When We Could Still Afford to Live in Ocean City
Ocean City NJ in the 1990s was still a place where a bunch of young people working summer jobs could actually afford to rent houses.
I’m talking about the early 1990s, before I knew my wife, when I was still dating my high school sweetheart, Krista. I was working at Voltaco’s, surfing when I could, and spending most of my free time with a group of people who somehow managed to turn a few rented houses around town into our own little summer community.
I think the house where this particular story happened was around 18th and Central. I’m not completely certain anymore. What I do remember is that it was midsummer, it was hot, and the place was absolutely packed. Friends, friends of friends, girls who came with those friends, surfboards leaning everywhere, music, and people moving from room to room and spilling outside.
I had an air keyboard at the time and sometimes played with a few other people. I don’t remember everything we played that night. The one song I do remember is Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. For some reason, that stayed with me.
The Houses
I think I first started hanging around with this group during my junior year of high school. At one point they were living around 14th Street and West Avenue in a three-level duplex. As I remember it, they had the top floor and the bottom floor, with somebody else occupying the middle. I would stop there after working at Voltaco’s.
There were always surfboards around and always somebody there. The number of people squeezed into some of those summer rentals was ridiculous. Bedrooms were optional. People slept wherever they could. Some slept in closets. One guy, as I remember it, slept outside underneath a truck bed.
And somehow it worked.
These weren’t millionaires spending the summer at the Shore. We were restaurant workers, surfers, kids and twenty-somethings piecing together enough money to stay in Ocean City for the summer.
That house on 14th is gone now. It burned down recently. There’s an empty lot there—or at least there was the last time I paid attention—and I’m sure the inevitable replacement will be another enormously expensive Ocean City property. Probably a duplex, because why build one million-dollar home when you can build two?
That’s one of the reasons I’ve become so frustrated with Ocean City. But that’s Ocean City now. I’m talking about when we could still live there.
The Picture on the Wall
The parties blur together after more than thirty years, but individual moments still pop into my head. One of them actually came back to me while I was writing this.
I was sitting on a couch at one of these houses and noticed a photograph hanging nearby. It was an overhead picture of a Grateful Dead show in Pittsburgh. I looked at it more closely.
There I was.
Right in the middle of the photograph, wearing my tam.
What are the chances of that?
I’d gone to that Pittsburgh show years earlier, and somehow an overhead photograph from it had ended up on the wall of a house where I was sitting at a party in Ocean City. Out of the thousands of people in that crowd, I could pick myself out of the picture.
I’d almost completely forgotten about that until I started writing this. Memory is strange that way.
The Club MTV Girl
One summer, two women came down and somehow found their way into our circle and our parties. One of them had danced on Club MTV.
Remember Club MTV? At the time, that meant something.
She was blonde and, as I remember her, incredibly attractive. Meanwhile, our group had no shortage of guys who looked exactly like what you were supposed to look like spending a summer surfing at the Jersey Shore.
JR was one of them. Mahoe. Noah. There were always girls waiting around for some of these guys.
There was another guy whose name, unbelievably, I can’t remember now. I can picture him perfectly: long hair, bronze skin, muscular, six-pack stomach—the absolute stereotype of the perfect summer surfer.
Put me next to these guys and I knew exactly where I thought I ranked.
And this woman liked me.
That was the part I couldn’t process.
Me? Not JR? Not Mahoe? Not Noah? Me?
It felt almost like somebody was setting me up for a joke.
Her friend hooked up with my friend Ben, which only made the situation more complicated. Ben kept telling me that she wanted to be with me. Let’s go to Corson’s. Let’s go here. Let’s go there.
I kept saying no.
There was one reason: Krista.
Our relationship was rocky by then, but I was still completely devoted to her. Whatever problems we had, I wasn’t going to cheat on her.
Eventually I did end up going to the woman’s house with Ben and her friend. At some point, she handcuffed me to a chair. I think it was my left hand, although I can’t swear to that after all these years.
What I do remember is being pissed.
She had the key hanging from her ear, and I told her she’d better get the handcuffs off me. She did.
And I walked home.
Nothing happened. No great summer romance. No wild story about hooking up with the beautiful blonde Club MTV dancer. I walked home because I loved Krista and I wasn’t going to cheat on her.
There was just one problem with this display of loyalty.
Krista was cheating on me.
She was at a Grateful Dead show in Washington hooking up with some blonde guy.
At least somebody got the blonde.
Was I an Idiot?
I’ve thought about that night differently at different times in my life. Part of me looks back and thinks: What the hell was wrong with you?
Here was this beautiful woman who had danced on Club MTV, who could have picked from any number of guys around her, and for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, she wanted me.
That was probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I literally walked away from it.
But that’s the easy way to tell the story.
The truth is more complicated. Yes, I was loyal to Krista. Whatever was happening in our relationship, I loved her at the time and didn’t want to cheat on her. But looking back, I think fear had something to do with it too.
I couldn’t understand why this woman would want me. That may have bothered me more than anything.
I could look around that house and see JR, Mahoe, Noah, and all these guys who seemed to fit the role perfectly. They surfed. They were tan. They had the hair and the bodies and the confidence.
Then there was me.
When she chose me over all of them, instead of simply accepting that maybe she actually liked me, some part of my brain went looking for the catch.
Maybe that’s why I kept saying no.
Thirty-some years later, I still don’t know whether walking home that night was admirable, stupid, insecure, or some combination of all three.
But I know I walked home.
And oddly enough, when I think about that summer now, the woman isn’t even the part I miss.
I miss being able to leave Voltaco’s after work and walk into a house full of friends. I miss surfboards stacked around rented houses and people sleeping in closets because somehow twenty people had figured out how to make a summer in Ocean City work.
I miss a town where young people without much money could actually live.
I miss sitting on somebody’s couch, looking at a random photograph on the wall, and suddenly realizing that the tiny figure in the middle of thousands of Deadheads was me.
I know it did.
I was there.