It’s so cold out tonight.

My landlord watches me from the first floor of the house where my apartment is, down near our beach on the island. He yelled at me the other night when I got home, telling me I was playing my music too loud and stinking up his house with cigarettes.  I told him I no nothing of what he was speaking about, since I smoke my cigarettes every else in the world except my apartment, and that I listened to my music on my headphones.  Besides, I wasn’t even at my apartment during the hours he spoke of, and suggested that he speak with his daughter, claiming that she’s been crushing on me like that chick that scratched up Cary Elwes’ car in The Crush, and that there better not be a fucking carousel in the attic that I don’t know about, or else it’s gonna end up in a bloody showdown where’s she’s gonna hit you over the head with a crow bar, and then comes after me and I’m gonna have to punch her in the face and knock her down like fucking Buster Douglas to Mike Tyson.  He stood back, and paused, and apologized to me, saying that his daughters always get crushes on the guys that rent the apartment, and that two of his older daughter actually started dating the tenents.  I said I did not know that, and acepted his apology, and then went back to smoking my cigarette and waiting for Bill to show up so that we could smoke the blunt I had rolled up just ten minutes ago.

“NIGGASSSSSSSSS!”
The stereo echoed the sound of TuPac out throughout the neighborhood, as we turned down a side street in Midland and parked under the darkness of the low lying trees.
Bill turned to me.
“Light?”
The lights of the streets sparkled bright across the winter sky that stretched and enclosed the lil ol’ world of New York City.  It was no longer cold, and was no longer as deep and harsh as I thought ten minutes ago.

Brown and black damp leaves carpeted the dirt road where streets had been paved at one time.  The mist of the humid winter air had been converted into rain by the branches and the leaves that had survived the early nor’easters and now clung steadfast to the limbs of the tree boughs.  Fifty feet below the canopy, the pungent skunky smoke curled up ahead of the its second hand cloud and dissipated into the early evening fog.  Its chimney was built of five people standing in the cypher, passing a crudely made blunt that Kris had to adjust in order to get it to pull correctly.

There was me, that is Jay, and my three dudes, that is Billy, Murdazz, and Kris.  Anne had come along for the cypher as well, and we stood in the heart of the woods along New Dorp Beach, standing just off of one of the lesser traveled paths that ran perpendicular to the dunes that bound the woods and the beach behind.

It was a time in out lives and a time in the year where we chalked up everything of the past and began to take inventory of what we had accomplished.   Had we grown? Had we become better friends?  Are we having fun?  It’s difficult to even remember what we had talked about, but I know the conversation had meaning and humor behind it.  The content gets clouded by anxiety of waiting for the next two puffs and the pass to the left.

Kris passed to Bill.  Puff.  Hold.  Listen.  Exhale.  Listen.  Repeat.  Pass to Murdazz., who mimics, then me, I follow suit, then Anne, again, and back to Kris.  Now come shotties.   Then we play Chicago, but we call it New York.  Then we are high, and we forget.

I’m paranoid.  The cops are waiting.  Kris is too fucking loud.  So is Bill.  Murdazz is cooperating, but now he’s freestyling and Johnny’s dad could be walking the rottweilers in the woods and catch us any second, and he fucking hates Kris because he blew up that window that one time with an M-80, and the dogs will bite our faces and play with our guts like rubber chew toys.   They’re all fucking with me, every one of them.  I’ve gotta cover up the smoke, someone 500 yards to 5 miles away might smell it.  I light up a Newport.

The woods looks great this time of year.  The rotting smell of organic wet matter.   We’re all done, so we walk out of the woods and onto the beach.  The moon strains to glow, and the ocean sings in crashing waves.  I’m baked.  I love it.

Creosote is the preferred substance with which to waterproof the planks, beams, and pilings of the boardwalk and its piers. It is the odor of used motor oil mixed with turpentine, and it smells inflammable. The subway smells like it because they treat rail ties in the same manner, which is to soak the timber in the liquid, and let every fiber absorb it. The smell is more noticeable under the pier in Wildwood, where the go-carts race on the 15′ wide asphalt track that winds in and out of the columns made of logs that hold the boards above.

It’s an aroma that brings me back home while I’m 200 miles down the Jersey shore, and I’m standing on the sundeck of Raging Waters. Sometimes, the chlorinated air subsides and a whiff of creosote wind mixes in with the Atlantic salty mist, so when I look to the north along the coast, my nostrils fill with a smell that transports me to the jetty at the end of New Dorp Lane, where my dad has a fishing rod jammed in between a couple of barnacle-encrusted rocks while he takes a stroll along the shore in between Miller Field’s loose stone lot and the remains of the old Staten Island Area Station Hospital, where either some kids or the local beach bums have let a bonfire burn out over night and all that remaind at 2 p.m. in the afternoon is a fraction of the bulk of some wooden bulkhead that broke off a jetty or pier and floated from Keansburg, Sea Girt, or even Point Pleasant, across Raritan Bay and guided by the tides and a small warm air thunderstorm just to wash up along our beach amongst the ever-constant inundation of flotsam and jetsam, of crushed quarter drink containers, tennis balls that dogs could not fetch, tampon applicators of unknown origin, glass that had been blasted by brown harbor sand, straw that broke off the dead marsh plant stems during high tide, and the occasional message-in-a-bottle from children not expecting their messages to be returned to shore by a bay which only imports but does not export items that are fed to it from Staten Island because even the ocean uses the forgotten borough as a dumping ground.

My father strolls along, taking puffs from his cigar, passing a family which puts out a blanket in the same clearing of sand every day, its corners held down by beach chairs, a cooler, and the radio playing oldies on 101. WCBS-FM. He’ll head back to the jetty to find a rod without a bite yet again, but the goal of fishing New Dorp Beach is not to catch fish, and besides, who’d be dumb enough to eat them?

“501 to 511.”

The shoulder mic on my radio beckons me to send-out to give breaks to people on the rides, and I’m still in Wildwood, but I know how to get back home when I’m feeling like an alien down here. They’ve standardized the treatment of pilings and piers up and down the shore, that creosote smell might as well be home.