told Gary that I’d given him a little something, and we shook hands, and they left.

Now it was time to mop the floor and lock up. I started at one end, gathering everything I needed from each room as I went along, turning the lights off, leaving the refrigerator door open, piling bags, sweater, jacket, and finally keys and purse on the porch. I emptied the slops into the drain on the street, and carried a carton of orange juice salvaged from the refrigerator over to my friend the Catwoman, who gave me a cup of coffee. Then I headed back to Manhattan.

It had finally stopped raining, but that platter of cloud was still hovering over Jamaica Bay; at the western edge the sun dropped under the rim, spreading golden light into a long slit at the horizon. It was rush hour, but, again, I was going against traffic. I can’t remember when I’ve tried to park at rush hour. It seemed possible: people who are crazy enough to drive to work and park on the street would be leaving. But then again people who are crazy enough to reverse-commute by car would be out cruising. My favorite street was parked up solid. So was the street where the violence had broken out. I knew there would be nothing on my street, because of the car-rental agency on the only block where it’s legal to park during the day, but I drove the length of it anyway, and turned left at the end, ready for a twenty-six-block tour of the city, in search of a Monday-Thursday spot. I realized just after turning that the spot at the corner, which I had just passed up, was legal: I backed up. I fit. It was too good to be true. I got out and looked at the sign: It really did say Monday-Thursday, and though there was a No Parking sign with an arrow, I was on the right side of the arrow. I checked to see if the car ahead of me had enough room to get out if I pulled up snug, and it did.

Ah. Now it can get cold.

Yellow Curb Fever

The Wave this summer has been brimming with stories on the parking controversies of Rockaway. I missed the meeting last Sunday about raising the parking fee at Riis Park. It now costs five dollars a day to park there, and the proposal is to raise the fee to ten dollars, effective the summer of 2009. The Wave had an article on the proposed hike, complete with photos of parked cars, and of cars arriving in order to park, in this historic facility. (You will remember that the parking lot at Riis Park Beach was, when it was built, the largest parking lot in the world. Still, it is not very photogenic.) Many of the people who use the parking lot at Riis are families who make a day of it, setting up tents and hammocks and grills under the scrubby little pines, and fishing in the bay or swimming or picnicking. The only locals who park at Riis, as far as I can tell from the Letters to the Editor (of which there are plenty), are golfers.

The National Park Service wants to raise the parking fee to keep the cost of parking at Riis in line with parking fees at other lots in the Gateway system—in other words, because they can. Most of the revenue would go back into the park—paying parking attendants and making improvements—but some twenty per cent of it would go toward improvements at other parks. Besides the golfers, who demand a safer parking lot (cars get broken into), letter writers included a local politician and a civic-minded elder. Naturally, no one came out in support of the price hike. I suppose what will happen is that they’ll reduce the hike by approximately the amount they proposed to give away to other parks and raise the price to eight dollars.

The other big flap in the parking arena began in a Letter to the Editor. A man who lives on Beach 118th Street had recently learned that a friend received a ticket for parking in front of the house of neighbors who had painted their curb yellow. It’s true: anyone can paint his curb yellow. Because of the severe restrictions on parking in the West End (where, incidentally, it is clear that the editor of the Wave lives and parks), homeowners have all kinds of strategies to save the spaces in front of their houses for themselves and their guests. They put up bogus signs (“No Parking, 24 Hour Drive,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” “Parking for Irish Only”) or set out orange traffic cones that they picked up somewhere. The letter, published on July 27th, included the address of the house of the yellow curb and stated that there is no driveway or garage at that house, and that, furthermore, the people next door had also painted their curb yellow and erected one of those portable basketball hoops to keep people from parking there.

The next week, the man with the yellow curb wrote a letter in his own defense: wounded by the Wave’s publication of the first letter, which made his home and family the subject of scandal, he enclosed proof that his curb cut is legal and demanded an apology. The Wave responded with a separate article on the controversy: the letter they printed had ignited a feud on 118th Street. Mostly the article quoted the letter, but it also pointed out that it is illegal to paint your curb yellow. The family in question did not know this. Also, the family acknowledged that their curb cut is not as high as the standard curb cut, but explain that there is a valve poking up in middle (possibly a cap for the water main). The article was accompanied by a photograph of the yellow curb, in black-and-white.

The house next door to the house with the substandard yellow-painted curb cut—the one with the basketball hoop—also occasioned a letter to the editor, this one from an extremely jaded resident. “How long have you been living on this block?” she asks. “You said you called the police and 311 and no change? Hello, obviously these people know someone!”

