On the Waterfront

Spent the weekend at Rehoboth/Dewey Beach this weekend. Jen, a friend of mine from when we worked at the courthouse, has a brother who has a house there, so from time to time we go over and crash his pad. This weekend, he was out of town, so Jen had some of us over. In the end, it was Jen, me, Christine, Linda, and Sue at the house. (For some completely inexplicable reason, I frequently end up being the only male among this group of friends.)

Dewey Beach is a fun place to hang out, although sometimes excrutiatingly heterosexual. I mean, frat scene heterosexual. The crowd tends to be composed of college-age people -- or just-out-of-college age people -- who somehow have nothing better to do with their time or money over the summer than hang out at the beach in sweet crash pads, drinking all night, and recovering all day, only to repeat the process the next day. Surprisingly, there are also a decent number of over-25 people hitting the scent too, but they, too, have nothing better to do with their lives than maintain their (usually vain) attempt to recaputure their youths by drinking excessively and seeking their next bed partner at or around last call.

Because all my friends are straight girls, we go to Dewey when we want to take our own misguided tours of recapturing our youth through excessive bar-hopping. (The gay bars are more in the Rehoboth area. Not wanting to drag my straight friends to a gay bar at the beach, I usually just tag along with them to the Land of Uber-Heterosexuality.) This past weekend proved no exception.

We spent our evenings at a bar called the Starboard. It's a fun place. I'm amazed at some of the really hot guys there taking their pick of cute women. Sometimes you hear that the gay community has claimed every goodlooking guy. I'm here to tell you that's not true. There are tons of hot guys looking for women at these hookup joints.

Jen met a cool guy named Mark. They were talking at the bar for a while. I had no idea how drunk Jen was while this was going on, but apparently, she was. Before the night was over Jen would be leaving her lunch in a corner outside the bar and we would be escorting her home in a cab. And by "we," I somehow have to include Mark, for he made his way into the cab with us.

Don't get me wrong, Mark came across as a completely nice guy. I was just a little taken aback by the fact that Jen would actually invite a strang new guy home after meeting him in a bar, especially with four guests also staying in the house. Unfortunately for both of them, however, Jen was not done re-living her dinner when she returned home, and, apparently out of some embarassment, she locked Mark out of the bathroom while she went about her business.

At some point Mark came back downstairs (where I was staying) and started putting on his shoes. Unsure of whether Jen intended for him to leave or not, I asked him what was up. "She has locked me out of the bathroom," he said. "I thought I'd be staying here, but that doesn't look like it's gonna happen."

I genuinely did feel bad for the guy. It's not often that a guy is willing to come home with a chick who's puking up her guts. And who's still quite nice. But, I didn't know if Jen still wanted to see this guy around the house when she woke up in the morning. I was prepared to offer to let him crash on the couch that night, but I was having some trouble deciding what Jen would have thought about that. So, basically, I left the matter in his court. "What do you want to do now?" I asked. Eventually, after much (rambling) "discussion" (I used that term advisedly, since it was rather nonsensical banter), he decided he would catch a cab back to his hotel. I did tell him to leave his cell number, though, so that Jen could get in touch with him. I sensed she liked him.

The next night, Jen did actually call him again, but she failed to leave her number. She had assumed that it would show up on his called ID, until I pointed out that my phone doesn't give the ID if the phone is turned off. However, not wanting to seem desperate, she didn't call him again that night. I told him to call her on Sunday sometime. I hope she does.

***

Sue was referred to -- twice -- as resembling a "librarian" type. While I can see what the guys are getting at, it's so untrue. Every librarian I've ever known has been a short, rotund, dowdy old woman. Sue is a tall, thin, rather hot chick (albeit with a kinda plain face). No accounting for taste. On Saturday night, she managed to spend the night talking to some guy whose name I forget, but who was clearly a player on the scene. At 47, recapturing youth was clearly a top priority for him. I admit he looked good (and I don't just mean "for his age"), but there's gotta be better ways meet women than finding them at bars in a beach town. Thankfully, Sue wasn't planning on hooking up with him.

***

Linda found herself a man, too. His name is Evan and he actually lives in the DC area. He seemed like a nice guy and they danced most of the night and even shared a few kisses. (This was the first time I've ever seen Linda kissing a man. It was interesting, in a kinda jarry way.)

I hope it works out for them. Evan seems like a nice guy. Linda left him her number. We'll see if he calls.

***

And my recap of the weekend would not complete without my recitation of my near-death experience.

We (Linda, Sue, Christine and I -- Jen was still recovering from the night before) were on the beach on Saturday afternoon when we decided we were going to take a walk up the beach for a little bit. So we did, walking perhaps half a mile along the shoreline.

I suppose we should have noticed much earlier that something was amiss when lightning strikes began appearing over the horizon, but we honestly believed that we had a lot of time to make it back to our stuff. Oh, how wrong we were.

When we finally turned around to look at the sky, it was dark. As we started jogging (instead of walking) back to our stuff, the sky opened up and we started getting pelted with large droplets of rain. I mean, these things were large. And combined with the rather strong winds whipping these droplets of rain at us, it was hurting.

At this point I came to once again realize that I am in exceedingly poor physical shape. The rain was blinding me; the cold was taking my breath away (my asthma didn't help matters either); and the incredibly soft sand meant that each step required ten times the effort it would have on a normal sunny beach day. I honestly thought I might die. And it would have been a drowning. In the rain. That's how hard it was raining.

Linda and Sue somehow managed to move their way along the sand and eventually got ordered onto the boardwalk by the cops. They then managed to locate our stuff. We had happened to set up camp in a dent in the beach, so there was literally a torrent of water completely flooding our stuff. Not funny. I was not there to witness it, but it was amusing to imagine. Thankfully, nothing in my bag was completely irreplaceable, so hey.

Meanwhile, I was with Christine, having been separated from Linda and Sue by the storm. (Low visibility, you see.) (No pun intended.) I don't know why we were so far from the water, but it was definitely difficult to move in the sand. Eventually I gave up and told Christine it made more sense to head up to the street and walk from there. The rain was continuing to beat down on us and there was no way I was going to be able to make any substantial headway on the sand.

So I basically ordered Christine to follow me as we headed up away from the sand. We hit a bridge and walked up, only to realize that the bridge led not straight to a street, but to a private patio area at a housing complex. While I was somewhat concerned that we were trespassing, I also was relieved to be out of the driving rain. Thankfully, my trespassing fears were allayed when almost immediately after we set foot on the balcony a woman came out to greet us with towels, inviting us in to sit down and get the heck out of that crazy rain. We sat there for about 10 minutes while the rain passed and eventually -- while profusely thanking the random family that had taken us in -- we left, a few new towels in hand, to find Linda and Sue again.

I know this story doesn't sound that bad now, but I seriously felt like I was going to die on that beach. Just a quick reminder about the awesome power and majesty of Mother Nature.

But otherwise, the weekend was a lot of fun! No, seriously.