Born At The Right Time

(The Long Goodbye Series)

There’s a running commentary that goes on between we natives who came of age in the late Sixties here on The East End. It starts off with an easy banter that stirs tall tales of antics at our high school hangouts (The Marmador in East Hampton and Sip ‘N Soda in Southampton). That soon segways to the freewheeling discovery of local kids stumbling on the natural wonders and curiosities of a place that few of us expected would become untenable in our lifetimes.

If you grew up on The East End, and by that I mean Westhampton to Montauk (in those days the North Fork was truly for hayseeds other than a pocket of New York renegades that gathered way out in Orient), in the days of James Brown performing at The Saint James Hotel and the mod set drinking gin martini’s at Rigley’s Steak House and Herb McCarthy’s Bowden Square, you were, as the Paul Simon song says, born at the right time.

Ours was an East End peopled with farmers, fishermen, tradesfolk, housewives and a curious briny breed of creative types who sought refuge from the hard surfaced realities of city life in the weather worn fishing cottages of Accabonac Harbor and porch-fronted farm houses of Sagaponack’s potato fields.

Rag-topped VW bugs, faded fiats and rusting MGs mingled among the station wagons and pickup trucks on Main Street on any given Sunday when folks filed into The News Company and Silver’s to buy the Sunday papers. Broods of local kids gathered into booths at The Paradise or The Candy Kitchen for breakfast after morning mass. Brushed hair and shined shoes all around. Ours were wide spaces, empty barns and empty beaches. Uncluttered back roads.

There at the counter, in straight-legged jeans or baggy khaki’s, sat the train weary foot tapping, cigarette smoking beatnik. Recounting free verse incantations of Frank O’Hara and Alan Ginsberg in the scrawny flesh and wide-eyed innocence of a 1965 Bob Dylan. Artists sat elbow to elbow with the farmer and the fishermen at the counter anticipating winter. Pioneering types traded chores for studio space. In summer they shared rooms not houses.

It never crossed our minds, or for that matter I doubt it crossed the minds of the light-seeking 1960s city folk, content to bunk among potato bins and rent funky bungalows with hotplates, that the East End would one day morph into this current rendition of The Hamptons – where fishing shacks are bulldozed to make way for the water views of 6500 square-foot private homes of Wall Street traders. And folks spend more and more money to buffer themselves from one another.

The funny part is (if there is one), it was never about who owned what. It was about the empty beach, and the potato field, and the fishing shack. It was about living small and thinking big. And talking to the beatnik at the counter.