This story being submitted for the 2019 Summer Lovin contest. Your votes are appreciated.
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How did you spend YOUR summer vacation? I spent part of it at the beach during the Woodstock fiftieth anniversary celebrations that went on at the original site. Me and my good buddy Brent debated whether to head up to Bethel, New York or Ocean City, New Jersey and the latter won out.
Brent and me, Bryson, the narrator of this improbable tale. We were good buddies from childhood. We're '69ers, born in the same year as the iconic Woodstock rock festival. While some of the original attendees returned to that now almost sacred stretch of farmland, that special place from their youth, we decided to relive our own nostalgia.
Both divorced and, like so many of the single guys that come to the shore every summer, we went on the prowl for female companionship. We did this kind of thing as high school and college students, so we thought it might be fun to try again. Our problem, of course, was trying to interest young millennials in us, men old enough to be their dads. Comically absurd, right? We thought so too. We were on a lark, not some serious quest to find romance, although we didn't expect to turn it down if given the opportunity.
We paid for a four-night stay, and for the first two days, we didn't do anything but gawk at all the young poon, the teens and twenty-somethings, daring each other to make a move, to take advantage of the so-called "opportunity" that abounded.
"Opportunity for millennial guys," Brent said, "not for us."
"We can tell them we're twenty-five," I suggested, "that it's the premature gray that makes us look older."
In fact, Brent was the one with gray hair, fast turning white. My hair, other than barely visible flecks of gray, is dark brown. Well, at least we still have our hair. Not only that, we're both in great shape, in better shape than some of those chubby millennials we saw around us. Brent runs, I ride a bike, and we both lift weights. "But you still can't hide your age," one of my married friends had said after I told him about our upcoming trip. "You'll look ridiculous trying to pick up girls your daughter's age. What could you talk about, have in common?"
Good questions, and ones that didn't escape us when we planned this little caper. What could we talk about? That's assuming we'd even get past our opening line, whatever that might be: 'You're from Philadelphia, I bet.' Or, 'We were wondering how girls your age might vote in twenty-twenty.' Or, 'Are you sorry you weren't born early enough to attend Woodstock?' Brent liked that last one.
Why didn't we start with women around our age? Truth to tell, we didn't see many of them, and those we did were coupled up. That left the millennials, some of whom were hot as the sun beating down on the beach. Not that we needed that. No, we figured we'd have a better chance approaching "average" looking chicks or even slightly below average. Back in the day, back when Reagan sat in the Oval Office, we did okay. We eschewed the same old moldy, corny lines. 'What's your sign?' Not for us. We'd approach them about politics or cultural events, and did quite well with those that were dialed in. Quite well didn't mean we got laid, far from it. Quite well the way we defined it meant hours of stimulating talk and, if we got lucky, some serious necking, sometimes on the beach, other times in our car.
"We were young gen-Xers then, not divorced middle-age men," I said to Brent on day three.
"But in our minds, we still are those young gen-Xers," he responded.
"On some level you're right. But try convincing these girls of that."
We tramped down to the ocean and began to wade in. The water could've been warmer, especially for mid-August. But we got used to the low to mid-seventies water temp soon enough, bodysurfing alongside the boogieboarders and others, including a couple of cuties (they all looked cute from our age perspective) whose enthusiasm for riding the waves appeared to match our own. I made eye contact with the brunette in the red and white one-piece hopping on one foot to clear water from her ear. She smiled at me, then quickly turned away. Her blond friend in the white bikini noticed and grinned in a strange kind of way—as in 'these dudes are much too old for us.' But that was only my perception, perhaps gleaned from being self-conscious about the so-called generation gap.
The lifeguards didn't give us much room to maneuver, packing us in between green flags. I got where they were coming from. Still, with near-perfect waves such as these, people were bumping into one another. One wave sent me smacking into the brunette's head. "Sorry," I said when we surfaced in the shallows.
Nodding, she rubbed the water from her eyes. "Great waves, too many people," she said. She flashed me a warm smile, then turned and wadded back out, looking for the next ride. I watched her hands and legs churn through the water, noticed her hair, long enough to reach the middle of her back.
Moments later, we saw the girls heading out toward the beach. We watched, hoping to see where they were sitting, then lost sight of them as they melted into the crowd. Brent turned to me and said, "We'll find them, they can't be far."
