Fast Food Fish Fatale

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

T.S. Eliot

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I met a mermaid on Long Island.

I can't think of a more prosaic place to meet a mermaid than the beach at Sunken Meadow State Park. The last thing that ever surprised me about that placid body of water was learning that the U.S. Navy used to sink German subs there during World War II. I think I read somewhere once that there was a proposal back in the 1950's to build a seawall between Connecticut and Montauk Point to create the world's largest artificial fresh water reservoir, but obviously that never went anywhere. No, if I were to set out to find a mermaid, it would be in Fiji or Bali or maybe on a cruise, or more likely on a lifeboat as a hallucination on the third day after running out of fresh water.

It was the middle of November, and the wind was whipping off the sound like rocket-propelled razor blades. I was freezing my ass off because I didn't have the right kind of coat. I didn't have the right kind of coat because my old coat didn't fit anymore and had gone to the thrift store five years before. I hadn't ever lived through more than a week of a Yankee winter, and I never had any intention of doing so if I could help it. The only reason I was there in the first place was because my grandmother died.

When I was kid I used to spend summers on Long Island with my grandparents. Those summers were full of firsts -- my first concert, my first beer, my first cigarette, my first joint, my first…first. My Aunt Judy was only two years older than me, so I got to tag along with her and her friends on their various exploits, adventures of greater dangers and rewards than any trouble I could find in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I had looked pretty hard. My slight North Carolina drawl was an attractive novelty, and my rendition of country dumb got me around the bases more than once.

If I could live any year again, over and over, it would be 1980. In 1980 I was fifteen years old and I felt like a grown, confident man. The cynicism of Watergate had opened the floodgates of decadence, and the coming of Ronald Reagan and his implicit promise to crash the party, turn off the music, flip on the lights and send everyone home was a whole summer away. AIDS was just a whisper in a dark corner. Thanks to Vietnam, the drinking age was a tender eighteeen, and an off-peak round trip to the city on the Long Island Rail Road was less than five bucks.

It was the last gasp of the American Golden Age, and I didn't even know it.

What was on my mind that day wasn't the lost glory of drinking and partying, but the more insidious type of loss, the kind that grabs you when you're not looking, chokes you and makes you shout "Uncle!" over and over until you're hoarse. It didn't mean much to me at the time, but during those Long Island summers, my grandmother and I would go to walk on the boardwalk at Sunken Meadow almost every day, before supper in the evenings when the toll gates were closed and the noisy people from the city had packed up their giant radios and 8-track boom boxes and returned to the outer boroughs.

We would talk about all sorts of things during those walks. She actively listened to whatever teenage drivel was coming out of my mouth, and she humored me by giving my words the gravitas that I thought they deserved. Even when I said something stupid, and I must have done that a lot, she was gentle when she offered an alternate point of view. It took a funeral to make me realize that as careless as those summers seemed at the time, they were steeped in a sagacity the likes of which I do not have and never will.

The boardwalk at Sunken Meadow had changed, but it hadn't changed very much as I saw it through the overlay of my memory. The tears I had thought were finished at the family plot in Pinelawn, shed in loss and anger as I mumbled my way through the Kaddish prayer I never really learned came to my eyes, intractable and unwelcome. They stung worse than the cold. The more they stung, the more I cried.

Even though the cold had chased off all but the hardiest of walkers, but I didn't want to put on an emotional display even for those few, so I took the steps down to the sand and started walking toward Callahan's Beach to the west. With no one around, I loosened what little restraint I had and cried in great gasping sobs, my cold, half-frozen tears making blurry prisms in my eyes thick enough to make it hard to see.

It was then I saw the mermaid.

I didn't notice her until I was fairly close, and when her image finally broke into my conscious mind I entertained and discarded multiple theories as to what she was. At first I thought she was a beached porpoise. Then I thought perhaps she was a dead seal. Then I concluded that she was a bloated corpse, some poor bastard who had run afoul of the type of business people who deal with their personnel issues by partially immersing them in concrete and dumping them off the most convenient pier.

My sobbing drew up short. I cleared the teary ice from my eyes with great childlike swabs on the backs of my hand.

It wasn't anything it should have been. It was a mermaid.

Other than being a creature with a human torso and cetaceous tail, she bore almost no resemblance to the make-believe variety. Her hair was a tangled mass of mousy brown. While her mane may have flowed in the water, it was a wet noodle on land. She wore no clothing or jewelry, no conch necklaces or seashell bracelets. There was nothing erotic about her bare body. She was as flat-chested as a boy, and her nipples were almost as pale as her unhealthy-looking white skin, rubbery and well-padded. Her fingers were blunt and webbed.

