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 accidentally dropped
some things outside while taking down wash from the clothesline. Had she not
come back to retrieve them, 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 Socks 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 adrenaline covering the pain. Finally, 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, wondrous daydreams,
feeling the full potential of my existence. But beneath 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.
: - | >
