Chapter 1
It was July 1985, and I was 21 years old. I was young and full of life. I had a great job that paid exceptionally well, in the high-tech Mecca of Research Triangle Park, or RTP, between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I had a beautiful, new girlfriend of three months, named Consuela, but we all called her Connie. I had an even newer Porsche 911, a condo in the hottest complex in Raleigh, and more money than I'd ever had before in my life.
Everything was perfect.
I had started working just over a year earlier, and in that first year, I hadn't taken a single day off for vacation. So, in July, my boss insisted that I take a week off.
"You're young!" he told me. "You should be out having fun. Look at me! Don't end up like me! Take that pretty girlfriend of yours out of town and have a blast."
So, that evening when I got home, I told my roommate, Mike, that I would take off a week at the end of the month.
"Can you keep an eye on things while I'm gone?" I asked.
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know exactly. Dave suggested I take Connie someplace fun, so I was thinking maybe Myrtle Beach. Get a hotel room on Ocean Boulevard, within walking distance of the Pavillion."
I should probably tell you a little bit about Myrtle Beach for those of you who weren't blessed to grow up in the Carolinas. In the late '70s and early '80s, Myrtle Beach was THE beach for fun between Daytona, Florida, and New York, hell, maybe the North Pole for that matter.
In North Carolina, all the beaches were mostly just mile after mile of empty white beaches, dotted with houses, fishing piers, and the occasional hotel. The most sophisticated area was Wrightsville Beach, but it was just a couple of blocks of shops and a big fishing pier. Atlantic Beach, Emerald Isle, Surf City were all great places to take the family or to enjoy the natural beauty of the ocean.
For teenagers, they were boring.
Myrtle Beach was different! It was electric. It was exciting. There was a "downtown" area, with a boardwalk called the Grand Strand, overlooking the ocean. You could grab an Orange Julius from a girl with herpes sores all over her mouth, or French Fries, from a place that pretty much only sold oily, thick french fries. There were artists, musicians, and booze aplenty.
I grew up in Fayetteville, NC, about a two-hour drive northwest of Myrtle Beach. As a teenager, anyone who was anyone would spend the summer at Myrtle Beach, and party, party, party. Then you would spend the first month of the new school year reliving their adventures with your friends. If you wanted to be popular, you had to be seen at least once at the Pavillion, the Grand Strand, in the Magic Attic, or if you had a fake ID (or were a cute girl), Mother Fletcher's.
The main attraction in downtown Myrtle Beach was the Pavillion, located on the water at 9th Avenue and Ocean Boulevard. It had first been built in the early 1900s, but after burning down a few times, they replaced it with a large, two-story concrete building sometime after the second world war. It housed a snack bar, pool and foosball tables, and the ubiquitous Eagles surf shops that carried pastel-colored t-shirts and Panama Jack sunglasses, which were all the rage.
Upstairs at the Pavillion was the famous dance club and music venue for teenagers called the Magic Attic. I saw many of my favorite rock bands, including Nantucket, PKM, and Black and Blue, whose major claim to fame was the song Hold on to 18, and that their guitar player Tommy Thayer replaced Ace Frehley in Kiss in 1994.
Across Ocean Boulevard was the Pavillion Amusement Park, featuring tons of rides, amusements, and roller coasters. Along Ocean Boulevard were covered walkways, benches to sit and watch people. It all had a theme park kind of feel to it. As teenagers, we spent a lot of time cruising the strand.
We would spend hours in our cars, preferably hatchbacks with the hatches up, blaring ACDC, or Molly Hatchet from our stereos cruising up and down Ocean Boulevard. Girls would jump in, ride a few blocks, drink a beer or take a few hits from a joint, then jump back out. I didn't have a hatchback, but my friends did.
Myrtle Beach had its own culture. There was a particular style of dancing called Shagging or doing the shag. If you wanted a date, you had to know how to shag. The first time I ever heard shagging referred to as something OTHER than dancing was in the Austin Powers movie. To me, and everyone in the Carolinas, there is, was and will only ever be, one kind of shagging, and it's done upright on a dancefloor.
You shagged to what we called Beach Music. Ok, this was not Jan and Dean or the Beach Boys. Sorry, all you west coasters. Beach Music was the sounds of the late 50s and early 60s R&B songs from bands like the Drifters, the Embers, Chairmen of the Board, and the Catalinas. I listened to Heavy Metal bands in my car, but when we had girls around, the Beach Music was on. You would have been surprised how quickly a girl would lose her bikini to the crooning sounds of Up On a Roof or Under the Boardwalk.
For nighttime entertainment, the preppie crowd went to a little club up the road called Bahama Joe's. I think I went once. It wasn't my scene. Rednecks went to the Bowery, where Alabama was the house band for a while. I much preferred the hot girls, flowing booze, and wet t-shirt contests at Mother Fletcher's, which was within easy walking distance of the Pavillion. They played loud, fun, contemporary music, but the reason people went there was simple: get drunk and find someone to fuck.