She loitered in the sand where the brown water lapped at it, her head propped listlessly in her right hand. She was looking at the steep hill of sand and soil that lay between her and the housing developments and shopping malls. The weak waves of salt water lapped over her gently, washing away a little sand from underneath her and making her wriggle from time to time in order to stay moored to the land.

My reaction was less than polished. After I was done gaping, I closed my jaw just to open it up again and gape some more.

She rolled her eyes in a gesture as human as any eye roll ever made by the most exasperated adolescent upon seeing her father in black socks and sandals.

"Close your trap. You're drawing flies," she said in a voice that reminded me of old movies.

"Are you real?" I asked and immediately regretted it for how stupid it sounded when I played it back in my head. I looked around for cameras. "This has got to be a put-on."

"Ugh!" she scoffed. "Another yokel."

I walked up to her as close as I dared, which wasn't all that close, and peered at where the human-looking part of her met the dolphin-looking part of her. There were no obvious seams, zippers, clumps of putty, or any other telltales of a mermaid costume. Unfortunately, the lack of evidence for a hidden camera-variety prank didn't really rule anything out, including the likelihood that I was having a psychotic episode. Hadn't Grandma told me about a great uncle locked in the looney bin somewhere? She may have mentioned it on that very beach.

"So you're a mermaid?" I said slowly.

"And you're Jacques Fucking Cousteau. Give the man a shrimp!"

"You're kind of sarcastic," I observed.

"Is there a gorilla preserve on this beach now?" she asked. "This is like talking to a sea monkey."

"Fuck you, bitch of the sea." It just popped out. I was in a unique state of mind, being awed and mourning and pissed off at the same time.

"That's better. Congratulations. You're off the list."

She slapped her tail against the water a few times. I sidestepped the worst of the spray.

"List?"

"Top ten dumbest splittails of all time."

"Splittails?"

"Homo sapiens, as opposed to the more evolved Homo ichthus."

"Wow. Thanks."

She looked back at the hill.

"So..." I began.

"Yeah?"

"What, uh, are you doing here?"

"Admiring my seashell collection. What are you doing here?"

"My grandmother died," I said.

"Propeller blade?" she asked sympathetically. "Tuna net?"

"Old age, really."

"I forgot that you guys do that."

"Do what?"

"Get old. Tommy used to talk about it a lot. Wrote about it. Have you read his stuff?"

"Have I read 'Tommy'? Did he have a last name?"

"I don't know. Should he have?"

"Depends."

She jerked her head up suddenly.

"Did you dump grandma's ashes in here or some shit? Have I been breathing human crumbs?" She looked around. "Ew!"

"No," I said quickly. "We used to come here a lot."

"How romantic."

"Just to walk and talk and stuff. So why are you here?"

"You know how you guys like to look at the ocean?"

I nodded.

"Same with us, only we like to look at land."

"Oh. Makes sense. But aren't you afraid of getting caught?"

"Caught? Doing what?"

"Existing."

"Not really."

"What if someone takes a picture?" I took my cell phone out of my pocket, expecting her to bolt into the deep water and disappear.

She wriggled into an ingénue pose instead. It was more disturbing than erotic.

"Do you really think you're the first splittail to point a camera at me? Snap away. You'd be amazed at the lengths people will go to keep their belief systems intact."

I put the phone back in my pocket, snapshot untaken.

Our conversation languished briefly in a verbal Bermuda Triangle.

"There is something you could do for me," the mermaid said after a few minutes.

"After you've been so nice, how could I refuse?"

"Don't be all jellyfishy."

I sighed. "What do you want?"

"Running shoes."

"Really?"

"No, stupid. I want a Happy Meal."

"What?"

"A Happy Meal. From McDonald's. A cheeseburger, no mustard, fries, and a vanilla milkshake. Whipped cream, no cherry."

"You're kidding."

"And get the toy for boys. The girl toys always suck."

"You know those come with apple slices now?" I asked.

"You can feed that shit to the seagulls. Just get the good stuff. I'll make it worth your while."

"How?"

She rolled over until she was facing the sound. Her hands went toward where her groin would be, if she had a groin.

"I don't think I want..."

She rolled over. "Don't want what?" she asked seductively.

"Well, uh, I uh," I stammered fluently.

She opened her hand. A dull coin had appeared on her oddly unlined palm.

"This is a Spanish piece of eight. It's worth a small fortune." I found out later that her version of a "small fortune" was extremely small; in fact, less than four hundred dollars.

"Where did that come from? Oh, God!"

"What do you say, kid?"

"Kid? I'm forty-two."

"I've burped up things that are older than you."

