When I was 13 we took a real vacation. By a real vacation, I mean it was just mom, dad and us kids (no dogs or grandmas) and a real motel! We drove the 15 hours straight (with only one bathroom break – tell me about it) to Cape Cod because dad didn’t believe in sleep. Naturally, my parents weren’t used to the planning part, so we had no motel reservations (not like Cape Cod was a HUGE resort area and it wasn’t peak season being July and all). Now this was back in 1984, so, of course, there was no internet. There were, however, telephones and even AAA offices that could have been proper means of securing said reservations. My parents liked to fly by the seat of their pants, I guess.
Nonetheless, we arrived extremely tired, crabby and beyond hungry (mom didn’t even make radiator burritos this trip – dad must have gotten a raise or something). Since we only stopped once in 15 hours, we survived on beef jerky, cheese puffs, and old jelly beans mom had scrounged from our months-old Easter baskets. There may have been SPAM involved for the others, but I don’t do mystery meat, so I voluntarily acquired my vacation anorexia. Of course, since we had been cooped up for umpteen hours, we all had to use the facilities so bad, we could hardly stand up. What made it especially bad was the fact that we drove up to a zillion motels on Cape Cod at midnight with no reservations only to be told there was NO room at the inn. Also, we were turned away at many because they told us they didn’t allow children (smart people). I don’t know if my parents were trying to sell us (wouldn’t blame them at that point) or if they were really serious, but I was starting to feel that familiar sense of dread come over me: I thought we might just have to resort to camping after all! Of course, we didn’t have our camping gear with us, but I knew dad was a survivalist (he was in the Vietnam War, after all), and he could probably fashion a tent out of a couple of mom’s muumuus, some duct tape, and some of that nasty, shoe-leather beef jerky.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen because at one of the last places on the cape, we found a room. At this point, my parents were desperate, so they conveniently told them that it was just for two adults and no kids, never mind that us kids were running around outside causing a huge commotion by the office looking for a bush. Dumb motel cryptkeeper was either deaf and blind or just took extreme pity on my parents. We got to the room and found a double bed – one - in a 10 x 10 room. Nice. My first real motel stay and I had to sleep on the freakin’ floor! Not to mention, the bathroom had no door and the shower perpetually trickled. So this was the luxury I had been missing all these years? Pffft. At least I didn’t see any bugs (yet).
We were all so tired that night; we pretty much just fell asleep in a heap on the floor. When we awoke the next morning, we went down to the motel office for the “free continental breakfast.” Well, they either saw (or heard) us all coming and put the good shit away, or they got away with calling moldy bread in smelly Tupperware containers, next to a fire-hazard toaster from the 1950’s, and equally stale corn flakes in equally smelly containers, breakfast. Mom tried to convince me that the fur on the bread was alright to eat since that is what they make penicillin with – but I knew (after consulting my PDR) that the mold had to be tempered before it was actually not dangerous. So I scraped the fur off the bread, and then it wasn’t so bad with cranberry marmalade.
After breakfast, we headed straight across the road to the beach. Gypsies on the loose! We had our 20 million (slight exaggeration – but not much) blow-up water toys that we lugged down with us, found a perfect spot and settled in. My sister Dara and I could not wait to get in, so we kicked off our flip flops and ran to the shore only to stop dead short of going in – ummmmm, there were crabs EVERYWHERE running around like they owned the place. Now, this was my first experience with the ocean, so I was all like, “What the hell are they doing here?” Nobody thought to warn me about this? Mom said if she had told me, I would have complained the whole trip down (boy – does she know me or what). I found no solace in the fact that they were supposed to be there. One thing was for sure, I was NOT going to risk losing an appendage to one of those fuckers. They even looked mean – just daring me to stick my bare toe in so they could snap it off. Of course, I did exactly what mom had predicted – I plunked down on the beach towel and pouted vowing to make everybody miserable since I sure was (only fair). After about an hour of mom lecturing me about how to make the best of it and since I was the oldest, my sisters looked up to me and they would go in if I did and we didn’t drive over 1,000 miles to just sit and look at the ocean. She didn’t much like it when I retorted that she wasn’t going in so why should I (which BTW – she used the lame excuse that she had to watch my baby sister who was playing in the sand).
Anyhow, I finally devised a plan (give me long enough and I can find a way around anything). I realized that if I wore my flip flops AND got on an inner tube – those bastards couldn’t get to me! Brilliant! My one sister, Dara (AKA Slinky sis) followed close behind me (little brat couldn’t come up with her own brilliant ideas, thus she mooched mine – welcome to my world). We got situated in our inner tubes next to one another and relaxed. Ahhhhh – the ocean wasn’t so bad after all. Once we floated a little bit away from shore (and I felt my ass was safe from getting snapped by a crab or other clawed crustacean), it was pretty peaceful and serene. I laid back, shut my eyes and relaxed. Apparently Dara did as well and we both drifted off – both figuratively and literally. I don’t know how long we were asleep, but I woke up to find we were out to sea. I could just barely make out the shoreline in the distance, we were that far out. I’m sure you’re wondering, “Where the hell were your parents?” That, my friend, is a question my therapist and I have yet to get the answer to.
Now, calm, cool and collected is not my cup of tea in deadly situations, so, of course, I reacted like any loose cannon would – in absolute terror. Naturally, I started shrieking to the best of my ability (a great survival skill I had honed through the years). Holy shit, I had just seen the movie Jaws and I knew how this shit went down. From the great white’s perspective, I looked like a juicy seal kabob and I envisioned a plethora of them swirling beneath me like the aquatic sea vultures they have proven to be. My next immediate fear was being completely lost at sea and getting marooned on a deserted island (although, Gilligan’s Island was one of my favorite shows). Then I remembered I couldn’t swim well and my inner tube was starting to look a tad deflated (like my hopes). As my eyes darted around in fear, I spotted Slinky sis floating nearby who had just been rudely awaken by my ear-piecing shrillishness. I paddled my arms quickly over to her and in a tender, sisterly moment, made sure she was OK. That felt weird. So once I realized she was fine, The Blame Game ensued (our personal favorite). She blamed me for falling asleep and I blamed her for blaming me (and then she said that I would have to be ugly Mary Ann while she would get to be Ginger since she had the red hair – that REALLY pissed me off). It took all of about 10 seconds of us screaming and smacking at each other before we started wrestling – in our respective inner-tubes - on the ocean – a half-mile from shore. Needless to say, the ocean-wave wrestling ended almost as quickly as it started – by both of us falling into the sea. Imagine our surprise when we fell and our feet hit bottom and we could stand up! Yep – all that time we were that far from shore and the water was barely up to our waist (thank God for low tide)!
As we trudged back to shore, we found mom asleep, baby sis with about three pounds of sand (and other unknowns) in her diaper and dad at the Galley Grub and Pub. Besides being burnt like a couple of lobsters (and left with abandonment issues), we were no worse for the wear. The rest of the trip had just as many colorful memories such as the day we went whale watching and I regurgitated my lumberjack breakfast over the edge of the boat right into the mouth of a humpback (to which the whole boat ganged up on me for doing, but it really wasn’t like I planned that and did they REALLY want me to hurl it on deck)? Finally, I witnessed my first guy-guy and girl-girl make-out sessions all over the city (apparently, had my parents researched better, they would have found that Provincetown has one of the biggest concentrations of gay population) so they had a lot of questions coming from their precocious Catholic-school youngsters. I came away from that trip learning about the importance of sunscreen (I blame my wrinkles solely on that trip), how the ocean’s tide works and that people who like people of the same sex are just as pervy as the rest of us (really, people – get a room).
