Sabotage
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know who the hell Nicoletta was, but I hated her name and Jeanine’s face looked goddamn awful. I decided, like I did on most days on the island, that I would have a little goal. An objective, like in a video game, to earn some extra points. In this case, the points went toward petty revenge and a false sense of purpose.
Long Beach Island is beautiful if you are visiting or rich. If you’re homeless, it’s an unbelievable paradise. I guess I should qualify that. If you’re homeless save for a functioning pickup truck, and have a full time job paid in cash that you don’t need to spend on anything except a truly lunatic amount of drugs and alcohol, then, well, you get the point. It is not an island in the tropical sense. Rather, it is more like a synthesis of all the best images of New Jersey coastal living. And there’s no denying they are images. Tiny mom-and-pop shops of all kinds, people eating ice cream, surfing, lively night-life, beautiful beaches. Just images, living fat off your hopes that their interior means half as much as their polymerized, reflective surface, always showing you your own reflection within its hypnotic sheen, in the scene, part of the life of having it all, just a dainty little nefarious image. But an FYI from yours truly, the inebriated (and low-IQ) brain lives on images. And God is inebriation a wonderful thing. The only thing unfriendly, then, about Long Beach Island is its squadron of computer-generated NPC asshole police cops, always repeating their programmed line: “my island” after every sentence like broken algorithms looking for their own source-code. But we will get to that later.
Nick Denardi 