“There’s a lot of cursing in this.” -my boss
“It’s the most fun I’ve had reading anything in ages.” -my boss’s boss
“You couldn’t pick a hotter picture of me?” -Nuria Marquez Martinez
“Can confirm that I do not hate you.” -Samer Kalaf
“Congratulations on your wedding day! It is my honor to join your family and friends in celebrating this milestone. May your relationship be blessed with happiness, love, and dedication. Jill and I send you all the best as you embark on this new journey together.” -Joseph Robinette Biden
The SEO-tastic Literary It Girl Beach Zine Summer Kickoff Glizzypalooza [Charli xcx remix] (feat. my brilliant, beautiful friends) is officially 48 hours away. As threatened, here is my painfully earnest opening essay. There will be a quiz — prepare accordingly.
The Rockaway Peninsula only has three seasons: summer, local summer, and Rockaway winter. (Arguably there’s a fourth, hurricane season, but it overlaps with local summer, for better or worse.)
Summer is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the version of the Rockaways that tourists are most familiar with. It’s when you can stand in an hour-long line for an arepa, then stumble back to the 8x8 patch you’ve staked out on a beach that resembles a bloated swap meet. There are prop planes overhead and competing Bluetooth speakers and inevitably some leather-skinned middle-aged Chad on a beach cruiser swerving down the boardwalk with a Trump flag billowing in his wake. I realize this may sound unappealing, but after a few piña coladas the chaos becomes its own intoxicant, and besides, you just schlepped an hour on the train, you might as well make the most of it.
Local summer is that blessed period — roughly from Labor Day to Halloween — when the peninsula maintains the charm of high season with just a fraction of the crowds. The water is still warm, the waves are at their best, and the boardwalk takes on the air of a small town Main Street. Neighbors chat at picnic tables and the concessions consolidate into fun, collaborative Franken-menus. By the time local summer rolls around, I can’t walk out of my house without running into someone I know.
What follows this period is Rockaway winter. It differs from regular winter in that, on top of the miserable cold, the neighborhood is a ghost town. Even some locals flee for Puerto Rico. All of the seasonal businesses are closed, and the few that remain open operate on shoestring schedules. No more Rippers. Ditto for Surf Club. Kiss the vintage shops and board swaps goodbye. There’s painfully little sunlight and the already-unreliable trains start to operate in a manner completely unconcerned with getting anywhere on time. (But good luck getting an Uber, sucker.) Plus there’s the wind. Goddamn that frigid sea breeze that hits you like a Mack truck.
This is the Rockaway that I moved to. In the fall of 2022, I was priced out of my apartment in Brooklyn, the final indignity to top off perhaps the worst year of my adult life. I’m not interested in reexamining every crisis that year walloped me with, but I only mention it to say that when I found a criminally cheap bungalow for rent two blocks from the beach, I had nothing left to lose.
***
That Rockaway winter was the beginning of my love story. Yes, I fell in love with a person, but separately, and certainly more formatively, I fell in love with a place. This place.
I Under the Tuscan Sunned my way through my little bare-bones house, bonding with my handyman, Victor, and recruiting my friends to help me DIY light fixtures and gallery walls. I sent dispatches that reeked of my infatuation — look at this gorgeous sunset! omg a dead whale! — to my human love back in Brooklyn. As the ground thawed, my new neighbors contributed tomato starters and azalea seeds to my fledgling garden.
That summer, the Rockaways, as it exists in true form — in local form — coyly began to reveal itself to me. On Friday mornings I would bound out my front door at sunrise, dog in tow, so we could splash in the waves before the lifeguards arrived. I spent Sundays lying in the grass next to Connolly’s, watching the leaves overhead ripple in the breeze while I should have been in shavasana. I biked or skateboarded everywhere, because it was too big of a pain in the ass to ever move my car. I listened to my neighbors play music on the boardwalk, and at the urban garden in Edgemere, and on a dock of questionable structural integrity at the boat club in Broad Channel. I picked fresh strawberries and got a Queens Library card. One morning I went out to surf, and the next thing I knew I was at a pig roast under the A train, riding a mechanical bull.
I must confess, I’m not a good enough surfer to truly appreciate a good wave day at 98th, my preferred break. Last summer I nearly drowned more times than I’d like to admit. But afternoons with clear skies and mushy waves were some of my favorites — when the waves are just mediocre enough, the crowds thin out and no one in the lineup takes themselves too seriously. You can try to pop up and carve on a boogie board, or boogie on a surfboard, or rescue a canoe from the trash and pray to God no one drops in on you. You can also just commune with Mother Nature, which exists in her full glory less than 50 yards from the shores of New York City. Once you’ve paddled to the outside, the noise of the boardwalk falls away, breaking waves turn to gentle bobs, and you can see dolphins more often than not.
***
Now, a quick history lesson: Colonizers took over the Lenape village of Reckowacky — meaning “lonely place” — in the 17th century. Or was it Reckonwacky — meaning “the place of our own people” — ? No matter, it was destined to become a resort town for rich Manhattanites. That is, until after WWII, when New York’s urban planning autocrat Robert Moses decided actually, let’s get the undesirable poor as far away from the city as possible and stick them in that lonely place.
There were decades of segregation, disinvestment, and neglect, but also creativity and community-building. In Far Rockaway, a young Rammellzee was pioneering a new art movement cum philosophical treaty called Gothic Futurism on the side of his local A train; the Ramones were repopularizing surf rock with “Rockaway Beach;” further west still, queer New Yorkers were reclaiming “the people’s beach” at Jacob Riis Park as a safe haven and vital third space for the LGBTQ community.
Patti Smith once wrote that she “was so taken by Rockaway Beach and [a] ramshackle bungalow behind a derelict wooden fence that I could think of nothing else.” She bought that bungalow in 2012, and has since referred to it as her Alamo (for surviving Hurricane Sandy) and her “vision of paradise” (for obvious reasons). Until 2016, you could stop by Mac DeMarco’s house on the bay side, unannounced, and he’d make you a cup of coffee.
So to say this weird little peninsula at the end of the A line is a special place seems... lazy. It’s well-trodden territory. I could have spared you all this hemming and hawing and we could be dribbling Modelos down our salty chins if I would just shut the fuck up already.
But this is the first place, in my 30 reluctant years on this planet, that has felt this special to me. My bungalow is spitting distance from a big sign that reads PLAYLAND, and if it weren’t true I’d say it was a cheesy, heavy-handed metaphor. Every morning I wake up in a place that literally used to be an amusement park. The rides are long gone, but somehow the childlike magic remains. Rockaway Beach is the place where the full exposure of the sun oversaturates color, making the ocean and the buildings and even the New York City sidewalk sparkle; even my own outward appearance shifts, as my hair fades and my shoulders darken. It’s the place where lonely people like me find their own people, over and over and over again. It’s the place where my cells expand and vibrate, just like the Atlantic in the prime of local summer.
