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One day Bert, JD, and Sportface (aka Mo, Larry, and Curly) woke up at the beach and decided they wanted to drink a lot of beer.
But there was a problem. Sportface’s grandmother, who owned the house where they were staying, wanted the three strapping young college men to flip 27 mattresses in her beach house.
JD refused. “No way I’m flipping mattresses. I’m going to the beach.”
Beach vs. flipping mattresses?
The choice was obvious.
Bert and Sportface felt the same way as JD.
The three of them escaped to the beach without touching a mattress.
After laying their towels on the beach, six-foot-nine-inch Bert walked up the beach to the liquor store. Minutes later he returned carrying a case of beer in his hands walking along the shore in front of the lifeguard stand.
He wasn’t hiding the fact that he was carrying beer openly on the beach. It was an act of abject defiance and, in retrospect, really cool especially given he was the tallest guy on any beach in America that day.
Undeterred by his conspicuousness, Bert was bent on drinking Budweisers.
He brought the beers to our towels and we started drinking. Jim was aroused by the beer but just as much by the fact that he was sporting his fire engine red gym shorts with the words “Play Hard” inscribed along his right and left butt cheeks.
We drank all day and started to feel uninhibited. Later that day we went out to the Summer House in Rehoboth and drank some more.
We danced with the gals in sundresses, drank some Long Island Iced Teas, and ended up in Dewey Beach at some point at the Rusty Rudder then Bottle and Cork.
There we found live rock bands. Outdoors, we looked out the Rehoboth Bay, on the neon dance floor in the Rudder, fantasizing about strolling with a lady out to stare at the moonlight over the water.
A pickup scene this was.
For some of us.
Sportface was always being chased by the babes, being asked by them to dance. He’d do the bump with them on the dance floor. But Z, JD, and Bert struggled with the ladies.
“No way the babes love you more than me,” said JD. “I go to Auburn and those babes love me.”
“You ain’t Sammy Sportface,” said Sportface. “Chicks dig the Sportface.”
It all got fuzzy from there. Maybe there were moonlight walks, maybe there was romance, maybe we just went to Nicolas to down Nicabolis. Maybe we dove into the ocean.
These are all maybes because nights out at the beach laced with adult beverages always end up hazy and fraught with blotted-out images of oblivion.
Thematically, this day/night party marathon was remarkably similar to the day Bert, Rudy, and Sportface had in Rehoboth Beach. Somewhere soon after the lunch hour, we went out to drink Budweiser.
A few dozen Budweisers later, we were riding along Silver Lake in Rehoboth when one of us bragged he could swim faster across the lake than the other two. Bert careened his car in some ditch near the lake and the three of us sprinted into the water.
It started as a legitimate and spirited swimming race. But then Rudy stopped halfway across and stood up laughing.
Bert and I turned to see what he was doing and why he was laughing.
“I’m taking a dump,” said Rudy.
He seemed to enjoy dumping in the lake more than most of us enjoy dumping in our bathrooms. Something about getting back to his natural habitat, dropping a deuce, fill Rudy with uncontrollable joy.
This was around the same time Z somehow befriended a girl at the beach named Kim. For several hours we lost track of Z. He showed up hours later telling us he was in love with Kim.
We were skeptical and with good reason. Not one time since – 40 years later — has he ever mentioned Kim. Whatever Z felt that night, it wasn’t love.
On another occasion, Z and Bert drank a bevy of beers over the garage at midday at my grandmother’s beach house. They played a game called Red Black. It’s pretty simple. You get a deck of cards. Before one guy flips the card, the other guy guesses whether it will be red or black. If the guy is wrong, he has to chug a beer.
It doesn’t take long to get intoxicated playing Red Black.
The game devolved. Z passed out on a bed over the garage with beer cans scattered on his bed and all over the room like confetti.
As nude as anyone has ever been.
For some reason, my grandmother took a visit over the garage and found Larry – a guy she hardly knew – naked.
She didn’t like what she saw. She threw Larry and Bert out of the house and they drove up to tell me about the incident as I was working at the Summer House washing 10,000 dishes a day.
“We can’t stay at your house anymore,” they said. “Your grandmother kicked us out.”
So once I got off work we drove to Ocean City, MD’s boardwalk. The goal was to eat as much junk food as possible and then go on the scariest ride called the Zipper in which you get in a cage and get spun around non-stop while flying far into the sky on a gigantic pendulum.
I ate fries and hot dogs and pizza and a funnel cake. Then went for a whirl on the Zipper.
Around I went, flying all over, swinging up and down non-stop. The funnel cake/pizza/hot dog rumbled around in my stomach. My mind turned upside down in unison with the Zipper.
Bert went to get another case of beer. As I got off the ride, he handed me a Budweiser and I chugged it down.
“Sure beats flipping mattresses,” I said. “Bert let’s get another case of Budweiser’s. Time for some more Red Black.”
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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