| Issue #30, October 20, 2006 |
Champagne
The End-of-Summer Party in Seats 12A & B Aboard the Jitney
By Dan Rattiner
The food and drink on the Hampton Jitney is served during the trip from a sort of bar affair at the back of the coach. A stewardess does the honors, and at 10:30 a.m. the other morning, on the Ambassador trip to Manhattan, Laura was serving the obligatory orange juice, coffee and muffins. I was sitting toward the front of the coach in my sportjacket and tie at that hour reading the newspaper when I heard, very softly, the sound of a champagne cork being uncorked from inside the coach in the back. They don’t serve alcohol on the coach, I knew, and so, curious, I got up to see what this could be and, walking down the aisle, headed back. I soon came upon two young women sitting together about two thirds of the way back who were very discreetly enjoying the contents of something that one of them had in her handbag. I stopped to look down and, immediately was offered a smile and a clear plastic cup.
“We’re celebrating,” one of them, a very pretty blonde said, “the end of the season.” She very discreetly pulled the neck of a champagne bottle out of the bag.
How could I pass this up? So I sat down.
“I’ll drink to that,” I said.
The next half hour of this two hour trip thus became something of a party. A quiet giggly party. Myself, and these two young women, cousins, who turned out to be both named Tammy, and a man sitting in a seat in front of them who got introduced to me as the manager of the Meadow Club in Southampton. Also present from time to time was the stewardess, Laura, who, maybe that wasn’t her name, forget her name, was monitoring the proceedings.
“We have a toast,” the blonde woman said, “at the beginning of the season, and at the end. It’s been another successful season and we’re all the better for it.”
The blonde woman looked vaguely familiar to me. I thought perhaps I had seen her before. And when I heard the last name of one of them, which was Reilly, I thought I knew why.
“We’re coming in from Montauk,” the blonde told me. “I’m heading to Florida. Tammy lives in Montauk. Grew up there. She’s heading back out to there tomorrow.”
I told them my name was Dan, that I lived in East Hampton and that my dad owned the drugstore in Montauk for many years.
“White’s Drug and Department Store,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me to mention the newspaper. I was too caught in the celebration. “Are you any relation to Bea Reilly who owned the Surf and Sand?”
“That’s our grandmother!” Tammy Reilly said.
And so we had the makings of a conversation. Bea Reilly’s Surf and Sand is today the Seaside Inn on the Old Montauk Highway overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The place is long gone, but Bea Reilly owned it and ran it for thirty years, and she watched me come of age and grow up. It was one of my long ago hangouts in that town.
“I first heard the song “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones at the Surf and Sand,” I said. “We danced the night away.”
“We still do,” blonde Tammy said. “But now it’s at Nick’s, the oceanfront bar in the center of town. And did you ever see the big sign on the side? They put it up on Sunday night and it says TAMMY TUESDAY, that’s us. They named a day after us.”
“Yeah,” the other Tammy said, “And then we spend Wednesday morning on the beach, remembering all the fun we had Tuesday night.”
“Most of which we forgot,” Blonde Tammy said, “so people TELL us about all the fun we had Tuesday night.”
Tammy filled my glass again. “No please,” I said. “I’m on my way to a Board Meeting.” But there it was, refilled.
How interesting it is when lives cross like this.
Tammy Snow, not the blonde, was actually raised by Bea and spent her childhood in Montauk. I might have seen her out at the Surf and Sand once, on a tricycle. She said it is hard to go to the Seaside now, which is why they prefer to hang out at Nick’s, because her grandmother is gone and the place is sold.
“She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman,” I said.
“Yes, she was,” said blonde Tammy. “To the end.”
“Not around?”
“She passed away three years ago. Came on suddenly. Lived a good long life. Do you remember her husband, Bob?”
“I remember the two of them ran the Surf and Sand for the first fifteen years,” I said. “After that, it was just Bea. I never asked. What happened to him?”
“What I was told was that he wanted to open a bar and restaurant in New Jersey on the seashore there. Bea had hers. He wanted something he would do. So finally he left and he did that.”
Blonde Tammy is on her way to Florida for the winter. She owns a bar in Orlando, called Reilly’s. She’s cut from the same cloth as her grandmother. She’s just leaving off her summer job, which is as one of the manager of a nearby tennis club.
As for Tammy Snow, she has worked at Dave’s Grill for sixteen years. This is probably the most iconoclastic, take-it-or-leave-it restaurants in the town. Right on the waterfront in the fishing village, it announces its policy right on a blackboard where you come in. Actually, it’s not a policy, it’s the rules for customers. No sending anything back, no dogs, no children loose running around, no loud shouting, break the rules and you have to leave, middle of dinner, doesn’t matter, you’re out. The customers love the place.
Tammy Snow is on her way to New York City to visit some friends, see blonde Tammy off and then it’s back to Montauk. Dave’s is open all year around, although sometimes it isn’t. Depends on Dave. It’s that kind of place.
I’ve now gone back to my seat toward the front of the Jitney. People are reading the Times, sleeping, looking out at the scenery and now Laura comes by, hawking free snacks and apple juice.
“No, thanks,” I say. “Did you have any champagne?”
“Can’t,” she said. “I’m working. But it’s still all a lot of fun.”
One time, when I was 19-years-old and living with my dad and mom in Montauk, a movie crew checked into the Surf and Sand to make a movie in town. I went down there to meet them. I even joined them at script meetings and on shoots where I worked as a helper. I recall, in a scene on the beach with a mad scientist in a tent with testtubes, rattling the tent flap from outside to simulate a storm while he poured concoctions within. It was a horror movie called THE FLESHEATERS and it made quite a stir when it came to a theatre near you a year later. They gave out little squares of sponge that had red powder in it. Just add water and it leaked blood.
The director of the film was Jack Curtiss and the mad scientist was a well known star of that era called Martin Koslick who had quite a resume playing mad scientists because of his creepy German accent.
The Flesheater itself, a huge thing nine feet tall with ten arms and three eyes, rested inside the garage in the back of the Surf and Sand. For shoots on the beach where the Flesheater emerged from the sea, they’d put it in the back of a flatbed truck and march it through town.
Blonde Tammy has just come up the aisle with the last of the Champagne. She’s filling my glass once again. Nobody even notices.
“That’s IT!” I say. “Absolutely it! This is a board meeting I’m going to.”
And she’s gone. We are now passing the remains of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing. Soon there will be a skyline. Gotta go.
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