This week (August 17th) the Wave reported that a resident got a ticket for parking in her own driveway. It’s really more of a photo essay, with a shot of the car, overhanging the sidewalk a bit, and the Traffic Enforcement Police vehicle in the background (and an “Open House” sign with balloons, which kind of confuses the issue), and a long caption: “It is illegal to park on the beach blocks west of Beach 126 Street at any time and it is illegal to park on most west end streets during summer weekends. So where do people park? In their driveway (if they have one), of course. Because of the restrictive parking regulations, there has always been an understanding that overstuffed driveways were all right on summer weekends. A car parked up the curb cut, even blocking the sidewalk a bit, was usually ignored by local police. Last Sunday, however, a local parked in her own driveway was ticketed by a traffic enforcement agent for just that.”

Tucked away in a section called Beachcomber (one of my favorite sections) is a tiny item stating that you if you park at Fort Tilden, at the western end of (and very convenient to) Riis Park, you will get a ticket from the National Parks Service (but payable to the city) unless you have a sticker. To get a sticker, you have to show car registration and driver’s license, but the sticker itself is free. I’m not sure this isn’t misinformation, but if it’s true, it’s awfully good news. Shouldn’t it be on page one?

T.G.I.F.

“How was the waugh-da?” the girl at the deli asked, from behind the salad counter. I stopped this morning on my way home from the beach to see if the Wave had come in.
“It was great,” I said.
“What the hell?” said the cashier, registering my wet hair and towel. I think this is the girl I once lost patience with. I told her to concentrate on what she was doing.
“She goes there every day,” the first girl said.
“Not every day,” I said.
“Almost.”

She’s seen me twice now this week. As long as I'm staying in Rockaway, I try to go for a dip before work at least three out of five mornings a week. Otherwise, what am I out there for? This morning it was overcast, and I might have used that as an excuse not to go in the water, but I knew I would regret it, so I went. Clean, not too cold, with good, regular, long-breaking waves, maybe a suggestion of a rip tide.

After my swim, sitting on a towel with a cup of coffee, I noticed down the beach lots of surfers hanging on the water in their black wetsuits. They don’t mind if it’s overcast. Gulls were dropping clams from on high to break them open. I had piping plovers in stereo: cheep-cheep cheep-cheep cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep. I wonder if they have only one pitch, and if I will ever be organized enough to take a pitch pipe with me to the beach to find out.

And the Wave had come in—the local paper, that is. I'm saving it till I get home tonight and can read about the latest parking controversy.

Dominion

A discussion of traffic tickets among the crew at the marina over the weekend veered off suddenly onto the piping plover, and so I can say with certainty that in Rockaway, at least, “plover” rhymes not with “lover” but with “Dover” (or, rather, since this is Queens, “ova,” as in eggs). A cop brought up the subject, speaking on the understanding that everyone present loathed the plovers. And they do. Even the one woman present (besides me), a mild creature whom everyone loves, and whom I’ve heard singing the praises of the swallows, said that when she sees plovers in the marina she throws pebbles at them. The cop, who had just been talking about driving a car on the boardwalk (cops do it all the time), said he ran into a friend who spends August fishing off Cape Cod. “Why aren’t you at the Cape?” the cop asks. The friend goes rigid. “He thinks I’m kidding him. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ he says. 'You can’t go anywhere up there now. The plovers built their nests all over the beach, and everywhere you go’”—meaning on the beach in your truck—“‘there’s someone from the Audubon Society, pointing and saying, "There’s one!"’ He went on for a half hour. He says the economy up there is tanking because of the plovers.”

They all shake their heads. One of them quotes the bumper sticker “Piping Plover—Tastes Like Chicken” and laughs. “I wouldn’t wear one of those,” someone else says—not, I think, because it’s in bad taste but because the birders would be all over him. They have such a sense of entitlement—they're not going to let some little birds push them around—that if anyone spoke in the plovers' defense, one of them might start quoting Genesis: "And God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and OVER THE FOWL OF THE AIR." The resident Francis of Assisi—he puts out pans of water for the pigeons—claims he doesn’t know what a piping plover is. “You know, those little birds that run back and forth on the beach.” He knows. He is just not going to admit it in this crowd. "I thought those were sandpipers," he says. I pipe down.

For the Birds

Of all the complaints you hear in Rockaway in the summer—not enough lifeguards (so that beaches are closed); not enough parking spots (because of nonresidents parking on the street); cops giving people tickets for drinking beer on the beach or for swimming after hours or for surfing at a nonsurfing beach or for not surfing at the surfing beach; that Coney Island gets all the attention while Rockaway gets the drug-crazed and the mentally ill; that there isn’t a movie theatre or a mall or a swimming pool or a ferry or (my personal pet peeve) an Internet café—from one quarter there has been silence: no complaints about piping plovers.

