by John Glynn
House Captain Benefits
Since captain’s names are on the lease and are liable, and did all the work to put the house together, they will get the following additional benefits:
Extra weekends
Top room picks
Noise Violation
Anyone present at the house and their guests will split any cost incurred.
While we’re not there to babysit each other, everyone should make a reasonable effort to keep other housemates in line if their behavior becomes a disruption to roommates or neighbors.
NO Fighting
Absolutely no physical aggression or violence is permitted. Zero Tolerance, immediate eviction.
No belligerence toward other housemates. If there are any problems or tension, bring it up with a house captain.
House Budget
The house budget was constructed using our experience from last summer. The house captains have included a sizeable safety buffer and budgeted generously. Should house costs exceed the planned budget and collected guest fees, all housemates will be responsible for splitting the additional cost.
Other General Rules
No animals.
If you break something, you will pay for it in cash. Your security deposit does not automatically cover things you break.
Do not take other people’s food / towels / belongings without asking.
Do not pour/throw things in the pool. You will pay for the extra cleaning.
Drinking and driving: zero tolerance policy. Automatic eviction.
Penalties for Not Abiding by Rules
First offense is $200 fine paid to the house pot.
Second offense is a loss of a weekend and additional $200 fine.
Third offense is eviction.
I, _________________________________________________, agree to the rules above and understand the repercussions if I do not adhere to them.
Signature _______________________________________
Date: __________________________________________
Most of the clauses seemed prudent, but the idea of inciting a fine was mortifying. I wondered if these rules were informed by past fiascos. What sort of crazy shit had gone down the summer before?
A cold mist slicked the glass buildings on Sixth Avenue, the beads slowly gathering to a downpour. By the time I reached the corner of Fifty-Third and First, I was drenched. The Land Rover was live-parked by a McDonald’s.
I tossed my duffel bag in the trunk and jumped in the back. Shane was in the driver’s seat and Mike sat shotgun. Kirsten, Mike’s best friend from childhood, moved over to make room for me. She had visited Mike at college and I’d known her since freshman year.
“OMG, you’re soaked to the bone!”
Kirsten’s eyes were big and expressive, a bewitched green. Her beauty was hard to take in. Long blond hair framing a heart-shaped face, a quiet symmetry. She was mellow, an observer, but always friendly.
“Do you know Colby?” she asked.
He was leaning against the window, his pressed shirt loose at the collar.
“Hi!” he said, extending his hand. “I’m your Hive dad!”
I recognized him from Mike’s social media. His hair was gelled and slicked back. A laptop case sat by his feet. He’d begged off his desk Friday by vowing to log in remotely.
“Can you believe it? Memorial Day weekend and they got me workin’. Let a girl live!”
Mike had cracked the window and was smoking a cigarette.
“Will you put that thing out?” Shane chided. “You’re letting in the rain.”
“Oh, come on. It’s just water.”
“I got the car detailed yesterday. You can smoke when the rain stops. Put it out.”
Shane fiddled with his iPhone’s radio adapter and pressed play on Klingande’s “Jubel,” a tropical house song that felt like summer. He pulled into the slow crawl of traffic, the cones of headlights. Aqueous shadows roved across the dash. We were off.
As night fell, the rain ceased and traffic began to fade away. Shane juiced the speed. We were energized by the sensation of actually driving, but the slick roads beneath us jolted me back to winter and the car accident. Those stop-motion scenes—the skidding and sliding, the way the wheel locked up, the violent somersault, the shatter of glass—were never far away. I was here, I reminded myself, because of Kicki.
I kept these thoughts to myself, and as the conversation motored about freely, I mostly listened. Kirsten and Colby were unguarded, and I relaxed into the exchange. They talked about past hookups, drunken escapades, the places in the city where they’d left their credit cards, and I chimed in here and there. Colby was, in his words, “single and hungry.” Kirsten was single, too.
