Author’s Cut of Chapter 3 of SOUND

We tossed a few dollars on the parlor’s crumb-covered table and headed out the front entrance onto Decatur, sidestepping the overflowing trash bags and empty silver Coke syrup canisters that were scattered along the curb. The night air slipped and mingled around us as we sauntered beachward, our steps interrupted by sycamore roots that pried through the sidewalks or by ridges in the cross-streets where it seemed whole sections of different cities had been run together. Decatur had once been the hub of the city’s western half. Now it was tired, dusty, packed-away: its parking meters headless, most of its shopfronts storm-shuttered. Old lettering cobwebbed along the walls of weatherbeaten brick—Woolworth's Men's Clothing Hairdressers. Here and there, newer plastic signs smoldered—bail bonds, army surplus—their yellows and whites sputtering behind the hands of green leaves that fanned them with salt breezes.

From as far back as I could remember, the place we called home had been a salt-air corroded, neon-laced no-man’s-land, its welter of candy-colored Victorian houses and towering apartment blocks hanging on the grim end between decay and revival. Growing up, we had heard all the stories about the city thirty, forty, fifty years ago. The boards. The Carousel. The crowds of vacationers, from pineys to New York bankers to American presidents. Everything had been bigger, brighter, cleaner back then. Our fathers came up on roaring strips and packed pavilions; we made do with litter-strewn promenades along abandoned boulevards and low-slung clubs bomb-sheltered in the shadows of aborted beach condos.

It didn’t take long for me to see how the city was changing. With each passing day, the city was becoming less and less like I remembered it. Newly minted millionaires were building minimansions upshore and down. Closer to home, demolition crews were imploding the burnt remains of the motels and apartment buildings that had once crowded the beachfront; in the place of whole blocks, craters; around the craters, chain-link fences; on the fences, a paper-thin city in watercolor and pasteboard, equally 1890s, 1920s, and 2020s; above the watercolors, new buildings in brick and steel and shiny green glass. Watching the tourists piling off the southbound trains into the cavernous arrivals hall, the roofers scrambling to patch up the Carousel’s caved-in ceiling, the new cars lining the sidewalks along Ocean Avenue, it was hard to deny the boosters who tooled around town whistling “Glory Days.” The city seemed to be getting younger as it aged, at least as long as you didn’t notice the fractured blocks that the developers hadn’t touched, the way history kept piling up in the alleyways and abandoned lots. The way it seemed to me, the city’s development wasn’t erasing or retracting time; it was bending it into a spiral.

We passed beneath the Boulevard overpass. A flock of pigeons, purple-headed, greenwinged, milled about like an oil-slicked puddle. The overpass’s columns were clean, covered with a patchwork of beige paint blocks.

A semi rumbled across the overpass above us, sending
flakes of green paint snowing off the road’s underbelly.
Tom stood on top of an overturned shopping cart. We
hissed curling lines of black paint across the overpass’s
concrete stanchions, paint fumes mingling with exhaust
creeping through the bandana that covered my mouth
and nose. One more turn of the wrist and I closed the
loop. “Done.” I tripped over my gym bag and algebra stuffed
backpack backpedaling to get a better look at
our tags. “This stuff can’t be good to inhale.” Tom looked
up. “I hear it causes memory loss.” “Where’d you hear
that?” “I forget.”

“                                                                                                                ”
So, every time I bring my car into the shop, it’s a different thing.

“                                                                                                                ”
Flat tire, a blown belt, a jammed window motor and that’s just the

“                                                                                                                ”
past two months. I’m sick of . . . Hold up, let’s cross the street here.

Tom was a habitual jaywalker, always looking for the most direct route from wherever he was to wherever he was going. With the first lull in traffic, we broke up the street toward the far corner.

Palace Amusements hulked to our right like an old steamer anchored in new seas, its sides barnacled with bleached posters, brittle and peeled from the ocean breeze. Looming over us from the roofline was the Palace’s famous portrait of Tillie—its weird boy-man mascot, part clown, part huckster, hair parted and pomaded, blank eyes staring out over the beachfront. He’d seen and heard everything from the rooftop: from the hotel fires of the forties, to the new boardwalks in the fifties, to the shuttering of the Convention Hall in the eighties, smiling the whole time as if to keep from crying, the smeared and pocked freckles on his cheeks looking more like tears with each passing year.