My friend G., having invited herself to the beach, noticed it first. “Where are those little birds that run back and forth?” she asked. It’s true that there weren’t any on the beach that afternoon, but I figured it was just because the beach was crowded and the tide was in and the birds were elsewhere, in Arverne or at Breezy Point. Then there was an article in the Wave about the perennial battle between the piping plovers and the volleyball players (“On the Peninsula It’s a Battle for the Beaches,” by Michelle Romano). The Rockaway Beach Volleyball League, whose members play at Riis Park, have in the past had to move their nets every week to accommodate the piping plovers (rhymes with lovers), which are listed as a “threatened” species; by law, the places where the birds nest and raise their chicks have to be protected. This year, it seemed as if the volleyball players had triumphed: the birds had (in the irresistible idiom) “flown the coop.”

In Rockaway, people take it very personally when a section—their section—of the beach is closed, for whatever reason, but when the reason is those little birds that run back and forth, the most enlightened Rockawayites get all bent out of shape. There are people who hate dunes, in the belief that dunes attract plovers. There is even a bumper sticker: “Piping Plover—Tastes Like Chicken.” The New York Post ran a piece last month about a fragrance launch in Amagansett which featured Land Rovers on the beach and ended with accusations against fashion editors for upsetting the plovers; the article also reported that in East Hampton, for the second year in a row, the Fourth of July fireworks display was cancelled on account of the birds, pitting patriotism against plovers.

The Wave article was admirably balanced and well written, giving lots of space to a cute ranger at Gateway National Park named Dave Taft (I once went on a walking tour led by him). “Not everyone gets to see a piping plover,” he said, in their defense. But it got me worried. I started missing the birds whenever I went to the beach. In the same week’s Wave, I noticed an announcement for Piping Plover Day, sponsored by the Parks Department, at Beach 59th Street, so I rode my bike down there one morning. You hear them before you see them, piping away. I locked up my bike on the boardwalk and was relieved to see a handful of plovers racing along the beach with a pair of skimmers—wonderful black birds with long pointy orange beaks and yellow legs, who whistle at each other out over the water.

A few days later, at sunset, low tide, I went to Fort Tilden to look for plovers. This time, I was overjoyed to have a little flock fly over me while I was in the water. Then last Saturday I went down to my neighborhood beach to take a dip and watch the sunset. Beachgoers and surf were lit up golden; the ocean was full of seaweed, and the waves sloshed in, as green as spinach. And then, there they came: piping plovers on my beach—yes! Their underbellies lit up white as they flew toward the sun, and when they banked and doubled back they disappeared.

Maybe you have to be a native of Rockaway to resent the piping plovers. (There is no danger of my driving an ATV or playing volleyball.) I’ve asked myself how I’d feel if my beach was closed on account of the birds: I came five hundred miles to be by the ocean—I’m not going to mind a couple of extra blocks. When I thought there were no plovers in Rockaway, I felt deprived, as if the summer were ruined—the beach just isn’t the same without them. They are like tiny slapstick comedians, zipping back and forth on their rapid little legs, chasing the waves out, rushing back in, lifting off all at once, at some mysterious signal, and circling out over the water to fly back up the beach and begin again, their flight smooth yet unpredictable, like a ride at Coney Island that makes you slightly dizzy.

When I got home, a neighbor stopped me to say, “Hey, that chick got arrested—you know, the crack whore? The police handcuffed her and took her away.” All day, our local crack whore had sat outside her bungalow with her mother, presiding over a somewhat pathetic yard sale. And now she was in jail, or at least in night court, and her mother would have to bail her out. I was kind of sorry. But I was glad I'd seen the plovers.

Paved Paradise

The first place I ever rented in Rockaway was a converted garage on Rockaway Beach Boulevard between 123rd and 124th Streets. It was on a beach block, meaning I didn’t have to cross any streets to get to the ocean. And it was right on the fault between alternate-side parking, to the east—No Parking Fridays, 8:30 to 10 A.M. (although the other side of the street was No Parking Anytime, so I guess technically it wasn’t alternate-side)—and, to the west, seasonal parking for a beach community: No Parking Saturday, Sunday, & Holidays, May 15-September 30. Many policemen and firemen live in Rockaway—and a mayor, Abraham Beame, had a summer home here—and I suspect they swung some sort of deal with City Hall to get these regulations, which insure that the neighborhood isn’t besieged by a bunch of DFDs, dragging their coolers down the road in the middle of the night and slamming their car doors, leaking oil, littering, changing babies’ diapers, and partying until the wee hours. The non-residents are supposed to put their cars in the lot at Riis Park, which, when it was built, was the biggest parking lot in the world. (These days, it is rarely full.) Residents had better have a garage or a driveway or driveway privileges, or they are screwed, at least in summer.

