My mother died in , at the end of my sixth-grade year, and one year later, during the summer before eighth grade, my father remarried and moved the family from suburban Long Island back to our former home on the East End, in the sleepy seaside town of Amagansett where haul-seiners still cast their nets each morning into the sea.
Tucked behind the Amagansett grade school, the court was sheltered from the wind and the eyes of adults, and I joined a motley assortment of other outliers, sons of tradesmen and fishermen, making mischief and doing what I loved most, playing basketball. One afternoon during the spring of my ninth grade year at East Hampton High, a group of varsity players, having discovered our oasis, showed up at the Amagansett court and, needing one more, pulled me into a game. I remember getting the ball on a breakaway, hurrying the shot and missing the layup.
I was disappointed, of course, but also understoodβI had only played on one actual basketball team before and that one, a seventh- grade team cobbled together by an English teacher before we moved back east, had played a total of one game. He flicked his wrist from his forehead in a shooting motion.
You want a job? Although John soon got pulled onto the cooking staff, he and his mother usually gave me rides to work, and he and I would hitchhike home afterward, generally at one or two in the morning, though on busy weekend nights not till three or four.
It was amazing how hard we worked, trying to keep up with the summer crush of diners in the undersized kitchen, the bus staff carrying in tray after tray piled high with dishes to me and a second dishwasher, one of us emptying the glasses, scraping the plates, loading the machine, the other unloading, stacking dishes, racks of glasses, and hustling them back out to the bussing station. The Hamptons were just becoming the Hamptons , and the staffs at this and a few other restaurants were feeling the early tremors as the land beneath us started to shift.
