As the first tentacle rose out of the murky brown water of the bay and wrapped itself around the stage of the Jones Beach Amphitheater, Angie DelVecchio was vividly imagining the death of her boyfriend, Alan, by way of strangulation. Her eyes twinkled, both from the nuclear glow of the creature’s throbbing flesh and from her delight in the image of Alan’s windpipe collapsing under her perfectly manicured hands. Coincidentally, her cousin Bobby was also imagining the death of his boyfriend (he had just decided that he was, really, his boyfriend) Paul, but a gentle, sentimental, dying in his sleep after a long life together kind of death. Paul was wondering what Bobby would do if he reached over and held Bobby’s hand. Alan was imagining someone breaking into his car in the stadium parking lot. All of them, and most of the rest of the audience at the Rowdi Krowd “Greatest Hits Toür 1999” concert, figured the monster was another elaborate element of the stage show, a fitting follow-up to the fireworks. It wasn’t until the third tentacle snapped the spine of drummer Dru Blud that the cheers turned to screams.
#
No one would ever say that Angie didn’t work hard, just that she didn’t work hard at the right things. She a woman who everyone still thought of as a girl - a woman who didn’t just have perfect hair and makeup, but who knew the subtle difference between makeup for the club, for the office, and for mass; and a girl who knew what she shouldn’t wear to the office or to mass but wore it anyway and got away with it. She was a woman who was well-liked, professional, and efficient as the weekday secretary at the Clean Teeth Club Dentistry office, but she was also a girl who was so efficient at her job that she could spend seemingly half the day flipping through all the gossip rags and lifestyle magazines delivered to the waiting room and the other half on her elaborate schemes to win every and any radio call-in contest in the tri-state area.
What Angie loved most, more than she loved any of her romantic conquests, maybe even more than she loved her favorite cousin Bobby, was winning things she didn’t need and didn’t want. About a year before she met Alan, a year before Rowdi Krowd announced on TRL that they would be making one last North American tour (they had no idea how final it would be), she had called into one of those radio contests on a whim and won two VIP tickets to see the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff Live at Madison Square Garden. Some wire crossed in her brain that day, and there was no going back. While Angie’s boss, Dr. Baumgartner, regularly encouraged her to sign up for this professional development class or that at the local branch of Nassau Community College (he really saw the potential in her), Angie blew a few months of savings that might have gone towards tuition on filling one of the drawers of the reception desk at the Clean Teeth Club with ten little phones, the ones the cops and drug dealers called burners, the ones you could top up with calling cards from the 7-11 without even registering an account. Each one was loaded up with all the local stations on speed dial and just enough prepaid minutes to do her business. When she settled in every morning with her coffee, she would arrange them out on her desk and begin the routine. She knew when every talk show had its call-ins, and she would rotate around the radio dial all morning. She could call in on all ten phones at once by devoting one finger to each phone.
She began to win often enough to become a bit of a local celebrity and to inspire several of the radio hosts to consult with their legal departments about whether there was some way they could block her from entering every damn contest. There wasn’t, and Angie racked up a prize list of makeovers, appliances, and shopping sprees. More than anything she enjoyed the concert tickets. She had seen Yes, The Spice Girls, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, and even the New York Philharmonic with her winnings. The latter had been a real red letter affair - she used one of her shopping spree prizes to buy herself a little black dress as well as a beautiful silk shirt for Bobby, and they had made a whole day of trekking into the city to Carnegie Hall. They drank martinis at a wood-paneled bar on Park Avenue after the show, and Angie told Bobby she felt like Audrey Hepburn. He told her he felt like George Michael in his red silk shirt, and while she knew what that meant, she didn’t say anything about it.
Angie was also a girl (or woman) who made all her ex-boyfriends miserable in a tangible, hormonal way that made them want to punch a wall or kick a door (and many did). She was a girl who laughed over one-dollar margaritas with her girlfriends when one of them told her how Al Maggio came into the Broadway Diner looking like shit after she had dumped him for his cousin. And there had been an endless leapfrog from this cousin to that friend to that old teammate from the varsity days until she had run through most of the eligible bachelors off the Hicksville stop of the Long Island Railroad. Angie’s mother, a devout Catholic, breathed a sigh of relief when things had seemed to stick with Alan, despite him being older, in spite of him being Irish, in spite of him being a divorcé, in spite of him robbing her of that long-held fantasy of the white wedding officiated by Father Bart, who had also baptized Angie, heard her first confession, placed that first Eucharist on her tongue, and confirmed her with the saint’s name of Catherine only a decade before.