My bungalow was a detached single-car garage with a pointy roof at the end of a narrow driveway. It was behind a three-story house full of tenants, all with cars. The driveway was augmented by a parking pad out front. I never fully understood where in the drive I was supposed to park, but I did give the first-floor tenant, a family man, a set of car keys, so that he could get out if I blocked him in. (He did not give me a set of keys for his minivan. He had a nice blond wife, two demonic children, and two vicious Pomeranians.) Once I was woken by a pounding on the bungalow door at two in the morning: a tenant in the big house couldn’t find a spot on the street and was entitled to park in the driveway—it was a Saturday night, and he said he’d been driving around for hours. The family man had moved my car and left it in the other tenant’s spot.

I soon learned that if there was a spot available on the street in front of the house I should grab it to save space in the driveway. There were both a fire hydrant and a bus stop in front of the house, but the sign for the bus stop was missing, so people parked there anyway. Once, a woman who was waiting for the bus told me, “This is a bus stop.” I said, “But there’s no sign,” and proceeded to lock my car and leave the scene. “I’ll have to walk out in the middle of the street to get the bus,” she said, getting angry, and then she started screaming at me: “You don’t care, do you, bitch!” That shook me up (Welcome to Rockaway!), but it was true: I didn’t care, as long as I didn’t get a ticket.

I rented the beach garage for two summers, until my landlords sold the property. They had rented the place to me cheap the second summer, while the big house was on the market, because they hoped prospective buyers would see that the garage was habitable, and therefore a source of rental income. In the end, though, before the inspectors came, the landlords arranged enormous boxes cagily over the toilet and the sink, to make the place look as if it were used only for storage. The next summer, the new owners put up a tall fence around the property, redid the deck, fortified both the house and the bungalow with brick facing, and did in fact use the bungalow for storage. I moved on.

What a shock this year to see that the grandly renovated house had been demolished. I’ve seen plenty of ramshackle bungalows go under the bulldozer to make way for condos, but a perfectly good three-family house with a deck and a yard on a beach block? It was between a small suburban-looking apartment building of recent vintage and a bigger, older, shabbier apartment building. What were they going to put in there? A sliver high-rise?

When I drove by with some friends last weekend, to point out the spot, I was in for yet another shock: the property had been graded and paved and fenced in. It was a parking lot!

People are always raving in the Wave about the difficulty of finding parking in the West End, meaning those neighborhoods on and west of the parking fault: Neponsit, Belle Harbor, and Rockaway Park (sometimes identified, for real-estate purposes, as Lower Belle Harbor). They argue that Rockaway residents should be issued stickers distinguishing their cars from those of the DFDs and permitting them to park on the street on weekends. But this parking lot is not for them. I took a closer look at it when I walked past there yesterday, on a foggy morning, on my way to pick up my car from the mechanic's, where I had taken it for its annual emissions inspection (it passed) and its first ever tuneup under my ownership (it cost a small fortune). (I even remembered to ask the mechanic to look at the space over the accelerator, where a spritz of liquid has been unpredictably wetting my right foot.) The property has apparently been annexed by the shabby apartment building to its west, which has been renovated and given balconies and a new blue awning and a new name: The Ocean Villa. The pay phone out in front of it, which I had thought of as my office, is gone, and there is a new sign at the bus stop. The new parking lot has green plastic vegetation woven into a chain-link fence around it and a sliding steel gate that locks. Clearly the developer saw that no one was going to buy a condo here on the Rockaway Fault unless he put in a parking lot.

The parking lot made me nostalgic for my beach garage, where I let my cats out on leashes (they got chased by the Pomeranians) and grilled porgies on a miniature Hibachi and heard the low-flying planes on foggy days and watched a single apple ripen on a tree outside my door, and where I never came home to bad news (largely because there was no phone).

When in Rockaway

Unfortunately, there are many summer activities in Rockaway that exclude me and from which I am exempt, thank God. For instance, I need not participate in, or even observe, the Bikini Contest, which takes place on a Wednesday night in August at Connolly’s, the best bar in the world, and is for many on the peninsula, including my neighbor D., the highlight of the season. There is also something called Hat Night, on Labor Day weekend. It’s basically a pub crawl that ends with a prize for the best hat and sometimes, if you’re young and restless, a new tattoo. And now there is Mustache Night, which is basically another pub crawl but on bicycles—from Connolly’s to the Lobster House, to the Tap & Grill, the Irish Circle, Blackwater’s, the Wharf, Jameson’s, and Harbor Light—with a prize for the best mustache. D. says he’d skip Jameson’s.

But I am not exempt from Friday nights. Last Friday, I met my neighbor the Catwoman and her husband, the master plumber, and D. at the Tap & Grill, a clam bar better known among the locals under its earlier incarnation as Boggiano’s, or “the old men’s bar.” I had Manhattan clam chowder and crab cakes. And a beer. And another beer. Then two seltzers with lime. (I was trying to pace myself.) And another beer. The bartender, a young woman who is also a neighbor, comes from a family of publicans. We were there partly because of her and partly because a band called the Loan Sharks was playing, and someone had heard that they were good. But the master plumber didn’t like the band (I think it was rockabilly; at any rate, there was a guy with a deep voice and a black cowboy hat), so after a while we went to Connolly’s, where everyone really wanted to go anyway.

