Beach Writing

 Summer 2011.

I was fat, drunk and stupid. It was the best of times it was the wo... you know.

Liquor would flow in the DC happy hours. We would start at Madam's Organ, a 'burlesque' bar in Washington's Adams-Morgan neighborhood (get it?). At noon, beers were a mere quarter (the bad ones...), the price going up by 25 cents every hour.

After what was inevitably a huge dinner we'd hop on over to our real hangout: Angles, a bar a few doors down whose owner, Phil, was until recently a war photographer - his pictures elegantly adorning every inch of symmetrical wall space. We'd stay there from 8:30ish till closing time at 3, and as Adams Morgan popped outside for the inevitable street brawl, we'd stay indoors afterhours, smoking cigarettes in the bar and drinking until a good 5:30 or 6 in the morning. Phil's violin would come out with the expectation that it would be me to play it and not him. Phil was a socialist of the Tony Judt sort, and we talk politics, we'd talk music, history, books, when he heard I worked cursorily in real estate he even tried to impress me with his knowledge of that. Phil eventually married is ectomorphically thin maitresse for the restaurant downstairs and later found out that Norm, the bartender, killed himself because the news made DC's City Paper.

Phil was all very fitting with the image of 'interesting' people we all hoped we were. The basic three staples of those years were Josh: tall, mysteriously brooding, surly, refreshingly free of all social graces. Rory: a little younger, medium height, full of optimism, handsome enough that practically all of DC would go home with him but he turned half of DC's women down because he found them boring. And me: basically the opposite of them both. I referred to us as Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Obviously I wasn't Kirk...

Early that summer my heart was broken twice. Once by a woman I'd known for years, once by a woman I'd met three weeks earlier. Being me, I'm sure I made the experiences as difficult as possible, but both experiences were, in their differing ways, brutal. Josh and Rory had no idea what experiences like mine were like, and I was basically there to fill the silences between them. Very soon, both of them would be gone, absconded together to some part of East Asia, I honestly forget if it was Vietnam or Thailand, and shortly after they arrived neither of them spoke to each other again.

What did we ultimately talk about? Well, what do all young people talk about. Our futures! What else is there? And I remember particularly as we smoked once (or was it as we drank?), I managed finally to articulate what I wanted and why I wouldn't be going with them on their open invitation big East Asian adventure they planned. It wasn't just because I thought I'd be a colossal failure in organizing life in a foreign country, it was because I wasn't suited for it. What I ultimately wanted wasn't travel, it wasn't 'experience' or 'adventure' it was... art. Big deal, I know... the most Tucker realization an Evan Tucker could possibly Evan... but when you're 29, you don't necessarily realize it. Against all evidence, you still think to yourself that all things are possible, that you are not who you are, and that all kinds of global adventures might give you the same joy you'd get from a lifetime pass to every show in New York.

Somehow, between binge drinking I managed not to get kicked out of my parents' house - living in an uncanny valley between my final years in DC and my first years in Baltimore; but the living room of my parents house began to cave in (heavy-handed metaphor alert) and we all ended up in my parents recently acquired beach house in Oceanview, Delaware, right off of Bethany Beach.

In retrospect, it was the most consequential two months of my life. In this vacationland of the Mid-Atlantic I found myself bikeriding 20 miles at a time, living on a diet of fish and veggies, hiking trails, and generally well and satisfied for the first time in... was I ever satisfied before then?

The key? Writing. The plan? Writing. The future? Writing. Not marketing or promoting, just writing. Not worrying about a career. Just writing.

I had a blog I'd started for the chorus I founded which I meant for promotional musings that would market myself as a brand for my business (and we wonder why it failed...), and I decided simply to do whatever I wanted with it.

This place, the place where it all began, is more holy to me than anywhere in Jerusalem. It's the place I know I became a writer: however bad the writing, however trivial the subject, I know I've given my last to this project.

From the beginning of my life, I've wanted one thing and one thing only: regardless of the form or the genre, regardless of the hardship, all I ever wanted out of life was to be a great artist. Be it a writer, be it a musician, be it a visual artist who can't even draw a straight line, it was what I would move the earth to make happen. Whether or not anybody knew who I was, I would know who I was, and even if only a few appreciate what I do, they too would know. The arts were all I ever knew, all I ever cared about. If I had the ability to be an accountant or an office clerk or even a janitor, I'd have long since left this wasteland of a life behind for something that makes life work a lot easier; but I am made of art, and life has nothing else for which I have any capacity at all. I have lived by this goal, and whether death comes for me now or in my nineties it is in art's pursuit that I shall cross over.

Even if it's just from this house infused with the sounds of Delaware herons rather than the front lines of our life histories, I plan on crossing this life for as long as life is good enough to grant me, and even if it's just in these stupid essays, I will give all of myself to the word and the note, and if that is my life, there can be no life better spent in all the world.

Amen