Even the way that Angie met Alan, or rather the way she told the story, twisted him right into her well-cultivated smokescreen of misguided achievement and emotional terrorism. In Angie’s telling, she had gone with the margarita girlfriends into the city just to dance, just for a girl’s night, and she couldn’t help but lock eyes with Alan across the smokey crowd. In truth, the whole thing had been as calculated as Babe Ruth calling out his home run against the Cubs in 1932. She knew that her latest ex, Mike, would be there for his cousin Moe’s birthday, and she bought a brand new red leather miniskirt to stick a finger in his wound. She didn’t even take out money from the ATM for the train fare and that first drink. She was so determined to have another man pay her way in front of sad, boring Mike that she didn’t want to jinx it by carrying too much cash. She would later tell everyone that she knew that it was meant to be because Billy Joel’s “I Don’t Want to Be Alone Anymore” was playing as Alan crossed the room to speak to her. In fact, it was “Are You Jimmy Ray?”
“Are you dangerous?” asked the chorus of the soon-to-be-forgotten song. Angie always felt dangerous.
Anyone with a pulse would have been enough to make Mike jealous, but to her delight, Alan was something special. He was a solid six feet, dressed in the uniform of a Wall Street day trader: a limp, sweat-stained Winchester shirt, black pants that were half a size too small from too many rushed lunches of dollar slices, and that rose to reveal the cheap leather shoes he’d paid a man a dollar to shine on his lunch break, the real gold cufflinks he had saved for two months to buy, his blonde hair slicked back with half a bottle of LA Looks, the alcoholic sting of Aqua Velva on the nape of his neck. To a Manhattan girl, he looked like any other schmuck walking into the club off of Spring Street, imitating men with more money and less sense. To Angie (and more importantly, to Mike) he looked like a man of means. He bought her a vodka cranberry, and then another, and he even paid for the top shelf. To the surprise of all her girlfriends, she was too captivated by this new conquest to notice a bouncer ousting Mike after he threw an empty Heineken bottle at a wall. She gave Alan her number, her real number, the one for the phone she actually carried, the one with the phone bill that came to her parent’s house on Boblee Lane. He called her the next morning. It was love. Or something.
With the arrival of Alan in Angie’s life, Bobby was ousted from the concert-going roster, which he resented but understood. Bobby had his own shit going on, anyway. He was finally making some headway as a heel in the Long Island wrestling circuit as Bubba Bash. He was bringing home enough cash from his fights to think about quitting his day job at the body shop, and a promoter in the city had called him up to some fights in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where he could fill in for an old-timer who wanted more time with his family and his remaining vertebrae. It was at one of these shows that he met Paul. Six months later, Bobby was still having trouble saying what Paul was.
At the wrestling matches, Paul was a fan. At the dive bar downstairs from Paul’s Chelsea apartment, he was a friend. Upstairs in that apartment, Paul was his lover. Paul understood the rules of the kayfabe as well as he understood that some people weren’t lucky enough to have parents who had seen Philadelphia and thought it was about time that people talked about these things. Paul could be all these people at once in the same way that Bobby could be the brute in the ring who broke Chet Beef’s nose, the Yankees fan who couldn’t stop complaining about Steinbrenner over their beers, and the great kisser on Paul’s lumpy, curb alert couch all in one night. But as accommodating as Paul could be, Bobby knew that he needed to figure it out soon. Missing out on tickets to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers was the least of his worries.
#
The only Rowdi Krowd song that Angie could name was their iconic hit, “Grind On Ur Love,” but she called into the 8 AM morning zoo show on Hot 97 and then again to the 9 AM show on Z100 all the same until she won not two but four VIP seats to their tour blow out at Jones Beach. She liked Jones Beach, with or without a concert. She had fond memories of sneaking out of the house in a cocktail napkin of a bikini that would have made her mother scream and crisping herself golden on the sand every summer. She fantasized about what she would wear and how she would do her hair all morning, and she called up Bobby on her lunch break to offer him two of the tickets.
“You should bring someone,” she said. “I never see you with anyone.”
“You know how it is,” he replied.
She told him he should at least call up a friend, maybe one of the guys from the wrestling circuit. Bobby said he’d think of someone. There had been a time when Angie would have invited one of the margarita girlfriends - all of them were a little bit in love with Bobby, who was polite and handsome and strong and never drank too much unless the Yankees were down, but while Angie was self-obsessed, she wasn’t oblivious. They made plans to meet in the parking lot of the amphitheater with enough time to tailgate before the show. She called Alan and told her to pick her up at five.
Bobby met Paul at the Freeport station of the Long Island Railroad, and together they picked up a six-pack and rode the N88 bus to the last stop along the line. As they walked around the curve of the bay to the amphitheater, Bobby felt like the whole world was glowing around him, like there was some cosmic hum in his chest that he couldn’t deny. He would realize later as an EMT handed out doses of iodine to the survivors huddled around the police barracks that only some of this feeling was his love for Paul - the rest was the radiation vibrating off of the mutant thing that had crawled up from the sea floor and into the bay after a long-lost Cold War submarine had finally rusted out its hull and disturbed everything within a twenty-mile radius with the ooze of human ingenuity.
