On the rare occasions when we’d been caught alone, the first thing people had asked was “Where’s Benji?” or “Where’s Reggie?,” whereupon we’d delivered a thorough account of our other’s whereabouts, quickly including context, as if embarrassed to be caught out in the sunlight with only half a shadow: “He rode into town. There was something in the human DNA that had compelled people to say “Benji ’n’ Reggie, Benji ’n’ Reggie” in a singsong way, as if we were cartoon characters. Joined not at the hip or the spleen or the nervous system but at that most important place-that spot on your self where you meet the world. We were born ten months apart, and until I started high school we had come as a matched set, more Siamese than identical, defined by our uncanny inseparability. What do you see in this picture? Two brothers going off in different directions. My brother and I did a zombie march, slow and mute, to the back seat, where we turned into our separate nooks, sniffing the upholstery, butt to butt, looking more or less like a Rorschach test. The trick of those early-morning jaunts was to wake up just enough to haul a bag of clothes down to the car, nestle in, and then retreat back into sleep. Well, it wasn’t really dark-June sunrises are up and at ’em-but I always remember the drives that way, perhaps because my eyes were closed most of the time. My father’s method was easy and brutal: hit the road at five in the morning, so that we were the only living souls on the Long Island Expressway, making a break for it in the haunted dark. They stopped to grab a bite and watched the slow red surge outside the restaurant window while dragging clam strips through tartar sauce-soon, soon, not yet-until the coast was clear.
Others headed back to the city late on Sunday evening, choking every last pulse of joy from the weekend with cocoa-buttered hands. There were those who ditched the office early on Friday afternoon, casually letting their co-workers know the reason for their departure, in order to enjoy a little low-pressure envy.
Gangsters move in silence how to#
Over the course of the summer, you heard a lot of different strategies for how to beat the traffic, or at least slap it around a little. That year, we got out the second Saturday in June, in an hour and a half flat from the Upper West Side, having beat the traffic. In the summer of 1985, I was fifteen years old. We were so grateful just to be there, in the heat, after a long bleak year in the city. Still, it was hard not to believe that it all belonged to you more than to anyone else, that it had been made for you, had been waiting for years for you to come along.
Gangsters move in silence skin#
When did you get out? Asking this was like showing off, even though anyone you could ask had already received the same gift: the same sun wrapped in shiny paper, the same soft benevolent sky, the same gravel road that sooner or later would skin you, pure joy in the town of Sag Harbor. First, you had to settle the question of out.
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