You Can't Go Back (But You Can Try)
Montauk, memories and returning to the scene of the crime
Last weekend I went to Montauk to visit my aunt and her boyfriend. It was the first time I’d been there in many years. When I was a little kid, I often went with my parents. Sometimes with both of them, sometimes with just my mother. We had a really good family friend, who I've since lost touch with, who was a surfer and a writer. And my opinion of him as a little girl was that he was the coolest person in the entire world. I thought it was unbelievably cool that he knew how to surf – it inspired me to attempt to learn to surf years later, which I did with little to no success. He has written a couple of cult books, which I also found unbelievably cool — I never knew anyone who had written cult books. He treated me like a niece, and it was always such a thrill to be around him, my parents and their friends.
Montauk always meant seeing this adopted uncle with colourful, sordid stories from many lives lived, including the repeated lore that he and my mother went to Morocco together to smuggle hash when she was far too young. He had a near-mystical status in my eyes. It helped that he was a surfer; he had beautiful dogs that were always with him, and he was funny. He was really, really funny.
As an only child, I often felt more comfortable in the company of adults, mostly because I was forced to spend so much time around them. My mother took me everywhere with her, which meant that I was often the only kid at the party. Beyond hanging out with adults, spending time by the beach meant talking to imaginary friends and splashing in the waves for hours on end with a boogie board. I was a true water baby. The boogie board was one of my many imaginary friends: I would talk to it as if it were a person, enjoying entire conversations with it. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an only child, I can’t think of anything more only child-y than being forced to make a piece of Styrofoam with a rubber lead into your companion.
Our family friend left Montauk, but I'm not in touch with him (and I stopped talking to boogie boards years ago). Whenever I go out to that part of the world, memories of those times flood my mind. But the Montauk I returned to is not the town I remember from childhood.
When I was a little girl, Montauk was not the coveted destination it has now become – it was a working-class town where surfers and artists lived. There was a sort of secret quality to it — referred to as “The End” because of its location on the easternmost tip of Long Island. You really had to make the effort to get there, so not everyone did. It was never as manicured, alluring or moneyed as the Hamptons. There was a wildness to it. There was something really special about it. The Montauk that I returned to still has that wild quality, but it also has a certain scent of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue: that of meatpacking district nightclubs transplanted onto the beach. And so. Much. Traffic.
We used to stay at a motel called the East Deck at Ditch Plains, which to me felt like heaven. It was just your run-of-the-mill motel, not particularly fancy or special, but it was steps away from one of the best surf breaks on the east coast. I learned upon my arrival to Montauk this time that, as is the way of the world, a billionaire had bought the East Deck in 2013 for $15 million and tried to turn it into a private beach club. We really are living in the end times when a storied surf spot becomes the private playground of billionaires. Those plans faced so much opposition from the local community that it’s now being developed into private homes instead. It’s not surprising the plans had to be scuppered in the face of so much opposition: a private beach club is so antithetical to the somewhat counterculture surfer worldview.
What I find so sad about the East Deck being lost to the annals of time and memory isn't that I liked the motel that much: it wasn't that nice. It's more than that. The memories I attached to that place have so much meaning: memories of excitement, entertaining stories from people my parents knew, the possibility of becoming an artist myself (because I saw other people doing it successfully) and of course, the beloved boogie board. It was the site of so much childhood fun, and now it’s gone.
The last time I stayed at the East Deck was when I was 15 years old with my mum and my very best friend at the time. We were in one of those intense teenage friendships where you want to spend every waking moment together. We spent hours discussing boys (in particular one boy), who we were outlandishly obsessed with and could somehow fill hours trying to decipher the inner workings of his mind (a futile task). I later lost this best friend due to a wild night around Christmas on St. Mark's place. My family was visiting New York from London for the holidays and, overexcited, I got really sick from drinking too much. She was angry and scared. I was too wild for her, and we lost touch after that. I remember sitting on the bed in our room at the East Deck. She did my makeup in preparation for us to hit the streets of Montauk and go to the one diner in town for BLTs. As she put mascara on me, she said:
“It’s amazing. Did you know your lower lashes are longer than some people’s main lashes?”
