ABOUT MONTAUK
Five years after he graduated from college, a twenty-seven year old editor at a pretentious New York magazine comes to the realization that he is disillusioned with his life. By taking an unintended chance, he escapes his daily routine for an alcohol-soaked weekend in Montauk, Long Island. As an approaching late season tropical storm engulfs the seaside resort town, he considers the roots of his once-close family and his loss of connection with them, especially since the death of his father a year ago. He meets others who are also sitting out the storm and tries to find a human connection with each of them while he refuses to stop trying to fulfill his unrealized dream of climbing the steps of the famous Montauk Lighthouse. Alternately humorous and poignant, Montauk reflects the unsettled feeling of growing up in the suburbs and the career aimlessness of post-college life in a narrative though is relatable to readers of any background.
MONTAUK Christopher McKittrick
1. I’ve always found train rides to be incredibly boring since there’s not a whole hell of a lot to do on an hour commute on the Long Island Rail Road. Sure, you could buy a paper at one of the newsstands that are carbon copied at every station, but if you’re like me, you don’t care enough about the world to spend fifty cents to find out what its latest problems are. Passing the time becomes even more difficult if you’re one of the hundreds of thousands who spend every weekday morning on a train to New York City just to get to work. I’m one of them. After five years of the same routine, I’ve learned to ignore the other people around me on the train, even on the days when I’m getting crushed in my seat, like today, after an obese nurse in her bleach-stained scrubs found a seat next to me. I look around the car and notice that nobody is smiling. If anyone were, the unfamiliar expression would stick out like the toothy grin of the otherwise-invisible Cheshire cat. At least we all seem equally miserable. When I arrive in the city I have a few blocks to walk to work. Sometimes when I walk through the city, I look up at the concrete canyons and I think to myself that New York City has to be the pinnacle of man’s achievement of civilization. To be honest, sometimes I don’t always think of that as a good thing. It might help my demeanor if there was any joy in my destination, but a few years back, my job became more-or-less pointless. It wasn’t always like that, though. I used to be one of three copy editors at
this trendy New York nightlife magazine back when I was an unpaid college intern seven years ago. In those days, I had to actually pay attention to my work, because if I didn’t, a whole slew of articles would go through with mistakes, and I could get canned. Since then, the magazine broke through and started doing really well for itself, and I somehow found myself promoted along the way. Now we have two groups of copy editing staff instead of three overworked copy-editing interns. I’m in charge of the second group. The first group catches any obvious mistakes, and then my staff looks it over. After my three-person staff goes through them, I pretend to review their corrections and send the pile up to printing. So I don’t do a damn thing. I haven’t gotten past the first page of any article in two years. I just don’t see the utility of feature articles on nightclubs that will be little more than a hazy memory of an underage drinker when the “hotspot” inevitably closes its doors in half a year. The truth is that I don’t even know what pretentious BS my rag puts out every month anymore. It took me until this past year to finally accept the fact that the only reason I am in this position is because I’ve been at the magazine longer than almost anybody else. It has nothing to do with my merit or ability, but rather my own inability to make a career change. Yet, I can only guess that since I’ve come to work like this every day for years, nobody really notices. I’m just “eccentric,” they say, “eccentric” and “quiet,” as if those words could really explain all that I am. Fifteen minutes into my floor’s lunchtime, Morrison, this twerpy kid who never misses a single punctuation mistake, skulks into my office. “Here’s those corrections on the piece about Long Island wineries,” he says with a goofy “I’d do anything to please you, boss” grin on his face. I’d love to hit him with something heavy, but the only things in my desk that fit that criteria are liquor bottles in varying states of emptiness. “Thanks Morrison.” I call all the employees I supervise by their last names because it makes the environment that much less personal. I’m much more comfortable with that separation present;
it ensures that nobody knows me well enough to ask me to join their weekend softball league or buy some knick-knack to support the PTA of their children’s school. “I’m going to head over and take a lunch. I’ll see you at 1:30!” “Make it 1:45. You’ve earned it, kid.” That’s the first executive decision I’ve made in weeks. “Really? Thanks! You want to head over to the break room with me?” Every day for lunch Morrison goes to the break room and gets a granola bar and a Snapple from the snack machines. I can’t explain it, but I just have a thing against people who eat entire meals from vending machines. If the electricity went out, would he starve to death? “No thanks. I have plans.” For someone who works in Manhattan, I’ve actually seen precious little of it even though I go out for lunch nearly every day. Instead of joining Morrison, I head (as usual) to an old-world style British pub six blocks uptown (don’t want to be too close to the office, even if I don’t care if someone catches me) and polish off four heavy stouts and a corned beef on rye. I have lunch at this place at least three times a week, and I’m so consistent that the bartenders always have my first pint ready before I sit down on my usual stool. Most people would probably think that in a city where the eating establishments number in the tens of thousands (and double that if you count the street vendors) eating at the same place three times a week is a sign that your life has become routine, but I never saw the harm in sticking to what you enjoy. With the fortification of the four stouts, the last few hours of my typical workday don’t seem so bad. I figure I might as well take advantage of being able to work in an environment where I can run my entire department with a half-decent buzz daily. That’s a luxury my father never had. My father once told me, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” That was easy for him to say. Before he even learned how to walk, he had a love for cars, and nobody who knew him