“Everyone finds love in Montauk,” Kirsten said. “Even if it’s just for the night.”
In Manorville, we pulled into a Cumberland Farms for beer, chips, and jerky. Shane filled the gas tank. The parking lot overflowed with luxury cars glistening beneath a fluorescent overhang. The air savored of gasoline and wet pavement.
“Everyone who’s anyone is at this Cumberland Farms on a Friday,” said Colby. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
Over seventy miles in, Long Island split into two forks. To the north lay vineyards, antiques shops, flowerbox beach towns. To the south: the Hamptons. It barely made sense to me that Long Island could contain Brooklyn and Queens, let alone two elusive eastern prongs. At the farthest tip of the South Fork, at the very end of the Hamptons, Montauk speared the Atlantic like a long-armed fist, earning the nickname The End.
As the beers flowed in the back seat, I learned more about my housemates. A daunting thirty-one people had signed on for half shares. All but a handful were second-year veterans. Most housemates fell into one of three buckets: the girls, the finance guys, and the gays.
“I’m in two buckets,” Colby said. “Got my finance bros and my gays.” He turned to me. “You’re in a bucket of your own.”
Colby had first gone to Montauk two summers prior. He’d barely had time to drop off his bags before his boyfriend—a guy eight years his senior—whisked him into town. They took shots at the Point, then hit the dance floor of the Memory Motel until four a.m. The next morning they woke up and drank mudslides at the Royal Atlantic Hotel. Then they dozed on the beach until it was time to do it all again. A couple weeks later Colby broke up with the guy, but he’d fallen in love with Montauk. He met Mike that autumn and the house took shape.
“For me it was different,” said Mike. “I’ve been going out to Montauk since I was a kid. Two weeks every August. First time I drank was at a beach bonfire in Montauk.”
We rode through Southampton and into Bridgehampton, passing fields lined with shuttered fruit stands. In East Hampton, we drove down Further Lane, a street that lent its name to a hedge fund. The back roads were narrow and hemmed by topiary, leaving much of the landscape to the imagination. On certain streets the front lawns opened up, revealing clapboard estates and driveways made of crushed seashells.
East Hampton’s town center felt like a suburban extension of Fifth Avenue. Sotheby’s, J.Crew, Ralph Lauren, Dylan’s Candy Bar. The pharmacy was called an apothecary. A movie theater boasted an old-time marquee. It was nothing like the honky-tonk beaches I’d known as a child, where bikers revved their hogs in pizza-joint parking lots.
Where our family vacationed, you had to bring everything. Coleman coolers packed with Hi-C juice boxes, cans of Del Monte pears and Chef Boyardee. For a week away my great-aunt Annie once brought a washing machine and dryer. It was that kind of beach and we were that kind of family.
By Amagansett, the last town before Montauk, the trees grew taller. Trappings of the Hamptons still lingered—surf boutiques, upscale taquerias, gilded verandas—but the money-clipped strictures began to slacken.
“Look!” Kirsten called. “There’s Talkhouse!” On the left side of the road stood a cobbled warren of strobe-lit dance rooms, a sign that read STEPHEN TALKHOUSE.
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�It’s the craziest bar ever,” she said. “We go there on Fridays sometimes. It’s a bit of a hike from Montauk, so you have to commit, but it’s worth it. They bring in an eighties cover band that plays in the city. You always bump into someone you know.”
“It’s definitely the most fun bar in Amagansett,” added Colby. “The line is out of control but we just cut it because of Ashley.”
“Yeah, Ashley’s obsessed with Talkhouse,” Kirsten continued. “She goes prepared. She once left her hair straightener there and went back in the morning to get it.”
“Who’s Ashley?” I asked.
“She’s my roommate in the city,” Kirsten said. “She’s from Fairfield. She’s…”
“She’s the Mayor of Montauk,” Mike finished. “You’ll meet her soon enough.”
