Birdy

ladies pass by, we start pointing up to Billy Penn and they look up to see old Billy with his dong sticking up.
    One day we decide to bicycle across the bridge and into New Jersey. We get across and hang around Camden. We’re going to go right back that afternoon, but then we see a sign pointing to Atlantic City.
    We have our whole bankroll with us, money we made selling pigeons: twenty-three dollars. Usually we kept it in the hole where we used to keep the rope ladder, but we have it with us this 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