was surprised that by the age of twenty-five, with barely a high school diploma to his name, he already owned a successful auto body shop. It’s not easy for me to follow that. I’m nearly a decade out of high school, and I’ve yet to figure out what it is that I love. Whether he wants to admit it or not, any man’s story inevitably begins with his father. My earliest memories consist of my father’s auto body shop kicking the hell out of him daily. I could see the years of his life fade away like the color of his hair as he struggled with the stress of running a business. As the years went on, it seemed he had more rough days than easy ones, though all in all, my father was good at what he did. Yet as much as I hate to say it, it didn’t come as a surprise to me when he dropped dead of a stroke a year ago, only half a year after he finally sold the business. That damn place took so much out of him that once he finally got rid of the parasite, he had nothing left, and my old man had absolutely no clue what to do with himself. I first started working at the magazine while my father was still alive. When I came over for dinner one night a few months after I went full-time there, he asked me how the job was going. “I don’t know, Dad. I like it all right, I guess,” I answered. “I didn’t ask if you liked it,” he snapped back in his gruff, but not quite angry, manner, “I asked how it was going.” “Well it seems like it’s going well. I guess I just don’t feel appreciated there.” My father furrowed his brow. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? They pay you, don’t they? Isn’t that a sign of appreciation? If that isn’t appreciation, I don’t know what is.” I was a bit embarrassed by how uncharacteristically harsh his response was, because it made me feel like I believed I was ungratefully entitled to constant praise at work. But I had waited around for too many years for my “life” to start that it had started two years before I even realized what happened. I was waiting for a big moment, waiting for the cracker-jack prize I would receive after being ushered across the bridge into adulthood, but I never
got it. After my father died, I finally realized that I wasn’t getting it. In a way, I don’t think you can blame me—after all, I’m a member of the “Everyone Gets a Trophy” generation in which you got awarded just for showing up. It tied in with the reason why our coaches always told our tee-ball team that each of our games ended in a tie so no kid went home crying or otherwise feeling bad about himself. The constant pats on the back and positive reinforcement did nothing but make my teammates who kept playing think they could do no wrong, and they kept that attitude right through high school as they wondered why major league scouts never made it to their high school games. What the coaches didn’t realize was that some kids were a lot more perceptive than they thought, and I was one of them mostly because my father wouldn’t let me be otherwise. After every game, we’d climb into his pick-up truck, and he’d tell me the real score by his count and how I could improve for next game. Knowing my father, there must have been fair praise as well, though I couldn’t remember any of it now if my life depended on it. The real lesson in all of this, my father would explain, is to not only celebrate what I did well, but to reflect on how I might improve. This lesson, my father told me, applied to more than just tee-ball games. “If you keep doing that,” he said with his usual fatherly authority, “you’ll never go wrong in life.” But either his advice was ineffective or I stopped following it seriously, because I have wound up where I am in life now. So maybe this is my chance to reflect, to figure out where I’ve gone wrong and why the life I have now doesn’t seem like the result of frequent self-improvement reflection time. Or maybe it isn’t. Despite this, my father was not usually an angry or judgmental man, but he was a man in every sense of the midtwentieth century working class connotation of the word. A job wasn’t a dream to him. I’m sure he had dreams, but what they were I couldn’t say. He was never relaxed enough to talk about them. On the few weekends my father was sane enough to relax, he
