A Bicentennial Story
June, America’s bicentennial summer. The city is in a bad way — broke, drug- and crime-ridden, a physical wreck. From Inwood to Bay Ridge, New Yorkers navigate the chaos with the feeling that anything could happen at any moment.
For millions of Americans, the Daily News headline from the fall — FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD — says it all. New Yorkers respond with a two-finger salute. Drawn by cheap rents, dreamers, freaks, and fairies reclaim beaten-down, bombed-out neighborhoods. Music — punk, New Wave, salsa, disco — pulses into the night from CBGB, Max’s, the Flamingo, Le Jardin. On 17th Street, Warhol is busy turning art into commerce, while the trend-chasing gallery scene is reinventing itself in formerly gritty SoHo. Even the money guys on the Street feel it, as they grease themselves up in preparation for a decades-long orgy of greed-is-good capitalism.
For a nineteen-year-old from Ohio, it’s a bit overwhelming. Since the end of the school year, he’s been living with his girlfriend — a dark-haired New Yorker he shared a dorm with and fell hard for a week into the fall semesterr — at her mother’s Park Avenue condo. Her dad, a gregarious media CEO, has arranged a job for him in the sales office of a sports franchise his conglomerate has acquired. The gig is what folks fifty years in the future will call a bullshit job. All he has to do is show up in the morning at an office in a midtown skyscraper — he walks or takes the bus down, never the subway — and fill the long hours until 5:00 pitching season ticket packages to corporate ad directors and marketing managers. No quotas, no sales reports, no pressure. He’s no good at it, but then no one cares. Still, he likes to be liked and manages to ingratiate himself with other members of the team, who don’t quite know what to make of him and do their best to ignore the fact that he and the team’s star import were onboarded together, just the two of them, by the team’s general manager.
When he’s not not selling season tickets, he and his girlfriend sample the fare on offer thanks to her dad’s connections. Gallery openings, film screenings, dinners at fancy restaurants, a town car to take them to her grandparents’ place in Westchester, where they swim and frolic, or out to the Hamptons, where they lounge by the pool with and up-and-coming fashion designer, a city councilman with his eye on the mayor's office, a not-so-busy actor looking for someone to bankroll his directorial debut.
As the month wears on, some of the fizz comes out of their champagne summer. The astonishing sex of the fall and winter months starts to seem a little less astonishing. He wonders about the possibility of a boys’ night out — his girlfriend would probably approve — but he’s afraid to ask and too scared to try. More and more, the noise, dirt, and smell of the city get on his nerves. By the end of the month, he’s missing his friends and thinking about heading home for the Fourth.
Summer is the sweet season in Northeast Ohio: days long and sunny, grass green and fragrant, any excuse for a get-together a good one. His parents like to party and know how to throw one; they’re fun people. On weekends, they host an ever-changing cast of colorful characters: Andy, a retired general practitioner with an alarming tendency to mix his love of horseback riding with a fondness for gin; Mary, his chain-smoking artist-wife who, forty years on, still can’t figure out how she ended up in Ohio; the Coach, a surrogate-father to all and his wife Helen-Marie, who together raised nine kids in a three-bedroom ranch without losing their sanity or sense of humor; Nick, a lapsed MENSA member who loves to torment the family dog and usually ends the evening with a bloody hand or shin; Carrol and Bob, the town know-it-all and her long-suffering husband; and Charlie T., snake-charmer in a golf cap, quick with a joke, quicker with an insult. At some point in the evening, usually after the meat has come off the grill and been served with salad, the singing starts: Broadway show tunes — “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” “The Street That You Live”; standards from the Great American Songbook, an encore, “Danny Boy” or “(I Left My Heart in) San Francisco,” sometimes both. His dad, the main attraction at these gatherings, has a lovely voice, perfect pitch, and a way with a lyric. He sings because he loves to sing — before marriage and four kids, he thought about singing professionally — and because his friends love to hear him sing.
But New York, down-but-not-out New York, also knows how to party. And while it’s been a few years since it threw a big one — the World’s Fair in 1964, the parade for the Miracle Mets in ’69 — it’s planning to pull out the stops for the bicentennial. For a nearly bankrupt city, the list is impressive: concerts and neighborhood festivals, Revolutionary War reenactments, free admission to museums, a massive fireworks show over the harbor, and the centerpiece, Operation Sail, a once-in-a-lifetime procession of more than two hundred tall ships up the Hudson to the George Washington Bridge and back again. If he and his girlfriend stay in town for the party, they’ll be treated like royalty, with ringside seats to most of it, whether on a private yacht cruising the river, choppering above the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, or from the terrace of a Fifth Avenue triplex.
It’s a tough call. He and his girlfriend go back and forth about it: she’d be happy to stay in the city. But she knows he's homesick, and at the last minute they decide to drive out to Ohio.