Connolly’s is on the ground floor of a huge old gray-painted house, with a burgundy awning over the entrance and benches outside and glossy dark-wood booths and a dartboard, and Guinness on tap, and the cider that locals drink with ice. The owners live upstairs, and if you are really, really lucky, and come in with the Catwoman and the master plumber and D., who serves as bouncer on the night of the Bikini Contest, you might find your way behind the bar to the stairs leading to a very low door that you bang your head against (but only once) on the way to the garden. Connolly’s, which is open only from Memorial Day to Labor Day, gets really crowded late at night with lifeguards and surfers—beautiful people with deep tans and white teeth—so it’s best to get there early and be home in bed before the toilet breaks in the ladies’ room and the owner calls for the master plumber. (That night, only the sink stopped up.) When it was time to go, along about midnight, one of the four of us had to use the bathroom and the others had to wait, and by the time he or she came out, someone else had to go, and we had to wait again, and it was 2 A.M. and the place was jammed before we finally got out of there.

D. wanted to take the boardwalk—it was a beautiful night, with a waning moon—but C. set off up the Boulevard at a march, and I kept up with her, because we both had to go to the bathroom. We tried not to laugh when the master plumber, trailing us by half a block, suggested we stop at the Tap & Grill. We were going past a low row of attached bungalows next to the deli, and trying to be quiet and not attract any attention, because people were still sitting out on their porches, when a voice on one of the porches said “Hello” into a cell phone, and the master plumber said, “Uh-oh,” and —maybe you had to be there—we all cracked up. I leaned against the wall of the deli laughing. The master plumber stood in the middle of the road laughing. C. continued up the street laughing. I made it home and laughed myself to sleep and started laughing again the next morning when C. turned up outside my porch door to see if I was all right.

I was fine. I’d had two cranberry juice cocktails and one pint of Guinness at Connolly’s. But I can’t do this every Friday. At least, I don't think I can.

When in Rockaway

Alternate-side parking has rarely been a problem in my neighborhood in Rockaway (which is not to say that parking isn’t a giant problem in other neighborhoods in Rockaway, and, along with potholes and street markings and parallel vs. diagonal and DFDs—people who are Down for the Day, as opposed to residents—a source of passionate contention in the Wave, the peninsula’s local weekly). On my street the rules are in effect Mondays and Tuesdays from 11:30 A.M. to 1 P.M. This means that on Sunday night I park on one side of the street, and on Monday night I move the car to the other side of the street. Simple. And there’s never any need to sit in the car (even if one’s schedule permitted) and take a keen interest in street cleaners. The only trouble is that I can never remember which side of the street I’m supposed to be parking on.

I suffer from a form of directional dyslexia, which means that I have trouble distinguishing between left and right, east and west, north and south, prone and supine. I’d have trouble with up and down, too, if it weren’t for gravity, and just wait till I get to port and starboard. If it’s Monday and my car is on the left, or east, side of the street, is that O.K.? Yes, even though the sign says Tuesday. It’s counterintuitive: One can’t help but be drawn to the side of the street with that day of the week written on it (remember days-of-the-week underpants?), yet that is exactly the wrong side to park on. Sometimes it’s easier to just go around the block, where there is a street of new houses, with parking pads, and the city has not yet gotten around to posting alternate-side-parking rules, so anything goes.

During my recent trip to Amsterdam, I had a long-term plan for parking, which may help lodge in my memory the correct alternate-side formula. I departed on a Wednesday and returned on a Monday, so before I departed (I hesitate to use the word “left” in this context) I had to move my car from its Tuesday spot, on the right, or west, side of the street, to a spot on my side of the street, the left, or east, side, which would be good through Monday. In this case, the left side of the street was the right side of the street, as in the correct or proper side of the street. It was on my calendar, immediately on my return, to move the car and pay the Visa bill. If it hadn’t been on the calendar, I might have forgotten, because these rules are almost too simple, and, after all, the entire Atlantic Ocean and almost a week in Amsterdam had interceded between me and my parking spot and Visa bill. Now I can visualize my car on my side of the street when I got home that Monday (thanks to my neighbor C., who picked me up at the airport in her black Mustang convertible with the top down—che dolce vita!). Unfortunately, I can also visualize the gelatinous glob that someone lobbed on my windshield and that smeared when I turned the windshield wipers on and then, in its stickiness, attracted dirt and grit. (Next stop: car wash.)

I don’t like to brag, but I think I may also have mastered prone and supine. It’s kind of a long way round, but supine begins with the letter “S,” and so does snake and so does sinuous, both words that I can readily associate with the spine and its S shape and the fact that when you lie on your back on the mat to do your Pilates exercises your spine should form a gentle "S.” Also, supine has "up" in it, as in “face up.” As for prone, it has an “o” in it, as in "face down." Besides, it’s the only alternative.

