Solitude
I had no computer. I had no TV. I had no air conditioning in the dead of summer. I had a CD cassette radio that I got for my 14th birthday. I used this radio to listen to the Don and Mike Show on Thursday afternoons, and WZBZ and WGBZ, The Buzz, the local contempo-dance station trying hard to be South Jersey’s KTU. I had no Opie and Anthony, no Ron and Fez late nights. At night, I could tune into to 770 WABC for Yankee games, and 880 WCBS for the news in the Tri-State. The sounds from home comforted me in times of solitude.
I scanned the USA Today I had picked up at McDonald’s and spent an hour staring at the baseball standings, seething at Boston for being in first while the Yanks sat mired in second. I took bites out of garlic knots, and sips from a 3-liter of Coke. Coke was all I drank except at work. In fact, work was the only time I’d drink water, water that came out of the fire standpipe near the Giant Slide just behind Annie’s Pretzels, where we also picked up the ice to fill the yellow Igloo cooler jugs that we would scatter about the pier so as to keep our employees hydrated.
I started smoking right there in my room, instead of getting up everytime and going to the balcony to oogle big titted 19 year olds, I would dump my ashes and butts into an empty Coke bottle that I’d occasionally fill with soda to extinguish the Marlboro Menthols I was done with. A bitter acrid smell emitted from the top as old nicotine mixed with flat cola, and I’ve known this smell for a year or two, when I had my own dorm room in Buffalo, and I would stay inside whenever I had free time, and I’d play Final Fantasy VIII, cook ramen noodles on the hot plate that I had won for 6,000 points in skee ball while I worked at South Beach Amusement Park, and I’d deposit my cigarette butts into 20 ounce Coke bottles or into Arctic Shatter Powerades.
Solitude helped when I got homesick.