Friday — a work day that he has no problem taking off. They throw their bags into the sports car he helped teach her how to drive and hit the interstate. The weather is glorious, the drive across Pennsylvania the closest thing to a magic-carpet ride he’ll ever experience — just the two of them, young, wind blowing through their hair, not a care in the world. He can’t wait to show her off to his friends, to return their stares with a nothing-to-it grin.
The weekend unfolds has he’d hoped. They share his old bedroom in his parents’ un-air-conditioned house. They hang out in the kitchen and on the deck, cooking and eating and slapping at mosquitos. His parents love her, she loves them. On Saturday night, they get together with a couple of his best friends and follow a dirt road to a field of tall grass, struggle over a rickety wire fence, claim a favorite spot on a grassy embankment overlooking I-80. They drink a few beers, smoke a few joints, reminisce about the not-so-long-ago good old days as semis lit up like Christmas trees rumble by. His friends are charmed by her, she by them. Sunday morning, they head down to Main Street with the rest of the town to take in the annual Fourth of July parade. They cheer the gas-guzzling convertibles bearing town VIPs, the firetrucks and floats, the high school marching band and dancing majorettes, the kids on bikes with plastic flags threaded into spokes. Lots and lots of flags. It’s a classic American scene out of a Rockwell painting. Later that evening, after more drinks and another perfectly grilled meal, they head back downtown for the main event: fireworks watched from vinyl-strapped lounge chairs set up in the parking lot of the local shopping plaza. His town is home to a large maker of fireworks; it prides itself on its annual Fourth of July display, and people from miles around jam the streets around the plaza to watch. The show does not disappoint. Punctuated by whomps from hidden launchers, red, white and blue starbursts alternate with bright, fizzing comets and delicate golden willows. People check their watches — is this it? is this it? — and when a thunderous heart-stopping BOOM anounces the finale, his girlfriend smiles and clamps her hands over her ears.
Monday morning (a work day — again, no problem): time to head back. She hugs his parents, thanks them for making her feel so welcome, says she hopes she’ll see them soon, on campus or maybe in the city. They smile, say that would be lovely. Happy, he hugs his mom and dad, climbs into the passenger seat of her coupe, leans over to give her a kiss.
It’s the furthest thing from his mind, but everything will change over the next few weeks. He’ll go back to work and not sell season tickets, she’ll do her thing. They’ll flee the city at every opportunity. On the surface, things will seem normal, but something in their relationship will shift. Blame it on heat and humidity, but he’ll be quicker to express annoyance or impatience, she’ll stare into the distance when he starts to complain; most nights they’ll fall asleep without making love. Come August, his summer job over, they’ll be happy to take a break — he to visit friends who summer off the coast of Connecticut, she to visit family and friends in the Hamptons and on the Cape.
He’ll arrive back on campus a day or two before she does and will be happily situated in off-campus housing with five friends on the day of her return. The past ten days have been close to unbearable for him, and he’s spent hours thinking about what he might to say to make things right. Watching her walk up the drive to the townhouse, head down, hands jammed into overall pockets, he knows he won’t get the chance. They sit in his bedroom and talk. She tells him it’s been an intense year and maybe they should take a break. He tells her she’s crazy, that whatever isn’t working can be fixed. She demurs, shakes her head. They talk some more, and she agrees to give it more time, but it won’t be the same and by October break it’ll be over. For the rest of the year, he’ll wonder what went wrong. When the year ends, he’ll put his things in storage and head up to Boston with more questions than answers.
Twenty years later, he’ll come across a photograph in an oversized coffee table book that will bring him up short. Snapped on a late August weekend in that bicentennial summer, it shows a dozen or so people mingling at some kind of reception on the patio of a mid-century bungalow tucked into the pines of the outer Cape. Known for his love of large-format cameras, the photographer has left the shutter open in the fading light for as long as he dares, blurring some of the guests as, drinks in hand, they gesture or shift position. tion, At the center of the composition, a young woman — dark-haired, spectacularly curvy, brightly striped wrap draped across her shoulders — leans against the trunk of a tall pine. She's stunning, but it’s her expression — somber, a tad impatient, as if she’s steeled herself for an unpleasant task — that shakes him. In a note accompanying the picture, the photographer explains that he’d brought his camera to the reception and purely by accident spotted the young woman “lost in her thoughts, with the adults droning on around her.” All those years later, he knows what she was thinking. For confirmation, he only has to shift his gaze to the right, where the only other young person in the picture, a high-school friend of the dark-haired girl, glares at the photographer, the expression on her face both protective and a little apologetic. Leave her alone, it says, she’s made up her mind, okay. She’s made up her mind. It’s a lesson he learned years ago, and that most young men learn at some point: once a woman makes up her mind, it usually stays made up.
And that’s the story. It doesn’t have an ending, not a real one; in life there’s only ever one ending. But if one is lucky, there are lots of finales, and the fireworks leading up to them are always the best part of the show.