Norbert

The last I saw of Norbert on Thursday night/Friday morning, he was perched on the white metal kitchen cabinet at about 4 A.M., peeking around the doorway into the bedroom, having used every trick in his repertoire—rampaging through the bungalow, knocking an ashtray, a candlestick, a tea cannister onto the floor, leaping with a thud from the refrigerator to the balance beam of the wall that doesn’t go all the way up to the ceiling—to wake me up. This, and the steady purring and nuzzling of Madison, beside me on the pillow, is sometimes enough to make me get out of bed and give them what they want: a between-meals snack that would buy me a few more hours of sleep. But that night I remained steadfastly in bed.

Now, Norbert is not exactly underfed, but this did not prevent me, when he didn’t come to breakfast in the morning, from feeling guilty for having made him share one small can of cat food with Madison the night before. I can’t leave dry food out because of the ant problem. And Norbert needs a constant supply of kibble the way I need a constant supply of Kiebler’s.

I looked in all the rooms and on all the high shelves that Norbert launches himself up to, and then I checked the front-porch screen that bellies out and that a cat could possibly tumble out of if he jumped up on the ledge in mid-rampage or leaned his weight against it. I should have stapled it down long ago, but I always thought if I lost my keys I would have this inlet, and Norbert, who was a foundling (albeit a foundling on Fifth Avenue), has never shown any desire to escape. I went out and looked between the houses, just in time to see a black cat crawl under the bungalow. I had this wild hope that the black cat was showing me where Norbert went. My flashlight battery was all but dead, but I knelt down and tried to see under the bungalow. All I saw was that my plumbing had sprung a leak.

I needed to shower and get to an appointment on the Upper West Side before work, which meant being on the A train platform at 7:59. I knew I was going to call my neighbor C., the Catwoman, who might have some idea not where Norbert went but how to go about looking for him. But it was still only seven, so I made some coffee in order to think straight about my missing cat. The other cat, meanwhile, was blissfully unconcerned. She ate her breakfast, and she ate Norbert’s. Then she stretched out in a sunbeam on top of some boxes, looking ravishing. Chill, she tells me. We don’t need him anyhow.

Norbert has a weakness for kibble, so I got the kibble bag out of the oven (where I have to keep it so he can’t get at it; he recently mistook a bag of bloodmeal for a kibble bag and tore it open while I was at work, spreading dirt all over the living-room floor) and took it outside and shook it as I called his name. For some reason, I walked down to the deli, as if that would be Norbert’s first destination. (Maybe I was projecting.) He would certainly be easier to spot on the street than in the bungalow colony, a block dense with houses, like a checkerboard, and full of cats, both strays and outdoor cats with owners, all of whom, I might add, respond to the sound of kibble. This adventure was further complicated by the fact that Norbert rarely meows. He’s not mute, but for some reason he has developed the habit of silence. I’ve heard him meow only a handful of times, and have never figured out what motivates him, so I have no reason to believe that he might find his voice in a moment of distress.

I called and cancelled my appointment, then woke up my neighbor C. She came over with a flashlight and we poked around under the bungalow some more. Unlike me, she was certain that Norbert had stayed nearby and not gone to the deli. “I think I see him,” she said, and I had a momentary sensation of relief when a pink nose appeared from under the latticework, but it was Buster, our court's top cat, who is dark gray and white like Norbert but darker over all, and slimmer and more muscular. Buster pads down the walk every morning with his tail sticking straight out behind him. We were also assisted in our search by Buster Jr., a smaller replica of Buster who is fitted with a green collar, as well as by the black cat I'd seen earlier, Harley, and a white-and-pale-gray cat. I went down to their house and poured them a pile of kibble in the hope that it would keep them occupied long enough to give Norbert a chance to come out. “If only people would keep their cats inside!” I wailed to C. She has nine indoor cats, and feeds a whole passel in her court, which the ASPCA has fixed and tagged, so they are an official colony. Our block may sometimes reek of cat piss, but at least we don’t have rats. The other dramatis feles are Nestor, a fluffy strawberry-blond in the corner house (his name in Queens is pronounced Ness-tuh), and Smooch, on the back court, a mostly white cat with a little black Hitler mustache who is sometimes neglected and sleeps on the roof. My two cats don’t go outside: Madison has no front claws (her previous owner did this; I would never declaw a cat), and Norbert knew he was onto a good thing when Daysi, my catsitter, rescued him from in front of her employers’ building and adopted him for Madison and me while I was in Greece four years ago.

