Birdy. William Wharton
time.
We start down back roads leading toward Atlantic City. Now we know what we’re doing, we start watching for cops. We want to sack out before it gets dark.
That night, we sleep in a tomato field. It’s summer but it’s cold. We each eat about ten tomatoes, with some bread and coke we bought at a store in Camden. In the morning, when we wake up we’re frozen. I begin to think of going back. Birdy wants to go on to the ocean; he’s never seen it. His folks are poorer than mine and they don’t have a car. Already I’m going to get the shit beat out of me for staying out all night so what the hell. What can they do anyway? Old Vittorio can just beat me up again; he can’t kill me.
That afternoon we get to Atlantic City. Birdy goes berserk when he sees the ocean. He likes everything about it. He likes the sound and he likes the smell; he likes the sea gulls. He runs up and down the beach at the edge of the water flapping his arms. Lucky it’s late afternoon; not many people to see him.
Then, Birdy takes off, running, flying, jumping into the water. He still has his clothes on. He gets knocked on his ass by the first wave. He’s dragged out by the undertow. I think he’s going to drown, but then he stands up soaking wet, laughing madly, and falls backwards into it just as another wave crashes over him. Any ordinary person would’ve been killed. He rolls around in the water thrashing and throwing himself into the waves. Some girls start to watch and laugh. Birdy doesn’t care.
When he comes out, he flops in the sand and rolls. He rolls and rolls till he rolls limp under the water and under the waves deep into the water again. He rolls back and forth in the surf like a log or a dead person. Finally, I have to drag him out. For Christ’s sake, it’s getting late, and now his clothes are all wet.
Birdy doesn’t care. We wheel our bikes along the boardwalk to Steel Pier. We have a great time buying as many hot dogs as we want and riding all the rides. We buy a two-pound box of saltwater taffy for dinner; and move on back up the beach to where it’s deserted. We find a good place with warm sand and bury ourselves in it.
I tell Birdy about his mother poisoning the blue bars. We decide not to go home and not to write where we are, either. Hell, my old lady’s always complaining about how much I eat; it’ll save her having to feed me. I’m sick of having the old man jump on me, too. Birdy says that, except for falling off the gas tank, swimming in the ocean is probably the closest thing to flying. Says he’s going to learn to swim.
Nobody ever learned to swim the way Birdy does. He doesn’t want to swim on top of the water like everybody else. He goes out under the waves and does what he calls ‘flying in water’. He holds his breath till you think he’s drowned and then comes up someplace where you aren’t expecting him at all like a porpoise or something. That’s when he starts all the crappy business with breath holding, too.
In the water I was free. By a small movement, I could go up and move in all directions without effort. But it was slower, thicker, darker. I could not stay. Every effort would not let me stay more than five minutes.
We have left the water. Air is man’s natural place. Even if we are forced to walk in the depths of it, we live in the air. We cannot go back. It is the age of mammals and birds.
One hundred billion birds, fifty for every man alive and nobody seems to notice. We live in the slime of an immensity and no one objects. What must our enslavement seem to the birds in the magnitude of their environment?
We decide to take off down the coast to Wildwood. That’s the place my family usually goes every summer. Atlantic City is bigger but Wildwood is more open, more natural.
We roll down on the bikes. We’re still looking out for cops. It’s terrific, free feeling, no house you have to go back to, nobody waiting for you to come in and eat; nothing to do but roll along and look at the scenery. I never knew before how much I was locked in by everything.
On the way down, we decide we’ll sleep on the beaches at night, spend the days there in the sunshine. We’ll lift whatever we need from the stores. There’re also lots of garbage cans behind the restaurants where we can find all the food we need. We’ll buy a couple old blankets at the Salvation Army and a pot to cook in under the boardwalk.
It works out exactly like that. Things hardly ever do. All we spend any money on after we get the blankets and the cooking pot is the rides at night and saltwater taffy. We get to be dedicated saltwater taffy addicts. We both like the kind with red or black stripes and a strong taste.
We don’t have any trouble with cops. There’re all kinds of people down on vacation, and so a couple strange kids are hardly noticed. At nights we’ve fixed a hidden nest down where the boardwalk is only about three feet higher than the sand. We tuck ourselves in there and hide our cooking pot in the sand during the day.
Birdy is going crazy with his swimming. All day long he practices holding his breath, even when he isn’t swimming. I’d be sitting there talking to him and I’d see his eyes are bulging and then he’d blow out his breath and say, ‘Two minutes, forty-five seconds.’ He asks me to count for him sometimes. The way he wants me to count is Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, and so on; really nuts. All day he’s in the water ‘flying’, coming up once in a great while and taking a deep breath. He’s found the local public library and is reading about whales and porpoises and dolphins. He’s a maniac. When Birdy gets started on something like that, there’s nothing you can do.
The worst thing of all is the sideshow freak called ‘Zimmy, the Human Fish’. Birdy spends a fortune watching this guy. This is a truly creepy set-up. Zimmy has both his legs chopped off just at the top, so he looks like an egg with a head and arms. He’s fat with gigantic lungs. He has a big sort of swimming pool with a glass front, like a goldfish bowl, and people look through the glass to watch him do his tricks. This guy is Birdy’s hero. You see, Zimmy can stay underwater without breathing, doing tricks down there, like smoking cigarettes, for as much as six minutes at a time.
I get tired of watching so I spend my time at the act just next to Zimmy. Two madmen drive motorcycles around the inside of a wooden bowl. They race each other. It’s wild. Then, there’s a woman who climbs into a motorcycle with a sidecar and they put a big hairy lion beside her. She revs up the motorcycle and spins around the inside of the bowl, hanging out sideways with that lion roaring all the way around. Christ, it’s amazing what people will do. There’s one young guy in the act who does acrobatics on this motorcycle – standing up with his hands on the handlebars while he’s hanging out sideways on that wooden wall. He has tremendous deltoids and forearms with tattoos all over them. He looks like he’d be one hell of a tough nut to pin.
Nights, Birdy and I ride the rides. Birdy chooses all the rides that throw you against the sky. There’s one where they start you spinning so you go faster and faster till you’re upside down, with nothing to hold you in your seat. Everybody screams except Birdy. He sits there with a big grin on his face. I do that once, that’s enough.
Another time I’m trying my strength on one of those things where you swing a sledgehammer and try to ring the bell. I ring it three times in a row and win a little Teddy bear. There are a couple cutee girls watching us and I give it to one of them. We get to talking. They’re from Lansdowne. Birdy stands around but he’s bored. I talk them into going on the roller coaster with us. One has red hair and nice beginning tits pushing out her sweater. The other is quieter, more the type for Birdy, if there is any type of girl for Birdy.
On the roller coaster, I hold her hand in her lap, tucked sort of between her legs. I can feel the slippery flesh under her dress.
I put my arm over her shoulder and she leans her head against me. While the car is clickety-clicking up for the downhill run, I look back at Birdy and his girl. He’s leaning over the edge looking down and she’s looking straight ahead, holding her own hand in her lap. She smiles at me; Birdy doesn’t notice. He could even be thinking of climbing out of the car and jumping. I wouldn’t put it past him.
After that, I talk them into going for a walk along the beach, and we walk over to where we have our nest. We get out the blankets and spread them. The girls are getting nervous. They’re here with their parents and have