Twelfth Avenue Freeze Out
New Jersey shore houses had their own personalities, similar to the hotel in The Shining, but with more sand and far less blood in the hallway.
Each summer, the houses and locations changed. Even the friends changed. They moved in and out like drunken understudies in a play.
The only constant was the alcohol.
Everything else was up for grabs.
Not every shore house was built the same.
In the late seventies and early eighties, they were poorly built and sparsely furnished. They were meant to shelter people from the sun and the heat, and not the harsh, cold Jersey Shore winters.
One two-story house we stayed in didn’t have a ceiling. It had a roof, of course, but just rafters where a ceiling on the first floor should have been.
Some houses were so small (at times we had more than the legal occupancy limit) that finding a spot to sleep was first-come, first-served.
If you were too late, you slept on the porch (which happened more than once).
But then there was the house on Twelfth Avenue in Belmar.
It was the biggest house we had ever rented.
It was so big (how big was it?), that everyone had their own bedroom.
That was a novelty we never had before.
If there were people in the backyard, you couldn’t hear them from the porch.
Much like a mullet, it was business in the front and party in the back.
We had a variety of age groups and diverse friends that rented the house that summer. It was big enough to hold generational siblings.
Which meant we could have three separate groups having parties in the same house.
Backyard, back of the house, and front of the house, all at the same time.
Their only interaction were at the kegs of beer.
Having a shore house wasn’t just having parties.
A shore house allowed us to do some really stupid things.
I may not be able to tell you why, or the aftermath of, those stupid things, but here we go (alcohol and old age made their own memories).
On a sunny afternoon, one of the people in the house was doing pull-ups on the front porch of our house with his shirt off.
Did we have a pull-up bar on the front porch?
No, he was doing pull-ups by jumping up and grabbing the front edge of the porch’s eave.
Was he drunk when he did pull-ups on the front porch of the house with his shirt off?
The short answer was, I don’t know.
The realistic answer was:
Yes.
But it wasn’t illegal, right?
Well…
…apparently it was, since he was issued a ticket right then and there.
Over the years of drunken parties up and down the Jersey Shore, that was the only ticket ever issued to someone in the group.
Luckily, my record was clean for not doing drunken pull-ups off the eave of a house.
With such a large house, we often had visitors that, when sober, could find our house no problem.
However, after a night of drinking and visits to bars and other houses, those same guests might not make it home.
Since we never took headcount at the end of the night, we’d never notice if a friend didn’t make it back. It was the Jersey Shore, and there were some very good reasons not to make it back at night.
So it was no surprise when one of our guests staggered through the front door around breakfast time.
It was a surprise, though, why he stayed out all night.
He told us he was coming back from the bar, very drunk, went into the wrong house, and fell asleep on a random couch. The next morning, the people in the house found him and sent him on his way.
No muss, no fuss, which I guess happened more often than you’d think.
He then told us he couldn’t remember exactly which house he passed out in. We asked him why he cared. It wasn’t like he was bringing them a thank you for letting me crash on your couch cake.
Apparently, his keys were in their couch.
But keys were not the only thing lost associated with this house.
I was having trouble with a woman I was seeing, surprise, surprise, so mid-week I took a couple of days off and headed to the shore with a case of beer.
This was B.S., Before Scotch.
So while I commiserated with my beer, there was a knock on the back door of the house.
Remember I said you couldn’t hear anything if you were in one end of the house and something was happening on the other end?
Well, I answered the door. What I found were a couple of teenagers asking about the house and how to rent it.
What I didn’t hear were their friends, who rummaged through the front room and took money and a driver’s license from my wallet.
What an experience having shore houses over the years.
Whether we were crammed into a one-bedroom second-floor duplex, or a ceiling-less two-floor bungalow near the beach, or a house where everyone had their own room.
With a shore house, size didn’t matter.
