dinner in a plastic rainforest. The wait staff paraded a flaming volcanic brownie past our table four times. I’m sorry, Kate. I know that you hate it, but I have to smoke, she said. Her heels kept getting stuck in the space between the boards. When Hurricane Sandy hit the shore, the television told us that the whole boardwalk was washed out. That the entire city was being blown away. Now the place is dying for tourists. They don’t even know it’s still there. My dad’s business partner is on his second wife and third girlfriend. All three of his kids were always allowed to go to the company parties, but my siblings and I were not. The first year we were old enough to be invited, my brother stayed home to play video games. I took my boyfriend Jay, and we danced and flirted and kissed the way young twenty-somethings do in front of strangers. The second wife remarked to my mother how sweet it was that my brother and I were so close. In an attempt to dissuade the homeless population from sleeping under the boardwalk, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority closed off many of the access points. Smoke them out. Drown them out. Flush them out. I couldn’t sleep in the bed with Jay, with my sister throwing up in the bathroom, with my dad downstairs about to leave my mother for a cocktail waitress. But as I drove down the expressway a little after three, I found myself nodding at the wheel. If only I could set up a bed in the Pine Barrens. I could swirl all the pills down the toilet, unplug the sound of the water from the wall. Terence Winter developed the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. He had a team of researchers on staff to make sure that the historical information would be correct, but he opted to fictionalize the characters themselves. He did this because he knew the audience would be waiting for the famous punchlines, the infamous assassinations. It’s like looking through a crystal ball and you’re like, ‘Oh God, is that how it ends?’ Sometimes it’s better not to know.
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