Long Island trash at the beach, I love and hate you.

I love you because, first of all, I am not you and I never will be you, in part because I wasn’t in high school when Lita Ford was in her full on hair and leather glory and because – well, just because. I love you because you are a dying breed. Your accent, your look, your whole existence is the result of being young in the mid to late eighties. As you get older and eventually abandon summers at the beach for retirement in Florida, I’ll be forced to deal with the spiky haired and overly tanned club kids from my generation. And they are not nearly as fun to observe or listen to as you.

But, and I’m so serious, I mostly hate you when I’m at the beach and all I want to hear are waves and wind and the sounds of kites flying and the occasional conversation. However you, Long Island trash, you have plans all of your own for the beach. And for me. Since you have settled right on top of me. So maybe I just like the idea of you and not your physical presence…it doesn’t really matter. You’re way too close for comfort and my IPod does not drown out your sounds.

People from Long Island know the Long Island trash – they have a special look and sound all of their own. You are Long Island trash if:

- You graduated from high school in the late 80s and come heavily accented.
- You come to the beach with seven coolers between four people, beer guts and muscle shirts, and saggy breasts in a bikini top that hasn’t been able to support you since 1998.
- Within 15 minutes of your arrival, you talk on your cell phone with your “buddies” who are “just coming over the bridge” about four times.
o Your buddies don’t show up for another 30-45 minutes
 They bring more coolers and the bearded tattooed guy who might be 40 or 60 – time has either been very kind or cruel to him.
• There is no food in any of the coolers.
- You call beers “beeyahs”.
- You consume a cooler worth of beeyahs in 20 minutes.
- You’ve been friends since at least 1982.
- You are loud. So loud. And you play the requisite hair metal on your boom box.
- You smoke many, many cigarettes between swigs of your beeyah.
- You have no shame in what you look like. In fact, you seem quite proud and I admire you for that. And I bet that tattoo looked awesome 25 years ago when you first got it across your back.
- Within the group, there is always a Kenny and a Diane, maybe a Tommy, and someone whose birth name is Coco or some other random stripperish name.
- Someone totally has a perm. She is totally holding a beeyah as she takes a huge drag off of her cig.
- You don’t seem to have any kids, and for that, I thank you.
o But if you left your child somewhere, I bet that you named him or her Skylar.

Before the panties (or manties if you’re a dude and beginning to get hysterical) get bunched up, let me say that not everyone who graduated from a Long Island high school in the mid to late eighties is Long Island trash. It’s really only a select few who go the trash route and it’s rather arbitrary as to who follows this path; though I suspect a penchant for cutting classes and love of aqua net and Ratt are part of the problem. My friends and I can’t even guess what towns they’d come from. Hometown, Long Island, is the first exit off of the Robert Moses Causeway as you leave the beach. Surely, they couldn’t have come from there. Maybe they grew up further inland.

And fine, so I don’t necessarily hate the LI Trash at the beach, but I honestly hate super loud people who like to draw attention to themselves. The beach in the summer time is not the place to expect to find the silence that is crashing waves and seagulls and I go prepared to overhear strange conversation, see interesting/beautiful/yucky people and hear some awful music drifting out of a radio here and there. All I’m saying is, if you’re going for force me to listen to your conversation, don’t wax philosophical about Life in the most cliché of clichés and overused phrases; if you’re going to force me to look at you, then please be sort of on your way to hot.

However – I cut slack if you absolutely fulfill four of the eleven criteria on my list above. And you play “Kiss Me Deadly” or “Sister Christian” because those songs are the bomb.

And had I known that you all would have shut up when I stood up to put on my cover up and leave, I would have stood up to choke on a cigarette or pretend to drink a beeyah with you almost as soon as you’d arrived.

PS, I now lay out by the camping areas because it’s worth walking ten minutes to get away from you all.

See ya at the beach.

Last 5 posts by Melissa Montemale

• I'm Not Obsessed - July 25th, 2008
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• Es Muss Sein - January 21st, 2008