When I was five, I choked on a
lemon drop. It happened in summer on the front porch of our house in Ocean
City, New Jersey. I breathed in too hard while running around, and that little
yellow cap turned into a death pebble. The front door had latched shut from the
inside, and by then my parents were around back on the beach. I banged and rang
the bell, but no one heard against the loud wash of the ocean. The drop lodged
in, and me locked out. I grew desperately faint and began seeing electric white
dots floating around...
At the last minute, the gods
intervened. Earlier, our neighbor had dropped a sock outside while taking down
wash from the clothesline. Had she not come back to retrieve it, she wouldn’t
have seen to administer the Heimlich maneuver, and you wouldn’t be reading
this. (If I publish a memoir, it’ll be titled The
Sock that Saved Me.)
Seriously shaken, I had my
first nightmare that evening. In my dream, I was in the basement of the house.
A thin but opaque fog obscured the ground. It seemed like walking on wet sand,
though, and I could feel gritty saltwater coursing around my bare, reluctant
feet. When I reached the center of the room, an area of fog cleared and a
faceless pair of eyes opened in the floor: androgynous, intense, unstable. For a moment they regarded me
favorably and relaxed into a smiling, reassuring expression. Then, as starkly
as my afternoon play had turned to peril, those grinning eyes turned on me and
squinted into a threatening, sinister taunt as if to say, "How'd ya like
that candy, Marty pants?"
I awoke like an exclamation
point. I’d been sleeping in a bunk on the third floor, so there were two sets
of stairs between me and my parents on the ground level. In that state of wired
fear, running down each step felt too slow to escape the disturbing afterimage
pursuing me, so I jumped down both flights one after the
other, my anxiety covering the pain. At last, I found Barb and Bob Graff in the
living room watching a horror movie about killer ants, a consolation compared
to the trailer that had played in my mind.
*
* *
To this day, the ocean remains
a positive, spiritual place for me. The age, size, and grand rhythms of the
open water inspire me like no other setting. Immense and healing.
On multiple coasts and continents, I’ve long stood breathing it in, tuning in
to its ancient white noise, inviting the busy choreography of its sun-speckled
surface to trigger vast, healing daydreams, feeling the full potential of my
existence. But under the magic there’s a threat, a lethal undertow swirling
with pincers, stingers, carnivorous appetites, toxic industrial detritus...
And that aquatic, psychotic
whatever-it-is that haunts my brittle confections.
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