Everyone loves Norbert, though he has a tendency to nip and put his head in your pocketbook and hiss when you try to get your bag back. He didn’t purr at all at first, so unaccustomed was he to comfort, but finally a velour throw or a fleece robe would do it for him, and he began to knead and purr. He has a face like parted curtains—an inverted widow’s peak, gray framing white—and a pink nose. His other markings are like a tuxedo cat’s, except that instead of pure black he has black-and-gray tiger stripes that morph into a tortoiseshell spots. C. said recently that he looks like he’s wearing a white scarf, but I see it the other way: a white cat wearing a gray-and-black saddle blanket. He walks like John Wayne.

I called the office and said I couldn’t come in till I'd found Norbert. I made one trip to the hardware store for a new flashlight battery. I had a pit in my stomach as if a meteorite had landed there. Every once in a while I’d go out to the street with the kibble and shake the bag and call his name in all its variations: Norbert! Norbertino! Norbertone! (C. calls him Norby.) There is a honeysuckle vine blooming on the street, and though I’ve always loved honeysuckle—it’s blooming now along the A-train tracks—for the first time it smelled too sweet. Had Norbert ruined honeysuckle?

There was another source of guilt: Two days earlier, my neighbor T., across the court, had lost one of her turtles. She had put the two turtles, about the size of bicycle helmets, outside in a plastic pool. “I’ve been dying to do this,” she said. She arranged a few stones in the middle for them, in case they wanted to bask, and bought them a bag of goldfish—real goldfish, not Pepperidge Farm—which they chased around and snapped up. I had watched one of the turtles stand on the other to try to heave himself up over the lip of the pool—he toppled back, in classic turtle-on-its-back style, but was able to flip himself over by using his hind feet—so I was not surprised when she told me, mournfully, that one of her turtles had escaped. Now I felt that I hadn’t shown T. enough sympathy. The turtle was probably under the deck, which was securely fenced in, and short of ripping up the deck, it looked like it would be impossible to find him. She’d taken the other turtle back inside. “Think of it this way,” I said. “Now you have an indoor turtle and an outdoor turtle.”

The first sign of hope was when the Catwoman heard something by T.’s fence and looked under the deck. “It’s the turtle!” she said. Just then Buster Jr. came along, and the turtle fled (as best it could). I got my stepladder and climbed over the fence onto T.’s deck. C. fetched a plastic dish pan from my kitchen, then spotted the turtle again. He was out in the open. I knew that one of the turtles was called Snappy, so I was very careful picking him up, but he wanted to be rescued. “Look how dehydrated he is,” C. said. I hosed him down a bit. When he started trying to climb the walls of the dish pan (stupid turtle), we decided he’d be better off in the cooler, which was deeper. In case he was hungry, I threw in a few big leaves of escarole. Meanwhile, C. called T. on her cell phone to give her the glad tidings. I allowed myself to hope that if we had found a turtle, we could find a cat.

Everybody said, “He’ll come back. My cat got out once, and he was gone two days/three days/one week, but he came back.” Three days! I couldn’t be out here kneeling in the dirt next to the bungalow at five in the morning for three days, but then again I couldn’t not. Norbert is famous. His name is known from Hastings to Provincetown, Montreal to Aruba. A year ago, I had gone to a big group art show in Red Hook, Brooklyn and, turning a corner, come across a Coney Island sideshow-style banner of a black-and-white cat: “The Amazing Norbert—Sees All, Knows All, Eats All—25 lbs. Alive!” I left a note for the artist—Johanna Gargiulo Sherman—telling her that, incredibly, I, too, had a cat named Norbert with a tendency to overeat, and she got in touch. Her Norbert was also a foundling with a weakness for kibble, and had a crush on a cat named Lily, who wouldn't give him the time of day. "The Amazing Norbert" was not for sale, because she was putting it on Cafe Press, meaning that there was a whole line of Amazing Norbert products, everything from thongs and baby bibs to trivets and bicycle messenger bags. I have since become her best customer. Would all those mugs and T-shirts and calendars turn into bitter reminders of the day Norbert went away?

My mother used to tell the story of my brother, as a toddler, getting lost at Euclid Beach, our local amusement park. It may have been for two minutes or two hours, but I could imagine her distress, her inability to be consoled by people saying, “Oh, he’ll turn up,” or “Pray to St. Anthony.” This is just the sort of thing that makes me promise to reform, to lose weight and give up caffeine and alcohol, to tithe ten percent of my income to the church, if only I can see his little face, with his pink nose and heavy black eyeliner, peeking around the bedroom door again.

T. got home in the evening and, after taking her turtle inside, came out to shake kibble and call Norbert with me. Suddenly it seemed like there were an unusual lot of airplanes leaving JFK in a flight path directly over the bungalows, one every two minutes, and intolerably loud. Norbert would never come out from wherever he was with all this racket.