[I heard that in 2004 the local community suddenly became outraged at the lewd, drunken behavior of teenagers in wet t-shirts at Mother Fletcher's, closing the place down. Hell, Mother's was well-known for precisely that from long before my first time there in 1980 and well past my last in 1986. I think the real reason for its demise had more to do with tax revenue than the behavior of drunk girls showing their boobs.]
Back then, there wasn't a direct route from Fayetteville to Myrtle Beach. Most people drove down I-95 to Dillon, South Carolina, then took US 501 all the way to Myrtle Beach. You would turn right on 3rd Avenue S, and head all the way to Ocean Boulevard. That would drop you in the heart of Myrtle Beach, and you would cruise north along the beach and through the Pavillion.
I hated to do the same thing as everybody else. So, I would drive my 1972 Monte Carlo down the country backroads along the most convoluted course you could imagine, all to shave twenty minutes off the drive. I made that run so many times, I could do it in my sleep. I could probably do it right now, almost forty years later, assuming the roads are still there. I would haul ass on those big-banked, two-lane country roads. The cops were too busy out on the main highways ticketing all the preppies. They left a good-old-boy like me alone, doing 90 with my Thrush glasspack purring.
I remember one time, a bunch of us met at the high school on a Sunday morning to drive down, spend the day, and come back. I wanted this girl, named Gina, to drive down with me, but instead, she rode with this douchebag in his brand new Firebird Trans Am, with the t-tops like Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. We all left together and agreed to meet up at the parking lot of the Pavillion when we got there.
I waited in the parking lot for thirty minutes until the rest of them started showing up. I did everything I could to get Gina away from the preppie douchebag, the whole day, but he had something I didn't.
Money.
I came from a dirt poor family. We lived in a mobile home until the summer between 4th and 5th grades when the four of us moved into a 1200 square foot, 3-bedroom house. My parents never took us to Myrtle Beach as a kid. We went to the empty, natural North Carolina beaches, where we only had to pay for the gas there and back, and the fee to fish on the pier. My mom packed all the sandwiches and kool-aid, so we never ate out.
I never even heard of Myrtle Beach until 9th grade, when all the girls I had crushes on talked about it non-stop. I got a part-time job, worked my ass off, and saved up a thousand dollars. When I turned 16, I bought a used car, and that Sunday, my buddy Rick and I drove down to Myrtle Beach for the first time.
I went back every weekend and spent as much of my summer there as possible, as a beach bum. I worked odd jobs, here and there, to get enough money for a motel room, which I shared with two other guys, beer and food now and then. I became darkly tanned, and my hair sun-bleached blonde. I learned to surf and spent many nights sleeping on the beach. I was careful to avoid the cops, who would haul you in, call your parents, and blackmail them into sending them the money for your fine via Western Union.
I also became very familiar with the dark underbelly of Myrtle Beach. Drugs and prostitution were commonplace among the teenage drifters who lived there. They were mostly homeless. Many of them were runaways. During my summers, I was pretty much one of them, except I didn't do drugs and sell my body. I had been offered several times by older, mostly married women to fuck them for money. I fucked them and only once accepted the money, and only because she shoved in my pocket without me knowing it, while she sucked my cock.
That actually explains my earlier comment about the girl at Orange Julius with herpes sores. Her name was Tina, and she was a year younger than me. I met her early one summer on my first weekend down. She was cute as hell, and we hung out, got drunk, and had sex.
She was from Ohio. Her friend had stolen her suitcase, purse, and all her money. I felt sorry for her, so I let her hang out with me in my room for a few days. I thought she dug me, and we were tight, but I came home from my job, emptying trash cans on the beach, to find her fucking some dude in our room.
He looked up at me. He was an old dude, maybe thirty. Ok, to me, at the time, he seemed ancient. He snapped at me, "Wait your fucking turn, I paid for an hour, I'm getting an hour!"
I went outside and sat on the railing, drinking a beer while they finished fucking. I heard the bed banging on the wall and him grunting. I never heard Tina making any sounds, not like when we fucked. She was a screamer.
I heard what I assumed was him busting his nut. A couple of minutes later, the door opened, and he came out. "She's all yours," he said with a laugh. "Hope you don't mind sloppy thirds. I didn't use a condom. Neither did the n[racial slur deleted]r that was in there before me."
What can I say? It was South Carolina in 1980.
I waited a few more minutes before going in. Tina was in the bathroom; I could hear the shower running. I sat down calmly in one of the two beat-up chairs by the table where I kept my beer cooler. I grabbed another Old English 800 out of the ice and noticed more than half were missing.