It was a relatively mundane compliment, but for an insecure 15-year-old who wasn't quite sure about her beauty and who didn’t think she was particularly pretty: those few words made me feel good. They stuck with me. It was the first time a peer pointed out something about me that I hadn’t seen myself, and it made me feel worthy and beautiful. Still now, 20 years later, I remember her words if I’m feeling down on myself. She probably doesn’t know it, but she helped shift my self-perception to a more loving place with those few words in that shabby surfer motel.
In the Montauk I knew you had to go to Easthampton to get a decent meal. When I was 8 years old, we returned to New York for the summer after our first year in Hong Kong and it was the cause of much excitement. We spent our time that summer visiting friends and family – and of course, we stopped at the East Deck. July 1995: the summer that Clueless came out. We went to get Mexican food on the main strip in Easthampton and then to a showing of Clueless at a classic cinema that’s still there. I'm not sure if the Mexican place has survived, but my memory of that restaurant is that it was the best Mexican food in the world, simply because I loved the feeling of being there so much. That night is imprinted in my mind forever. Amy Heckerling, Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash changed me and a generation of kids who were probably too young to watch it and didn’t fully understand the jokes. I will never forget how I felt when I sat down to watch that film: captivated from start to finish. I’d watch it 400 more times over the course of my life. The feeling I had when I walked out of that film onto the clean streets of Easthampton was exhilarating: it made me feel like I wanted to tell stories. I could tell that being able to do that was currency. I was obsessed. How could I do that and have a wardrobe like Cher Horowitz?
I wanted to be able to make people feel that good. I wanted to do that one day, I wanted to be able to evoke feelings like that and make people laugh. I wanted to have the opportunity to tell a story people became obsessed with. Of course, little eight-year-old me didn't know all of this at the time, but I just knew that the connection I felt to that movie was unlike any other I’d had before. It’s a feeling I’ve repeatedly returned to that sentiment, and it’s always when a good story hits me right in my soul.
I've seen New York change a lot over the years, as we all have. I've witnessed New York go from the gritty shitty New York everyone talks about with somewhat rose-tinted glasses to one that feels more polished and inaccessible to those of us who are from here. The gates are somewhat closed to people, at least in places like the Hamptons, and it’s much harder to gain access to that storied strip of Long Island in the Atlantic Ocean than it once was. It doesn't really matter that the shitty diner on the main drag in Montauk no longer exists. It’s (mostly) a good thing that you can get some delicious food for breakfast and a decent coffee in town. The expectation that places will remain the same is a fool’s errand, sometimes things change both for better and worse.
And yet, the memories that I have attached to that place loom largely in my mind for whatever reason—being there made me wish I could go back to how it once was. That surf town meant a lot to me. There are such distinct early memories. There’s the one with my parents sitting on the beach as I frolick with my sibling the boogie board. There’s the one with my friend showing me my beauty before I could see it in myself. There’s the one with the example of a real-life human who did what I wanted to do (write). And there’s the one with me being cracked open by a piece of art that I loved with such abandon it made me feel new and different (you can fight me if you don’t consider Clueless a classic). And there are many, many more.
In many ways returning to Montauk (and any place that I’m attached to from childhood) feels like a return to the scene of the crime. There’s so much there, it’s so loaded– and so much has changed both in my own life and in the world around me (RIP East Deck). But returning to the scene of the crime can also bear a lot of fruit: it can connect you to a part of yourself that wanted to do the thing that maybe you ended up not doing. It can connect you to the thing that maybe you still want to do. It can remind you that there were indeed good times. Sometimes it's too painful to revisit the scene of the crime. Sometimes it's too painful to revisit the places that meant so much to us in our childhood only to realize that now we're just adult humans moving through life, and life is not always how you thought it would be (or how you remember it). And sometimes, it evokes a bit of magic and helps you to recommit to whatever it is that made you feel so alive back then. It can be both. Here’s to nuance.