TRUE.Beach

a true story

by Astor W. Heinemann

When I was a kid my family and I used to go to the beach a lot. This was great when I was younger, but as I got older and my legs started getting hairy they itched like hell. From all the scratching I developed some pretty bad rashes which did not go well at all with the salt water.

This is when the problems started.

The earliest memory I have from those trips is when I wouldn't go into the water, my mom and one of my aunts decided it would be good fun to pick me up and throw me in. I was bigger and stronger than both of them, but I didn't want to kick or punch too hard for fear of hurting either one of them. Apart from the humiliating experience, my rashes got even worse that week. This was how it went for a while.

A few years later they had given up asking me to come into the water and I usually just stayed behind in the shade listening to some music. This particular time we were in Atlantic City and there were no trees or shade I could sit at, so I had to stay out in the sun.

It was pretty empty for late summer, but I enjoyed the solitude anyway, just sitting in the sand, sun burning up my skull, nobody and nothing around me other than the bags and clothes from my family already in the water by then.

There were a lot of birds flying around and if you've ever been there you know what I'm talking about. So I was there minding my own business when out of nowhere this fucking bird decides that out of all the empty space for meters and meters around me, I was the perfect spot for taking a shit.

It came without warning, like a bomber dropping it's deadly nuke perfectly aimed at a critical enemy target. It came right unto the right side of my head covering a large portion of my hair, sloshing through part of my face and finally ending up in my jeans, as if I had just jizzed my pants...from the outside!

Whiter than the sand, white as an old man's head, white as snow, pure, untarnished bird shit all over me. At first I didn't know how to react, I was confused, what was this warm feeling taking over me, it was shit. My immediate thought was not to look up for fear of being targeted with a second bomb, this time straight on my face. I looked around in fear, terrorized at the prospect of anyone seeing this.

So I took off my clothing, used my jeans to wipe off the shit and went quietly into the water and to my surprise my legs didn't itch anymore. No one ever knew, well, at least till some months later.

And this happened again several times. Just hanging out with the neighborhood kids outside my place, sitting on the sidewalk below the power lines where birds also hang out with their friends. It seems word got around that it was hilarious to take a dump on me, a hotspot, the deserving one, so it kept happening, birds sizing me up, taking their strategic positions, ready, aim, fire. Every single time, my friends saw it and a new nickname stuck, the birdman.

The beach is a source of plenty pleasant memorable moments for most people, but for me it is the source, the beginning, the shit. I don't remember white sandy beaches, I remember white, slimy aerial septic waste flying down firmly on me.

I am Astor, and birds shit on me.

Ende.