At the border of Amagansett and Montauk, Shane opened the moonroof, letting in the stars. Outside I sensed a sandblasting, a peeling away. We had driven past the point of civilization into a wild, moon-dipped isthmus. The air whipped cold and pungent through our open windows. I could see the ocean on both sides. Beyond the sand banks stood sleek, streamlined houses with flat roofs.
We passed three fish shacks—Lunch, Clam Bar, and Cyril’s—the last channel markers before Montauk. After Cyril’s the highway split. We continued down the Old Montauk Highway. Beyond the occasional fire hydrant and the dip of telephone poles, the road was stripped of human interference. We wove between tangled pines on one side and diving views of the ocean on the other.
The street names in Montauk were written vertically on white stakes, and they shined like thin ghosts in the headlights. We turned onto our street in Hither Hills and curved up a narrow road. As Shane flipped on the blinker, I tapped into the night’s star-washed energy. A wood-beamed house appeared on a hill. We had reached the Hive.
Chapter Seven
My first night at the Hive shimmered with a low-key radiance. We were tired from the drive and slipped into sweatshirts. Mike turned on the TV, just to have something playing in the background. Hook was on TBS. The others weren’t scheduled to arrive until the next day.
We drank rosé and slid back into our conversation. Colby told us about his job and how stressed he’d been lately. He worked as an analyst in fixed income; I had no idea what that meant, but I sensed a darker concern embroidered within his words, a holding back. One minute he seemed engaged and amiable; the next he got lost in a somber daze. Colby was flamboyant but not effeminate, and his “gayness” seemed to toggle on and off. He existed on multiple planes at once.
Kirsten was a style editor at Ralph Lauren and liked her job fine. Her bigger problem was relationships. She kept going after the wrong guys.
Mike told us about the Montauk of his youth. The Sloppy Tuna bar used to be Nick’s. Montauk Beach House used to be Ronjo. Surf Lodge was Lakeside. As a kid he used to go to Montauk with his extended family every August. Then his uncle Tim died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Montauk was the same until it wasn’t.
Hook ended and Mike fiddled with the remote. The television was stuck on the channel guide and wouldn’t refresh. I got up and attempted to change it manually, to no avail. The cable box and channel guide both read 11:11, but our phones said it was 11:14. The TV had also frozen on 11:11. It stayed like that for the rest of the night.
We took the frozen TV as a portent of our arrival. Mike claimed the number 11 followed him wherever he went, though its meaning to him was unclear. The Hive was said to be haunted, and I’d eventually hear all the stories. But I held to the adage that 11:11 brought luck. You could hang your hopes on that number, make a wish. Perhaps it would come true.
I was assigned to a room in the basement, but stayed that night in an empty upstairs bedroom. As I settled in, I experienced an inner stirring. The car accident, those months before, had reduced me to a larval state. But now I felt myself reaching for more.
Sleep came quickly that night—thick and dreamless, a harkening back to my first night of college. As with the Hive, BC and its pinwheel of unfamiliar senses wore me out on the first day. After a barbecue in the quad and some pilfered vodka shots in a dorm room I fell asleep instantly. My mom had washed my extra-long twin sheets to make them smell like home.
My real struggle had come the night before, as I attempted to fall asleep for the last time in my childhood bed. I remember the blue light through the window, the glow of my Moonbeam alarm clock. The basketball, skiing, and tennis trophies on my bookcase. The collage of photos and magazine clippings I’d decoupaged to my wall—an evolving expression of my half-formed inner life. The air conditioner hummed, but summer was over. I would wake up in the morning and my life would be drastically different. I would never again live permanently with my parents. I didn’t know who I was or what I would become. And even though it wasn’t the case, not by a long shot, I was, to my young mind, on my own.
I awoke the next morning in the same position I had fallen asleep in, buried beneath a white chenille blanket. I felt refreshed in a way I hadn’t in months.
