(The Last Summer).

By James Bernstein

Peter shot himself that summer.

It was the Summer of Love, the summer of ’67, the summer we all knew we had to change, forever. High school was over. Life was about to start, we thought.

Peter put a gun to his head. They found him in his room, at home, his bathing suit still on. No shirt. But he had on his swim flippers. Was he planning on a dip?

By August, a chill had come into the air. The scent of autumn was around. And we did not speak of Peter. Not really.

“He was a nut,” Gary said at the beach, after wallowing in the water a while, despite the chill.

“Musta been,” Ben agreed.

“Why the fuck else would he have done it,” Robbie asked, a light laugh and lilt to his voice.

We saw Peter’s father, once, on the beach. But we didn’t go over to him. He looked at us. He did not wave.

A few weeks after the funeral, which we attended, we saw Anna, his younger sister. She had black rings under her eyes. Her face was a frozen frown. She walked up to us. She did not smile.

We did not say anything.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked.

“Hanging,” Gary said.

“Oh,” Anna said, and walked on.

Peter’s funeral was freaky. None of us really wanted to go. Our parents made us. We wore suits, even though it was 95 degrees, and even hotter in that funeral home. None of us walked near the casket. In fact, no one really looked at it.

None of us had ever been to a funeral before.

Peter’s mom and dad sat in the front, holding each other. Anna sat with them. She was still. So were we, mostly, anway.

Then Gary started sweating. He said he felt sick. He got up. He never came back inside.

No one went after him.

A rabbi finally got up. He said Peter was a fine young man, that only God could understand why these things happen, and we could not question God. After that, he sat down.

It looked as though Peter’s dad was going to get up and say something, but I saw his wife tug at his arm, and he sat back. Anna walked out first. She smiled at me. I did not smile back.

We jumped into Gary’s beat-up ’66 Chevy and followed the hearse to the cemetery, even though none of us wanted to go. Gary’s dad said we had to. So we did.

What I remember most was the heat, and feeling sick. For a few seconds, I thought I might pass out. But I didn’t. There were sobs, cries, yells from the family.

“Asshole,” Robbie whispered. He meant Peter.

We all chuckled. Somehow, that made things seem better, although exactly how I cannot tell, but it felt better to laugh than cry.

That was over quick too, and we headed for the beach. We drank beers and smoked pot all afternoon.

“What a schmuck,” Ben said.

“Yeah, what a schmuck,” Robbie said.

The afternoon was over in a jiffy. The whole day seemed to go like that.

And then it was August.

We were on the beach, for maybe the last time before everyone would split. College. Gary made Yale. Ben NYU. Me too. Robbie had enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was headed for boot camp at Parris Island.

“You’re going to get laid a lot once you get out of Parris Island and put those blues on with the medals,” Gary said to Robbie. We knew Robbie had never been laid. He smiled. He was sweet. The Marines would send him to Vietnam. He would not come back.

The seagulls circled and cried overhead that long, late last August afternoon, a sure sign of fall.

“Schmuck, schmuck,” one of them seemed to be singing out. To all of us.

By dusk Robbie and Ben had gone home. Only Gary and I were left to watch the orange sun sink one last time.

“I’m going to miss you, shithead,” he said.

“Nah, you won’t. You’ll be a Yalie. You’re off to fame and fortune. You’re going to be like your dad, a famous rich lawyer.”

“Fuck you,” Gary said.

“So why do you think Peter did it?” Gary asked.

“Fuck knows,” I said.

“You were close with him.”

“No one was close to him,” I said.

We looked down The sun had set. The beach was almost dark, deserted.

“We  we better go,” I said.

For a second, we grasped each other, knowing this would be the last time before life would not be the same again. We would not be the same.

I heard Gary sob,  and I sobbed too.

The soft sound of the waves behind us were forever, eternal.

We walked off the beach, my arm around his shoulder and his around mine. Once back on the street, Gary looked at me. Soberly. “A schmuck, that’s all you can say. He was a schmuck.”

“Yeah,” I said. “For sure. A schmuck.”

The next morning I would leave for the NYU campus in the heart of Greenwich Village.

We would learn that summer lessons that would last us forever: we would learn that life is not always simple, nice or, most consequently of all, understandable. We would learn that perhaps we cannot always understand what is even right in front of us, much as we want to try. But we learned something else equally important: we learned that we had gotten though Peter’s suicide together, and that come way may, we would get through other crises in our lives as well, as long as we had others by our side.

I would come back to the town and the beach where we had all grown up. But not often.

Whenever I did, I heard the seagulls, singing their maddening song.

 

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