"Yeah, but something tells me that being found by us doesn't top their priority list," I said.
Brent chuckled. "Hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained." His sarcastic tone said it all—he was no more optimistic than me.
Before returning to our beach spot, we decided to hunt them down. As Brent said, they couldn't be far. Even so, finding people among all those tourists lounging on their towels, chaise lounges and under their beach umbrellas wasn't easy. Not exactly your proverbial needle in a haystack, but no mean feat either. We trudged along the sand, on the hunt. "If nothing else, this gives our calves a good workout," I said.
"And you could use a good calve workout," Brent ripped. He was always teasing me about my smallish calves. No matter, because then I remind him of the disparity in our strength levels: he's never even been close to me in the power lifts.
We walked close to where the beach and boardwalk meet, when Brent made an abrupt stop and pointed. "There they are. Or at least I think it's them."
I gazed into the distance, using my hand as a sun visor. "Could be," I said, seeing two girls sitting on a blanket, applying sunscreen to themselves. "Their suits match what we saw in the ocean. I think you're right. Now what?"
Brent clicked his tongue, tsk, tsk. "Can you fucking believe this? Fifty-year old men discussing pick-up strategy. Are we pathetic or what?" He laughed.
He shot me a look of amused skepticism when I said we were really only nineteen. "Okay, twenty-five." His expression stayed frozen. "Okay, would you believe thirty?"
We had a good laugh while still scouting our "quarry." The blond lay on her stomach reading, while her friend sat up, arms splayed behind her, listening through ear buds. At that moment, we felt fifty going on nineteen, twenty-five or whatever age we were before becoming embroiled in the responsibilities of marriage and then parenthood. Perception's reality, as they say, and this was a weird, mixed-up reality, to say the least, feeling the way I did back in my free-wheeling days, yet still anchored to a middle-age mindset.
"The time is nigh," Brent announced. "We've got to start somewhere. Might as well be those two."
We argued who should be point man in this operation. "You exchanged some words with the brunette already," Brent reminded me, "so you should."
Fair enough. Brent kept a step behind me as we approached. That nervous-excited feeling swept over me, something I hadn't felt in years. I could picture us being shot down, even laughed at. But what the hell?
"So, we meet again," I said, standing on the edge of their blanket.
The blond looked up from her book, then looked at her friend who removed her ear buds, then looked at me. "Huh?"
Oh boy. "I smacked into you riding that wave. Just wanted to apologize."
The brunette nodded. "Oh. Right. But, um, you don't have to apologize. The lifeguards should move those flags further apart."
Brent looked down at the blond in the white bikini, she with the adorable butt and long legs. "Any good?" She blinked her pretty blue eyes, looked at him as if to say, 'what the hell are you talking about?' He craned his neck to see what she was reading. "The book, I mean."
She grinned. "Oh." She held it up, A Brief History of Time. "I like, just got it out of the library. Fascinating."
"Haven't read it but it's on my list," Brent said. I surmised that he was just feeding her a line.
My eyes scrutinized the brunette in the red and white one-piece, built like a long-distance swimmer, full-figured but solid. Big legs. Hazel eyes. Pretty smile. Alabaster white teeth. I asked what she'd been listening to. "A little of everything," she said. "From Spoon to Luke Combs. Even Vivaldi. I'm a girl of eclectic tastes when it comes to music."
I almost couldn't believe we'd made it this far. We'd established a beachhead, no pun intended. Time for introductions. "I'm Bryson and he's Brent," I said.
"Layla," the brunette said.
The blond raised her arm. "Alisha here." She sat up, looking us over. "Are you guys married?"
The girls traded giggles. Then Layla said, "She asks because when we were in Wildwood last summer, two older guys tried to pick us up. It was like, really hilarious, because about an hour into our conversation, their wives came down to the beach and caught them. It made quite a scene."
"No wives, not anymore," Brent revealed. "We're divorced."
Layla, sitting cross-legged, Indian style, pulled and twisted her long hair above her head, then tied it into a knot. "And now you're here...why? To meet young chicks like us?"
"They're going through a mid-life crisis," Alisha said. More giggles.
"Mid-life crises, hell," I insisted. "We're not a day over twenty-nine."
"In our minds, he means," Brent said.