would take my little sister Lynn and me on our boat out of Port Jefferson harbor and spend the day on the Long Island Sound. He was a changed man when we were on salt water. It was the only place where the shop couldn’t touch him. He even spoke differently, peppering his words with nautical lingo, even if he did always mispronounce the Latin as “terry firma.” He treated our 17foot outboard as if it were the crown jewel of the Spanish Armada, and he spent far too many of his few free hours (along with hundreds of curse words) keeping her seaworthy. But he did it all because he lived for those day trips with his children. Although the memories of the many trips have molded together, I will always remember every detail of one particular trip. For some insane reason my father promised me that on my twelfth birthday, we would take the boat to the end of the Island. It took hours, and I can’t imagine how much he spent on gas, but I loved every minute of it. I remember how proud I was of myself for holding in my lunch after my sister threw up her peanut butter sandwich over the side when we hit the choppy water outside of the Sound. Our boat sped past schools of fish that, on any other day, we’d stop and try to catch. Instead, to pass the time, I tormented Lynn by humming the Jaws theme and reminding her that she wouldn’t even be a light snack for a shark. We had never been that far out in the ocean, and I thought the cloud-filled blue sky would swallow us whole if the ocean didn’t first. My mind was overwhelmed with the adolescent excitement of seeing something I had never seen before, though my father could have told me any point of land was “the end” and taken us home and I would’ve believed him. However, a promise was a promise to my old man, and, if nothing else, my father was an honest man. I knew we reached the real end of Long Island when I saw the lighthouse. Until that moment, I had no idea there was a lighthouse at the end of the Island. And, to be honest, I never even thought about there even being an end. Certainly, I knew it had to end or else I would not have asked my father to take me to see it. But for a
twelve-year-old, to see for the first time that a world existed outside of what I knew was just…inconceivable. For one brief moment, with all the awe of my childhood overtaken by this overwhelming feeling—seeing the Montauk Lighthouse, this red and ivory monolith, a beacon through the overcast skies to the ocean beyond—it was too immense for me to comprehend. It was like seeing a castle out of a fairytale. That moment left a measureless impression. I’ve always wanted to feel that way again. “Can we go to the top?” I enthusiastically asked my father. Even though the ocean waves rocked our boat more than usual, my gaze didn’t waver from the light so high above me. He smiled his familiar fatherly smile, straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. “We have a long way back, and it’s late afternoon already. We’ll come back someday,” he said in his deep, trustworthy voice that my own voice has never equaled, “And I’ll race you to the top.” But twelve became thirteen, and at thirteen, I became a teenager, and soon I was in high school. Before long I was in college and I hardly saw my father anymore. The boat rotted out from years of weekends that my father spent at the auto body shop, and it was eventually too damaged to sell honestly. I never got to that damn lighthouse since. In his last few years, my father never knew just how badly his son screwed up. He saw that I had no ambition, no girl, and no one remotely resembling a friend. Still, as far as he knew, I earned a respectable living, although I know deep down he must’ve expected more from me. I can only envision him being disappointed in me, which, sadly, is something that I’ve since accepted. While I resign myself to the levels I allowed myself to sink to, I know that he never would. That’s why I kept him at a distance during his last years. Yet, until I stood at his wake facing his closed, painted face in his open casket, I never realized that he also could have been keeping himself detached from me likewise. I don’t care to think much about my father’s wake. I was surprised at the amount of people who attended, though Lynn
would tell me later when Mom wasn’t around that she thought it had more to do with the circumstances of his early, sudden death than anything else, the whole “that could be me tomorrow” sort of mindset. I’m not sure I agree with her, since Dad was a well-liked figure in the community. He was always getting his car washed at school fundraisers (although most of the teenagers in our town were of the privileged stock and didn’t know how to wash a car anymore than they would know how to pay their own credit card bills) or buying cases of Girl Scout Thin Mints to put out in the waiting room of his shop for his customers and husky technicians. I’d like to think the turnout was out of respect for my father, not a local epidemic of morbid curiosity. And I’m supposed to be the cynical one. The actual funeral was to me more surreal than anything else, and there isn’t much I can say about it. I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses when my sister read Kipling’s “If—,” which she identified as our father’s favorite poem. This was true, though he only knew about the poem because he read an excerpt of the last stanza off a postcard he received from a distant English relative in the late eighties; a post card he kept pinned on the wall next to his dresser for the rest of his life. Even so, I am still convinced it was his favorite poem because the only other poem he knew was “The Road Not Taken.” For whatever reason, Dad hated that poem, and I never thought to ask him why.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christopher McKittrick was born in Long Island, New York and currently lives in Queens. His short stories range in style from fantasy to literary fiction and have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Burnt Bridge Literary Review, and the By Mind or Metal and Powers anthologies from Static Movement Press. His nonfiction work has appeared in Newsday and Good Times Magazine. He also contributed an essay on director Terry Gilliam to Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film from McFarland Press and he is a regular contributor to MovieBuzzers.com, a website focused on the film industry and DailyActor.com, a website focused on acting in all media. He has spoken about literature, film, and comic books at various conferences across the country.