We were on East Beach, long the scene of the Island's most debauched March-time frolics and the only beach on which alcohol is condoned, if not tacitly ignored by the police. There were three couples there, recently-graduated Aggies from Conroe and Bellville and other small towns, nipping on cans of Bud Lite and Coors Lite, playing a spirited game of beach volleyball without a net.
Nearby, some other guys were in a truck, driving a buddy toward medical attention — he had a two-inch shard of gafftop-catfish spine stuck in the bottom of his foot, which was starting to swell as it filled with evil trash-fish poison.
And there was the Mud Man. I had seen him minutes before walking away from the beach toward the dunes with a woman by his side. Suddenly the man collapsed in a tidal pool on the rain-sodden beach. As the man literally wallowed in this shallow, the woman walked on without so much as a single look back. The man grabbed mighty handfuls of sand and rubbed them into his hair and chest. "I am the mud man!" he shouted to no one in particular.
Here it was, at last, the real deal: sodden stupidity and freewheeling fun in what was going to have to pass for the sun. For the past 24 hours, we'd been seeking real-live college people killing their brain cells in the sand and on The Strand. In all our searches from one end of the Island to the other, from beyond Jamaica Beach to East and back twice, and into The Strand District more times than we could remember, we hadn't yet seen Mud Man's type in his natural habitat.
We had seen hordes of wholesome, well-padded families from places like Garland, Cedar Park, and Huntsville enjoying trading off sandcastle and seagull reveries in the afternoon with fried-fish feasts and massive ice cream cones on The Strand by night. (While Galveston's visitors were clean-living and upright, we found the locals to be another story, but more on that later.)
Where were the fireside beach soirees and teetering-on-the-brink-of-disaster beach-house deck parties of my misspent youth? Where the teenaged riots in Menard Park, the 97 Rock- and KLOL-sponsored megabashes of the 1980s and early '90s? Where were the beaches awash in the thrum and hiss of hip-hop drum tracks billowing out of Blazers and Broncos, the raucous cries greeting the flash of bikini breasts, the couples making out in the rolling greenish-brown surf?
My God, what hath the modern travel industry, social networking, and bazillionaire amusements / restaurants / cheeze merchant Tilman Fertitta wrought upon the sun-and-sin capital of my youth?
Only Mud Man stood in opposition to the last three decades of Landry-fication.
Kramer asked him where the girls were, because we knew Mud Man would know.
"Over there," he slurred, pointing a brown finger vaguely to the west. "Unless I ran 'em all the way off the beach."
My man...We knew you'd lead us to the promised land.
And sure enough, there were about a dozen where he had pointed, lounging on beach towels in their bikinis amid coolers. At last, here was a concentrated pocket of Spring Break, a bevy of bathing beauties come to town in search of Gulf Breeze-scented hedonism.
Not so much. As it happened, they'd come down from way up north on a Habitat for Humanity project, rebuilding homes for the poor in Beaumont. This was a day-trip to the beach for them. I was flabbergasted. I'd only heard of such altruistic youths before, and here were some in the flesh. While I was still trying to process that nugget of information, another added that they were students at UConn, which I initially heard as Yukon. And really, had they actually come from those forbidding glacier-streaked, aurora borealis-illuminated, gold-rich, grizzly-patrolled mountains, I would have been scarcely more surprised.
And as you got closer, we could see that despite the fact they had braved a near-flood to come to permissive East Beach, all of them, to a woman, were drinking bottled water. These were not sex-crazed hardbodies but secular missionaries. I thanked them for their service — sincerely — and told Kramer we could wrap the shoot.
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And 24 hours before, despite awful weather, we'd had high hopes.
Our arrival in town Sunday afternoon was more doom-laden than I'd experienced in 40-plus years of going to the Island. The vista of the bay from the Causeway looked like something out of a stormchaser video, and after checking in to the Hilton on the Seawall, as we watched the "Local on the 8's" forecast on The Weather Channel, the wind lashed our windows. The national radar map showed a line of hellafied storms extending all the way from Iowa down to, and just barely through, Galveston Island. "What a bummer for the Spring Breakers!" passive-aggressively chortled one of those cleavage-exposing mean girls TWC is well-known for hiring as anchors. A bummer indeed.
