This is a shameless plug for my daughter Jodi’s new novel, By Invitation Only, which hits the bookstores this week. Each year Jodi also publishes an excellent comprehensive guide to the Hamptons called Jodi’s Shortcuts.
I’ll never forget my first trip to the Hamptons. It was in the 1960s.
With the help of some friends, I had rented a place in Amagansett sight unseen. On the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, my wife and I packed up most of our worldly belongings. We put our two fighting children (Donna, 10, and Michael, 7) in the back seat of our car along with our new jet-black standard poodle puppy named Tiffany. My wife sat in the front seat next to me holding our baby daughter Jodi.
It was after 7 p.m. when we pulled away from our apartment building in Manhattan. “How long will it take to get there?” my wife asked.
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Ever the expert, I said, “It’s 90 miles away. It should take about two hours…”
At 11:30 that night I was lost, exhausted and bleary-eyed, and my kids were screaming that they were too hungry to fight. My wife, incensed, had stopped talking to me two hours before, when I turned off the packed Long Island Expressway on Exit 62 and announced, “We’re almost there—I can smell the ocean!” I had been lost in the suburban stretches of Coram, Riverhead, and western Southampton, making countless passes at various Bluff Roads. (It appears that every town in Suffolk County has a Bluff Road.)
In the final hour everyone in the car, including the dog, took turns alternately crying and whimpering. Now we were definitely in Amagansett. I then made a right turn and a left turn into an incredibly fogged-in area and found myself on a the darkest street I have ever been on.
“Where are we?” my wife asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Let me get out and see if I can read that sign.”
That was a mistake. The minute I stepped out of the car Tiffany, the jet-black poodle, bounded over the seat and jumped out of the car and disappeared into the inky blackness of the night. Do you know how fast a jet-black poodle disappears into the black night? In less than a second.
“You’ve lost Tiffany,” my family wailed, in unison.
“TIFFANY!” I screamed into the night at the top of my lungs. “TIFFANY!” we all screamed. That’s when I lost it. I ran up to the closest house and started pounding on the door. “HELP! WE NEED HELP!” I shouted.
A frightened, pajama-clad man answered the door. His face registered shock at this wild-eyed madman with his family behind him shouting the name of a popular jewelry store.
“Can you help me? We’re lost… hopelessly lost…and now we’ve lost our dog,” I sputtered.
“What are you looking for?” he asked suspiciously.
I gave him the address. He smirked and pointed to a house across the street.
“That’s it,” he said, and slammed the door in my face. I’d like to think he was happy to help us, but I couldn’t help but notice he avoided us for the entire summer.
The story has a happy ending. Tiffany, having decided that we were too hopeless a family to leave alone, came prancing back a few minutes later.
Then we went back to fighting with each other.
But Jodi, little baby Jodi, was evidently traumatized for life. At the age of 1 and a half she clearly made a decision that night to dedicate her life to making sure that no family would ever again go through the horrors of being lost and hungry in the Hamptons.
If you wish to comment on “Jerry’s Ink,” send your message to jerry@dfjp.com.
