I Worked At The End of The World, On Long Island For Two Summers

Well you’ll order a flagel of course, with probably cucumbers and some kind of low fat cream cheese, once you reach the top of the bagel deli line that curves out the door and onto the sidewalk and road, in sweatpants or athleisure to wear but not sweat in, eye bags, and hangover breath.

You wouldn’t want all the calories and carbs of a non-smooshed bagel any way, though I’m not sure how changing the shape decreases the contents other than by delusion.

You’re probably smacking around in flip flops the same way people talk while chewing gum.

You’ll definitely have to have a gatorade zero from the deli, and a large iced oat milk latte from just down the road, delicious but not $11-which-costs-more-than-a-flagel-sandwich delicious.

Maybe you’re wearing a MTK crew neck. It was purchased the night before at a bar or off the street on those racks the souvenir shops put out. You didn’t buy it.

You just caressed the arm of a man with a healthy trust fund and yawn-worthy Princeton haircut a few times. The crew is made in china, out of polyester but probably got at least $120, maybe $180 out of that trust fund.

It’s a somber blue, but stood out to you next to the espadrilles and Veja sneakers and fake faded baseball hats for the effect and obnoxious gabby sun hats and graphic T-shirts that shout THE END OF THE WORLD, MONTAUK.

By 2pm, you will have burned through the flagel and its lack of calories from all the physical activity of sucking off a vape pacifier. But you absolutely cannot eat now.

Not when 3pm means see-through dresses and impossible garments that somehow cling on to tanning oiled skin and somehow pass as clothing.

You’ll only wear colors that nature could never produce, loud and shouting to be noticed, in bold prints of kiwis or jalapeños.

You’ll add on some large reflective glasses you can’t actually see through and walk out in toothpick kitten heels to a beach bar for a skinny Casamigos margarita.

Lines, lines, lines out from the host desk and way past the ribboned lanes that no one respects, why should they?? when they’ll probably be denied entry.

“We don’t have room for whales,” the host will tell them.

You’ll manage to get in (and immediately thank yourself for only eating that flagel).

Everyone’s Instagram will be hungry by 3:30pm. Instagram stories will eat first, quick panoramic videos and reposts that basically say so fun you should be here but you’re not, you absolute pathetic loser, and then a post on the feed will follow, curated while hungover in line the next day at the deli.

Once you’ve collected sufficient content for the next hour, you’ll realize Alix Earle is throwing her hands up over there and the guy, Vinny from the Jersey Shore TV show is cracking jokes at the table beside you.

Then you’ll overhear,

“Margot Robbie just came in through the beach entrance,”

and you’ll be told you came the wrong weekend, that the Jonas brothers gave a surprise performance last weekend. You’ll have to take this all in as if you’re just watching or hearing about your neighbors or distant relatives.

Make sure everyone believes these people mean nothing to you, regardless of what posters still hang in your childhood bedroom at your parent’s house.

“I heard someone say the girl who sings ‘I’m a Nasty Girl’ is singing here tomorrow.”

“Kate Hudson will come back again tonight, she just has to!”

“Girlll I’m manifesting it!!”

Getting outside on the deck means you made it inside, you won’t have room to stand or breathe but just enough space to dip chicken tenders into tepid honey mustard. You’ll find that honey mustard dried up underneath those long acrylic nails tomorrow.

Someone whose name you’ve never heard of until you checked the set list on Instagram this morning will be “performing.”

Your server didn’t have the time to check who it was either, so they’ll lie when you ask who it is, saying they just forget how to pronounce the name but he’s so good, wait ’till you hear him.

All of a sudden, this has to be your favorite artist since you were five. They’ll spin a few buttons, nod their head, and throw their hand up every once in a while.

Don’t ask if anyone wants to get the check, even with a two hour line willing to put a deposit down for the table, because everyone is here to be seen and that takes longer than however long its been.

“I don’t even know what I ordered,” is how the big boys you’ll go with will pay the several thousand dollar check at your table.

“Thanks darling and you know I took care of you,” is what one big boy will whisper to your cocktail server in a designer white dress, while holding her waist, before finally letting her leave the table with the signed check.

The unce unce uncing will murmur a pulse in your ears even after the $60 uber has taken you away from the speakers. But it’ll be the third, or is it the fourth? night out in a row so the thumping bass will seem kind of quiet to you now.

In the Uber, you’ll pass Ditch beach where forty or so people are dancing in the sand under a makeshift boho tent to an old timer DJ using real records to spin.

Their silhouettes will adorn the sand under a full moon and you’ll wonder what they do during the day, if they’ve ever cared about their Instagram stories or if they’re just tripping on mushrooms.

You’ll get disgusted when you remember seeing that beach just yesterday, packed with people who are allergic to shoes and use the sea as their shower. Their pants riding low and ripped. Even the rich, well mostly the rich go there, what freaks, you’ll think, to pretend they’re not rich until it’s convenient to be.

The ones that aren’t rich borrow their surfboards and rent out motel rooms for the summer, but you won’t know that. The ones that aren’t rich don’t ride around in sage green Range Rover Defenders, like you, but at least they get to ride their rusted bikes past the enormous doll houses.

Plus they get tipped out thousands for encouraging alcoholism to collared shirts opened three buttons down and faces, like yours, burnt out with this lifestyle but more so, sunburnt. So sunburnt that their skin, and your skin, cooks the pounded foundation and powder and bronzer that struggles to cling onto already peeling skin, but you won’t realize that, otherwise all of this wouldn’t appear nearly as attractive to you.

The ones that aren’t rich here, are rich outside of this dystopian never-ending party because they are more involved in all of the other ways of being a human—something else you definitely can’t know about.

I’m not sure how much would change if homeless people made the Hampton Jitney trip out here, and maybe camped out on the center of town’s roundabout green just for show, like some kind of Black Mirror social experiment.

Maybe your kitten heels and trust fund sidekick would donate to the cause for your egos or maybe you’d never come back here because how could anyone insult your weekend off on Long Island, no in the Hamptons, no in Montauk–how’d he’d even get here??

But what if there was nothing for you to spend your money on, where would all of it go?

Surely the illusion that Don Julio tastes so good and the designer MTK crew neck made in china would play up and it’d be all too overwhelming and stressful to have that much money and no good sense with what to do with it.

It’d probably be a lot harder to find instances to be as rude when ordering chilled shots or demanding wristbands from dehydrated and unshowered Irish boys carrying ice from 20 feet away. Ice that will already be half melted and sloshing out onto the deck and down legs by the time it reaches those $15 dollar tequila bottles at your $15,000 table.

I don’t know you and you don’t even see me, but without the finances and the right attitude, all the luxury around this town and the shots and the fake small talk and $27 aperol spritzes get to me–it's inescapable even on hikes and when reading books in isolated bays that all those silly kids, like yourself, with unquenchable thirsts for a good time don’t know about.

It gets to me because this town is situated where the rest of the world is sort of just neatly folded and tucked away behind the horizon of the sea that hosts yachts and their private millionaire owners.

This sexy thumping and bumping joint is stowed away from everywhere else because no one wants to see everywhere else when they’re here any way.

Let’s fly a plane overhead that spells out PATRON CIELO TEQUILA in the sky instead, someone in charge of marketing to your kind of people often says that. It’ll be big enough to distract everyone here from seeing all the other ends of the world.