“                                       ”
Whoa, hey, look at that.

One of the Palace’s metal-leaved fire exits hung open.

“                  ”
Let’s go in.

We snuck inside, drawing the door shut behind us. Sickly silver moonlight illuminated shallow rainwater puddles that had accumulated in the carpeted arcades, the linoleum-tiled snack bar, the gouge-ridden roller rink that together filled the Palace’s block-wide space. Fresh clouds of dust puffed up with each step as we wended through the rows and clusters of darkened rides, here a minicarousel frozen in time, each of its horses rearing and straining but getting nowhere, farther along a minitrain overgrown with vines that had forced their way through the floor.

Rows of video games and slot machines were covered with tarps. Piles of old bedding, cigarette-burned and water-stained,

I pulled the arm. Seven. Seven. Seven. Twenty silver plastic
coins poured out of the blackjack machine into my gray
paper cup, piling up on top of coils of red two-point
tickets. Five thousand more and that Nolan Ryan rookie
card was mine.

rested against the concession stand, surrounded by empty Sterno cans and charcoal ash, wet newspapers and rat droppings. Light slipped through the splits in the plywood that covered the main entrance. I crept close and peered out.

A crowd buzzed under the Palace’s bulbless marquee, their heads and shoulders limned by the streetlamps winking on in the gathering dark. They were knotted around an overturned garbage can where a dealer, fitted cap low, head bobbing, swirled three tent-bent cards in rhythm with a boombox thumping at his feet:

Rollin’ deep with the Jersey fam / Pullin’ sticks, doin’ vicks / Whippin’
Ay ay, scare money don’t make money. Whatchu got, money?

the fly Land / But that was just a dream that got shattered / In the
Which one, which one? Where you at?

The whoop of a police siren sent me jumping and the crowd scrambling for cover. In the mad dash, the trash can tipped and scattered the dealer’s china-patterned cards across the pavement like porcelain shards. The police horse-collared two members of the crowd and slammed them against the hood of the cruiser. Quick pat-downs, rooting through pockets. The boombox, upended in the rush, fired bass lines and drum kicks into the sidewalk. The sidewalk answered back with a muffled roar. The sounds of the siren echoed off the walls of the abandoned blocks behind us. Blue and red flashes pulsed on the plate glass windows on the far side of the street. Thin glassine Baggies shone white in the street light. The cops pocketed the Baggies and hustled their captives into the backseats of the squad cars. A siren burst and they were gone.

Yeah.
Let’s get outta here.

I inched the exit open and surveyed the street.

It’s safe.
“          ”

We continued on past the boarded-up entrance to the Asbury Lanes.

“                                                                                                               ”
Where was I? Right I’m sick of sinking all my money into that damn car.

“                                                                                                                ”
And I’m sick of Finnerty getting rich off it. How many years did we go to

“                                                                                                          ”
school together? And he can’t give me a break here and there on a

“                  ”
spark plug?

A right off Decatur and onto the Circuit, the long avenue that circled the city’s oceanfront blocks. Oceanside, all the obstructions that crowded in on the Boulevard—the towering billboards and fast-food signs, the rows of utility poles lined up like an armada’s worth of masts—fell away. Along the northern horizon, Lower Manhattan shone like a fluorescent bar graph, dwarfed, at least here, by our city’s own skyline: the Free Fall, the Sling Shot, the Ultimate Rush. Along the water’s edge, the boards’ booths lay heaped like paling embers. Faint sounds of washing waves mixed with the dull bumping of stereos from the line of cars loping up the Boulevard toward us.

* * *

The Tides Bar glowed at the northern edge of the boards. A cluster of silhouettes lounged on the ramp that wrapped around the outside of the bar. Near the door, other shadows sipped drinks against the still chilly ocean drafts in the drowsy early evening. Inside busier by a little, a light warm-up for the high season.

* * *

{Shortly after sitting down at the Tides, Cincy encounters Vera for the first time in the Tides Bar. Here's how that looks in the novel...}

{And here's how that same passage plays out...}