By now I had also cancelled my evening plans, and people were saying Norbert was more likely to come out after dark, when things had quieted down. I was inside agonizing when a neighbor on the back court came to my front door and said, “Did you lose a cat? Is he big and fat?” This was no time for vanity, so I admitted that, yes, Norbert was on the portly side. “We think we see him. He’s between two bungalows, across from my girlfriend’s.”

I went over there, where the girlfriend and her little boy were out in front of her house. She pointed between two bungalows, and there at the end of the gravel path was Norbert, his back to the wall. I walked over some piles of siding stored between the bungalows, and when I got to Norbert he ducked under the house. I lifted a flap of siding and he stuck his head out. I took him by the scruff of the neck and drew him out from beneath the house and lifted him up. T. and her husband were coming up the walk as I came out with Norbert, and they looked as happy as if Norbert were their own prodigal son. When I got him home, he went back to the porch ledge by the loose screen, which I’d put masking tape over but which I now hastened to staple firmly into place, and then staple some more. I think he was trying to reconstruct what had happened. I gave him some kibble. The next day I had to work in a trip to the pet store, because there was no doubt that during his day in the wild Norbert got fleas.

My religious feelings have now subsided, and I can resume buying Amazing Norbert products, but I’m not sure honeysuckle will ever be the same.



Photo by Hylary Kingham

Hot Water

The summer travel season is under way, as the Times puts it, which means that the winter parking season is over, and it’s cat-chauffeuring time. I moved out to the beach last Saturday, luring one reluctant cat into her box with a sprinkling of Kitty Kaviar, while the other, the Amazing Norbert, was eager to go wherever the cat food was going. I gave a ride to my friend MQ, who lets me park my car (formerly her car) in her driveway, and who lent a hand with the cats. They were quiet in the back seat, and I got them all the way to the door of the bungalow before three helicopters roared over, flying low, probably on their way back from the air show at Jones Beach, setting off every dog and car alarm on the peninsula, and incidentally terrorizing two newly arrived cats. It reminded me of the Concorde.

I had turned the water on in Rockaway earlier in the month, surprising myself with my studliness. Now it was time for the hot-water heater. Usually, my neighbor T. fires up the hot-water heater for me—a fireman’s daughter, I am a little afraid of explosions—but he and his wife, also T., were getting ready for a party, so I thought I’d try to do it myself. I got out my notes. Step 1: “Turn cock in pipe.” That’s easy enough: just take a small wrench and turn the valve on the gas pipe from horizontal to vertical, permitting the gas to get to the heater. Then, “Press down red button (2 min.).” T. has always had to fooster (my mother’s word) with this red button for quite a while before enough gas comes through for him to light the pilot. “Set top dial to Pilot”; “Set temp to off (vacation)”; “Light pilot”; “Turn up knob slowly”—“That’s so it don’t blow up in your face,” T. said.

I must have known, despite my good intentions, that I was going to end up asking T. to come over and help, because before I did anything else I cleaned up the area around the hot-water heater. It was all furry with dust. While cleaning, I noticed a phalanx of ants on maneuvers in the direction of the cat-food bowls. I attacked the ants with Windex, which is my improvement on my grandmother’s method, which was to pour boiling water on them. (I mean that it is an improvement not in the Buddhist sense of being less cruel but in the housecleaning sense of being faster and more convenient: it takes long minutes for the water to come to a boil as the ants come marching, and then your kitchen floor is awash with the corpses of parboiled ants.) Every summer there is a plague of ants, but this year, catching them early, on their way past their first redoubt at the hot-water heater, before they summitted the sink and the kitchen counters and turned the corner into the living room, I tracked them to their source: the chinks and gaps in the bathroom floor. Since you can’t spray Windex on every individual ant in creation, I set out ant traps and later bought a gel dispensed like caulking from a pump . . . but I digress.

Once the floor was relatively clean, I got my kitchen matches and my needle-nosed pliers and prostrated myself before the hot-water heater. I positioned the dials and held the red button for a long, long time, finding a use for a Pilates move called the Swan as I managed to keep the pressure on the red button with the hand holding the matchbox, strike the match with the other hand, fit it into the pliers, and stick it inside the heater, in the general direction of the pilot light, though I couldn’t actually see where the pilot light was. I repeated this exercise about six times without success, then gave up and went and got T.

“Didja press down on the red button?” he asked.

“Oh, DOWN.” I looked back at my notes, and that is exactly what it said, but for some reason I had been pulling up on the red button. I must have primed it, though, because T. had the pilot lit almost instantly. “I don’t know how hot you want it,” he said, turning the temperature dial. There was a whoosh as the fire ran around the ring, and I was in business.

I bought T. a six-pack of Budweiser, and went down to the beach. You can do a lot with cold running water—drink it, clean with it, boil it and kill ants with it—but there is nothing like a hot shower after your first dip in the Atlantic Ocean on Memorial Day Weekend.