The bedroom was small and cozy with wood veneer furniture and its own private balcony. I sleepily stepped onto the deck. It had rained in the night and the planks were damp. The Hive was situated in a heavily wooded area, and two red birds flapped through a tall pine tree that stood close by. I hadn’t noticed the tree the night before, but now I could see the rain droplets clinging to its waxy needles.
Red birds, my aunt Ellen said, were signs of the departed. They appeared when we needed them, to remind us we were not alone. In our family, a cardinal meant Kicki. I thought about her final days. How our entire extended family gathered at the hospital to be near her. Kicki’s sister Annie made the trip up from Southington, Connecticut, and held her hand. Annie could always make her laugh.
As Kicki was staring into Annie’s eyes, she made a confession. I miss my mom. It felt like a private thought, something she hadn’t meant to articulate out loud. I miss my mom. Her mother had died decades ago. Kicki was ninety-two. And she still missed her mom.
When it was clear the end was approaching, my dad, who was her primary care physician, asked her if she would like to go home, to her own bed. That would be lovely, dear, she said.
I felt Kicki’s presence as I stepped out of the bedroom. I was the first one awake. I began to explore.
The Hive had two other upstairs bedrooms, the master (aka Princess Room) and Mike and Shane’s room. I peered into the Princess Room, where Colby and Kirsten were still sleeping. The room had cathedral ceilings, exposed rafters, and a wall of closets with mirrored doors. One of those doors stood open, revealing a pink flower-stitched bathrobe on a plastic hanger. It couldn’t have belonged to Kirsten. Maybe Colby, but doubtful. I assumed it was the owner’s, something she kept in Montauk year-round. You never know when you might need a pink flower-stitched bathrobe.
Mike and Shane were also asleep, tethered together on a narrow, low-slung futon. Their room was small and beachy, a sloping alcove. An oil painting of a sailboat hung above their nicked dresser. I imagined Mike had already loaded its drawers with his summer clothes—Lacoste shirts, Vilebrequin bathing suit, running shorts and pants from Vineyard Vines.
I went downstairs. The living room, like the rest of the house, had pine paneling of an older vintage and a maroon shag carpet, which I was surprised to learn had replaced the previous year’s white shag carpet. Every wall and ceiling in the house was made of unlacquered tongue-and-groove wood. Trapped within them were the scents of salt, must, and firewood. Kirsten had described it as a seventies porn den. I thought of it as On Golden Pond with a dash of The Shining.
I ran my hands across the old records on the built-in bookshelf: the Beach Boys, Herman’s Hermits, Carole King. Magazines from the seventies (how they’d survived in such pristine condition we’d never know) fanned the wicker side tables. To the right was a bay window and beneath that a banquette with mismatched accent pillows packed so densely they stood vertical. A second bookshelf contained wondrously rand
om books. A Field Guide to Birds’ Nests in the United States East of the Mississippi River. Little Dorrit. A Viking edition of The Portable Nietzsche. Many of them didn’t have jackets. I inspected a copy of The Communist Manifesto, its salt-cracked spine bent with humidity.
The kitchen and dining room were separated by a Formica island lined with jars, mixing bowls, and the empty remains of our thirty-pack. I pushed aside the cream-colored drapes to let in the light. The kitchen opened to a screened-in porch and a deck that cantilevered a steep, tree-lined hill. At the bottom of the hill was the swimming pool.
I walked out to the deck. It was an overcast day and the clouds hung like gourds. The exterior of the house, like the inside, was framed with wooden clapboards. I admired the rising latticework of decks, railings, and stairs, the oddly shaped roof that looked like a honeycomb.
Our Hither Hills neighborhood was wedged between two parallel highways—the Old Montauk Highway and the New Montauk Highway—which weren’t highways really, just beach roads with high speed limits. All the houses seemed woodsy and secluded, perching on twisty roads that only Mike could name. He knew this place down to its marrow. But Montauk was no longer the Shangri-La of his youth. Loss, as he had told us the night before, had rendered it complex. Still, something had compelled him to return.