Coppertone Days

When I went to grade school in Miami and wanted to write, I didn't think I had anything interesting to say about where I lived. I just assumed it was all palm trees and cocoanuts everywhere you went. It took finally moving away and looking back to see how different living there was, especially Miami Beach. That's where I developed my first crush.

She was tall, much taller than I was, taller even than my parents. I would see her as we crossed the 79^th Street Causeway from Miami going east. If I remember correctly, she greeted us on the roof of a motel just as we passed over the second drawbridge and arrived in the city, leaving Biscayne Bay behind. She always greeted us with the same message: “Tan . . . Don't Burn. Use Coppertone!' She was blond, about my age, and always wore a bikini that a little black dog was pulling down from behind. She was motorized, so her bikini bottom was forever going up and down, revealing the pale flesh that was the point of the billboard. It was my first sight of a girl's rear end. I was smitten.

My father had uprooted my mother, my sister, and me from New Jersey in 1958 and followed in the wake of his parents, who had already settled in Miami, where his father opened a shoe repair shop. All my mother's relatives were in Jersey, all her brothers and sisters, all my sister's and my cousins. Snow was in Jersey. My mother loved snow. She never forgave my father for moving us away. Maybe that was why she took to the beach so easily. Maybe there she could be mistaken for just another tourist, someone for whom Up North was still home.

We crossed Biscayne Bay as a family often in those days, always on weekends because my parents both worked. No matter how many times we went, my sister and I would always grow giddy with excitement as we climbed in the back seat of the blue Impala with our plastic pails and shovels. I was around ten, Terry five. The Coppertone girl with her little peep show was my mother's signal for everyone to roll down our windows and let the car fill with the smell of salt and brine.

 

My father angle-parked in front of the low sea wall that separated the beach from the sidewalk. (Many years later, Hurricane Andrew would separate the sea wall from existence.) We didn't call our shoes thongs or flip-flops then. They were simply "rubber shoes." I never understood why we had to put them on before climbing over the wall -- the sand was scorching, and they provided no protection as we tried to run and hop simultaneously to whatever spot our parents picked out. But our mom was insistent.

 

My parents spent the next six hours lying on a blanket under their beach umbrella, except for very brief forays into the surf. I never understood this. What was the point of being there if you weren't going to swim all day? But some days we didn't swim at all. On those days, the sand at the water's edge would be strewn with dead pink or blue jellyfish, or streaks of black tar, or an endless rope of seaweed, and we knew the water would be the same way. At least once, a shark sighting kept us dry. But even once the shark had been led back out to sea, my day was as good as over, and Terry and I resigned ourselves to making little pail-shaped mounds around our parents' blanket.

When we got back to the door of our apartment, our mother always instructed us to remove our shoes outside, and then, just one of us at a time, run through the living room and into the bathroom, where we removed our suits in the tub. Sand in her house was as serious as bedbugs (which we never had because they were terrified of her). First Terry would run, then me, then our parents, who I think just walked. A few days later, our new tans would begin to flake, and the four of us would take turns peeling the long strips of skin from one another's backs like some sort of zombie grooming ritual.

One day, when the shoreline was yet again littered with ocean debris, my parents decided it was no longer worth the drive just to have to turn around and go back home. That's when my father got the idea of taking us to a motel and not checking in.

The Sandy Shores was farther up the beach, all the way to Sunny Isles. (Our beach was around 71st Street, and the motel was just past 167th.) It was your basic two-story oceanfront motel, with a pool deck overlooking the ocean and rows of chaise longues overlooking the pool. We made ourselves at home out there as if we were residents. I think that's where my mother most felt like a tourist. She parked herself on a chaise and lit a cigarette. Terry parked herself in the shallow end of the pool while I jumped into the deep end. I still wore my plastic Treasure Island inner tube, though; I didn't think I was ready for swimming lessons. My father, meanwhile, spent more time in the pool than he had in the surf. Maybe he didn't like the turbulence of waves, or maybe he was just into chlorine.

I'm certain a Miami Beach motel experience today is nothing like it was in 1963, and I don't just mean the rates. The manager, overweight with a big cigar, a northern accent, and always grinning, spent time out on the deck, greeting everyone and welcoming us to buy drinks (soda for the kids) at the outdoor pool bar when it opened at noon. At 3:00, when Terry and I were buzzed from caffeine and the adults were liquored up, the manager would come back outside to clear everyone from the pool. Then in a stentorious voice he would turn into a ringmaster and announce the arrival of the motel's clown-in-residence (whose name is on the tip of my tongue, where it's been for 50 years and drives me crazy), who would do a special act on the diving board just for us. I have no idea whether this was standard fare for other motels, maybe so. This clown, who resembled Bozo, spent the next fifteen minutes pretending he was afraid to jump. The kids howled with laughter. (This was long before Stephen King turned clowns into horrific nightmare figures.) Their parents laughed appreciatively. When he finally plunged in as if by accident, he got a great round of applause, climbed onto the side of the pool, and skipped merrily into the building.

For Terry and me, the clown was nothing compared to the next attraction -- hamburgers and hot dogs. They were free, too, which was my father's favorite part. The manager and a helper set up a grill beside the rear wall that separated us from the beach. The men lined up with paper plates in hand (the women waited on their chaises) and their children jumped back into the water, frolicking even more than before because now lunch was coming. I stood with my father because he needed help carrying the four plates. I thought nothing of what we were doing. The food was free for the guests; we were guests; ergo, the food was free for us. Ethics didn't play into it (or into my head at that age, either). Besides, whatever our father did had to be OK. I mean, he was our father, right?

The Sandy Shores became our home away from home for the next year, maybe two. It was where my mother, sitting up sideways on her chaise one morning, burst my inner tube with her cigarette and said that if a clown could swim, so could I. (I did, eventually. Who wanted to be shamed by a clown?) It was where Terry screwed up the courage to move to the deep end, but always holding on to the side of the pool and wearing the football-shaped float strapped to her back. It was where something happened I would never forget.

Just before we left the motel for the last time, the faux Bozo finished his act, and the manager rolled his grill out to the wall. My father and I got in line as usual. But when there were only three or four men ahead of us, we both noticed something. Each of them was holding a room key out for the manager to see before receiving his food. This was something new. It meant we didn't belong there.

We gathered our things and walked back to the car. On the drive out to the causeway, I thought hard about what had just happened. My father had been wrong to bring us there, and he must have known it. So the four of us had been trespassing all this time. My mother must have known it, too. This was going to take a major reassessment on my part; all I knew at that moment was that I was confused and, in a way that would only become clear in the coming days, crushed. A seismic shift had taken place in my journey toward adulthood -- I was learning not to trust.

I would spend much of my remaining youth hanging out on Miami Beach with friends, but this part was over. Just as we approached the causeway for the last time as a family, I turned around to look through the back window at my favorite billboard. The Coppertone girl's motorized bikini bottom was waving goodbye.