If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go by Judy Chicurel Read Free Book Online Page B

thought made my insides twist, as though my heart was lined with bruises.
    I looked back at Bennie for a long minute. Then I put my arms around his neck and kissed him, full on the lips. His eyes widened and then he laughed. “Man, this night’s just getting better and better,” he said. He held out his hand and turned toward the Comanche Beach entrance. I looked back one last time before twining Bennie’s outstretched fingers with my own. We crossed the entrance threshold and walked toward the abandoned lifeguard chair down by the water, the sand wet and cool as crushed flowers beneath my feet.

FOUR
    adventures in zombie land
    E lephant Beach was sinking; it had been for years. In 1928, Dolphus Rugby, the millionaire, commissioned circus elephants to build the boardwalk for Sally Stewart, his child bride, who wanted to live by the ocean. He built her Moonlight Manor, a sparkling palace with one hundred rooms facing the water; even the servants’ quarters had seaside views. There were ballrooms for dining and dancing and a rooftop garden with an orchestra, and at night, boats filled with liquor would pull up to the shoreline, and soon the town was filled with bootleggers and film stars and Broadway producers who came down from the city to savor the sea air. Before dinner, everyone would promenade the boardwalk, dressed in Mainbocher and Schiaparelli, sipping from their sterling silver flasks as they gazed restively at the sunset, waiting for the night to begin. Those were the days when the grand old hotels like the Prince Albert and the Sea Lion were filled to capacity. Florenz Ziegfeld and his Folly girls would come down after their show for a late supper; Fanny Brice held dinner parties in her rented mansion on the bay. Cab Calloway, the famed bandleader, built a house in the Dunes, where all therich people lived, and each morning tipped the boy who delivered his newspapers five dollars for bringing them right up to his front door.
    Nobody promenaded the boardwalk anymore because you could trip on a rotting board and break your leg during an after-dinner stroll. The wonderful old hotels were now crumbling castles, left to dust after the film stars and bootleggers discovered air travel. Elephant Beach might have been only fifty-two minutes from the city by car or rail, but if you could fly to Santa Barbara or Cuba or the French Riviera, why would you spend your summers here? The hotels and the great mansions by the bay, with their glorious floor-to-ceiling windows broken and boarded up, went on the market at severely reduced prices. But the taxes were monstrous and nobody could afford the upkeep of so many rooms; they were taken over by squatters or converted into housing for welfare recipients.
    After everyone deserted Elephant Beach, stores went out of business and the once prosperous Buoy Boulevard became shabby and mean. People blamed the Negroes who’d come up from Georgia and Alabama to work as chambermaids and butlers and drivers at the hotels and now had nothing to do but loaf in front of Brown’s Liquor Store, right across the street from the railroad station. People said it didn’t look good, black faces the first thing you saw when coming off the train or driving in from the Meadowbrook Parkway, and the town’s seedy glamour faded even further.
    Just when we were running out of people to blame for Elephant Beach’s slide from a playland paradise to just another seaside town on the skids, the County Asylum let all the patients out for some kind of experiment in community living and it was decided that the abandoned hotels on the boardwalk would make wonderful communal residencies. There would be on-site psychiatrists and doctors and medical workers, and medicine and jobs, and families who lived nearby to help take care of the mental patients and streamline them back into society. But whoever was in charge of the experiment dumped them in Elephant Beach before figuring out schedules and staffing and meals