The creature wanted to die in peace, and the shielded waters of the bay were warmer and calmer than its home in the deep ocean. It felt - as much as it could feel or understand anything with its gelatinous nervous system - a sense of awe at seeing the glow of the sun through the shallow water for the first time in its hundreds, maybe thousand years of life. The light sparkled along the surface of the water, and Bobby was awestruck too. He felt like his intestines might burst out of his body and wrap themselves around every inch of Paul. He knew that even if they hadn’t said it, Paul was his boyfriend. Paul felt the same.
They met Angie and Alan at Alan’s Porsche. Alan could barely afford the monthly payments, and he winced as Angie hopped onto the hood and posed like the girl in the video for “Grind On Ur Luv” as a group of nearby tailgaters blasted the song. He winced again as she launched herself from the hood and swung her arms over Bobby’s shoulder, smearing his right cheek with cherry red lipstick.
“This is Bobby, you know how I talk about Bobby,” she said as she fished a beer can out of the plastic bag hanging off of Bobby’s wrist and sprayed foam all over the car. “And who’s this?” she asked as she noticed Paul.
“I’m Paul,” he said and held out his hand to shake. Instead, Angie handed him the open can and smeared her lips across his right cheek too, planting her waxy, indirect kiss between his body and Bobby’s. All three men blushed.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” she said. She passed another can to Alan before opening a third for herself.
She relished in the men’s painful silence while they all drank their warm beers. While Bobby looked like every boy she knew in Hicksville and Alan was a known archetype of capitalism, Paul was an interesting unknown. His hair was tidy, his face clean-shaven, his clothes were well-fitted but bland. He smelled like Vetiver. His black Converse sneakers were somehow both entirely appropriate for a hair metal show at the beach and yet slightly off in some indescribable way. She couldn’t put her finger on any of it, which she took to mean that Paul was doing his best to be inscrutable. He told her he had heard a lot about her. She said she hoped he’d heard good things, and he laughed. She liked him, and she could tell that Alan didn’t from the way his whole body seemed to go rigid like a fresh corpse. She could tell that Alan didn’t like Bobby either.
They split the last two beers, one between Angie and Alan, and one between Bobby and Paul. Bobby had shared many beers before with friends in their parents’ garages and behind convenience stores, but in front of Angie and Alan, he found himself blushing again as he watched Paul’s lips curl around the same spot on the can that he had just touched with his own.
“You’re such a pain in the ass,” said Angie as Alan pulled a lock out from under the driver’s seat and attached it to the Porsche’s steering wheel. “Who do you think is going to mess with your car tonight? The seagulls? Just finish this beer so we can go inside.” She took one last swig and handed him the can. He drank it dutifully.
Angie flashed her tickets as they approached the amphitheater, and an usher escorted them to a side entrance that led directly to the VIP box seats. They sat down in the dead center of the auditorium, only a dozen or so rows back from the stage. She dug her elbow into Alan’s side as a vendor walked by. He pulled out his wallet and paid a small fortune for four more beers, only slightly more chilled than the ones in the parking lot. Angie whistled between two fingers as a shirtless roadie walked across the stage. Bobby rolled his eyes, and Paul laughed. Alan said nothing, which somehow made Angie more annoyed than if he had complained or said anything at all.
After an opening act who would have faded into the detritus of rock history had they not survived the event and given an exclusive interview to Wolf Blitzer a week later, Rowdi Krowd burst onto the stage between columns of real flames. Dru Blud pranced along the edge of the stage, beckoning women to lift their shirts and reveal their breasts like some satyr who had traveled through time and space from the ancient forests of Crete to the shores of Long Island. The women obliged and screamed, and threw their bras. He held one between his teeth as he skipped to his drum kit and began to beat out their first song.
Anyone who had been near a radio in the past ten years knew the chorus to “Grind On Ur Love,” and the very walls of the amphitheater began to sway to the beat as the band launched into their biggest hit. The thud and thump of thousands of stomping feet radiated out through the cement and steel, across the sand, and sent vibrations across the water. The creature, already suffering from the unfathomable pain of every cell in its body tearing
itself apart from radiation, just wanting to die quietly in the warm, calm waters of the bay, felt the music like sand rubbed across a sunburn. It stirred from its resting place.
“Jesus, Angie,” said Alan as she screamed with delight. She elbowed him again. Every man but Bobby had to ruin everything, eventually. Paul caught her eye and shrugged. The band surged through the chorus.
