"When you’re a failure in the Hamptons you feel as though you’re in the witness protection program. Best not to make much of a fuss or become too visible lest we be unmasked for the person we truly are."
Britain granted independence to India and Pakistan. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in his X-1 Rocket Plane. The LP and Silly Putty were invented within weeks of each other. The Yanks won another world series and Gentleman’s Agreement took best picture. Gasoline was .15 cents a gallon and a new house could run as much as $6,000 for something really nice. Oh and Harry S. Truman was president.
Into this world was deposited one Robert Austin, at your service. The odds that this beautiful baby boy would ever find himself in a venue to communicate with an audience of many live humans defies all the laws of probability. Even my mother, who always told me I could do anything (even when she knew better) would have drawn the line here.
Yet here I am, fifty years hence, with a place to write and readers to read and prepared, come what may, for rejection or acceptance and ready, for all the world, to treat those two impostors (rejection and acceptance) each the same. Sorry about that Rudyard.
This piece, it seems, wants to be about the Hamptons themselves. Sag Harbor in particular. Austin's home almost all the time. Robert Austin had what he thought was just the thing for such an undertaking. Once on the Jitney to Manhatten, he had leafed through several Hamptocentric magazines. He skimmed and wondered, wondered and skimmed about the Hamptons nobody ever writes about. The article you never find in any publication. Pieces with titles like “The Hamptons On .50¢ A Day”, “Down and Out in Amagansett” or “Lifestyles of The Badly Beaten and Doomed”.
These people, who are never written about are, in fact, the dominant population here at “The beach”, the extremely irritating term used by seasonal visitors or renters, trying to sound casual and totally relaxed about the scene. But this isn’t really the beach now, is it. We are miles from any beach clean enough to swim in.
When not busy ignoring the Flagship Stores of East Hampton or the luxury showrooms that dot Montauk Highway as it winds through South Hampton, we’re hunched over our Formica table, our spouse at our side, trying to decide for the life of us, which, if any, of the cascading stack of bills can possibly be addressed, still leaving enough left for Moo Shoo Pork from the Chinese Take Out next to the Seven Eleven in Sag Harbor.
Natives will sometimes tell visitors that this restaurant or that is perfectly fine, good, even very good. Our advice is not to check your brains at the door. Look at what other people are eating. Does it look familiar? A good sign. But flacking for restaurants is part of the wider conspiracy to support local businesses. It turns us all into flacks. Lying flacks.
But why the long faces? Things can’t be that bad, they say. There’s always something new and exciting just around the next corner, they say. Jesus.
It happened like this. We bought our homes when we were flush. During days we thought would never end. We were fine for a long while and so was everybody else. Now we cannot afford even to maintain these homes, except through the labors of men who fall a wee bit short of fully apprehending the art of landscape design. They cut the grass and after that you're left, abandoned, in a sea of dandelions.
Of course we still like to play. But now when we want to play, it is not tennis at the club. It is the re-run of last night’s Yankee game on the old square screen.
Then too, we are no longer consumed by the pressing need to re-grout the Egyptian tiles which frame the pool. We go to the beach, if we must, and, if they day is warm enough, we may go into the water, or, if we have children, we may inflate the plastic thing we used last year.
ADVERTSING POINT OF DIFFERENCE:
Unlike those bulky white marble rectangles with Life Sized Statues of The Buddha facing the deep end, inflatable pools are so portable they can set up anywhere on the little patch of crab grass behind the shed (You do have a shed, of course).
Now an abbreviated tour of several Hampton towns revealing some interesting facts and useful information.
East Hampton. Best appreciated on a rapid walk, in good weather, down a couple of blocks, where you will pass what remains after the blight that turned this sweet little village into a ghost town. And, even if you find an open store, entering an East Hampton shop begs an awkward exchange.
“May I help you?”
“No thanks. I’m just browsing.”
“May I ask your size?”
“Doesn’t matter. Like I say, I’m just browsing.”
“I understand, but the tops on that rack are a size 1.”
You have not been a size 1 since the cradle and are therefore embarrassed and upset by the ever helpful and smilingly overbearing staff in most of these stores. Why do they talk? Leave me alone. Please. We’ll ask if we need something. Sound like a plan?
And this is a pointless exchange in any event, since there is not a chance in hell you can purchase the top or whatever it is. After all, it would likely run you several months of salary.
Sign in the window of an East Hampton Antique Shop:
“For the price of a small house, you can own this beautiful chair.”
Now some of the stores in East Hampton are only flagship stores, not really intended or staffed for the sale of anything. Merely a displaying of the cream of an absurdly expensive crop for purchase elsewhere. Entering such a shop is a recipe for the kind of deep depression that only heavy meds or shopping itself can abjure.
And no visit to East Hampton would be complete without a drive past the densely privitted homes of Georgica Pond, homes with gates and dogs. Homes one cannot even glimpse from the car, but which are the haunt of Steven Speilberg Jerry Seinfeld, Martha Stewart and big money men whose names we’ll never know.
One very well known resident of this exclusive community is known to call all the people who tend her grounds, “Mexicans.” regardless of where they actually come from. “Where are our Mexicans today?” she has been known to ask. She does this even when the Mexicans are Japanese, African American, Filapino or Guarmian.
Then there is South Hampton, noted for its banks and jewelry stores. Here you will discover another good place to nuke the nest egg. Overheard in South Hampton:
“When the Jews start wearing plaid, you know it’s time to get out.” This sentiment still reflects the charming legacy of an earlier time, when the first English settlement was taking root. And Jews are a relatively new item on the menu. Used to be you had to have had a direct ancestor who came over on a Mayflower and then came to own a home in South Hampton.
There are, of course, Indians surviving all over the Hamptons. Especially adjacent to South Hampton, where you’ll find the Shinnecock Reservation and a strip of bodegas selling cartons of cigarettes at wholesale prices. It is primarily during these exchanges that most of us ever get to actually speak with a real (live) Indian. Should you decide to take this side trip to the reservation I strongly urge you to avoid sounding solicitous, asking questions about the history of these or any other native people. It has the same flavor as getting into a taxi with a black driver and beginning a conversation with something like “Joe Louis. Hell of a fighter; Hell of a fighter. Under rated, if you ask me”
There are also a few other towns that are sometimes considered part of the Hamptons. These towns may include West Hampton, where summer rentals to gum chewing executive assistants were invented. Or Quogue, which, as it turns out, nobody has ever visited.
All in all, the Hamptons are still a happy place. We do have our beaches, fishing boats for hire and many beautiful automobiles cruising Main Street in the summer months.
We do however share one trait for which the Hamptons are well known. It is smugness. It’s just that in our case it’s the smugness of knowing which valves are the critical ones during those precious first moments of a catastrophe. The better not to flood the kitchen with sea water or fill the house with carbon monoxide, a real bummer even on Georgica Pond.