I let it go.

"Let me get this straight. You put a Spanish whatever in your...fish thing...and came here to wait for someone to come by and do a fast food run for you?"

"Yeah. What's your point?"

I shrugged.

"That was no mustard, right?"

When I left the beach to pick up the mermaid's food I almost didn't come back. By the time I got to Commack and the McDonald's drive-thru line I figured that I was on the butt-end of some elaborate hoax. The only way to preserve my dignity was to stop falling for it and be on my merry way before someone shoved a camera and a consent form in my face. But I didn't. I got her Happy Meal with all the trimmings and a mushroom and Swiss burger for myself. I went back to the beach, feeling like an idiot as I carried the stuff across the sand. When I got back to the spot where I had seen her, she was gone. It reminded me of the time when I was four that Leslie LaRoux invited me to swim in her pool. I was so excited. I went home and changed and when I got back to her house, she was gone, and I was standing there crestfallen in a green bathrobe and bathing suit and a swimming cap that always hurt like hell when my mother put it on me.

I looked on the beach and across the water, but she was nowhere to be seen. Even though no one was witness to my being stood up, my face burned hot enough to cook the egg that was all over it.

Before I could throw the food into the water or plop myself dejectedly on the dirty sand, she rocketed out of the water like a seal in a Sea World show and screamed bloody murder, scaring the crap out of me.

She laughed so hard that air was whistling out of her gills.

"You're like a scared little anemone. I thought you guys like this shit. You always clap when a dolphin does it," she said bitterly.

"You have something against dolphins?"

"You bet I do. They're the Uncle Toms of the ocean. Always buddying up with you guys. It's as repulsive as you are."

"Bite me, Starkist."

"Don't be a walrus," she chided. "Hand over the grub."

I watched her pack her Happy Meal away along with half of my mushroom & Swiss burger and French fries. When she was done, she took all of the cups and wrappers, smashed them into a ball and threw them over her shoulder into the sound. The toy was a little plastic motorcycle, and it followed the wrappers and cups into the surf.

"That's a crap toy," she commented.

"Aren't you polluting the ocean? You know, your home?"

"Have you seen the shit they pump into the water down there in Jersey?" she asked. "And you're worried about a little paper and plastic?"

"It's our planet," I countered.

"No, it's our planet," she snapped back.

"How many of you are there?" I asked.

"Let's just say if you wanted to count us you'd need all your fingers and those little eels at the end of your splittails."

"They're called 'toes.'"

"Gross."

"Are there really only that many of you?"

"Wouldn't you like to know."

Thankfully, my ass, cold and wet on the sand, began to lose feeling.

"Damn, those are good." She belched in reminiscence of her Happy Meal. "Definitely the apex of your civilization. When you finally kill each other off, leave the recipe for the special sauce in a safe place, will you? Best culinary invention in two thousand years. And I've been around, too. Pericles once made me a gyro platter. Maybe it was Aristophanes. Now there was a guy who knew his way around a set of scales."

"What do you usually eat?" I asked.

"We bake bran muffins. What do you think?"

I sighed.

"Well, thanks for supper, pal. Nice chatting with you." She pushed herself out into the water.

"Wait!"

She stopped.

"What?"

"That's it? You just eat your Happy Meal and swim away?"

"I paid for supper, you cheap bastard. If you think a schlepping a measly Happy Meal is going to get me to spawn with you, you're crazy. "

"No! God, no!"

"Don't be so sure. Once you go mermaid, it's how you'll want laid."

"I mean, don't you have anything to tell me? Some wisdom you'd like to impart?"

"Well, okay."

She rubbed her chin, grunted, and telegraphed other telltales of deep thought. I thought about Grandma and how much I wanted to leave the beach with one last piece of wisdom.

"Don't pee into the rising tide," she said at last.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"Will I see you again?"

"Do you live around here?"

"No. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina."

"Does it have a beach?"

"Not really, no."

"Then I probably won't be stopping by. Besides, you're no Tom Hanks, kid. Sorry about your grandma." She tossed me the coin unexpectedly, and naturally I fumbled the catch. By the time I recovered it she was gone. I still have it. I tell people I found it on the beach. It's more or less true.

I waited around for a while to make sure she wasn't just messing with me again, but the cold and the dusk and the pain in my splittail eels eventually drove me away.

Needless to say, I never told anyone about the mermaid. She was right about how people need to keep their views of the universe intact. They'd have locked me up.

Every time I think about my grandmother, and it happens a lot, the encounter with the mermaid noses its way into every memory. As I recall those walks on the boardwalk, I can almost feel her pacing us from the water, listening in and making fun.