After the final verse, Dru Blud let out a primal howl and launched into a drum solo, the kind of solo that had made him a sex icon a decade ago, the kind of solo that still led women to throw themselves at him, even after years of partying and drugs had chewed his body up like an old stick of gum. The whole crowd went wild with the spell of it, even Paul, who only came because he wanted more time with Bobby, even Alan, who just wanted to go home. It was the kind of solo that made you think about your life, think about what you were going to do with your time on earth. It made Angie realize she didn’t want to date anyone, and maybe she would sign up for those professional development classes, and she should just invite Bobby to these things because he always made her happy and what else did she care if she had a nice time and a few beers? It made Bobby realize he wanted Paul, really wanted him, not just wanted him hidden on the couch in the Chelsea apartment, and he would deal with whatever that meant. It made the creature want the whole thing to end, everything to do with these people who did nothing but make noise and filth and pain in the world.
#
There’s a kind of story where the monster attacks the stadium, and Paul dies in Bobby’s meaty arms, and Bobby regrets that he never said I love you, and Alan is redeemed by saving Angie even though his only sin was being mediocre and dating someone as insatiable as her to begin with. Everyone cries at the end, and we all feel sorry for Bobby, and we wonder if Angie will marry Alan in the end or if she will go off to other adventures. We all feel bad about how we are killing the earth with our wars and our pollution, and we remember our favorite rock hits from the nineties.
This is not what happened.
Angie Delvecchio didn’t need anyone to save her, and Bobby didn’t need to try and save Paul, and even though Alan was useless it didn’t matter. As Dru Blud’s intestines sprayed out across the pit and all the braless women cried and shoved each other to the ground, the four of them slipped out the separate VIP entrance in moments. They all ran with pure adrenaline to Alan’s car, where he fought with the damn steering wheel lock for an eternity because his hands were shaking too much from the shock.
Bobby and Paul smashed into the near-vestigial back seats of the stupid Porsche, and Angie leaped into the passenger side and screamed at Alan to drive the fucking car, and he did until he spun into a ditch on the edge of the traffic circle around the water tower as police vehicles swarmed the highway. They watched with gaping mouths as a helicopter flew overhead and another throbbing tentacle plucked it from the air and dunked it in the water over and over like a baby with a bath toy.
Angie screamed, “Jesus Christ Jesus Fucking Christ,” over and over until Bobby put his hands on her shoulders, and she stopped screaming, but they could still hear all the screaming from the amphitheater, and Angie pounded her fist on the dashboard.
Paul put both hands on either side of Bobby’s head, and kissed him, and they both jumped out of the back seat while Alan kept trying to reverse out of the ditch, and Alan yelled, “Come The Fuck On,” and thought of all the payments he still had to make on the damn car. Bobby and Paul both pushed on the front bumper until the wheels stopped spinning and the car hopped back onto the road. They got back in, and they all sped off down the parkway and stopped when they got to the police barracks along the beach because Alan was shaking too much to drive anymore and he didn’t know what else to do. The barracks were strong and made to withstand hurricanes, and they ran inside as everyone inside was running out. They found a corner to sit and sat and cried.
Angie paid twenty cents to text her mother to say, “I am safe” and then her Aunt Teresa to say that Bobby was safe too, and then Paul called his parents in Cincinnati because people still remembered phone numbers in those days, and then Alan called his ex-wife. They heard an explosion, and they cried some more, and there was a blur of ambulances and EMTs and the little pen lights in their eyes to check for concussions and the interviews on the ten o’clock news.
#
Angie and Alan dated for another three months, just up to Thanksgiving. They had a final, petty fight over where they would share the holiday dinner, and Angie decided she just couldn’t handle it anymore, even if they had been through so much together. She went out for a drink with Bobby, and Bobby admitted that he always thought that Alan was a prick. Alan married his assistant, and they had two children.
Bobby brought Paul to the DelVecchio Thanksgiving on Long Island, and his father wasn’t too much of an asshole about it. They dated for another year until Bobby got the chance to tour with the World Wrestling Federation, and the traveling and distance was too much for them both. They stayed in touch, and when Bobby decided to retire from wrestling and use his savings to open his own body shop, they reconnected.
Angie did take those professional classes after all. She wrote a book about that day at Jones Beach, and then she wrote another book about all the people who came to her with all their tales of all the horrible things they had survived. She had a radio show and then a podcast, and when she talked to these survivors most people said she did it with grace and kindness albeit crudely. She clipped out the edition of the New York Magazine “Approval Matrix” that described her show as maximum lowbrow and exactly halfway between despicable and brilliant.
They all got cancer, of course, but who doesn’t these days if you live long enough.
The creature was put out of its misery, and military scientists studied it, and they didn’t learn anything that changed anything about the world.
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